by Gini Koch
“We are not stopping, even if they showed us a giant welcome mat. Mother, anything on the sun?”
“No, I’m sorry. Stars by their nature have quite a lot going on inside of them. It’s difficult to determine if this one is acting normally or not.”
“On to the next planet then,” Tim said. “And have you noticed—so far, these planets all seem Earthlike.”
“They’re all close enough to this sun,” Chuckie said. “They might be breathing oxygen.”
“I say again that we are not going to swing down there to find out.”
“Relax, baby,” Jeff said. “I’m sure the next planet will be normal for us.”
We reached said planet and Jeff’s cheery prediction was dashed just that fast. “Oh, my God, it’s like the planet of Red Skelton down there.” My music changed to “Tears of a Clown” by the English Beat.
“Who?” Jeff wasn’t the only one asking that.
“Really? My family was the only one that watched variety shows while they were still around?”
Tito chuckled. “No, I know who you’re talking about, Kitty. And, yeah, it does look like a planet full of tramp clowns.”
“We called them the sad-face clowns, but whatever. And some of these look like rodeo clowns, which is, I guess, their form of racial variety. This is, officially, the weirdest solar system in existence.”
Chuckie was busy explaining who Red Skelton was and why people our age knew about him—mostly because our parents and grandparents had loved the guy—and also why his tramp clown shtick had been popular. I was glad he was sharing, because I was far too busy trying to tell myself that this was just a big planet of sweet old men who sometimes dressed up as tramps and other times pretended to be seagulls, versus a planet of danger. Of all the clown types, I could handle the tramp clowns the best, though that wasn’t really saying a lot. I’d been okay with the occasional mime, back in the day, but now, after seeing a planet full of them, I doubted I’d want to hang out with any in the near or distant future.
As with the last two, the planet seemed Earthlike and Tito felt that what we were seeing was natural, not face paint or any form of costuming.
What we also hadn’t seen was a wreck of any kind of spacecraft, nor had we seen anything that indicated they were spacefaring. Whatever they were doing on these planets, it wasn’t related to space.
Scan of this planet done, we headed to the next one. This one was like a harlequin offshoot, but with a lot of acrobatics involved. Everyone was in colorful garb, tumbling, juggling, bopping each other on the head. So, when “The Jester” by Sum 41 came on, it didn’t surprise me all that much. I didn’t even comment—mostly because I was too busy wondering if we had any Valium on board. We just confirmed the usual—Earthlike, they were just born this way—and moved on.
The music changed to “The Clown” by Elefant before we were near enough to the planet to see who was on it. Took this as a warning, though, and steeled myself.
Which was a good thing. Because this planet was by far the worst. Because this planet was filled with what I knew were called Auguste clowns. As in, it was the planet Bozo came from. Or, rather, as we got a closer look, where the Killer Klowns from Outer Space came from.
They all had the weird, bushy hair that only grew on the upper sides of their heads and came in every color not known to man. They had round, red noses with no nostrils. Overly arched eyebrows. Giant feet in bizarre shoes or boots. Big hands in white, Mickey Mouse gloves. Ginormous, red, exaggerated mouths with what looked like carnivore teeth, not herbivore or omnivore. And they were all, to a person, bone white, the kind of white that makes snow look dull and dingy.
“Tito,” I said carefully, “do you think those are also naturally built this way?”
“I do.”
“Gotcha. Um, I don’t care if this is the system in danger. They can all turn to dust as far as I’m concerned. And Jeff? If you say one positive thing about whatever’s down there, I will honestly never speak to you again.”
“Ah, no,” he said slowly. “They look a little terrifying to me, too. The others didn’t. But these do. These look . . . predatory.”
“They also have spaceflight,” Chuckie said, voice tight. “Or at least the means to fire weapons into space.” Sure enough, we were looking at something that reminded me a lot of Cape Canaveral.
A face came onto our screen. Realized that we had hailing frequencies opened and that meant that we could be contacted without our having to accept the call, so to speak. The music changed at the same time, “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band.
The face staring at us looked almost exactly like the Joker from Batman. Well, the Joker on his worst day and with Bozo’s hair. Only this face was creepier, the eyes crazier, and the expression far more feral than the Joker ever had been.
He was speaking, snarling, really. Our universal translator wasn’t catching on quickly, either. Decided I didn’t care. Slammed my fist onto the external communications button. The face on the screen disappeared.
“Mother,” Tim said, before I could speak, “get us out of here. Right now. Top speed. Forget the last planet, just get us away from this solar system as fast as possible. And that’s an order.”
We zoomed away, past the last planet, and into the blackness of space. The total nothing was a relief.
“Are they after us?” Tim asked.
“Not as far as our sensors indicate,” Walker said.
“The universal translator has found the right code for translation,” Mother said. “Would you like me to play what was said?”
“Honestly? ‘Like’ is the wrong word. But yeah, we should probably hear it, in case they were asking for help or being nice or something.” And maybe they were like Hixxx—terrifying in the extreme when first encountered and yet great once you got to meet them as individuals, as people. Turned my music off so we wouldn’t miss anything.
A guttural voice came on. “We see you. Leave our solar system or die. If you come back, we will destroy you. We will find you in your sleep and murder you in your dreams. We will find you wherever you run, we will catch you, slay you, and eat your flesh. We will destroy you utterly. Leave us and never return.”
CHAPTER 74
WE WERE ALL SILENT for a good, long minute.
“No one else heard that, right?” Jeff asked finally.
“Correct,” Mother said. “I only played it for the command deck.”
“Thank God,” Reader said under his breath.
“So, they really are the Killer Klowns from Outer Space,” I managed. “And another ‘ridiculous’ movie is shown to be a documentary. I hope the kids aren’t too terrified by what they saw.” I mean, I was terrified, so why wouldn’t the kids be?
“I’ll be right back,” Jeff said. “Joe, take over.”
They switched places and Jeff hypersped out of the room.
Jerry cleared his throat. “I’m now with Kitty on the coulrophobia. In a big way.”
“How in the hell did something like that evolve?” Hughes asked.
“In a galaxy as vast as ours, in a universe that’s even vaster?” Chuckie shrugged. “Anything’s possible. By the way, Kitty, don’t panic about the whole ‘find you in your sleep’ thing. That’s just a weaker opponent trying to scare off a stronger one. Like a chihuahua telling a pit bull that the chihuahua can take the bigger dog. It can’t, but if it barks hard enough, the bigger dog may buy the threats, or just decide the fight isn’t worth it.”
“Um, dude, did you hear the same words I did and see the same face I saw? Because that guy wasn’t joking.”
“I did and I’m sure he’s their spokesman for those reasons. However, the threats were just that—threats. They didn’t say something like ‘we’ll shoot your spaceship down with our impressive missiles’ or ‘we have superior firepower’ or anything along those lines. They we
nt for the boogeyman approach, and that’s done when you don’t actually have a real form of offense and probably not a lot of defense, either.”
“Chuck’s right,” Jeff said, as he returned. “I wasn’t worried about what the kids were seeing. I was worried about what they might be feeling. Because I felt something, when that message came through.”
My throat tightened. What if Jamie had felt the Insane Joker’s emotions? I was a terrible mother, because this hadn’t occurred to me until now.
Jeff came over and kissed my cheek, hard to do with me in the helmet but he managed. “Baby, it’s fine. The kids did pick something up, and it was the same thing I did—fear. The people on the one planet where they saw us were terrified of us. So, Chuck’s right—that display was to scare us away. It’s just like what the Cradi have set up around their system. Not really effective, but the best they can do.”
“Well, it was effective for me. That system can dust as far as I’m concerned.”
“No,” Drax said slowly. “They are frightening because they are similar enough to humans that they’re familiar, but different enough to be off-putting. That doesn’t make them evil.”
“That’s pretty much the reasoning for why coulrophobia exists,” Chuckie said. “And Drax is right. We have this system marked now. We can send in a team who have no coulrophobia to make first contact—it doesn’t have to be us.”
“The Vrierst are extremely accepting,” Mossy said. “Ensure some are on that mission, along with some Turleens, and we should be fine. I could go down there right now, if needed. I don’t find them any odder than any other race I’ve encountered.”
“Maybe send some Juggalos. They might love this system.” Someone should. Wasn’t me.
While no one supported my Juggalos idea, the others started making noises about doing meet and greets. Steeled myself.
“No,” Tim said, before I could freak out. “I’m the Commander and that system isn’t in danger. They’ve threatened us, and while Chuck is probably right, there’s always a chance that this is a rare time when he isn’t. We have a mission, and it doesn’t involve getting to know the Clown Consortium.”
“Love that name.”
Tim grinned. “Good to know, Shealla. Mother, let’s get to the next system and check it out, sooner as opposed to later.”
“We will arrive in fifteen of our minutes.”
While we waited, I opened our hailing channel again and Mother insisted that Jeff take his position again. Joe grumbled but gave it up. While this was going on, wondered again why Mother was insisting on us keeping our initial assignments. Then again, if I’d been on Weapons, I’d have probably sent nukes into the Clown Consortium solar system, and Jeff wasn’t thrown until the last planet and, even then, wasn’t ready to push any buttons down. And he wouldn’t have even if Tim or I had ordered it, unless he’d felt that the threat was real and one we couldn’t escape from. So maybe that was why.
Was hella relieved that Tim had voted for focusing on the mission, versus facing our fears. I’d faced the giant sea serpents and that was, for the moment, more than enough for me to get my Bravery Badge. If the Clown Consortium joined the Galactic Council, they’d have a representative. I’d focus on getting to know and like him or her, or it, in case they were more like the Cradi, then branch out. Possibly I wouldn’t be afraid of these people then. Possibly.
But right now, any vacation glow I’d had was fully gone, so I was willing to call it a day in terms of my singing “Kumbaya” with scary aliens. At least until we reached the next system.
Which we did soon enough. And which was, all things considered, very interesting.
The system had eleven planets, most of them within the Goldilocks range of being close enough to their sun to be habitable, and habitable for humans. But there was no life in this system. At all.
We zoomed around each of the planets, but there was nothing and no one. Just a pretty set of beautiful worlds, hanging out with no one on them.
“I can’t even identify insects,” Walker said as we finished the fastest recon ever. “There’s plant life, somehow, and plant life without insects seems impossible, but these planets have everything other than life as we’d know it.”
“Could the plants be the higher life-forms?” Hey, we’d met two different kinds of tree people. Maybe there were rhododendron people and fern people. If we could have naturally born harlequins, why not sentient rosebushes?
“I’m not feeling anything,” Jeff said. “I’m focused and concentrating, and there’s nothing I’m getting.”
“Kitty,” Tito said, “see if you can feel any animal life.”
Did my best. “Nada. I mean, I haven’t really tried with insects other than those on Beta Eight, so maybe there are earthworms I’m not connecting with or something, but otherwise, I get nothing.”
“I find nothing in their sun to be different from the sun in the Clown Consortium system,” Mother said. “I am concerned, however, that I will not be able to determine what is or is not wrong with the sun where the Eknara is.”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there, Mother,” Jeff said reassuringly.
“Then we mark this system and move on,” Tim said. “This means that the third one is where Kreaving is. And if he isn’t there, then we’re going to have to expand our search.”
“Twenty minutes to the next system,” Mother said, as we headed off into the black.
“You know, I have a question. Why aren’t we picking anything up on our hailing channels? We heard Wheatles for a good amount of time when we picked his signal up before, and we were likely much farther away than we have been since coming out of warp. The Insane Joker could connect and threaten us, but we haven’t heard boo from Wheatles.”
“Maybe they’ve stopped broadcasting,” Jerry suggested.
“There’s probably a bad reason for why if that’s the case,” Joe said.
Refused to believe we’d be too late. “Maybe the Eknara ran out of power.”
“It’s possible,” Hughes said. “They’ve been stranded a while and the ship was damaged.”
“Though emergency beacons last the longest,” Walker added.
“But we never found out how long they’d been stranded,” Randy pointed out.
Reader nodded. “And if it’s been a lot longer than we’ve known about, then, yeah, they could be out of power to use even hailing frequencies.”
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Jeff said firmly.
We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. “The kids are okay?” I asked Jeff. “And everyone else?”
“Yeah. Those with no fear of clowns wanted to visit. Those who are like you wanted to get away. Otherwise, no issues. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, now that we’re far enough away for me to think rationally.”
“You do that?” Reader asked, as he came over and squeezed my shoulder gently.
“Occasionally.”
Mossy joined us. “I think we want to get both of those solar systems investigated sooner as opposed to later. We should be in a position to contact the Galactic Council easily, just based on where we are.”
“I don’t agree,” Drax said. My part of the command area was getting crowded. “If we were actually close enough, someone would have already rescued the Eknara. No one has, because we haven’t seen any activity nor have we picked up any passing chatter. Believe me, at the Core there is constant chatter—we have to mute it out, not leave channels open. Alpha Centauri and Solaris give off a tremendous amount of chatter, too, and they did so even before anyone on Earth was spacefaring.”
“Yeah, per my wife, radio waves travel,” Tito said. “They knew about us on Beta Twelve before they ever came to visit.”
True enough, I’d been told that during Operation Invasion and had never seen evidence to the contrary. “And yet, we are hearing
zero right now.”
“Makes sense in regard to the uninhabited system,” Chuckie said. “But not with the Clown Consortium. They could contact us, so they have the means to broadcast and pick up signals.”
“And yet they haven’t done anything to help the Eknara, so either they didn’t hear it or they can’t actually help.”
“Maybe they’re muffled somehow?” Jerry suggested. “I mean, that sounds insane when I say it aloud, but then I remind myself that Kitty says crazy stuff all the time and she’s right more often than she’s wrong.”
“What could muffle two solar systems?” Jeff asked.
“Three if we count the uninhabited one,” Tim added.
“Something,” Chuckie said. “That’s the best we have right now. The bigger issue is the one Mossy brought up—do we try to protect these systems, and the others we’ve been to so far, right now or do we wait?”
“We have so many systems that need protection right now. I don’t know that the Council has enough people to assign. Plus, I want to be sure they’re protected, not exploited.”
“I think we also want to be sure that the Z’porrah don’t find them,” Mossy said.
“We have to focus on what we can do right now,” Reader countered firmly. “And that’s finding the Eknara and saving that solar system.”
“Arriving at the third system,” Mother said. “Once again, coming in by the planet farthest from the sun.”
“Great,” Tim said. “Start scanning the sun as soon as you can, Mother.”
“I have begun. And, we are in the right place.”
“You’ve found the Eknara?” Maybe it was on this nearest planet.
“No. I have found an extremely unstable sun.”
CHAPTER 75
“YOU’RE SURE?” Chuckie asked.
“Yes,” Mother replied. “Now that I have examined two stable ones, as well as the suns for Nazez and Cradus, along with researching the data I have on our own sun, I can feel confident that I am correct.”