“You say the Djarik took your dad?” Black asked, his eyes narrowing.
Leo nodded.
“And just left the rest of you floating out there on that wreck?”
Leo nodded again. Black rubbed his chin.
“Sounds about right,” Kat said, clearly not surprised by the Djarik’s cruelty. Then again, three seconds ago she was mimicking pushing Leo out of an airlock into space.
“Please,” Leo pleaded again. “I have to help them.”
For a moment, Leo saw the captain’s eyes soften and he thought maybe.
But then the moment passed.
“Sorry, kid. Your have tos and my have tos don’t match up. And since I’m the one with the ship and you’re the one who snuck onto the ship, you get exactly zero say in the matter. So here’s what’s going to happen. We are going to go to Kaber’s Point. We’re going to make our delivery and get our money. And when we’re finished with that, then maybe, maybe, we will try to find somebody who cares. Until then, you will sit perfectly still and not say a single word or else you’ll find yourself floating back through space to that ship of yours, understood?”
Leo started to protest some more, but thought better of it, nodding instead. He was still alive. And though he had no idea what Kaber’s Point was or what the pirates were delivering, at least their captain hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility of helping him.
Bastian Black looked up at the girl. “How about you go lock ninja turtle here in the bunks. Let Boo babysit him till we dock. It will still be a while.”
“Boo?” Leo repeated. The seven-foot-tall creature with horns and sharp teeth and enough arms to rip all of Leo’s limbs from his body at once? “You’re going to put me in a room with that thing?”
The captain of the Icarus put up a finger in warning. “That was ten words.”
“Twelve actually,” Kat corrected. “I think that’s enough to justify shooting him.” Leo couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. At least not until Black laughed, and even then he wasn’t so sure.
The first mate who was nobody’s mate grabbed Leo by the collar, pushing him out of the cockpit as the electric guitars began blasting from the speakers again. Captain Bastian Black of the Icarus returned to playing imaginary drums to music that was made on a planet trillions of miles away.
It hadn’t taken long for Leo to miss Earth.
The first month aboard the Beagle was exciting, he reluctantly came to admit. Meeting the crew, learning the ins and outs of the ship, seeing the planets and the orbital stations, jumping from star to star. And there were things about home he was happy to leave behind. The smog, bad before the Aykari arrived and made worse by their constant drilling. The crowded streets. The constant threat of earthquakes—another unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of extracting precious ventasium from the caches in the planet’s crust. He didn’t miss the high-pitched whine of those Aykari excavators, as big as skyscrapers, each shaped like the Eifel Tower, burrowing into the ground, nosing their way to stores of V. Or the way the water had started to taste funny, like the metallic aftertaste you get when eating peaches straight out of a can.
But the excitement soon wore off, and Leo began to long for walls that weren’t made of steel plates. For toilets that weren’t tubes. For the smell of a spring rain and the tickle of a breeze along his neck hairs.
He ached for a sky full of clouds. He sorely missed trees—there were still hordes of them on Earth if you drove far enough out of the city. Tall, thin aspens and blazing red maples, and the sweet stinging scent of an acre of evergreens. Leo missed the smell of pine. He missed the mountains and the rivers and skipping smooth stones to the other bank. He missed hiking through Red Rock. He missed taking the magnet to San Diego to hang out at Coronado beach, chasing seagulls and burying his father up to his neck in sand.
And he missed the food. Oh, how he missed the food. Crisp apples and non-powdered milk and pizza dripping in grease. He missed licking the drippings from the edges of ice cream cones. He missed the sizzling hiss of fajitas and the smell of roasted peppers from his favorite Mexican restaurant.
And sunsets. Leo might have missed sunsets most of all. You don’t think about sunsets until you are on board a ship in deep space with only your watch to tell you when a day supposedly begins and ends.
When he was little he assumed those things would last forever, even as they started to disappear. He took them for granted. He just didn’t realize it until they were gone. Fresh air and not-freeze-dried food. Bird chirps and beach sand. Sunsets and greasy pizza.
It was a glorious combination.
Sitting with his mom and dad on the back porch, watching as Earth’s nearest star crept slowly toward the horizon, making a canvas of the sky. The sound of his brother’s basketball clanging off the rim in the driveway, having already scarfed down his three slices of plain cheese. That’s all he and Leo ever ate. One medium cheese for them. Another with everything on it for Mom and Dad.
They sat right next to each other like always, never across from each other like his friends’ parents, double-dipping their crusts in the same garlic sauce. The inseparable Fenders.
“Can you imagine not being able to eat pizza?” Leo’s father wondered.
“Who can’t eat pizza?” Leo asked around a piece of crust. But as soon as he asked he knew the answer. The Aykari couldn’t. They couldn’t eat any solid food; they had no teeth. They subsisted on a purely liquid diet—some synthetic mixture that human scientists were already trying to adapt for the Earth market, no doubt with the goal of spawning new fad Eat-like-the-Aliens diets. Leo had to admit the Aykari were all skinny.
“Their loss,” Leo said. What kind of a superior alien race doesn’t even have teeth? Or taste buds? Sure, they’d created a fusion engine the size of a deck of cards and could cure a host of diseases, but what was the point of living if you couldn’t taste chocolate? Or bacon? Just the thought of it was horrifying.
“Well, at least that’s one thing we have that they don’t,” Leo’s mother said.
“Speaking of . . . the university is set to approve my grant tomorrow,” Dr. Fender said. “To establish a partnership with the Aykari on the study of the additional applications of ventasium here on Earth. We’re going to look at everything. Medicine. Military. Construction. Environmental science. Cosmetics.”
“Cosmetics?” Mom asked.
“Philip Ganderson over in the chemistry department thinks it might be reconfigured to stimulate hair regrowth.”
“Ganderson. He’s the bald one, right?”
“So he’s a little biased,” Leo’s dad said. “I’m sure most of it will lead to dead ends. The important thing is that we’ll be working together, Aykari and humans. A two-way street. We need to show them that we have more to offer than what they can dig out from under our crust. We need to be a part of the bigger picture.”
“What bigger picture?” Leo asked. Only after his mother groaned did he realize he had walked right into his father’s trap. The warning signs flashed in his brain: lecture incoming. He should have gone to play basketball with Gareth.
“The bigger picture,” Dr. Calvin Fender said, smiling. “The biggest picture. The thing we’re all striving for. A free and peaceful galaxy. That’s what the Aykari are working toward with their Coalition. It’s what we should be working toward, it’s just that humanity hasn’t completely gotten on board with it yet—for whatever reason. Governments are dragging their feet. Afraid to commit.”
Coalition. Leo had heard his father use that word before.
Dr. Fender took a bite of his pizza, chewed it thoughtfully, then stared at the slice he was holding for a solid minute before pointing at it. “Let’s say this pizza is the universe.”
“No wonder I’m stuffed,” Leo’s mother joked.
“I’m trying to illustrate something,” Leo’s father said. “So this is the universe. Or our galaxy, at least.” He began to point to the toppings. “You’ve got your onions. Your
pepperoni. Sausage. Bacon. Green pepper. Mushrooms. Garlic. Spinach. Tomatoes. Olives. They’re like planets all mixed together.”
“Disgusting,” Leo said, taking another bite of his plain cheese.
“Delicious,” his mother countered.
“The point is,” Leo’s dad continued, “all these different planets, these different civilizations, they are separate, unique, independent, but they are all bound by something greater.”
“Cheese,” Leo said.
His mother laughed. His father didn’t.
“Yes. Exactly!” Dr. Fender said. “The Coalition is the cheese holding it all together. Making it one big peaceful, productive, egalitarian piece of pizza.”
“And your father calls me a dreamer.”
“It’s not a dream. It’s an inevitability. It’s going to happen. The Aykari have made it possible. It’s up to us humans now to band together as a species and find a way to contribute beyond just giving them access to our ventasium. It’s hardly enough, considering how much they’ve done for us.”
It sort of seemed like enough for Leo. After all, without the ventasium, the Aykari wouldn’t get anywhere. “So which are we?” Leo wanted to know, still staring at the slice of the universe in his father’s hand. “Which one is Earth?”
“We’re the mushrooms,” his mother said, plucking one out of her cheesy coalition and popping it in her mouth. “Don’t you think, Dr. Fender? Humans—the fungus of the galaxy?”
Leo’s father smiled, but his eyes were elsewhere already, looking up, not at the resplendent pink glow on the horizon, but higher, at the half-moon already visible, beyond the blockade of Aykari ships forming a defensive perimeter around Earth like a big brother curling his fists, threatening to take on any would-be bullies. Staring deep into the sky, as if his vision could reach the edges of the solar system, to the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Leo stared up there with him, sucking the grease off his fingers. It was a nice idea, this Coalition. Probably something worth being a part of. Even for the mushrooms. Maybe especially for the mushrooms.
There was no way of knowing then just how soon it would happen. No way for eight-year-old Leo to know that before his next birthday, the peoples of Earth would do exactly what Leo’s father predicted they would—join forces with the Aykari and start down the path of fulfilling Dr. Calvin Fender’s dream.
And the nightmare that would make it happen.
There was no escape.
Even if the door wasn’t locked—and Leo couldn’t be sure—there was no way past the creature guarding it.
Though, to be fair, the alien wasn’t so much guarding it as simply sitting beside it, slumped in his seat, staring at a datapad, occasionally grunting to itself. Close up, Boo looked no less intimidating. Its face appeared more of a blend of musk ox and mountain lion, with fine, curled whiskers prickling out of its snout; but it was still so massive, its muscular chest peeking out of the V-shaped fold in its robe, the rolling muscles of its arms no doubt capable of snapping Leo’s bones like pretzel sticks. Its curly ears occasionally twitched like a dog’s, and then one of the creature’s four hands would scratch it absently.
For what seemed like an hour, Leo stared silently at the alien, who didn’t seem to even acknowledge that anyone else was in the room. Until, without even looking up from its datapad, it said, “That’s it. I can’t stand it any longer. Just ask.”
The soft voice coming through Leo’s translator surprised him all over again. He cleared his throat, mustered the courage to utter two words, even though he was already eleven over his limit. “Ask what?”
The alien set down its pad and turned to Leo. Leo could see now that its eyes weren’t all black—there were flecks of orange scattered within them like constellations. “Whatever it is you’re wanting to ask me. You’ve been staring at me for forever. So just go on. Get it out of your system.”
“But I’m not supposed to talk,” Leo murmured. “That’s what Baz . . . what Captain Black said. And Kat—the girl—she threatened to shoot me.”
The alien snorted. “Yeah, she says things like that. It’s mostly talk. She doesn’t normally shoot anyone. . . . Unless they try to shoot her first. . . . Or if she thinks they are going to shoot her first. . . . Or if she thinks they’re thinking of shooting her.”
“Oh.”
The alien raised all four of its arms, showing Leo its hairless gray palms. “But I don’t even have a gun, as you can see, so go on. Ask.”
Leo didn’t think a gun was really necessary—the hulking babysitter could probably squeeze the brains from Leo’s skull like pulp from an orange. Still, he did have questions. About Captain Black. About the Icarus. About the shipment they were supposed to deliver. Questions whose answers might help him think of a way to get help. But in this moment, Leo was more taken with the fur-covered creature looking at him with wide and maybe slightly impatient eyes.
“Um. Okay. So . . . what, uh . . . what are you?”
“What do you mean, what am I?”
“I mean, like what species are you?” Leo added. “Like I’m human. And you’re . . .”
“Not. Yes, I know. As if I wasn’t outnumbered already,” Boo mumbled. “I am, in fact, a Queleti. I come from a planet in the Gajen system—far out on the Aykari border. Small planet. Lots of mountains. Cold. At least you would think so, given how hairless you all are.”
Leo shook his head. He’d never even heard of the Gajen system. He hadn’t learned about it in school, and it was never part of the Beagle’s itinerary. Of course the galaxy was a massive place, and he’d seen only a fraction of it, which could explain why he’d never met a Queleti before either.
“Don’t feel bad. I’d never heard of your planet either until I met Baz. Sounds lovely, from what he tells me—minus the constantly rising temperatures, rampant social injustice, and the disease-carrying insects and whatnot. My full name is Bo’enmaza Okardo Ryulen Zafar. House Okardo. Tribe Zafar, but the others just call me Boo.”
Boo, Baz, Kat, Skits. These didn’t sound like the names of pirates. They sounded more like characters out of a children’s cartoon. “And your name?” Boo asked.
“Leo Tyson Fender. Um, house Fender. Tribe American, I guess.”
“An honor to meet you, Leo of House Fender.” The Queleti gave Leo a four-armed salute that Leo couldn’t exactly replicate. The courtesy of such an introduction took Leo by surprise. Compared to the robot that wanted to starve him to death, the girl who threatened to shoot him, and the captain who forbade him to speak, this alien suddenly seemed the least scary of the lot.
“You don’t act like a pirate.”
“And how am I supposed to act?” Boo asked.
“I don’t know. Pirates are, you know . . . cruel. And bloodthirsty. And they don’t care about anyone but themselves. They just steal whatever they want.”
“Maybe you don’t have anything I want,” Boo remarked.
Leo considered everything he had on him. His watch. His inhaler. His worn-out boots. “Probably not,” he said. Still, Leo knew he should be careful. Just because this creature was soft-spoken and more agreeable than his companions didn’t mean he wouldn’t tear Leo’s heart out with his teeth if provoked.
“So let me ask you something, Leo of House Fender. What are you doing aboard this ship?”
“It was my brother’s idea,” Leo said quickly.
“Of course it was. That’s something I’ve noticed about your species. You’re incredibly adept at deflecting blame. Baz does it all the time. So your brother told you to stow away with a band of wanted pirates. I’m assuming he had a good reason?”
Leo wasn’t sure how good it was. “He said we were going to escape, to go get help, but there was only room for me.”
The Queleti nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “So he thought he was saving you.”
“Well, we see how that turned out,” Leo muttered.
“You’re still breathing, aren’t you?” Boo said. “That’s something. And the rest of
your House? Where are they?”
It took a moment for Leo to register what the Queleti was asking him. “The Djarik took my dad when they attacked our ship. My mother’s . . . gone,” Leo said softly.
Boo nodded his understanding. “So they took your father and left the rest of you behind? Seems unusual for the Djarik. Do you know why?”
Leo shook his head. He’d been asking himself that same question for five days, ever since the attack. “He was—is a scientist,” Leo self-corrected. “He knows a lot about ventasium.”
Boo snorted.
“What?” Leo asked.
“Nothing,” the alien said. “Just that when it comes to people’s motives, that stuff tends to come up a lot. Still, I’m sorry to hear about your parents. It is a terrible thing. And your brother was wrong to put you on board this ship. Family should never be separated if they can help it.” There was a sudden sadness in the Queleti’s voice.
“What about you? What about your House? Where are they?” Leo asked.
“All of the members of tribe Zafar are still back on Quel. I am the only one who left.”
“But you just said—”
“I didn’t leave by choice,” Boo interrupted. “I was exiled.”
“Exiled,” Leo echoed.
“I did something terrible. Something that shamed my House and my tribe. I had to go. Eventually I crossed paths with Baz and he took me in.”
“What was it? Did you hurt someone?”
“It is not worth discussing,” Boo said, his voice deepening into a growl.
Leo took the growl to heart and didn’t press it. At least he and this alien had something in common: they’d both been forced to leave their planet with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Though Leo had more clothes to show for it.
“Is that what you always wear?” He pointed to the long flowing robe that was snug around the Queleti’s shoulders.
Boo looked at his outfit with admiration. “This is a Yunkai. It’s the traditional garb of my people. The thick fur makes clothes superfluous on my planet, so it’s just for ornamentation. The color of your robe represents your station.”
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