When Quaja didn’t respond, he handed over the unit. “You’ll have to pull the ship parts yourself. They should all be working. They were when the ship crashed.”
“It crashed?”
“Yeah, some sort of mutiny just after launch. Someone knocked the autopilot off during the scuffle.”
Quaja disassembled the coupler using only four tentacles, then passed it back while passing over the obvious joke. He looked at it confusedly—as if he’d just learned there was a humidity sensor in the casing rather than a hydrostatic one—tucked it back under his arm, and led Quaja to a valley within a valley, completely filled with Xavier-class size ships and smaller.
“The valley is getting full. Hopefully, we get some lava flow soon.”
What others might have seen as a junkyard to be filled over—because it was—Quaja saw a playground of nuts, bolts, circuit boards, and all of the wiring she could play with for years to come. And while expansive, it actually reminded her of the Atalan. She could work on all its nuts, bolts, and intricate overclocked computers and engines her entire life, which was hopefully not cut short by the catastrophic cascade of failures that other mechanics had promised.
Among the standard lemons, there were a few stand-outs in the pile—ships which could possibly draw commendations for the fact that at some point they had flown at all. Quaja spotted a Trashbird, a playful name for any Earth-fleeing ship composed of Earth trash as a desperate attempt to escape Earth trash. The blue Dodge Challenger lay on its side sans rocket boosters, its undercarriage of polystyrene and drinking straws unashamedly on full display.
“Rumor has it, there’s water damage. The one you want is over there.”
Besides the giant hole in its hull, the junked Xavier-class ship showed little wear. It had its original Gunmetal Gray™ paint and furniture configuration. Where damage had occurred, the ship’s internal systems lay exposed with high-quality conduits, and not a strip of duct or insulating tape in sight. It would probably be best to repair this ship and switch it with the Atalan; however, something about the ship rubbed Quaja the wrong way. Her inspection told her nothing of the crew’s number or personality. Brian reported the crew had turned against each other and fallen from the sky because of it. Could that happen to the Atalan? They’d come close in the recent planet-assisted velocity shift. It had been chaos. Of course, ships crashed orderly too. Quaja had flown with dozens of highly respected, polite, chain-of-command-following crew members in Microlutions.
She pulled out the needed parts with almost shameful proficiency. In return she dismantled a molecular disassociator for Brian, which she suspected Brian didn’t actually have use for, but instead just wanted to see if she could do it. Perhaps he enjoyed watching.
Winding back through the miscellany and salvage, Quaja spotted a ridiculously orange space pod, of which half was a windshield. Inside, she could see a pair of orange fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. Why it had a rearview mirror was anyone’s guess, as the ship had no back windshield, but a place to hang orange fuzzy dice from wouldn’t be a complete shot in the dark. She climbed the wreckage of several ships of undescribed detail to reach the orange space pod and retrieve the dice.
“How much for these?” she asked.
“Oh, you can have those. They serve no purpose.”
“I’ve been told they’re lucky—” She said no more, remembering where she’d pulled them from.
Brian scoffed. “Have you ever heard the song Hotel California? You aren’t getting off this planet. Have you seen everyone here? All these ships? None of us planned to be here. Well, except for maybe Steve. These boards are going to fry just like your first ones did.”
“We’ll get out of here. We’ve got some place to be.”
Brian shook his head just as two Quarnex-colored beings arrived.
“Did you find a pilot?” Brian asked.
The two nodded.
“Crashed?”
“Failure to launch,” said one.
“All right. Grab what you need and we’ll talk about price. You better not have spent it all at Steve’s...”
Quaja wished them luck as she departed.
“Everyone thinks these ships run on imagination and dumb luck...” Brian muttered.
FOURTEEN
After all the crew members had adventures of roughly equal length, they returned to the ship at roughly the same time. There, they found Tarke curled in an uncomfortably tight ball in the captain’s chair. On closer inspection, they could hear the muffled convulsive crying of one stand-in captain.
Lorav cleared her throat.
Patav hummed.
Gail kicked the chair’s base with her metal-encased foot.
It wasn’t until a tentacle crept over the Cardalol like the worst-case scenario of Cats and Cucumbers that Tarke jolted and abruptly returned to the normal volume she occupied in space, plus a bit more for the hackles that rose.
Tarke’s eyes darted from face to face before she let out a “Wut?” as if her face fur wasn’t streaked with glitter midnight blue mascara.
“I saved the ship!” shouted everyone.
Soon, everyone was arguing and shouting about who’d done what, when, and better. Tarke leapt backward to perch on the back of the chair.
“As Captain, I have the floor!” she commanded. Everyone quieted as Tarke waved a pointed finger in the same motion of a track light pretending to find a contestant in a game show audience. “Patav. You go first.”
Everyone seemed a bit surprised when Tarke called on the triplet individually, even Tarke. Maybe it was the different shirts. Or, maybe she really didn’t like Lorav.
It took Patav a moment to frame her story to be personal. “I did emotional consulting.”
“Well, that’s a new way to say empath,” replied Tarke through damp eyes, sounding sarcastic, but the empath knew better.
“I identified people’s needs and collaborated with Steve to help them,” said Lorav. “I earned lots of tips,” she added.
“Well, that’s a clever way to use your ability without resorting to carnival work,” Tarke cut, but her thoughts had nothing but praise.
“We can use that money for the overdue mortgage, because I already have the control boards for us!” Quaja waved many tentacles in the air, as if she just cared greatly.
“Gail, what’d you get?”
“I got a rock.”
Stunned silence filled the room. The silence was stunned, not the people. The people weren’t really that surprised.
“I mean, I bought some asteroids on wholesale. I will be able to sell them on Exty and make a profit. When the deals close, I’ll have the money to help pay for the second mortgage.”
Tarke smiled and nodded. She bit her tongue instead of pointing out that if she’d wanted to help with the mortgage, she could’ve done so without buying rocks. She whimpered, either in pain from biting her tongue or from the emotion of the day. “I’m not Frankie. I have no idea why I thought I could do this.”
Quaja wrapped a tentacle or two around the Cardalol. “Some ships run on imagination and dumb luck. You’ve got enough of both to travel the expanse and back.”
“I do have the dumb part covered,” agreed Tarke.
“Frankie thought you could do it,” said Lorav.
Maybe creativity and happy-go-luckiness were good qualities for a captain. Maybe Frankie hadn’t placed her here on a whim.
“And I did get us another concert.”
“By whom?”
Tarke licked her paw and cleaned her face. She deposited the gunk on the back of the chair. Another lick and paw slicked her hair back. “Ladies and gentleladies, I’d like to present to you Earth 1970s singer-songwriter JAMES TAYLOR!”
Gail squealed, jumped up and down, and searched the bridge for her idol and personal serenade. Panties hit the closed door.
“Who?” Quaja muttered to the triplets. Their shoulders came up to their ears in a blocky shrug.
Tarke had offered
to carry JT onto the ship, but his response was, “I’m not getting into that deathtrap.” She offered that they’d step out of the ship for a personal concert, but his response was yet again, “I’m not getting into that deathtrap.” Instead, Tarke decreased the opacity of the windshield, and zoomed in so that the distant beverage cart and bulk sale pickle jar disappeared, and JT appeared to be just a head bobbing in fluid.
Gail squealed again. This time at a frequency that triggered feedback in the intercom system’s auto-tune.
When the piercing noise (for all but Tarke, whose upper range of natural hearing was much higher than the others) ended, they could hear James Taylor say, “And that was a song about heroin addiction.” Tarke clapped. Gail bit her hand to keep from squealing. “Now, any requests?”
“Free Bird!” shouted Gail.
James Taylor gave a small chuckle, but he wrinkled his face and popped a piece of translucent tape when he realized she wasn’t joking. Eventually he settled on “Walking Man,” after a comedic “Frozen Man” segue. Turned out, James Taylor sang a lot about his manhood.
Gail loved every moment, and possibly lost consciousness for part of it. It was difficult to know, because her bionic features kept the woman’s fall risk at a minimum. Whenever she’d fallen in the past, her implanted Life Alert Chronometer Tilt Sensor™ announced her predicament over the intercom system, mortifying the entire crew.
Meanwhile, Quaja replaced the fried control boards in the necessary consoles. It was easy work for her tentacles, and she was able to get the ship space-ready before the Walking Man had stopped walking... in the song, anyway. She coordinated with Lorav to create an auto-sequence launch which wouldn’t need user input until after they’d escaped the planet’s sphere of influence.
“Is there anything I can do?” asked Tarke without her characteristic bombast.
“Besides distract Gail so we could get this work done? That’s fantastic by the way. Yes, there is. I need you to find a place for these.” Quaja pulled out the pair of orange fuzzy dice, which now in a more controlled environment, smelled a bit like ammonia.
“Mevix yes!” Tarke did a little happy dance around the bridge, looking for the perfect place.
As the ship began its usual sputtering and groaning, Gail waved goodbye to her singer-songwriter idol, James Taylor. Her happy face momentarily wrinkled into a scowl when he didn’t return the favor, but soon the memory of the private concert brought a smile to Gail’s face once again.
They executed the launch sequence and distanced themselves from the planet’s surface. Outside Steve’s Bar, Steve and other transplants sat on lawn chairs in the warm waters with a beer in one hand and mild amusement in the other watching the Atalan’s ascent. Rising over one of the larger volcanoes, the ship’s shadow fell on a slow-moving lava flow descending into the section of the junkyard Quaja had visited. They gained speed, and at the last possible moments and screeching of a proximity alert, Quaja pulled the main control board out of the console. All the very applicable console lights faded, but the engine continued to roar. Without the inertial dampeners, the ship shook like a baby’s rattle. Small screws from the ship’s ceiling peppered the crew as they vibrated out of position, creating G-force bruises. Metal scraped metal.
Tarke felt a good hundred-thousand pounds, as if she’d just finished at an all-you-can-eat-sushi bar with her fake doctor’s note that she couldn’t eat rice. It had only worked in a couple of restaurants. Tightfisted Asian women had an excellent bullshit meter. Tarke tried not to imagine how much radiation was streaking through her body. Ships were required to have Faraday cages for the crew, and Xavier-class ships were not an exception. Unfortunately there was a loophole in the word for, and so Atalan’s manufacturers had provided a Faraday cage the size of a small lunchbox for the crew to use. Like vehicles boasting safety airbags but providing a small bag of popcorn, the Faraday cage had no business saving a crew member’s life unless it could do so by blocking communication of a small, mobile device. The loophole had been closed with revised safety standards in many stellar systems but not all, creating an interstellar price difference. As such, most ships were purchased in galaxies of cheap materials and shoddy manufacture to save a buck.
Now Tarke only felt ten-thousand pounds. If some existential force was going to stop them, it’d be in this moment. But Tarke continued to feel lighter as they traveled farther from the planet. Once out of Beramuda’s radiation belts, Quaja plugged in the control board. The console lights flickered on and danced in a joyful pattern that irritated all aerospace engineers before settling into a more appropriate configuration.
“Such a lovely place, such a lovely face,” said Gail, her voice dripping with nostalgia.
“The Eagles can suck it!” said Patav. The rest of the crew gave a nervous laugh that relaxed within the comfort of satire.
“Eagles? That was James Taylor,” corrected Gail.
FIFTEEN
It had been a Beramudean week, or four Earth-standard days, before the Atalanta Empress escaped the Beramuda Triangle. A new episode of Cat the Bounty Hunter had aired and showed Cat depositing Frankie deep into Microlutions territory. Not wanting to get into another fugitive search, most of the episode was filler, focusing on the personal life of Cat.
Everyone thought Tarke had learned her lesson on navigational contribution, and so didn’t really take her seriously when she yelled, “REVERSE ENGINES!”
Lorav responded when Tarke added a Huh-looo to the end of her command. “That’s not how that works. That’s not how any of this works.”
Patav gave her sister a jab with her elbow, which encouraged her to watch the TV show more closely. In it, Cat was radiation-boarding in the magnetosphere of a familiar planet.
“Hotel California,” muttered Lorav, as she did a physics-obedient maneuver to return to the planet they could never leave.
Working the engines hard in multiple directions, Lorav waded the Atalan well outside Beramuda’s gravity well, but well within the pilot’s discomfort zone. Thankfully, Cat’s ship hadn’t yet left the cosmic scene, and Tarke gave an almost too-distant hail.
The video cut in and out, but Cat lounged in front of a fireplace backdrop in a red flannel shirt that made him look like a vacationing lumberjack with a quilt to share, ready to warm someone through the longest and coldest stellar eclipse.
“What took you so long?” he asked with unintended seduction.
“We have our reasons—” Tarke flirted.
“Yeah, we got sucked in there!” offered Gail, pointing in a random direction to indicate she meant the Beramuda Triangle.
Tarke pulled her eyes off Cat to give Gail the death stare. Unfortunately, Gail had acquired immunity to such glares after extensive desensitization. Now only extended death stares over several days exceeded the threshold to trigger Gail to say, “What?”
“No kidding?” He smiled with his eyes and the temperature on the bridge rose 1.5 radians. “I didn’t think it was possible to get out of there. It’s like Hotel—”
“—yeah, yeah. Now where is Frankie?”
“That’s not her name. You guys all got played the fool. She’s THE GALAXY’S MOST WANTED.”
“No, she just looks like her.”
“That’s offensive. Not all Nurflans look alike.”
“And to think I’ve been toting my commemorative Cat the Bounty Hunter lunchbox which celebrates your eponymous album all these years...”
“The one where I’m arresting people in hell, yes. The red one or the Lisa Frank edition?”
“Skagforge, the red one. The Lisa Frank ones were the second production run, and it was cut short after the media decided it was prejudiced against residents of Hell.”
Cat leaned back in his seat before giving Tarke a wink. “So, you’re a fan?”
In that moment, all good favor was lost. Tarke climbed onto the center, claws out and hackles raised. “ENOUGH! You will tell me where my friend is or I will board your ship, claw out your thro
at, and fill various lunchboxes with your blood.”
“There’s the Cardalol in you. Your hackles have hackles.” He seemed calm, but he crossed his arms over his chest in a protective stance. “It’s just a TV show. Don’t blame me; a fella’s gotta eat. Microlutions told me to drop her off on Nurfla, which I did.”
“Your last episode said—”
“We just did that to simplify the storyline.”
“Seems pretty simple already,” muttered Lorav so only the author could hear.
“Was she OK?”
“Yeah, just dandy. Colors flashing like there was no tomorrow. Are we cool?”
Tarke wasn’t cool. She’d seen every single episode of Cat the Bounty Hunter without really considering the hunted in the show. How many misidentifications were glossed over in the name of entertainment? Cat had made it look so simple that Tarke had convinced the Atalan crew to go into the business temporarily. She had fought to turn in Quaja. It was as if reality TV wasn’t always reflective of the actual experience—and really, that’s what bothered Tarke the most.
“You think you can hunt her down again?” asked Tarke.
“Mevix no. Nobody likes a rerun.”
SIXTEEN
On Nurfla, ships without prior authorization were required to land at the central airport, which was appropriately unwieldy in a way that only a precise amount of pre-planning could create. From the air, the building was a half wheel. The central hub connected to five smaller stations via concourses which appeared like spokes. An additional concourse arced around the five to form the half circumference. Air Control assigned them to Substation Frosted Orange, which was either the second or the second-to-last spoke. Traffic Control directed them for taxiing, not with colored flags, but with colored bodies.
They’d never been to Nurfla before, and it was just the Crayola Technicolor Ombre World they imagined. Any practical description would paint a busy design, but composition and color were meticulously chosen with the viewers’ comfort in mind. Tarke didn’t think Frankie had ever visited Nurfla as an adult, nor had she ever given much thought to color. They needed to get her off the planet before the colors in her backstory began to run.
Atalan Adventure Pack: Books 4-6 Page 11