Stowaway

by John David Anderson

  Leo had seen them a hundred times before, of course, but always on a screen or from a great distance. Never right above his head. Just the sight of it—so massive, so alien—and the sound of its sublight engines arcing through the sky caused Leo to lose it, a small wet spot blossoming on the front of his shorts.

  His dad pulled over and told Leo to just finish in the bushes on the side of the road. Leo didn’t even bother to look where he was aiming—his eyes were still turned skyward, taking in the alien vessel disappearing into the horizon.

  “Sorry,” Leo said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I almost did the same thing the first time I saw one up close,” his father said. “Amazing, aren’t they?” Calvin Fender’s eyes were trained skyward as well, staring with equal bug-eyed wonder. “As a kid I always imagined someone was out there, you know? And now, to see them. To be a part of it. Man . . .” Leo’s dad shivered, then he pointed to the back of the ship. “See that bright orange ring back there? That’s the FTL drive. That’s the game changer. Without that, you and I wouldn’t even be having this conversation, because the Aykari would have never been able to find us to begin with.”

  Leo’s six-year-old brain tried to wrap itself around everything his father was saying. “Where’s it going?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a transport, so maybe it’s dropping off supplies. Or maybe picking up volunteers.” Even Leo knew that Aykarian ships spent most of their time hovering high up in the atmosphere or even farther out in orbit. They seldom landed. Except when they had something to give. Or something to take.

  “Volunteers for what?”

  Dr. Fender watched the ship shrink in the distance. “My guess is they are recruiting colonists. Workers. Miners. Soldiers. Pilots. Anyone willing to help out.”

  “Help out with what?”

  “Building the Coalition,” Leo’s father said. “The Coalition of Planets? Don’t they teach you about this stuff in kindergarten?”

  “I learned how to tie my shoes,” Leo said.

  “Really?”

  Leo looked down to see his laces flapping free, but then he glanced over to see his father’s shoelaces had come undone as well, so he didn’t feel bad. When he looked back up, the Aykarian transport was almost gone, though you could still hear its engines’ hum. “Will we ever go on a ship like that?”

  “I hope so,” his father said. “I think it might be cool, don’t you? Go out there. See new stars. New planets. New people. Besides . . . we might not have a choice.”

  Actually, that all sounded a little frightening to Leo. Especially if it was something he had to do.

  “You boys almost finished out there? Some of us prefer not to pee in the bushes if we don’t have to.”

  Leo smiled at his mother and ran back to the car, gearing himself up for another hour stuck in the back seat with his brother. He looked one last time at the wide expanse of sky and the Aykarian ship, now just a silver speck on the horizon.

  Someday, he thought. Someday he’d go on one, go out there, like his father said. Just to see what it’s like. But certainly not for forever.

  He already knew that he would always want to come back home.

  “You’d better eat that.”

  Gareth pointed to the spongy gray slab with his fork. Leo stared with undisguised disgust at the lump on his plate. He could list the basic ingredients: synthetic protein compound, an injection of vitamins, some kind of emulsifier to hold it together, and a load of preservatives to make it last for three years in deep freeze. It was something cooked up in a government lab to keep spacefarers from starving, and it tasted like it. He and Gareth called it ficken.

  Admittedly ficken nuggets were better warm, but the ship’s power supply had been rerouted to cover only essential functions, and heating up protein chunks was nonessential.

  Of course, this was the least of Leo’s worries.

  It had been four days. Four days since the Beagle was attacked by a Djarik warship and left limping, stripped of all its fuel, floating in the middle of nowhere—though to Leo, who’d been on board the ship for nearly three years, everywhere felt like the middle of nowhere. The Djarik had taken everything they deemed valuable, leaving the crew with the ship’s crippled and paralyzed remains.

  The crew minus one.

  There had been Coalition guards on board. Engineers. Navigators. The captain herself, and yet the Djarik had taken only Leo’s father. And it wasn’t by chance—at least that’s what Leo had gathered from the crew who tried to explain, who came to apologize, like Captain Saito, for not being able to stop them. Almost as if the Djarik attacked the Beagle for the specific purpose of kidnapping his dad. Except nobody knew why.

  Or if they did, they weren’t telling the two sons he left behind.

  Arguing over their last chunk of ficken.

  “I’m serious. Eat it.”

  “I don’t want it,” Leo said.

  The first two days after the attack, Leo refused to eat anything at all. He barely slept, every sound causing his pulse to quicken, flashes of his father’s face in those last minutes, the too brief hug, that broken promise—be back as soon as I can—the Djarik standing in the doorway, sniffing them out. The images spun around the carousel of his brain, haunting him and denying him sleep.

  Not that he could have slept for long. Not in the same room as his brother, who had woken up every hour thrashing so violently Leo was sure he would throw himself out of the top bunk and break something.

  As if they both weren’t broken enough already.

  Even now, Leo still wasn’t sure he could keep this meal down. But he also knew that what was left of the Beagle’s food stores had been rationed, which meant no cold synthetic protein chunk should go to waste.

  That still didn’t mean Leo had to eat it.

  He slid his plate silently over to his brother. Gareth didn’t look good. Dark half-moons sagged under his eyes and his hair had taken on a greasy sheen. Somehow he looked thinner to Leo already. And they both smelled ripe, layers of new sweat overlapping the old. Like warm food, warm showers were nonessential, and the cold ones stung, so Leo avoided them. He changed clothes only out of habit. He could feel the fuzz forming along the edges of his gums; he’d brushed his teeth once in four days.

  After all, his father wasn’t around to tell him to. There didn’t seem to be much point.

  Gareth considered the metal plate with its one remaining morsel of food for a moment before frowning and sliding it back.

  “I told you I don’t want it,” Leo said.

  “Yeah, but what would Dad say if he found out I ate half of your rations?”

  What would he say? Knowing their father, he would tell them both to keep their strength up. He would tell them to carry on, to use their heads, to not give up hope. Of course if he were here, Leo wouldn’t have this second hole inside him. Leo pushed the plate back. “I’m not eating it,” he said. “It tastes like Aykari turds.”

  “How would you know what Aykari turds taste like?” Gareth countered.

  “Well, it smells like them.”

  Truthfully, Leo had never smelled one either. He’d never even seen an Aykari do its personal business, he just assumed it smelled. Just because you’ve perfected faster-than-light-speed travel doesn’t mean your poop doesn’t stink. Does it?

  “Just eat it. Please. It’s good for you. It contains twenty-seven essential vitamins and nutrients,” Gareth said, reading off the recyclable container the nuggets came in. Chicken flavored, it said. Leo honestly couldn’t be sure if it was or not; he couldn’t remember what real chicken was supposed to taste like.

  “Forget it.”

  “Eat it. I’m older and you have to do what I say.”

  “That’s not a rule.”

  They pushed the metal plate back and forth between them, until Leo pushed a little too forcefully, causing it to slide off the table, its chicken-flavored cargo bouncing across the steel floor.

  The brothers stared at it guiltil
y for a moment. Then Gareth recovered it and put it back on the plate, using the edge of his fork to painstakingly saw it in two.

  Leo got the bigger half.

  The rationing had started the day after the Djarik attack. As soon as all the diagnostics were finished and the captain had a full damage report, she had gathered all ship personnel onto the bridge to give them the news.

  “I won’t lie to you,” Captain Saito began, looking over her bedraggled crew. “The Beagle took a serious beating. Our life-support systems are mostly intact—oxygenator, water filtration, gravity generator. We’re all still breathing and our feet are on the ground, but that’s it for the good news. The ship’s propulsion systems are damaged beyond repair, so unless someone can go out there and give us a push, we aren’t moving. The jump drive is also not operational. Not that it matters since the Djarik took all of our V. We have no weapons, no defenses, and no coms, which means we are basically sitting ducks.”

  “What about the shuttle?” a member of the crew asked. The six-passenger Lockheed landing craft that was supposed to be used for planetary surface exploration, but mostly gathered dust in the bigger ship’s landing bay. There had been little need to study the surface of planets because, despite being out here for nearly three years, the Beagle had found little worth studying. Its primary mission, Dr. Calvin Fender’s primary mission—to discover and analyze more potential sources of ventasium—had yielded little in the way of results.

  And yet it had somehow attracted the enemy’s attention.

  “I’m afraid the Djarik sabotaged the shuttle as well. They made sure none of us were getting off this ship,” Captain Saito said.

  Not none of us, Leo thought, a surge of sour bile burning the back of his throat. One of us was escorted off at gunpoint.

  “Our best hope is that the Coalition realizes that we haven’t checked in and are off the grid and sends a rescue team sooner rather than later. Either that or a friendly ship just happens to pass in range of our emergency beacon, which, given our location, is unlikely, but not impossible. In the meantime we are doing our best to get the long-range communications back up and running. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can get help.”

  “And what about Dr. Fender?”

  Leo traced Lieutenant Berg’s voice, spotting her in the crowd. She was the only member of the Beagle’s security detail he ever talked to—the rest nodded to Leo in the corridors or gave him a mock salute, but Lieutenant Berg was different. She showed him card tricks and slipped him extra packets of cocoa to mix with his powdered milk. She’d been there when the Djarik took Leo’s dad. She’d tried to stop them, as the bandages across her head could attest to, but a handful of Coalition security guards were no match against a squad of Djarik marauders.

  Captain Saito’s eyes darted to Leo and his brother just for a moment, then focused back on the crew. “We still aren’t sure why Dr. Fender was taken, but as soon as communications are back up, we will inform the Coalition of his capture. Until then, we will do what he would expect us to and look after each other. That and pray for his safe return.”

  In other words, the captain seemed to be saying, there’s nothing we can do. They were helpless. Stranded. Lost.

  Suddenly Leo felt like he was going to be sick.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Gareth hissed, reaching out and grabbing for his brother’s shoulder, but Leo brushed him off and bolted from the bridge. For once, Gareth didn’t bother to chase him.

  Leo wandered the silent corridors, taking in the evidence of the battle—the scars of laser fire scorched along the walls, the hiss of steam from pipes that had yet to be repaired—and made his way down to the engineering level where he could hear the clanging and cursing of someone at work. Someone who, like Leo, was skipping out on Captain Saito’s somber status report.

  “The devils take you, you bowel-crusted, feces-eating snarf sucker!”

  The cursing Leo recognized, even if his translator struggled with some of the words. The nanochip embedded in his skull was remarkable—a piece of Aykarian technology to nearly rival their coveted jump drive—but it wasn’t 100 percent accurate or exhaustive. Leo didn’t really need to know what a snarf was, though, to get the overall meaning.

  Leo moved past the entrance of the engine room and felt the temperature instantly jump. Standing inside with his shirt off, his skin glistening, his coils of long black hair stuck to his back, the ship’s chief engineer was busy smashing some contorted hunk of metal with a wrench, mangling it ever further. “Explode your anus a thousand times,” he said, tossing the wrench to the ground where it spun nearly to Leo’s feet. “Oh. Sorry, Leo,” Tex said, wiping his hands on his pants. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  Leo shrugged. He’d heard much worse. Much of it from the alien currently apologizing. Tekzek Zardokus was an Edirin, from a planet orbiting a star not far from the one Leo’s house used to circle—relatively speaking. In addition to being a gifted swearer he was also a talented tinkerer; and once Leo got over the fact that he had blue skin, three eyes, and a quick temper, Leo started volunteering to help with simple repairs, learning the ins and outs of ship maintenance from its primary caretaker. Tex—as he reluctantly allowed himself to be called—was the only alien Leo had ever befriended. Or tried to; Leo wasn’t sure the alien really had any friends. It couldn’t be easy being the only one of his kind on board.

  Tex wiped his forehead with a rag that dangled from his tool sash and closed his eyes for a moment. He opened the middle one and fixed it on Leo. “How come you aren’t on the bridge with the rest of the crew?”

  Leo shrugged again. “I’d heard enough,” he muttered.

  “So she told you all about our situation.”

  “She said we were pretty much stuck out here till we get rescued.”

  “She said ‘till,’” Tex said with a snort. “How optimistic.”

  “You don’t think the Coalition will come and rescue us?” Leo asked.

  “Oh, I think they’ll try. But good luck finding us without any communications system. Might have a better chance finding a single narp in the hide of a Hoashidian torblat.”

  Leo’s translator struggled with half the sentence, but again, the meaning was clear: the Beagle’s chief engineer didn’t like their odds of getting rescued.

  “Ships get stranded all the time,” Tex continued. “I used to be a scavenger, you know. Back before my people were invited into the Coalition. We’d find wrecks littered across the void and break them down for scrap. Some were abandoned. Others . . . not.”

  “And the people on board?” Leo asked.

  “Sometimes you’d find them alive,” Tex said.

  Others . . . not.

  “Of course it’s possible I can get this blasted hunk moving again, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Not without new parts. The Djarik were thorough in—how do you humans say it? Tearing us a new one?” The Beagle’s chief engineer slumped, sliding his broad-shouldered back against the same piece of mangled machinery he’d been beating on before.

  Leo went and sat down across from him. He could see the patches of white skin along the Edirin’s forearms. Burns. Some steam, some chemical, some ages old, others newly healed. Tex knew things. Had seen things. His people had been attacked by the Djarik as well, their planet bombarded, invaded. The Aykari finding them, inviting them into the Coalition—it had saved them, had saved their world. The engineer had told Leo stories of the battles raged on Edirin soil, the Aykari and Djarik filling the skies with fire, fighting over the most valuable substance in the universe, buried deep below his planet’s surface.

  Ventasium.

  That was humanity’s name for it. Even in English it had others: hyperblast, fairy dust, jump juice—but Leo’s father had always insisted on calling it by its scientific name, after the Italian scientist who had discovered it on Earth.

  Except Enrico Ventasi had no idea what he was really looking at when he pulled that chunk of radioactive rock from deep within Earth
’s crust, couldn’t comprehend the nature of the door he’d just unlocked. He wouldn’t know until two years later when the Aykari made first contact, telling the nine billion people of Earth that they were far from alone in the universe, and that because of their ventasium deposits, they were also one of the richest planets in the galaxy.

  Which also made them targets.

  Just like the planet Edir.

  Like Leo, Tex had seen firsthand what the Djarik were capable of, long before two Djarik torpedoes slammed into the Beagle’s hull. He had every reason to be pessimistic.

  And yet. “He’s still alive, you know,” the Edirin said, taking in Leo with his three unblinking eyes.

  “What?”

  “Your father. Dr. Fender. He’s still alive. I may be Edirin, but you humans aren’t hard to read. I can see it painted on your face. You fear the worst, but it hasn’t happened.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Leo asked.

  “Because if they’d wanted him dead,” Tex offered, “they would have just left him here with us.”

  Leo tried to keep that flicker of hope burning as he stared at the half chunk of ficken recently rescued from the floor, doubting it would make it taste any worse. He shoveled the whole thing into his mouth, somehow choking it down. Gareth reached across and ruffled his hair. “That wasn’t so bad was it?”

  Compared to what? Compared to everything else they’d already been through? No. At least the food he could swallow.

  “There’s talk of trying to repair the shuttle,” Gareth said, eating his half in nibbles as if trying to make it last. “Saito thinks that if they salvage enough parts from the Beagle they might make it flight worthy. Then, if they could find a way to power it . . .”

  “Then six of us would be able to get off this wreck,” Leo said, doing the math. “Leaving the other thirty or so behind.”

  “Not behind,” Gareth corrected. “Whoever takes the shuttle would try and get help.”