Space Runners #3

by Jeramey Kraatz

  Ricardo didn’t answer.

  “Like I said,” Benny said, “things have changed. And now, you’ve got us. We’re . . . I don’t know . . . translators isn’t the right word.”

  “Peace brokers!” Drue said. Then he hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but it sounds cool.”

  “Peace brokers,” Vala repeated.

  “Plus, my father is kind of in charge at the Taj now,” Drue said, the excitement fading quickly from his voice. “There’s no way I could change his mind by myself, but maybe I can at least get him to not hang up immediately.” He swallowed. “Probably.”

  “Listening is a good first step,” Jasmine said.

  The sound of stomping in the hallway took everyone’s attention. In seconds, two figures darted through the open doorway. Pinky stopped at the foot of the table behind an empty chair. Ramona followed after her, wheezing. She half collapsed onto the back of the seat.

  “Hologhost . . . ,” she managed to get out between breaths, “made me . . . run.”

  “We might need your coding skills,” the AI said. Then she turned her focus to the rest of them. “There’s been an unexpected development. The Star Runner we sent out has already made contact with something. It seems the Taj launched their own deep space probe after we left.”

  “What does that mean?” Benny asked.

  “This new satellite or whatever they launched has pinged Ramona’s Star Runner. They’ve been trying to establish open lines for the last few minutes.”

  “They’re calling us?” Jasmine said.

  Ramona grabbed her side, which must have been aching from her sprinting. “Bingo, J.”

  Benny stood up. “Then let’s answer it.”

  “Uh, okay, but how do we do that here?” Hot Dog asked. “On a HoloTek?”

  “I can do you one better,” Ramona said, tapping on her datapad.

  “What are you—” Pinky started.

  And then the AI disappeared. The swarm of nanoprojectors that formed the hologram instead projected a wobbly blue line that floated over to the middle of the table.

  “Oh, you horrible little hacker,” Pinky said through the speakers in their collars. “You are not trapping me in your HoloTek again. At least prop it up so I can see what’s happening.”

  “Just say when,” Ramona said, ignoring the AI. “I’ll patch you through.”

  Benny glanced around at the others They nodded to him. Finally, his eyes landed on Vala. “You want to meet in person?” he asked. “Now’s as good a time as any to try to make that happen.”

  The commander mulled this over for a few moments before speaking. “Then I will leave it to you, Benny Love. Let us see what peace and progress you can facilitate.”

  Benny swallowed hard, then got to his feet, motioning for Drue to join him by his side. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  “You got it,” Ramona chirped. “I’ve set the nanocameras to face you two.” She let out something that sounded half like a sigh, half like a laugh. “What would you do without me?”

  The blue holographic line wobbled a few more times before suddenly changing. There, floating in front of them, was Elijah West’s desk in his private quarters. A man sat behind it, his suit perfectly tailored and black hair slicked back. Steely gray eyes stared at them.

  Drue slowly raised one hand into the air and tried to smile. “Uh, hi, Dad.”

  9.

  Senator Lincoln stared back in silence, mouth agape, for two seconds. Then his entire body tensed as his lips pressed together into a grim straight line.

  “Yeah . . .” Drue said, drawing out the word until it disintegrated into a breath.

  “Where are you?” the senator asked. His eyes were full of fire, but Benny couldn’t tell through the hologram if it was due to anger, concern, or some kind of relief at the sight of his son. Maybe it was a mixture of all those things. He couldn’t help but think that this was a great example of what Vala had been talking about when it came to the difficulty of interpreting humans. At least where adults were concerned.

  “Well, you see,” Drue said, “it’s a long story. We—”

  “Jupiter,” Benny said, before Drue could name the exact moon they were on, just in case the Earth forces had any ideas about attacking the Alpha Maraudi there. “Basically. In that neighborhood.”

  “Jupiter . . .” Drue’s father repeated quietly. His eyes wandered around, taking in the stone walls behind the two boys. “How? That’s impossible. Where would you even be broadcasting from. Unless . . .” He trailed off, but his entire face seemed to pull back, as if it were being stretched over the front of his skull. “Don’t tell me,” he whispered.

  “Uh,” Drue said. “We kind of hitched a ride on the alien mother ship that was at the Taj?” For some reason this came out as more of a question, even though it was exactly what had happened.

  Senator Lincoln jumped to his feet and started shouting at people offscreen. “Haven’t you tracked this signal yet? Get the New Apollo team prepped. I want a map of every ship and resource we have in space between here and Jupiter and stats on how long it would take for us to reach the planet. Chart a course to the foreign satellite we’re connected to.”

  “The signal you . . . uh, pinged?” Benny asked, looking to Ramona, who nodded. Then he continued. “The signal you pinged isn’t coming from the alien ship, but from a Space Runner we launched so we’d be able to communicate with the Taj. Tracking it down won’t do you any good.”

  “Connection to the ship is max encrypted,” Ramona said with a grin.

  Drue’s father looked at Benny with narrowed eyes, then slowly began to sit down again.

  “So, you’re hostages, then,” he said. “What are their demands?”

  “Actually, we sort of hijacked their ship,” Benny said. “But we’ve formed an alliance with the aliens on board.”

  “You aren’t going to sit there and tell me that the Alpha Maraudi just let you have their ship and took you halfway across our solar system so you can be friends. You saw what they did to the Taj. They almost killed all of us. They would have killed you had we not shown up.”

  “They’ve actually been pretty nice,” Drue said. “Though, the beds leave a lot to be desired.”

  “Nice?” Senator Lincoln repeated, digging into the word. “We are on the verge of intergalactic war and you think the aliens who would annihilate our entire species are being nice to you? Have you learned nothing from watching me all these years? You’re being used as political prisoners and you don’t even realize it.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds bad, but . . .” Drue trailed off, pulling on the neck of his black space suit a little.

  “Benny,” Hot Dog whispered from the other side of the table, raising her eyebrows and silently urging him to take over.

  “Right,” Benny said. “Nice probably isn’t the right word. They’re being helpful. They’re listening to what we have to say.”

  The senator hunched over Elijah’s desk, his hands in fists. “And what do you have to say?”

  Benny sat up straighter, staring into the hologram. “Things have changed, Senator Lincoln, and if we don’t try to work together, both our species are going to destroy each other. None of us will get Earth. None of us will survive. We can find a way to avoid that. We can figure out a way for us to all to be okay. But in order to do that, you have to be willing to give peace between our worlds a chance. And that starts with taking Dr. Bale’s superweapon off the table.”

  He glanced around the room. Vala didn’t move. Neither did the members of the Pit Crew, who sat with their lips pressed together tightly, staring at Senator Lincoln from other sides of the hologram. Hot Dog and Jasmine both nodded to him. Ramona yawned.

  At Benny’s left, Drue leaned in a bit, grinning and talking softly without moving his lips. “That sounded good.”

  Senator Lincoln simply laughed. “What are you talking about?” he finally asked. “We beat the aliens at the Taj. Human
ity has already shown that we can win this battle. The only talks we should be having are the Alpha Maraudi officially abandoning any plans to take our planet and leaving our solar system for good. They should be apologizing to us.” He leaned back in Elijah’s chair. “Not that we’d trust them to stay away. Not after everything they’ve done.”

  Commander Vala made a low, snarling noise as several of her tentacles tapped on the table.

  “We have nothing to fear from the aliens anymore,” the senator continued. “We may have gotten off to a rocky start, but we’ve proven we can take them on. If Elijah had let us base soldiers at the Taj to begin with, we wouldn’t even be in this mess.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “You know that they intend to colonize our planet. You heard it from their own disgusting mouths. So why should we risk letting them live?”

  “For one, you’re talking about wiping out an entire species,” Benny said.

  “So are they.”

  “Sure, but,” Drue piped in, “I mean, I get what you’re saying, but when you really start thinking about it . . . It’s an entire planet of people who are in trouble.”

  Drue’s father stared at him for a moment. “And?”

  “You would just sit back and watch their planet burn from another galaxy?” Benny asked.

  “I would sit in my home country on Earth and continue to exist, along with every other human who rightfully belongs on this planet,” Drue’s father replied. “I would do it to make sure my family was safe.” He slammed his fist against Elijah’s desk. “I am done wasting my time listening to the fantasies of children. You know nothing of what you speak about.”

  Benny sat in silence for a moment, the senator’s words striking something in his core. Of course, he was trying to do all this to keep his family safe as well. And if it came down to it, that was the most important thing to him. Despite everything he’d done to try to make peace with the aliens.

  But there were other things to consider.

  “You don’t understand what using that weapon would do,” he said firmly.

  “This safety you speak of would be nothing more than an illusion,” Vala said.

  Senator Lincoln looked around, trying to figure out where the words had come from since the cameras were focused on Benny and Drue. “So you’ve got one of them there with you.”

  Ramona tapped on her HoloTek, and the swarm of nanoprojectors and cameras turned until Drue’s father faced the alien.

  “I am Vala, commander of this ship and outpost,” the alien said. “I have spoken with these humans and have thought long and hard about this ‘superweapon,’ as your people have taken to calling it. Knowing humanity, I do not doubt its existence for a moment. However, I am also aware of the limited scope of your people’s understanding of our shared universe. Of my solar system. I am sure that you could send some bomb to my planet. Perhaps faster than we could evacuate. But that would not completely eliminate the Alpha Maraudi. Do you think we have not sent mother ships to the far corners of other galaxies in search of habitable planets? That we do not have outposts across this vast universe? How do you think our commanders would react once they learned of our world’s destruction at the hands of a primitive planet in a vulnerable solar system?” The commander’s tentacles twisted together, forming two glossy horns that weaved around each other above her head. “It would take only one of our mother ships to destroy all life on your planet.” She paused. “In fact, that was our original plan. Before the humans around this table involved themselves and saved you.”

  “Have you not figured out what happens when you threaten us?” the senator asked, banging his fist on the desk. “We will fight you. We’ll do whatever it takes to continue to exist.”

  “This is not a threat,” Vala said calmly. “This is simply the logical chain of events that would occur were you to destroy our home world. Despite what you may think, we are at heart a peaceful species. Only the most drastic of situations has led us to the predicament we are in now. But losing so many of our people, I assure you, would bring wrath down upon your planet.”

  The senator didn’t respond, but Benny noticed a bead of sweat fall from his temple. His face, too, looked paler than it had just moments before.

  “The commander’s right,” Jasmine said, the cameras turning to her. “There’s no possible way you could destroy every Maraudi mother ship or evacuation ship, no matter how big this superweapon is. We don’t even know how many there are out there.”

  “But I bet this commander does,” the senator said. “I bet Vala could tell us exactly how many ships are in the alien fleet.”

  Benny glanced at the commander, who neither responded nor moved.

  “We don’t even know where the other mother ship in our own solar system is right now,” Jasmine continued. “If it gets close to Earth . . . I personally ran the debris projections before our attack against the asteroid storm. I don’t know how many of these weaponized Space Runners you have, but is it enough to stop a coordinated assault from two mother ships? A dozen? It would take so few asteroids to wipe all of humanity off the map.”

  “Uh,” Hot Dog whispered, “maybe don’t tell the ETs how to kill Earth?”

  “Trust me,” Trevone said. “We’ve been working with Pito. They know what’s possible.”

  “Uh, Ramona?” Benny asked. The cameras turned back to him. “Thanks. Senator Lincoln, Commander Vala has agreed to meet with people from Earth to try to talk peace and figure out how we can work together to save both our species.”

  “Peace,” the senator half spat. But there was something different about his expression. Ever since Vala had spoken about what would happen if they used the Dr. Bale’s weapon, the man had let a hint of concern shadow his face—a slight crease between his eyebrows. Even though Drue’s father still sounded like he was laughing off the threat to humanity, Benny could tell he was weighing what they were saying in his head. He was listening to them.

  “All we want to do is avoid . . . ,” Benny started. He glanced at Jasmine. “Mutually assured destruction.”

  “You don’t want the Lincoln name to be connected to the end of humanity,” Drue chimed in. “And, you know, I kind of want to go back to Earth and not have to worry about getting exploded.”

  “Just let us talk,” Benny said. “And for the sake of our solar system, don’t use that weapon.”

  Drue’s father was quiet for several seconds. “The government—the planet—I represent would be . . .” He paused, narrowing his eyes as though he were deep in thought. “We could discuss the remote possibility that there are other options.”

  “Good,” Benny said, his pulse thrumming as he tried not to make it obvious how relieved he was. “Great! That’s all we’re asking for right now.”

  “But, um,” Drue added, “it has to be in person.”

  “We would welcome an envoy of representatives onto the ship,” Vala said. “Though, with our current numbers, it would need to be a small delegation. Perhaps—”

  “I’m not walking into a trap,” Senator Lincoln interrupted. “Dr. Bale has told me of the potential forces your mother ships could hold and of the way you can control certain minerals.” He grimaced. “I’ve been encased in your rock before and that will not happen again. I won’t become a hostage.”

  “That’s fine,” Benny said. “We have plenty of Space Runners up here. We could, I don’t know, meet you somewhere else. Mars, maybe. Just a handful of people from both sides.”

  “No,” the senator said. “I don’t want those things coming any closer to Earth or our Moon.” He paused, sliding his fingers across the holo-surface of the desk, bringing up several maps.

  Ricardo and Kira had stayed quiet throughout the conversation, but Benny heard the leader of the Pit Crew grunt. “That’s Elijah’s desk,” he said. “He has no right to sit behind it.”

  “He has no right to be at the Taj at all,” Kira agreed.

  But either the senator didn’t hear their comments, or he chose to ignore t
hem. “What about one of Jupiter’s moons?” he asked.

  “Uh, yeah, maybe,” Benny said. Ganymede—with its surface made completely of ice—didn’t exactly sound like a great place for a peace talk, and he figured it was better to keep the location of Vala’s ship a secret. Still, Jupiter apparently had many, many satellites. If only—

  “Io,” Jasmine said from the other side of the table, tapping on her HoloTek. “It’s volcanic, but it’s got a rocky surface at least. We’d have no trouble landing there and getting around.”

  “Uh, we’re not going to burst into flames when we get out of the car, right?” Hot Dog asked.

  “It also has large ice regions,” Trevone added, one side of his mouth curling up in a look of satisfaction. “Well, frozen sulfur dioxide, actually, but similar to ice. That means there are places where the temperature kind of, you know . . . evens out.”

  “This is true,” Vala said. “We mapped several such areas when first observing the moons of Jupiter.” She nodded to Benny. “I would approve of this location.”

  “Io,” Senator Lincoln said, staring at a map of the solar system now floating about the desk in Elijah’s office. “Yes, we could make that work. Send us the coordinates you suggest and I will have Dr. Bale and our people look over them. If they think this is a suitable location, I’ll get back to you.”

  Benny looked around the table. “Does this sound good to everyone?”

  There were no objections.

  “Not so fast,” the senator said. “Here are our terms: You come alone. No alien vehicles that could trap us in rock. And I don’t want to face an entire army of the Alpha Maraudi. The bare minimum. Dr. Bale has ways of detecting the aliens. We’ll know if we’re being deceived.”

  “Then you don’t bring weapons,” Benny said. “We have ways of making sure you don’t.” He curled up his silver glove on the table.

  Senator Lincoln stared at him for a moment before nodding. “Now,” he said. “How many of you kids are there?”