A Daring Rescue by Space Pirates

by Rob Favre

  Renay pulled on my relishy sleeve. “You never told me there were giant cats on Earth! He is so cute!”

  “Yeah, when I was here you didn’t keep the big ones as pets. Also, they had much smaller teeth.”

  In the darkness past the rumbling giant cat, the truck was a tangle of cables, ropes, and ladders. Hammocks hung everywhere, most of them full of motionless people. Some were clearly sleeping, but most were moving buttons on small game controllers. There were no screens that I could see, but the people tapping the controllers wore sleek black goggles over their eyes.

  A giant truck with a Dodgers logo full of people napping and playing video games. I was home.

  Not everyone in the truck was in hammocks, though. Laughing, shouting children were running around, climbing on the ropes like monkeys, throwing balls to each other. Also, at each other. None of them looked like baseballs to me, but it was dark, and they were moving pretty fast. Renay smiled when a couple of shrieking four-year-olds tore past us chasing some small furry creature. One of them stopped to stare in awe at Mustard, and Renay waved at him. He waved back, but his friends were shouting at him and he took off after them. Her smile wilted as he disappeared into the darkness.

  We stepped over cables and under hammocks and around children until we reached a door at the back of the room, which Chang opened for us. Inside was an older guy with dark, leathery skin that looked like it had seen more than a few days in the desert heat. He had jet black hair and bright, curious brown eyes.

  And he was wearing not just a Dodgers hat, but a jersey as well.

  The room was cramped and small. The old man sat on a worn cot behind a small table cluttered with books and metal parts. The only light came from the back wall, where bright glowing images of fish glided across a big glass display like the one in Chang’s ride. There were no seats, so Renay and Mustard and I just stood awkwardly. Chang nodded to the old man and closed the door.

  The old man just studied us for a long moment. Then he started speaking, but I didn’t understand him any better than I had understood Chang.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you’re saying. Is there any chance someone here speaks English?”

  He answered, but for all I know he may have replied that his cousin Alphonso was the head of the English department at UCLA, or that his favorite burrito filling was sandpaper. I didn’t understand even a fraction of a single word. We weren’t going to be doing a whole lot of communicating verbally.

  The old man tapped some controls on the screen, and a picture of our ship came up, right where we’d landed it outside the stadium. It was taken from a high angle. I wondered if some of those buzzards we’d seen were maybe not buzzards after all.

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s what we came in.”

  He pulled up another image, a breathtaking crystal castle floating above wispy white clouds, warmed by the rosy light of a spectacular sunset.

  I shook my head blankly. “Never seen that before.”

  He called up more images. A polished chrome vessel, all smooth curves and graceful lines, gliding through the stars above a ringed green planet. Another object in space, this one white and spiny, like a gigantic crab or insect. A purple-blue ocean, covered to the horizon with a honeycomb of small islands and delicate strands of glittering wire. I shook my head each time.

  “Mustard, what is he showing us? Do you know what any of these pictures are?”

  “Oh, for sure, dude! That was Yang Ming Monsanto 5, the Guadalupe, and the delta region of Barbie Unicorn Prime. I think he’s got old pictures though, all the Barbie Unicorns have a totally different color scheme now. At least they did the last time my archives were updated.”

  “Well, what are they? Why is he showing them to me?”

  “Oh, those are human settlements. He wants to know which one you’re from. I was hoping he’d get to Awesome Flavor so you could finally see it. It has Moltencheese volcanos, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, Mustard. Hang on, let me try something.”

  I motioned to the old man that I would like to use his screen. He stepped back. I had watched him pull up the last couple images, so I thought I had an idea how it worked.

  The keyboard was still laid out in a way that I basically recognized, with some extra symbols that were totally foreign to me. Luckily, I didn’t need them to do what I planned to do.

  I typed in “hope/freedom.”

  And the Heifer appeared on the screen.

  The old man stepped up to the screen, studied it for a moment, then started typing. A screen of text appeared. He read, touched, read some more. Finally, he turned back to us with a smile.

  “Hope freedom?” He said slowly, pointing to me and then to Renay.

  I nodded. “Yeah, that was our ship. We’ve come back. Things here are… different.”

  He clapped his hands, turned back to the screen and touched the controls in a frenzy of gestures with both hands.

  Then he turned back to us and spoke. I didn’t understand a word, of course, but about a second after he finished, a male voice with a trace of a posh English accent spoke from the video screen. “Welcome back to Earth. My name is Darius.”

  I saw what was going on and breathed a sigh of relief. Now, finally, there was a chance we could get some answers.

  “Thanks, Darius. I’m Tom and this is Renay. And we were hoping you might be able to help us.”

  The computer translated for him, and he asked us what we needed.

  I held up my relish-colored sleeve. “First, some new clothes. Then, maybe a spaceship.”

  We “talked” with Darius for a long time. He had a lot of questions for us. I had a lot of questions for him, too. Renay mostly kept quiet. Mustard asked whether they’d ever had Flaming Spicy Meat Like Nuggets with Minty Ice Ranch Like Sauce, and I told him to be quiet for the rest of the conversation.

  We learned a lot about how the Dodgers lived. They were a mobile tribe, roaming around southern California, avoiding storms and mermaids. I wasn’t sure about that last part; it could have been something that the computer didn’t know how to translate. Anyway, they weren’t tied down to any one place. They got their power from the sun, moved whenever it seemed like a good idea to move.

  Oh, I also learned that these guys weren’t just Dodgers fans. They were the LA Dodgers. Their purpose had drifted a bit in the last thousand years, since they didn’t really play baseball anymore, or even really know what baseball was, but Darius was glad when I told them I was a fan.

  I learned a lot more than that, but I won’t bore you with all of it. I did ask about the whole dinosaur situation. Darius admitted he didn’t know where they came from, so we looked it up. Turns out there had been a whole fad for genetically engineered corporate mascots sometime back in the 2600s. McDonalds had created a whole herd of branded dinosaurs, but they left them behind when they moved their corporate headquarters off planet in 2765. Darius said we should just be glad we ran into dinosaurs and not mermaids. I asked him what he meant by that, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

  I had a million more questions to ask, about mermaids, and burritos, and the glass dome we’d passed, and something I saw on one of the computer screens called the Great Football Wars, but Renay stopped me. “Tom, this is all interesting, but our time is very short.”

  I almost asked one more question, but I knew she was right. I let her go ahead.

  “Darius, what we really need is some help.” She explained the situation back on New Newton, what was going to happen to everyone there if we didn’t get back. “Where can we go to ask for that kind of help? Who has a starship big enough to carry a few thousand people?”

  When the computer translated her question for him, he shook his head sadly.

  “You have come to the wrong planet I am sorry. We have no spaceships, drones only. Impossible to digest. Prosperous only have spaceships.”

  The translator wasn’t perfect, so we sometimes had to guess what it meant when it got words
wrong. Renay tried again. “Very well, where should we go to find the ‘prosperous,’ then?”

  Darius shrugged. The computer translated his answer as “Cannot contact prosperous. Walk among the stars.” He touched his screen and pulled back up some of the images he had shown before – sleek silver vessels in deep space.

  We asked and asked, hoping that maybe he just wasn’t understanding the question, but the more we talked, the less hopeful I became. According to Darius, the ‘prosperous’ were the people who could afford to build a spaceship or buy a ticket for one; the only ones left here on Earth were people who couldn’t afford to leave.

  Which meant that there was exactly one spaceship on the planet Earth right now, and it was the one we had arrived in.

  It was certainly possible that Darius was wrong. Earth is a big planet, after all. But a spaceship we didn’t know about was just as useful as no spaceship at all.

  We ran out of things to ask and sat in silence for a little while. Renay turned and pulled open the door. She stomped off without a word.

  Darius looked sympathetic. “Cannot you travel your spaceship and find help somewhere else?”

  I shook my head. “That’s the problem. We don’t have any fuel to take off again. We’re stuck here.”

  “Always return of prosperous you could restful.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Last visit 89 years ago. Could be back any iguana.”

  I thanked Darius for his help and went to look for Renay, and some clothes, and a new plan.

  They were underground for six weeks before any real trouble started.

  It happened in the dining area. She knew a lot of people found it crowded and suffocating, but she didn’t mind eating there. It reminded her of childhood, of the early days of the colony, when everyone shared work and everyone shared meals. Not everyone remembered those days as fondly. It had been long enough now that not everyone remembered those days at all.

  But the dining area was crowded, and it was hot, and people were hungry. And when they ran out of strawberry patars, rumors started to fly down the line that they were out of patars. Those became rumors that there was no more food for the day, or no more food at all. Someone grabbed food from someone else’s plate, blows were exchanged, and pretty soon there were dozens of people shoving and hitting each other. Nobody really even knew who was fighting who. By the time it ran its course, three people were unconscious, four had broken bones, and about twenty others had scrapes and bruises. The emergency council assured everyone there was plenty of food, and there was no reason to panic. But from that point on, mealtimes were all watched over by security “volunteers” holding metal rods.

  The boys didn’t notice that anything was different during mealtimes, but when they asked if they could have more patars, she told them “no.”

  Chapter 16

  I didn’t find Renay. I didn’t find any clothes, and I definitely did not find a plan. What I found was Mustard, and a crowd.

  I had been in there talking to Darius for so long that the daylight was fading when I stepped outside. The sky was purple-black and just being dotted with stars. I saw the Big Dipper and smiled. It had been a long time.

  The sleepy camp we had seen in the heat of the afternoon stirred to life as the sun went down. People were out, running around, laughing, fixing things in the blue-white glow of portable lights. And standing in the middle of it all, surrounded by a crowd of about fifty, was Mustard.

  He said something, and they erupted in sudden laughter.

  Mustard spotted me. He thrust two tentacles straight up and waved. “Tom! Tom, it’s so exciting! I have many friends! Come here and I will introduce you!” Everyone turned and looked at me like I was a giant sausage too. I was wearing relish, so I guess I couldn’t totally blame them. I didn’t see a way out of this, so I walked over.

  Mustard hugged me with three tentacles and patted my head with a fourth. He said something completely incomprehensible to his crowd of admirers. I thought I heard my name somewhere in the clatter of unfamiliar syllables. If Mustard was trying to make a joke, he did a real bad job delivering it, because nobody laughed. They just all stared at me. Nobody said a word. The wind rustled some clothes that were drying on a line nearby, and somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

  A little boy, probably four years old, took a couple of cautious steps toward me. He had sun-browned skin and dark eyes, and he was wearing a blue Dodgers cap. He reached out a tiny trembling hand and touched my arm, lightly, as if he thought I might explode if he handled me too roughly.

  “Mustard, what did you tell them about me? Did you say I was made of frosting or something?”

  “No way, dude, nothing like that. I just told them where we came from.”

  The little boy pointed up at the stars and asked Mustard something in a small voice. Mustard twirled the tips of his tentacles for a second, then pointed up to a spot in the moonless sky. The little boy’s eyes went wide with wonder. I didn’t have to ask Mustard to translate what had just happened; Mustard was pointing out which direction we’d come from. It wasn’t completely dark yet but there were already hundreds of stars visible in the sky. I wondered if Cordelia was one of them. I wondered if it was night there, if Zoe was looking up toward Sol and thinking about me.

  Mustard started talking again, but nobody laughed. Then he started singing, and everyone just looked confused. A woman in the back said something. Mustard replied, and a ripple of excitement spread through the crowd. Soon the questions were piling up faster than Mustard could answer. He crossed his tentacles and turned to me. He had to lean close so I could hear him over the questions being shouted at him.

  “Good news, dude! They were scared of you at first, but I told them that you aren’t human, and now they’re feeling a lot friendlier. They have some questions they’d like you to answer. Cool?”

  They had more than a few questions.

  With Mustard translating their questions for me, and translating my answers back to the Dodgers, I couldn’t be sure how well I was communicating, but they kept asking, so I kept doing the best I could to answer. Was Los Angeles full of people when I lived here? What was space like? Was Dodger Stadium used for tournaments in ancient times? Had I ever met a mermaid? What’s the best kind of sauce for buffalo wings? Why had I come back to Earth?

  I’m not 100% sure Mustard translated all of those right.

  We kept going for what felt like an hour. I was tired and hungry and thirsty, but I didn’t want to do anything to offend our hosts. I had some questions of my own, specifically about Mustard telling everyone that I wasn’t human, but those were going to have to wait. I kept answering questions. Someone brought me a beverage. It was sour and warm, like lemonade served at the temperature of hot chocolate. Normally I would have taken a pass, but my throat was dry and it was better than nothing. I kept answering questions. It all kind of became a blur.

  And then, in the middle of my clumsy explanation of what neighborhood I used to live in, everyone cheered.

  For about a second, I thought that maybe they just really loved my answer. Then I realized none of them knew what I was saying because Mustard hadn’t had a chance to translate yet. And suddenly everyone marched away, singing and chanting and laughing. I didn’t know where they were going, and I didn’t care. I slumped down on a stack of spare tires. The night air was cold without a hundred of my new closest friends pressing in against me. I was alone with Mustard.

  I took a sip of my sour tea. “They certainly had a lot of questions.”

  “They sure did, dude! Isn’t it great to have so many friends?”

  “I don’t know if I can call them my friends just yet.” I heard lots of voices chanting on the other side of the camp. I didn’t have a good view of what was happening, but a bright orange glow was flickering into life. “Mustard, I need to ask you something. Why did you tell those people that I’m not human?”

  “Oh, they were just scared.”

&nbs
p; “Scared of what?”

  “Humans.”

  But I didn’t get to ask Mustard about what he meant for a while, because we had to attend a dinosaur barbecue.

  The thing that had the Dodgers so excited was that someone had taken a truck downtown and brought back the Tyrannosaurus that Chang had killed earlier. I guess this was a special treat for them or something, because it everyone seemed to drop whatever they were doing to begin a spontaneous party. A dozen men and women were carving up the carcass. Others tossed black lumps of something flammable onto a blazing bonfire. There were groups of young people doing some kind of competitive chanting, and a game of something that resembled soccer but had like thirty people on a side and three balls. A pack of dogs was fighting over a stubby Tyrannosaurus forearm. A pink-and-green striped saber-tooth cat trotted by with a big chunk of dinosaur in its mouth. At least I hoped it was dinosaur.

  Through the hurricane of voices, I heard a familiar laugh. Over on the other side of the bonfire, I thought I caught a glimpse of Renay. She was wearing a pale tunic that glowed orange in the firelight. But a platoon of young men thundered past me in pursuit of a ball, and I lost sight of her. I made my way around the celebration looking for her, but there were too many people, and I was too tired. And hungry. Something smelled incredibly good.

  A large shape loomed behind me. I was relieved that is was not any type of extinct predator. “Hey dude! I’ve been looking for you! Here, have some! It tastes just like Chicken McNuggets!” Mustard handed me a warm metal skewer full of bite-size chunks of dinosaur.