by Wesley King
“Good luck,” the other man said. “Drop a box at the brig. Let them fight over it.”
The door slid shut behind them, and Sally stood up again. “Pleasant bunch,” she said. “You might want to avoid them, too. Especially Red Eye. He’s a scary one. Wrinkles is mean, but he’s also slow and doesn’t hear too well. I wouldn’t worry about him.”
She walked over to an open box.
“Stuff your pockets, rat boy. We need to get going—”
“How did you know they were coming?” Jonah asked.
She shrugged. “I’m used to listening for footsteps. They echo in the walls.”
She tossed him a food bar, and he shoved it in his pocket. None of it made sense to Jonah. Why did the crew have weapons and the Space Raiders didn’t? Why were the Space Raiders not allowed to go anywhere on the ship, if they were heroes chosen to save the universe?
Sally must have seen him frowning. “Sometimes it’s better not to ask,” she said.
“No,” Jonah said. “I want to know what’s going on.”
Sally shrugged and stuffed some food bars in her pockets. “Suit yourself. But you’re on your own. There’s only one place to go for answers, and you just saw who lives there. Time to go. If you really want to save your friends, you’ll want to take the engine room. I’ll show you the door—”
“Attention,” a commanding, cruel-sounding voice boomed over the PA. “I have just been informed that the boy who attacked First Mate Grouter has gone on the run in my ship. The rules are being broken of late, and I’m tired of it. I know you can hear me, Jonah Hillcrest. Turn yourself in today, and I will lessen your punishment. Continue running and I will lock you up in a cell and throw away the key, if I don’t decide to just throw you out the air lock first.”
Jonah’s eyes widened. He saw Sally staring at him in wonder.
“To everyone else on this ship—and I mean everyone—if anyone helps the guilty party, they will be punished as well. And to my crew: Whoever captures the attacker and brings him to me wins double pay. Think fast, boy. The hunt is on.”
The announcement finished, and Jonah just stood there, trying not to tremble. Things just kept getting worse. Now he had Red Eye hunting for him.
Sally smiled and shook her head. “You are one dead space rat.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
* * *
JONAH TRIED TO MAKE SENSE of the announcement. Why did the captain think he had attacked First Mate Grouter? He didn’t even know how to use his bonker. Had the ISR told the captain it was him? He certainly wouldn’t put it past them. One thing was for sure: His mission to rescue Martin and the other Space Raiders was suddenly a whole lot more difficult.
Jonah waited for Sally to run off. After all, he was a wanted boy now, and the crew would be tirelessly scouring the ship to find him.
He had a feeling that double pay would inspire a lot of hunters.
But to his surprise, Sally didn’t leave. She just stared at him with a lopsided smirk, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Shouldn’t you be running away from me?” Jonah asked.
He was probably pushing his luck, since he certainly didn’t want her to leave, but he had to ask. It occurred to him that a real hero would probably force her to run for her own safety, but in fairness, he had never claimed to be a hero.
She brushed her raven hair out of her eyes. “Run?” she asked. “No way. You’re more interesting than I thought. I didn’t know you’d attacked a crew member.”
Jonah knew he should tell her he didn’t actually attack First Mate Grouter, but she was suddenly looking at him like he was more than a space rat, so he decided to keep that to himself. Besides, he needed Sally Malik’s help.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to look tough, “I bonked him all right. Right on the knee. A real hard bonk. I also stole the List.”
Sally frowned. “Why did you steal the List?”
Jonah shrugged. “Something to do.”
Sally looked at him for a moment. She was probably trying to figure out how a skinny eleven-year-old had managed to accomplish such impressive feats. But maybe it was too dangerous to accuse a wanted crew bonker of lying, because she just smiled again.
“What was your Space Raider name?” she asked.
“Jonah the Now Incredible,” he said.
She gestured at the door. “Well, Jonah the Now Incredible, where to now?”
He met her eyes. “The crew’s quarters. I have Space Raiders to rescue.”
“Did you just hear that announcement?” she asked incredulously. “The captain and his crew are currently hunting for you. And you want to go to their turf?”
Jonah shrugged again. “It’s probably the last place they’d look for me.”
Sally opened her mouth to retort and then paused. “That kind of makes sense. We’ll take the service shafts from the engine room. Follow me.”
She hurried over to the storeroom door and stuck her ear against the metal, listening for footsteps in the hallway. Satisfied, she pressed the door controls, and they crept into the corridor. Jonah was watching for a red eye in the shadows. Sally quickly led him across the hall and punched 111 into the engine-room control panel. The door slid open.
Jonah followed Sally inside and came to an abrupt halt.
He looked around in awe. The engine room was massive. It was four stories high and crisscrossed with hanging walkways and service ladders and conduits and power lines. The engine core itself was a massive cylinder of tarnished steel and black casing from which all the conduits and pathways led. Hundreds of blinking buttons covered its exterior, and other machinery—cooling towers and overflows and regulators—rose up like rock formations around it. Taken at once, the room looked like a huge spiderweb of black steel and multicolored power lines, with the engine itself being the great spider perched in the center of its work.
It was at once terrifying and impressive. It was also very loud.
The moaning, groaning sound of the engine bounced off every wall and echoed down service shafts and conduits, creating a reverberating, howling orchestra of noise.
“Cool, right?” Sally asked, raising her voice a little over the noise.
Jonah nodded.
“Of course,” she continued, “it’s also the home of the Shrieker, so let’s move before it eats us.”
She led him to a service ladder and started climbing up. Jonah followed very slowly. He’d never climbed a ladder before. It seemed a bit dangerous. When they reached the first walkway, which was about fifteen feet above the ground, Jonah climbed off the ladder and snuck a peek over the side. He wasn’t overly good with heights, either. Even worse, the railings were mostly broken or bent or missing altogether.
Sally was already hurrying along, so he forced himself to get up and go after her. Each hanging walkway led to service shafts that disappeared into the bowels of the ship. There must have been eight or nine walkways stretching out from the engine, all leading to different service shafts and connected to each other by thick wires and steel beams.
“You come here often?” Jonah asked, glancing down again.
He wasn’t looking forward to climbing higher into the spiderweb.
“Sometimes,” she said, “but it’s a little too exposed. I prefer the air ducts.”
They reached the next ladder, and Sally climbed up like a monkey. She was clearly used to moving around in the web. Jonah reluctantly put his hands on the rungs, ready to follow her. Then he saw something in the corner of the room. It hadn’t been visible when they first walked in, since it was on the other side of the engine core. But it was hard to miss now.
There, sitting in the corner, was a giant pile of bonkers.
Hundreds of them had been thrown onto the pile, while others lay scattered around it from where they’d rolled off. There were enough for an army of Space Raiders. He considered going down to get one, but he needed both hands to climb. Jonah wondered why they kept the bonkers here. It seemed l
ike a strange place for weapons.
He slowly climbed up after Sally, his feet unsteadily finding the metal rungs below him. Sally peered down, looking impatient.
“You climb like a grandma,” she said as he crawled onto the walkway.
“I think my grandma climbs better,” Jonah muttered.
Sally raised an eyebrow, and Jonah remembered that he was supposed to be an orphan. He didn’t want Sally Malik treating him like the other Space Raiders did.
“I mean, she probably did,” Jonah said quickly. “Never met her. Where are you from?”
Sally frowned and then started for the next service ladder. “London. I told you.”
“Right,” Jonah said, hurrying after her. “Any siblings?”
Sally looked back. “A brother. John.”
“And he—”
“Wasn’t chosen,” Sally said curtly, starting up a ladder. “They left him behind.”
Jonah climbed after her. They were at least thirty feet off the floor, maybe more, and he was trying his best not to look down. The engine hummed even louder beside him.
“How old was he?”
She paused. “Seven,” she said. “He was still in our foster home. I ran away.”
“Why?”
She reached the top of the ladder and stood up. “Because I was a bad kid,” she said, just loudly enough for him to hear it. “And he wasn’t. And now I left him behind.”
Jonah climbed onto the walkway. “You seem nice to me.”
She laughed. “That’s because you’re a dimwit. You also thought I was a space princess.” She helped him up. “What about you? Were you a runaway?”
Jonah hesitated. “Yeah. I lived in a forest.”
“A forest?” she asked skeptically.
He nodded. “Yep. I stole clothes and food sometimes, when I wasn’t living off of berries and nuts and rabbits.”
“You ate rabbits?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
He’d never even seen a wild rabbit. He hoped they still existed.
“It makes sense,” she said thoughtfully, looking at his hair.
He patted it down, feeling a little self-conscious. “We should keep moving.”
“Yeah,” she said, giving him another once-over. “Any other secrets?”
“That’s it,” Jonah said.
She nodded and kept moving. “One last ladder. Then we head into the shaft.”
By the time they reached the top walkway, Jonah was trembling, he was so scared. The floor looked far away below them, half visible through the spider web. There was no railing here, so he stayed right in the middle of the walkway as Sally led him away from the engine core and toward the outer walls. The walkway led straight into a dark service shaft lit only by a narrow band of lights running along the wall.
“This shaft leads to a staircase,” Sally said. “And that staircase leads to the top level. The crew’s quarters and the bridge. What we’re going to do then I have no idea. There might be some air ducts we can sneak into. I don’t know. I’ve never been up there.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Jonah said. “Just get me to the staircase and—”
He was cut off by a squeak. Jonah quickly turned around and saw something running toward him at a disturbingly fast pace. Large as a small cat, it was covered in dark brown fur and had a long, slender tail. Jonah had seen rats in pictures before, but they’d never looked this big. This was a super rat.
And it was coming right for him.
He didn’t have time to react. The rat bounded over his feet, and Jonah yelped and jumped backward. That was a bad idea. He stepped right off the walkway and felt a terrifying sense of weightlessness as he started falling toward the distant engine-room floor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
* * *
JONAH REACHED OUT WILDLY, AND his fingers slid across the metal walkway and caught right at the edge. A powerful jolt ran through his body as his momentum suddenly stopped, and then he was just hanging there, his fingers still sliding toward the edge.
He felt his whole body straining. He didn’t exactly have a lot of upper-body strength. Jonah looked down. He could see black-metal floor more than sixty feet below him, right through an opening in the spiderweb of conduits and power lines and walkways. If he fell, nothing would catch him.
“Jonah!” Sally said, grabbing on to his arms. “Hold on!”
“Okay,” he managed weakly. His arms were already throbbing.
She struggled to get a firm grip. “You’re going to have to pull yourself at the same time,” she said, trying to position herself into a crouch. “You’re too heavy.”
Jonah saw his feet dangling below him. For a second, he felt faint.
He quickly fought it off.
“I’ll try,” he said.
His fingers started sliding toward the edge again. Jonah started to panic.
“Ready?” Sally asked urgently.
“Yeah,” Jonah said.
“I don’t know if this is going to work,” she murmured.
“That’s comforting,” Jonah said.
“On three, I’m going to pull,” she said. “You pull yourself up as well.”
“Right,” Jonah said. His fingers continued to slide. “Start counting.”
“One . . . two . . . three!”
Sally lunged backward, pulling him with her, and Jonah heaved onto the walkway, trying to pull himself up. It barely worked. Sally slammed onto her back, still clutching Jonah’s wrists, and his legs just cleared the edge of the walkway.
They lay there for a moment, locked in an embrace.
“Are you going to get off?” Sally asked.
“Yeah,” Jonah said, rolling off of her. “Sorry. Thanks.”
She slowly pushed herself to her feet. “No problem. Try not to fall again, though. That kind of hurt. What kind of forest are you from, anyway? It was just a rat.”
“Took me by surprise,” Jonah muttered. “Was that Whiskerface?”
She frowned. “Who?”
“Never mind,” Jonah said. “Can we get off this walkway?”
“Good idea.”
They hurried off and into the service shaft. Jonah was very happy to have walls and solid ground beneath him again. He decided he didn’t like the engine room. He never liked spiders anyway.
The service shaft was about seven feet high and four feet across. A strip of yellow lights ran all along one wall, and there were red, green, and yellow power lines and steel-encased conduits running along the ceiling as well. The walls were also covered with removable panels and smaller tunnel entrances.
They walked by several junctions where one service shaft intersected another, and Jonah saw service ladders poking out of the floor in several locations.
“There are main shafts,” Sally said quietly, “like this one, and also small ones and vertical ones and little areas you can crawl into. It’s a maze within a maze.”
“And the Shrieker lives in here?” Jonah asked nervously.
“I think so,” Sally murmured. “It might have a room tucked away somewhere in the maze.”
Jonah followed her through the service shaft, constantly listening for shrieks and laughter. He was just beginning to think the service shaft ran on forever when Sally stopped in front of a doorway. Inside was a black-metal staircase.
She glanced at him. “This leads into the crew’s quarters.”
Jonah nodded. “Thanks. I understand if you want to leave now—”
“Not yet,” she said, grinning. “This is just getting exciting. After you.”
Jonah started up the stairs. His footsteps echoed loudly in the close quarters of the narrow stairwell. They soon reached the top, where the staircase ended at a door with a small, grimy window built into it. Jonah peeked through.
The window looked out on another corridor much the same as Squirrel Street and the Haunted Passage. The only difference was that all the light panels worked here. He glanced up and down the hallway a
nd finally spotted an air grate about twenty feet down.
“There,” he said, pointing it out to Sally.
“And what do we do when we’re in there?” she asked.
He paused. “I guess we’ll figure it out.”
“Good plan,” she muttered.
Jonah took one last look down the hallway. “All clear.”
He hit the door panel, and it slid open. Jonah snuck down the passage, sticking close to the rusted gray walls. He was ready to run back to the shaft at a moment’s notice.
Jonah reached the air grate without incident and bent down to pull it off.
“Look,” Sally whispered.
He followed her gaze and saw an open door a little farther down the hall. The lights were on inside, and he saw a computer console and a table. They exchanged a look.
“Let’s check it out,” Jonah said.
He really wanted to get into the air duct and hide, but he also wanted answers. This looked like a good place to start. He hurried over to the open door, Sally close behind. Taking a quick look inside, he nodded and went in.
“Check the computer,” he said.
The small room looked like a workstation. The shelves held a few old files and star maps, while a second desk and computer sat in the far corner.
“Needs a password,” Sally said. “It’s not 111, either.”
Jonah wandered over to the other computer. He punched 111 into the home screen. Nothing. He was just turning back to Sally when he saw a brown folder on the desk. There was a label on the front with the typed words PROJECT WEED.
Jonah frowned and picked up the folder. He opened it to the first page and found a small star map of the known galaxy. He didn’t see any areas labeled “Dark Zone,” but there were some circled planets with numbers over them: one to eight. There were also scribbled notes on the page of travel-time estimates and little hand-drawn stars labeled possible sighting. Jonah flipped to the next page. It contained a picture of a planet called PER-1. Descriptions of the planet’s physical characteristics were listed below it.