“So what does white mean?”
“It means nothing. It means I have no station. To my people I am nothing. An outcast.”
“So then why do you still wear it?”
“Because Baz says I make him self-conscious without it. Something having to do with what he calls rock-hard abs.” The Queleti paused. “Also because I am still proud of where I come from, even if they are no longer proud of me. That symbol on your garb,” he said, pointing to the patch on the breast of Leo’s shirt. “The mark of the Coalition?”
Leo nodded. It was a simple design. A large red planet with at least two dozen other smaller planets forming a ring around it in blue. The red planet was Aykar, of course. The Bringers of Light. Preservers of order and peace. Earth could be any of the two dozen circles surrounding it. Leo traced the ring with his finger. He’d forgotten all his shirts even had that insignia—every scrap of clothing he had was provided for him by the Coalition.
Even in translation, Leo could catch a hint of something in the alien’s voice. A wariness. “What’s wrong with the Coalition?”
“Nothing. So long as you are part of it,” Boo said. But before he could elaborate, Bastian Black’s voice piped in over the ship’s internal coms.
“This is your captain speaking. We are coming up on Kaber’s Point, so make sure your seats are in their full and upright positions and that your robes and artificial limbs are securely fastened.”
“What’s Kaber’s Point?” Leo asked.
“It’s a place for people like us.”
“People like us?”
“The ones who don’t belong,” Boo replied.
The ventasium was always there, waiting for us to find it, just as we were always here, waiting for the Aykari to find us. Whether these two events transpiring so close together is a matter of chance or fate, I do not know. But I do know that without either one of them—the element or the aliens—our planet, and our species, were surely doomed for extinction.
—Enrico Ventasi, The Discovery of Our Species, 2045
An Uneven Exchange
LEO COULD NAME OVER THREE DOZEN PLANETS, NOT including the eight in his own system. His teachers told him it was part of his responsibility as a galactic citizen to be knowledgeable of worlds and species other than his own. His father wholeheartedly agreed.
In the fourth grade, he had to give a presentation on one of the other known inhabited planets in the Milky Way—a name humans stubbornly stuck to, even after the Aykari informed them of the galaxy’s standard numerical designation. The students in Mrs. Dolson’s class drew a planet from a hat and were told to describe its general location, nearest star, climate, gravity, composition, life-forms and civilizations, major galactic contributions, and so on. The students showed pictures of their planets on the giant vid screen at the front of the room. Most of them played dramatic classical music in the background. Strauss proved popular.
Leo drew Tildus 4, a little blue marble orbiting a very distant M-class star. Temperate and mostly covered in water, though unlike Earth, Tildus 4 had produced only primitive sea life due to a somewhat inhospitable atmosphere. Thus its major contribution to galactic culture was that its oceanic creatures were considered delicacies among the galaxy’s other species, like lobster or caviar to humans. Leo told his class that he hoped one day to own a shell from this planet to add to his collection, though he would have to wear a clunky protective suit and helmet if he wanted to go beachcombing, otherwise he would choke to death on the highly toxic air.
What struck Leo about that particular assignment wasn’t the presentations—though Misty Treach’s twenty-minute, fully animated vidflip on Cygnus 7 was overdoing it—but how full the hat had been. Mrs. Dolson had restricted them to only “a handful of possibilities,” picking only those planets that would provide “ample information available to research” and were in “relatively close proximity” to Earth, yet the list was still a hundred planets long.
Leo knew that only a fraction of the planets in the known galaxy were capable of supporting life, and only a fraction of those had a species intelligent enough to master space travel or at least take advantage of it when it was handed to them. Fractions of fractions. One in a million. Which made humans rare, but not unique.
And certainly not the center of the universe.
Sitting in his antiquated wooden desk in Mrs. Dolson’s class, staring at that hat full of planets, Leo was struck by the immensity of it. The universe and its infinite possibilities. Why then, he thought, does it sometimes still seem so small? How is it that with millions of planets circling millions of stars and the vast stretches of nothing in between that you sometimes still couldn’t find a space where you felt safe, a place you could go to escape the things that haunted you?
After all the presentations were finished the class was greeted with a surprise—a virtual visit from an Aykari educational ambassador. The class wriggled and buzzed at the chance to talk to an Aykari face-to-face. After an introduction where the ambassador touted the mission of the Coalition—a collection of free peoples forging a bold new path in the galaxy through the sharing of information, technology, and resources while protecting each other from those who would try to undermine those freedoms—a dozen hands shot up with questions for their alien guest, nearly every one starting with Is it really true.
Is it really true that Aykari have no tongues? (True, their species never had a need for them.) Is it really true that the planet Aykar was the first place ventasium was discovered? (True, though the Aykari didn’t and don’t call it that.) Is it true that the Aykari and Djarik have been at war for hundreds of years? (Human years, yes. We all measure time in our own way.) If you really have no tongues, then how do you . . . you know . . . make out with each other and stuff? (The answer this time from Mrs. Dolson over the stifled giggles of half the class: I don’t think that’s an appropriate conversation to be having right now.) With every query answered, three more hands shot up.
Mrs. Dolson never got around to calling on Leo.
A hundred planets in a hat. Thirty-eight presentations. A conversation with an alien who had literally traveled halfway across the galaxy. And yet Leo’s question remained: If there was somewhere in the whole wide universe you could go that your nightmares wouldn’t follow.
Leo would not have been able to draw Kaber’s Point out of Mrs. Dolson’s hat. The hat only held planets, and this was definitely not one of those.
What it was was a floating junk pile. At least that’s what it looked like from the cockpit of the Icarus. A multiship pileup on the interstellar expressway. A collage of freighters and cruisers all mashed together.
“That’s Kaber’s Point?”
He forgot he wasn’t supposed to be talking, but no one bothered to remind him. Kat sat in the pilot’s seat this time, navigating their approach. The captain sat beside her changing shoes, leaving his flip-flops under the console and slipping back into his high-tops. The robot was nowhere to be seen.
Leo wasn’t sure why he expected Kaber’s Point to be a planet. There was a planet nearby—Leo could make out the orange and yellow profile of it in the distance—but that wasn’t where they were headed. A docking bay of a giant cruiser beckoned them with open jaws, ready to swallow them up.
“Kaber’s Point is an outpost. A trading center. Making it out of a few massive ships keeps it mobile,” Baz said, lacing up his shoes. He turned to Boo, who barely fit in the chair next to Leo, and pointed at the shoes. “You like these? They’re Jordans.”
“How did Jordan feel when you took them?” the alien asked.
Baz shook his head. “Don’t even know why I try. Turn as you land, K. I want our nose pointing out, just in case we have to make a quick getaway.”
“Is there any other kind?” she replied.
Leo studied the conglomeration of ships all glommed together. It reminded him of the first human space stations. He’d learned about them in history, countries sticking big metal boxes and tubes together l
ike Lego bricks. Except those old space stations could only house a dozen or so astronauts. Kaber’s Point was more like a city made of ships. He didn’t recognize most of the designs.
“Are any of those Coalition ships?”
From the pilot’s seat came a snort, Kat shaking her head.
“Let’s just say this place works outside Coalition jurisdiction,” Baz said. “Or tries to, anyway.”
“What he means is, around here anything goes. So watch your back,” Kat said.
Watch his back? Did she mean him specifically?
“Wait—am I going with you?” Leo just assumed he’d be locked back in the bunk by himself. Or even worse, back in the cramped cargo hold where he’d been discovered.
“I want you where I can see you,” Bastian Black said. “Besides, it will be easier to pawn you off on some poor freight jockey this way.”
“Or to just leave you in the hands of a pack of Snids,” Kat offered.
“What’s a Snid?” Leo asked.
“A race of sluglike aliens with voracious appetites and a nondiscriminating palate.”
“Nondiscriminating?”
“Means they eat whatever they can catch,” Boo clarified.
“You get hungry enough and you will eat almost anything too,” Kat said. “Trust me.”
Leo shivered. On second thought, maybe the cargo hold wouldn’t be so bad. Leo had never been anywhere that wasn’t ostensibly under Coalition control. At least until his brother convinced him to stow away aboard this ship. And now he was headed to an outpost full of criminals and pirates and outsiders and human-eating slugs? “Do I have to go?”
“Don’t worry, Leo of House Fender. Snids don’t move too fast,” Boo assured him.
Kat easily maneuvered the Icarus into position, setting down in the belly of one of Kaber’s Point’s larger ships with a soft touch. Leo unbuckled and stood up with the rest. Kat unholstered her pistol, checking its charge.
“You anticipating trouble?” Boo asked her.
She glanced at Baz. “Always,” she said.
The captain of the Icarus turned to Leo. “Previous rules still apply. Keep your mouth shut and don’t do anything stupid. If you decide to run off, know that I won’t even wave goodbye. The sooner you’re someone else’s problem, the better. And this? This is gonna have to go.” Baz grabbed the Coalition patch stitched onto Leo’s shirt and ripped it loose, leaving a noticeable tear to the left of his heart. He handed the patch to Leo. “The less most people around here know about you, the better.”
People around here. The kinds of people that pirates tend to mingle with. Leo nodded and stuffed the patch in his pocket, then stuck his finger through the brand-new hole in his shirt.
“Now whose clothes look funny?” Boo asked.
Leo couldn’t get the image out of his head. Him crammed into the cargo hold, reaching down for his brother’s hand. The look on Gareth’s face—sadness, regret, but also resignation. The look he might get before starting a race he knows he is destined to lose.
At least this way I’ll know you got out.
Leo had gotten out, all right.
This was the plan: hide in the storage compartment aboard the pirate’s ship, wait for it to land somewhere and for the crew to depart, and then make your escape and go find help.
The ship had landed. The crew had departed. The problem was Leo was departing with them.
At least most of them. As they stood on the ramp of the Icarus, Baz gave instructions to the robot who was being left behind. It appeared to be picking little bits of debris out of its treads, looking bored, if such a thing was possible for a robot with an unchanging facial expression. It only looked up when Baz spoke to it.
“Listen, while I’m gone I want you to refuel and then try and fix the cooling system on the second sublight engine. Okay?”
“Fine,” the robot moaned.
“I’m serious, Skits. That thing has been running hot for days. And I don’t just mean a slapdash job that makes it look like you fixed it. I mean actually fix it.”
“I said, fine. God. What do you want from me?”
Leo had never heard a robot speak like that before, with that petulant mix of annoyance and resentment. Most robots were programmed to sound patient and helpful or gruff and intimidating. Skits’s voice replicator had a distinctive nasally whine to it.
“I’m just saying, sometimes I ask you to do something and I come back and you haven’t even started. You need to take a little responsibility around here.”
“Stop lecturing me, all right? I’ll fix your stupid engine. Jeez.”
The robot spun around and trundled off. Baz sighed. Leo recognized the look on his face—the same shoulder-tensed, tongue-bitten expression his father would sometimes get when he and Gareth broke something horsing around or forgot to finish their homework or tracked mud through the house. Back when they still had a house.
Back when he still had his father.
No. He couldn’t think like that. His dad was still alive. Leo was sure of it. He was still out there, somewhere, just like Gareth, waiting for rescue. We’ll find each other. Better yet, he would find them. He would find and rescue both of them.
As soon as he got some help.
Which meant getting away from this lot.
“Okay, crew. Stick close and try not to attract any unwanted attention. You especially,” Baz said to Leo, which seemed funny given that he was standing next to a seven-foot, four-armed, barely dressed, ox-faced monkey man. “Just act like you belong.”
Act like you belong. With a posse of pirates. On board a movable city full of aliens you’ve never even seen before.
Leo said he would try.
The ship they were docked in was easily ten times the size of the Beagle—nearly as large as an Aykarian frigate. Leo had seen several of those in orbit around Earth, studded with guns all pointing upward, outward, forming a barricade. But those ships were filled with Aykari, Leo knew. This one was filled with all kinds of beings, none of them Aykari.
“Act natural,” Leo whispered to himself as he synced his footsteps with Baz’s, fully aware of Kat walking close behind him. He was used to the Beagle with its mostly human crew. Here humans were a minority. In the hangar alone, Leo spotted a dozen alien species he couldn’t name—beings that clearly hadn’t made their way out of Mrs. Dolson’s hat. It’s hard to look like you belong in a crowd when that crowd includes an amorphous pink blob slithering past you, leaving a sticky slime trail in its wake. Or the stout, three-headed purple creature with the metal spikes for hair looking over three ship manifests at once. Or the hunched and hairy thing looking almost prehistoric save for the overalls and the giant blaster cannon strapped to its back.
One thing they all had in common though: nearly every living thing in here carried some kind of weapon.
“Not polite to stare,” Kat said over Leo’s shoulder.
Leo fixed his eyes on his shoes. It was true. A three-headed alien has a three times better chance of noticing you being impolite, but it was hard not to look. Kaber’s Point was a whirlwind. A giant market sprawling across its hangars, spilling out into its corridors. Makeshift huts, colorful banners hanging from the rafters, vendors with carts standing at the corners, shouting prices, hocking objects of unearthly design. The whole place reminded Leo a little of Chinatown back in San Francisco—if Chinatown was housed inside a spaceship and frequented by slithering pink blobs.
None of the other crew of the Icarus seemed at all fazed by the people parading past them, however, Baz leading the way at a determined pace. Leo wondered how much more of the galaxy they’d seen than him, how many other planets and systems they’d been to. Enough to feel comfortable in a place like this.
How long does it take to feel like you belong in the universe?
Leo looked back at Kat. “Don’t you wonder about them? I mean, where they come from? What they do? What they’re made of?” he said as they passed a creature that looked—or at least smelled�
�like it was made of cheese. Old cheese.
“I’m more interested in what I can do to avoid them,” she said. “Curiosity will kill you.”
“Like the cat,” Leo said, remembering one of his mother’s sayings.
“Which cat?” Kat asked.
“Nothing. Never mind.” At last he spotted a somewhat familiar face in the crowd, the dark blue skin and three narrow eyes of an Edirin, the same species as Tex, the Beagle’s chief engineer. Except this Edirin was decked out in armor with two menacing blades dangling from each side and a look that warned everyone to stay out of his way. Leo turned back to Kat. “None of them are part of the Coalition?”
“I don’t see any patches, do you?”
“So then they are all . . . you know . . .”
Leo wanted to say outlaws. He wanted to say enemies. But he guessed Kat wouldn’t see it that way. She might take offense. And Leo didn’t want to be on her bad side any more than he probably already was.
She answered before he could finish the question. “They are who they are. Doing what they have to do to get by. Just like us. And didn’t Baz tell you not to talk?”
Leo nodded and shut his mouth, but he kept his eyes open wide, partly just taking everything in, but also scanning the crowd of traders and merchants for someone who at least looked friendly. Nobody even bothered to look Leo in the eye, though. He was nothing. A nobody. Not their concern.
Maybe because they thought he was a pirate too.
They exited the hangar and traversed several more corridors, passing even more alien species that Leo couldn’t name, until finally Baz stopped. The door they stood before looked the same as all the others save for a small engraving etched above its control panel. The symbol looked like an octopus with huge jaws filled with rows of serrated teeth. Leo hoped that wasn’t a sign of what was waiting behind the door.
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