A Daring Rescue by Space Pirates

by Rob Favre

  Juliana’s smile broadened. “What a delightful idea. It seems this day will hold new experiences for all of us. Very well, lead the way.”

  I did. Xerxes grumbled about cat odor, but everyone got on board. After a few minutes the view port opened, and we were looking down on a stunning planet, emerald green seas and brick red clouds. Juliana reclined on a light couch, and the rest of us did the same. She asked about what things were like on the ship, what it was like sharing such a small space, how we avoided boredom without any way to access the computers. We did our best to answer.

  My palms were getting sweaty. Renay started to give me nervous glances.

  “So, you actually spent time with the marketing drone trying to guess a number?” Juliana chuckled in her soft, melodious way. “For the first time, I believe I understand the appeal of sleeping. You two showed a lot of courage and perseverance on your journey. I grow more and more excited at the idea of telling your story.”

  I did my best to look pleased. It was all I could do to not tap my foot on the deck. What could be taking so long?

  Xerxes stood up to stretch his legs. He stopped. He looked down at his light couch. A few seconds later, it disappeared. Had he noticed the delay? Did he suspect anything?

  Renay quickly spoke up to fill the silence before Xerxes could think about it too much. “Juliana, would you like me to show you how I cared for Preston?”

  Juliana smiled. “Yes, I would like that. I understand he is quite affectionate with you. Was he always that way?”

  Renay stood up nervously, and a box of light appeared around her.

  Finally.

  A box appeared around me too.

  Xerxes was so startled that he jumped. Juliana just looked confused. She waved her hand, but the boxes did not disappear.

  Juliana’s voice was icy. “What is the meaning of this? Who is creating these fields, and why can I not dismiss them?”

  I just smiled. “As much as I would like to monologue about my plan, we have to be going. But please, enjoy the bananas.”

  Our light boxes punched through the hull of the ship, and Renay and I flew out into empty space, protected by nothing but shimmering boxes of golden light.

  As we zoomed away, I looked back and saw the two holes we had punched in the hull were covered by golden fields. The ship’s external field projector had kicked in to keep the air inside. They wouldn’t be going anywhere very fast, at least not until it had those holes repaired. But I was glad the ship hadn’t exploded or anything. Juliana had been kind of jerk to us, but I didn’t want her dead.

  Our flight probably only lasted two minutes or so, but it felt like so much longer. It was strange and silent and peaceful, even though I was traveling at the speed of a rifle bullet. I watched the yacht grow larger as I approached, its bulbous, insectoid carapace gleaming white in the light of the nearby star. It was still hard to believe that anything that big had ever been built. For the last couple of seconds, it filled my entire field of view. I held my breath, wanted to close my eyes but managed not to. It felt like I was about to slam into the hull. But I slipped into a docking port, zipped down a long corridor, and came to a stop in the volcano’s core. My box winked out of existence just above the deck, and I stumbled clumsily. Sure, I’d traveled about fifty kilometers in the last two minutes, but it’s always the last ten centimeters that gets you.

  “Mustard! All that and you made me stumble right at the end?”

  Mustard looked concerned. “Have I made you angry?”

  I ran over to him and gave him the biggest, strongest tackle-hug I could manage. It would have knocked down my dad, but Mustard just sort of absorbed it without budging. “Of course I’m not angry! Mustard, you were incredible!”

  Renay hugged us both, laughing. “Mustard, we could not have done this without you. Now, you must teach us the dance of vengeance!”

  “Mmm, that’s gonna be tough for creatures with only four tentacles. But for my friends, I’ll give it a shot.”

  We danced the dance of vengeance. Badly.

  We really couldn’t have done any of this without Mustard. Our part of the plan was to get Juliana and her minions into our ship. The rest of the plan was on him. Our ship’s internal field generator was back in LA serving as a toy for the Dodgers, so Mustard had to use the yacht’s generators instead to make the couches and such appear, so that the trio of tedious wouldn’t suspect anything. Then, as soon as we were far enough away that the yacht couldn’t hear Juliana’s commands, he projected field boxes around us and brought us back. Without a generator of their own, or a link to the generator on the yacht, there was nothing Juliana could do except watch us vanish. It was fun to imagine the look on her face as she realized what had happened.

  What I did not want to see was the look on her face when she caught up to us. “Mustard, get us to the bridge.”

  “Right on, dude!”

  “Actually, there’s one other stop we need to make first.”

  We exited the light cube in Juliana’s former office. The model of the planned route to Crunchberry still hung patiently in the air, right where she had left it.

  “Mister Mustard, can you please chart us a new course?”

  “Where would you like do go, dude?”

  “Straight to Cordelia.”

  “You got it, dude!”

  The red zigzags disappeared, replaced by a single red line straight to Crunchberry. Cordelia. Whatever. I would have him fix the label later. I tightened my belt again. The pants were a little big on me, but Xerxes’s closet was vast, and I hadn’t had time to find a pair that fit perfectly. But I just couldn’t do what we were about to do wearing a skirt. Badly-fitting pants it was.

  “Mustard, does this thing have any weapons?”

  “Of course, dude, we’ve got planetary bombardment warheads, energy pulses in the exawatt range, a microsingularity generator…”

  “Arm them. Arm them all.”

  Renay looked puzzled. “Tom, what are the weapons for? We discussed this, nobody will be able to catch us before we get there.”

  “Oh, I know. It just wouldn’t feel right to be a space pirate without having some weapons ready.”

  She laughed. We blazed toward home at the speed of light, heavily armed and ready for anything.

  Anything, that is, except what we actually found.

  It was movie night, the first one in weeks. The boys were excited because it was a “good” movie for once. A young boy gets separated from his family and is raised by a herd of friendly dinosaurs. About ten minutes in, once she was sure they were absorbed in the movie, she and Hal got up and made their way to the other side of the hall. Most of the adults were already there.

  Boris delivered the update in a hushed voice. The food was almost gone. Maybe another week at half rations, maybe a little longer at less than that. Three of the generators had failed, only two were still running, and one of those could go at any time. The drainage system was clogged, and there was no way to fix it, so everything was going to smell like a latrine from now on. Resources and options were dwindling.

  “The time has come to make a decision. We still have enough power to implement Phase Six. If we wait until the last generator goes, that will not be an option. When we planned Phase Six, we agreed it could only begin with a three-fourths vote. So here we are. All in favor of beginning Phase Six, raise your hand.”

  She glanced over at the children watching the movie. They were so thin now, and tired all the time.

  She closed her eyes, held her breath, and raised her hand.

  Chapter 23

  We were sitting at a small table outside the deli, watching some pigeons strut down the sidewalk like they owned the place. She looked suspiciously at the reuben on her plate.

  “Salted meat, and cheese, and pickled cabbage, and this – stuff,” she pointed at a dollop of Russian dressing on the white china. “This will all taste good together? You are not tricking me into eating something horrible?”
r />   “Scout’s honor,” I said, and took a big bite of mine. Considering that whoever built the systems that created these had probably never been anywhere near a deli, or New York, or Earth, it tasted surprisingly close to the real thing. Or maybe it had just been that long since I’d had corned beef.

  Renay raised an eyebrow. I tried to reassure her with my mouth full. “She? Ish delishsh.”

  She took a bite. Her face contorted into a mask of pure terror, and she spit it out. I laughed so hard I almost spit mine out too.

  “That is disgusting! Whoever thought of putting those foods together was a sadist or a crazy person.” She took a big drink of her Coke. So far, she wasn’t a fan of most of the food here, but she liked Coke. A lot.

  “Maybe we should have started you on a turkey club.”

  “Maybe I will just stick to these.” She ate another handful of potato chips. I pulled her plate toward me. I was hungry enough to eat two reubens.

  We watched as gray trucks and silver sedans and bright yellow taxis rushed past, stopped when the light turned red, and then roared away again. There were lots of cars on the road, but no drivers, or bikes, or pedestrians. Or CHUDs in the sewer. I made a point of checking. We had found a replica of ten blocks or so of late 20th century Manhattan, filled with intricate and specific detail, down to the pigeons and the smell of smog and exhaust fumes. All that was missing was the people. It was like visiting an elaborate movie set without the actors or the crew.

  “It feels so empty and lonely,” Renay said into the quiet. I had been thinking it too, but I was glad she was the one to say it.

  I nodded. “We’ll just have to go find a whole bunch of people to fill it up.”

  I expected her to smile, but she just took another drink of her Coke and looked worried. “Do you think we will be there in time?”

  Every time she asked this, I tried to be reassuring. Every time I did, I was filled with doubt and a gnawing fear that we would be too late, that this would all be for nothing, that we’d get back and find only the charred stumps of the Enchanted Forest and thousands of blackened skeletons that used to be the people we knew. But I didn’t say any of that. “We’ll be there in time. Don’t worry. Your brother will be there, and he’ll be thrilled to see you.”

  She laughed, but it was a thin wrapper around a core of sadness. “He will not be my little brother, though. He will be a grown man. He will not want me to hold him. He will not want me to teach him things.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen a thing or two he doesn’t know about yet.”

  She sighed, looked out at the traffic, then straight at me, straight through me with her big brown eyes. “Who do you want to see?”

  “My parents of course. Rick. I’d like to say hi to Fradd and Kev.”

  “What about… her?”

  She didn’t need to say a name. We both knew who she was talking about. I tried to stay cool, but I was pretty sure I was about to say the wrong thing. “I mean, sure, I’d like to see her.”

  “You still miss her?”

  All of a sudden, I could not imagine taking another bite of this greasy sandwich. I put it down, stared at the plate, and shrugged. “Yeah. Of course I do.”

  “Will you still talk to me when I am not the only person you see every day?”

  “Renay, come on. You know I will.”

  “But you will still wish you could be with her.”

  “Renay, come on, it won’t be like that. She’ll be twenty years older than me.”

  “And if she wasn’t? You wouldn’t go back to her instant your eyes met?”

  “I…”

  Her chair scraped against the pavement as she pushed it back. “Take me to the blue crystal room,” she said to the sky, and a glowing cube of light wrapped around her and whisked her away.

  I left my food for the pigeons. I wondered if they were real enough to even eat anything. I walked the lonely blocks of an empty city, thinking.

  “Dude! You are gonna be, like, so stoked when you see what I’ve made!”

  Mustard’s tentacles were twirling in a complicated interlocking pattern, and he was bouncing up and down. I was annoyed with him at first when he found me sitting alone in the misty gloom of the cemetery, but seeing him so excited made me smile.

  “Okay, Mustard. Show me.”

  “Alright, dude. It’s actually two things. Here’s the first one.”

  A small light box winked into place right in front of me. Inside was a tray carrying a plate full of hot dogs, stacked next to a bowl of pink-orange sauce.

  “Dude, it’s buffalo wasabi ginger ranch! I finally got the formula optimized for this thing’s new fabricator. It’s so rad, dude! It can make like a thousand gallons of this stuff at a time! Try some!”

  I took one of the hot dogs, dipped it in the sauce, and took a bite. It tasted about the way you’d imagine buffalo wasabi ginger ranch would taste. But I managed not to make a face or spit it out or anything. I didn’t want to hurt Mustard’s feelings.

  “What do you think, dude? How is it?”

  “It’s… very radical.”

  “Dude, I know, right? Anyway, the second thing isn’t quite as good, but maybe you’ll like it anyway. Say ‘ship controls.’”

  I did. A field of numbers, graphs, buttons and sliders appeared in the air in front of me, all constructed out of glowing golden light. In the middle was a star map, similar to the one Juliana had made for us. It showed our location in the center, a glowing red ball about the size of a pea, surrounded by golden specks labeled with the names of stars.

  “Whoa. Mustard, this is great. This shows what’s happening with the ship?”

  “Yeah. Since you have to be human to control this thing the normal way, I figured you’d like some way to know what’s going on. But it doesn’t just show you. You can change things if you want. Try that one.”

  I grabbed the glowing orb just below the number indicating our current speed. I turned the orb counterclockwise. The number started to diminish as the ship slowed down. I turned it clockwise. The number started to increase as the ship sped back up.

  “Mustard, this is amazing. You did all this for me?”

  “For you and Renay. Where is she, by the way? You two have been together a lot lately.”

  “She’s… busy. Just wanted to be alone for a little while, I think.”

  “Is she still mad that you wanted Zoe to be here instead of her?”

  I felt like an anvil had fallen on my stomach. “Something like that.”

  “But now you’re glad she’s here, right? You should tell her that.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Mustard.”

  “Feel free to take some of the buffalo wasabi ginger ranch with you. That will make her happy for sure.”

  I smiled. “I might just do that, Mustard. Thanks again.”

  “Right, dude. See you around.” He vanished in a golden flash.

  I felt like walking around the cemetery for a little while to clear my head. I tried stepping around the glowing control panel, but it just moved with me. For a while, I tried going for my walk and just ignoring it, but the glowing dashboard really wrecked the gloomy mood I was looking for. I finally figured out that they would disappear if I said “dismiss ship controls.” With those out of the way, I was free to wander in the mist, looking at headstones with made up names and dates on them, eternal remembrances of people who had never lived, put here by people who would never die.

  How many names would I know if I wandered around in a place like this back on New Newton? There was a whole generation living there now that I had never met. If we were lucky, maybe they knew about Renay and me from stories or movies or something. If we weren’t lucky, well, there wasn’t going to be anyone left to remember anything. Either way, the past was the past. It wasn’t coming back. It was time to move on, time to think about how I wanted the rest of my life to be instead of thinking about what was and what could have been.

  I left the cemetery, and
the past.

  “You’re a tough person to find these days.” I sat down next to Renay on the beach, where she was staring out at the gentle waves as they lapped softly onto the sand. The crystal-clear water was a dazzling fiery orange, illuminated by the projected sunset. The sand was warm and soft. The only sound was the wind and the waves.

  “I keep having Mustard set the sky back to sunset,” she said. “I am sure I will tire of it at some point, but I have not yet.”

  “Did he show you his creation?”

  “The sauce? Yes. He appeared out of nowhere yesterday and all but forced me to try it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I tried it once. That was probably enough for a lifetime.”

  A seagull glided past, calling. I thought I saw a dolphin crest through the waves, far out from shore, but it was hard to know for sure. I liked the idea that there might be dolphins in this ocean, even if I knew they weren’t real.

  “I am sorry I lost my temper with you,” Renay said into the quiet. “Our situation is no more your fault than it is mine. You cannot help how you feel. You cannot help who you love, just as I cannot help wishing you felt differently about me. All we can do is make the best of it, yes?”

  “Renay, what if I… did feel that way about you?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Tom, you should know better than to ask someone to the dance only after you’ve been turned down by someone else.”

  “Yeah, I screwed that up. And I’m sorry. I never meant for you to get hurt by that, by any of this. But a lot has happened since then, to both of us. To the people back home. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want my future to look like. And what I’ve realized in the last couple days is that I’m going to be real lonely if my future doesn’t include you.”

  She studied the horizon. There was another bird out there, maybe a gull, maybe something else. It was too far away to tell. “I would be lying if I said I do not still feel for you, Old One. That is why it still hurts so much, knowing you would rather be with her.”