Stowaway

by John David Anderson

  “I’ll take care of Boo. And find that tracking device.”

  “Good. Take the kid with you,” Baz said, nodding toward Leo. “And do me a favor and send Skits out here. I’m sure she wouldn’t turn down a chance to vent a little.”

  Back in the Icarus, Boo sat on the edge of the table in the mess area, now serving as a temporary sick bay, gently prodding the edges of his wound. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “Mostly cauterized already. I’ll be fine.”

  It looked pretty bad to Leo. He was surprised to see the Queleti’s blood was red. Not all aliens had red blood. Aykarian blood was silver, like mercury. Some aliens didn’t even bleed at all. But beyond the charred and blackened hole in Boo’s robe, past the burned fur and flesh, Leo could see traces of deep crimson blooming.

  “It’s getting treated whether you like it or not,” Kat said as she dug around cabinets and crates, gathering supplies. She helped Boo remove his robe and examined the wound, looking not at all squeamish herself. Leo guessed she had seen worse. In fact, he knew she had. “Too bad your hair will cover it,” she said. “This is going to leave a cool scar.”

  “I’ve got scars.”

  “Yeah, but what good are they if you can’t see them?” Kat said, brandishing her bionic arm. “How will people know not to mess with you?”

  Boo shrugged his massive, muscular frame. “Somehow they just know.” He turned and winked at Leo.

  “Since you’re just standing there, ship rat, come give me a hand.” Kat gave Leo a plastic tube, the same medicine they had on board the Beagle, designed to prevent infection, numb pain, and stimulate the regrowth of tissue all at once. Another marvel the Aykari gave to a planet that had been relying on Band-Aids and fiberglass casts. “Squeeze a big dollop of that stuff right on the wound,” she said. “Then rub it in a little.”

  Boo looked at Leo and slowly shook his head.

  “Yeah. I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Leo said.

  Kat’s hands went to her hips. She glared at the Queleti. “You’re seriously going to be a baby about this?”

  “That stuff smells terrible,” Boo protested. “And it makes me itch.”

  “That’s how you know it’s working, you lug. Now, are you going to let Leo put that stuff on you or I am going to have to hold you down?”

  Kat gave Boo a hard stare and a tense silence settled between them. He had twenty inches, an extra functional arm, and at least two hundred pounds on the first mate. He could probably pick her up by one hand and toss her off the ship if he wanted to, in true bouncer fashion. But she had that look on her face and that tone in her voice and that was enough.

  “Fine. But make it quick.”

  Leo dabbed the odoriferous ointment on the wound, trying not to look Boo in the eyes and ignoring his low, rumbling growl. Kat followed with a bandage, wrapping it clear around the hairy shoulder. Leo didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt when somebody pulled it off. He hoped that somebody wasn’t him.

  “I’m going to go find that tracker. You make sure he keeps that on and doesn’t pick at it,” Kat ordered.

  “Right,” Leo said. As if there was a single thing he could do to stop him.

  But Leo didn’t need to worry. Boo didn’t fidget with his bandage or scratch at its edges. He simply leaned back on two hands and closed his eyes.

  After a moment he whispered, “Sijan.”

  “I know that word,” Leo said. “Baz said it came from your people. He said it was like doing a good deed.”

  “So he does listen to me sometimes,” Boo said with a snort. “Back on my planet, sijan is not just a word, it’s a way of life. A path that the Queleti strive to follow. It’s a part of everything we do. Unfortunately it is not the path I’ve chosen. But I still know it when I see it. And I recognize when a debt is owed.”

  Leo shook his head. “Oh. No. Listen, if this is about what happened at the bridge, it’s no big deal. Honestly, I don’t even know what I was thinking. And really it was Kat who pulled you up.”

  “It was Kat who pulled me up,” Boo agreed. “But yours was the first hand I saw. And that is sijan.”

  Boo reached out with one of his own hands—the one with the bandaged arm, though it clearly hurt to move, and placed it flat against Leo’s chest. A day ago Leo would have flinched, fearing that the Queleti was about to crush his ribs, but now he stood still, felt the weight of Boo’s hand. It was comforting, in its way. “You have a strong heart, Leo Fender,” he said. “It has a beautiful rhythm.”

  “Um . . . thanks?”

  “No. Thank you.” Boo removed his giant hand from Leo’s chest, then examined the hole in his Yunkai from the laser blast. “This will be impossible to mend properly, I’m afraid. The wound will heal, but the fabric used for these robes can only be found on my planet. I suppose I will have to live with it.”

  Leo thought about the hole in his now-burned-to-ashes shirt, the one where his patch had been—one large planet surrounded by a dozen smaller ones. The patch was still in his pocket. Many planets. One mission. One enemy. One cause.

  “Maybe you could go back,” he said. “To your planet. To Quel. Go back and get it fixed. Or get a new one.”

  “I cannot go back there,” Boo replied. “My people would not accept me. I did a terrible thing. Committed an act of violence against my own kind. It was unforgivable.”

  “My mother taught me that almost anything is forgivable, as long as you try to make amends for it,” Leo said.

  Boo shook his head. “Not where I’m from. On Quel, any act of violence against one’s own is cause for banishment. We are a mostly peaceful people. We have no soldiers. No warships. We fashion no weapons save the tools we use to farm with. There are no precious resources hiding within our planet’s crust as there are with yours. I think that is why we were not invited into your Coalition. Why the Aykari did not share their gifts with us as they did with you.”

  That can’t be right, Leo thought, still thinking of his patch. “No. The Coalition is for everyone,” he said.

  “Not for everyone. Only for those with something to give in return. Which is fine, but it is not sijan.” The Queleti wove one finger through the hole in his robe. “Perhaps it is better this way,” he said. “Now people will definitely know not to mess with me.”

  Leo studied the bloodstain on his borrowed shirt. He wondered if his patch would cover it.

  They both turned at the sound of Baz’s boots tromping up the ramp. Skits rolled up behind him, holding a crate similar to the one Boo had toted around Kaber’s Point.

  “She was loaded. Four whole cores,” the captain said triumphantly. “We drained her dry.”

  “And we trashed the cockpit,” Skits said, sounding uncharacteristically cheerful.

  “You trashed the cockpit,” Baz corrected.

  “I trashed the cockpit. And it was so much fun.” Skits’s head swiveled, showing off her menacing smile. Leo decided the robot wasn’t just temperamental. She was also a little insane.

  Baz pointed to the bandage on Boo’s arm. “All good here?”

  Boo grumbled.

  “It itches, apparently,” Leo translated for him. “And the medicine stinks.”

  “Well, next time maybe don’t get shot,” Baz suggested.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re a smaller target.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Baz said. “I’m going to go help Kat locate that tracker. Skits, you make sure those cores get locked into the jump drive. Liftoff in five. Ship meeting in ten. All crew are required to attend.”

  He looked directly at Leo when he said the last part.

  Leo had scars. Most of them were plain to see.

  The one on his chin shaped like a comma, earned from slipping off his hoverboard and planting his face on the curb. The pink and white patches on his knees from more of the same. The zigzag of white across his shin from looking behind him while running from his brother and catching the corner of a table, the wood sinking in l
ike a shark’s tooth, tearing a gash two inches long that had to be glued together.

  And the one below his elbow from falling off the top of the car. He and Gareth had been playing space explorers using the car as their ship. An asteroid had struck the hull and Leo had been sent out into the cold grip of space to make the necessary repairs. Seven-year-old Leo crawled out the airlock—their parents told them to roll the windows down—and pulled himself to the roof, his tree branch pistol now acting as a blowtorch as he sealed the hull shut. But he slipped on his way back into the ship. Gravity was still a force to be reckoned with, it seemed. As was the cement driveway.

  He must have landed just right—or just wrong. Leo’s forearm broke in three places, the pain searing and sudden. It was the kind of break that, had it happened twenty years ago, would have meant a graft, plus a cast for months with added months of physical therapy. But Leo was born in a different age. The Aykari had perfected bone regeneration—an outpatient surgical procedure involving a chemical compound of their own design and an incision no bigger than Leo’s fingernail. In four days he was tossing the baseball with Gareth in the backyard again.

  The Fenders thanked their human doctor, of course, but she said the same thing: such treatment wouldn’t have been possible before the Aykari arrived. They were the ones who deserved thanks.

  It was that way with everything, it seemed. So many gifts bestowed upon humanity, handed down literally from on high. And all it cost them was the earth beneath their feet.

  Leo’s arm was as good as new, the scar barely noticeable. You had to look closely, find the spot where the skin was slightly paler, thicker, like a well-worn trail. Most of the time Leo discovered it by absentmindedly scratching at it.

  He had quite a few scars, but the one on his arm was the only one that itched, a reminder of the time he and his brother went into space and Leo saved their lives.

  The tracker was finally located, detached, and left on the landing platform. If anyone else was using its transmission to locate the Icarus, it would bring them all the way to Vestra. There they could find a cheap drink at a local watering hole, a ticked-off bounty hunter, and plenty of red dust, but they wouldn’t find the Icarus, its captain, or its crew.

  A crew that was currently huddled in the cockpit of the ship, already putting some distance between itself and the wind-weary planet. Baz sat in the pilot’s seat as usual, flip-flopped feet resting on the console, Kat sitting beside him. Leo stood next to Boo, who was back in his damaged robe, savoring a second cup of gyurt. Leo’s cup was still waiting for him; Boo insisted on saving it for later.

  The Icarus still sat in orbit around Vestra. It hadn’t made a jump yet. To make a jump you need a destination, Leo knew. You needed coordinates.

  Of course, coordinates they had. They just hadn’t decided what to do with them.

  Bastian Black was uncharacteristically quiet. He wasn’t even drumming on the controls. It was the first time Leo had seen him sitting there without a song in his head, which meant, as far as Leo could judge by the straight faces of the crew (minus Skits, of course), that there was something particularly heavy weighing on their captain’s mind.

  Leo guessed that something heavy was him.

  “Something’s not right here,” he said finally. Baz seemed to be talking to himself, forgetting that everyone could hear him in the Icarus’s cockpit. “I don’t get it,” he said, louder this time, fixing his eyes on Leo. “Help me out here. Why would Gerrod Grimsley put a bounty on you?”

  Leo shook his head, the one that had a price on it, though he had no idea why.

  “I don’t think it’s because you’ve been tagging along with us. And it’s not just because you helped us escape. There’s something else going on. Zen called you out. Said she had to bring you in alive.”

  Leo didn’t need to be reminded. He could still hear Baz’s bounty hunter ex-girlfriend calling his name. Could still picture her rifle pointed in his direction.

  “Why was she after you?” Baz asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Black’s voice turned icy. “Don’t lie to me, Leo. What does Grimsley want with you?”

  “I’m not lying,” Leo insisted.

  “Ease up, Baz. The kid doesn’t know. Besides, maybe it’s not Grimsley who wants him,” Kat suggested. “Maybe the Aykari are looking for him and they’re going outside the Coalition for help. Grimsley doesn’t care who he works for as long as he gets paid.”

  Leo could believe that, though he doubted the Coalition would stoop to working with the likes of Gerrod Grimsley just to find one kid. Then again, Leo never thought the Coalition would stoop to working with two criminal network jackers either, but Dev and Mac had claimed otherwise.

  He could feel Black’s stare pressing on him. “I don’t know why he would be after me unless it has something to do with you. Maybe we could go back down and wake up your girlfriend and ask her.”

  “That sounds like a bad idea,” Boo said.

  “Yeah, especially when she sees what I did to her ship,” Skits added.

  Baz shook his head, eyes still focused on Leo. “Let’s go back to the beginning. A Djarik raiding party attacks your ship, a research vessel, crippling it. They take your V, your weapons—standard practice—but only one prisoner: your father. Why?”

  “I already told you I don’t know that either.”

  “But there must be a reason, Leo. You said he was a scientist. What was he working on?”

  “Something with ventasium,” Leo sputtered. “Finding alternatives to it. Or ways to make it stronger. He didn’t talk about it much. Said most of it was classified. He joked that it was above our pay grade.” That is, when his father talked about his work. Most of the time he kept it to himself, and Leo hardly ever bothered to ask.

  Maybe he should have.

  “Classified. Now that sounds interesting,” Skits chimed in.

  “Which might explain why the Djarik wanted him, but it doesn’t explain why someone’s looking for you,” Boo said.

  “Unless they think Leo can somehow point them to his father,” Kat said. “Which, now, of course, he can. At least we can . . . if that’s the play.”

  Leo could feel all their eyes on him now, even the robot’s unblinking sensors.

  “Believe me, I’m just as lost as you are,” he said. “All I know is that my dad’s out there. And he needs help. He needs my help.” And I need yours, Leo thought. Or at least I need somebody’s. Because I can’t do this alone.

  “Tell me something, Leo,” Baz said. “Your father—is he a good man?”

  Leo blinked. A good man? What does Bastian Black—a wanted pirate, a thief, a deserter from the Coalition—what would he consider good?

  “He cares about people,” Leo said. He thought about it for a moment, then added, “And not just me and Gareth. Everyone. He really wants to make the universe a better place.”

  “Good luck with that,” Skits said, earning her looks from everyone this time. “What? I’m just saying. The universe kinda sucks.”

  No one bothered to disagree with her. “He’s a good dad, too, if that’s what you’re asking,” Leo added. “I just want him back.”

  Leo watched the captain’s eyes. The Aykari’s eyes changed color depending on their mood. Humans weren’t so easy to read. Bastian Black was almost impossible. But Leo thought he caught something there. A flash of sympathy. Or regret. Or resignation. He’d seen it before, when he first agreed to take Leo back to the ship, and then again when he took back the case holding his medal. It was the look of someone who has lost something. Something essential. Leo knew that look well.

  “All right, Leo. If that’s the case, then I think we have two options. Option one—we find a way to smuggle you and the datachip into Coalition hands without getting caught, hoping that if we do get caught, they will repay our generosity by not executing us right there on the spot.”

  “Sounds like an iffy plan,” Kat said.

  “You haven’t hea
rd option two yet,” Baz said.

  “What’s option two?” Boo asked.

  “We go in there and get Leo’s father ourselves.”

  Baz’s second suggestion was met with silence all around. Leo wasn’t sure he’d heard the captain correctly. A rescue mission? From a Djarik base? That was a little more than iffy. It was insane. Why would Baz even suggest it? Would he really risk his life, his ship, his crew, just to help some stowaway?

  Skits was the first to speak up. “You forgot option three,” she said. “Dump the kid back on the rock below us and conveniently forget we ever met him.”

  “That’s not an option,” Boo said shortly.

  “Says who? You’re not the captain. This isn’t your ship.”

  “This kid saved my life.”

  “And we saved his. Even stephen.”

  “We’re not marooning him,” Kat seconded.

  But the robot was adamant. “Why not? He’s not our problem. He’s the Coalition’s problem. So is his father. Why should we do their dirty work?”

  “Because we wouldn’t be doing it for the Coalition,” Kat said. “We’d be doing it for Leo.”

  “Who is part of the Coalition.”

  “Who is a person who has lost his entire family. And we have a chance to do something about it. To at least bring two of them back together,” Kat said. “Besides, I think I remember him helping to push your crippled metal butt back into the ship at Kaber’s Point. I’m pretty sure you weren’t his problem then either.”

  That shut the robot up, at least for the moment.

  “The question is, do we trust the Aykari and the Coalition to go in and get him?” Boo asked. “They certainly have more resources than we do.”

  Baz shook his head. “I don’t trust the Aykari to save anyone. But that’s just me. Still, we’re talking about an awfully big risk here.” He looked at Leo. “Not sure it’s worth it.”

  Leo looked down at his Coalition boots, the soles worn, the laces untied as they almost always were. He thought of his father finding him in the driveway after his fall that one day, curled up and crying and clutching his broken arm, scooping Leo up and setting him gently in the car, his panicked brother sitting in the back seat, desperate to explain—We were just playing spaceship, he was on the roof, I don’t know what happened—his father’s soothing voice, telling them he wasn’t mad, that everything would be okay. You’ll be all right. Nothing that can’t be fixed.