Space Rocks!

by Tom O'Donnell

“Wow, you Xotonians sure get emotional,” said Becky. “I can’t imagine how much you’re going to blubber at their wedding.” She pointed at Nicki and Hollins. They stood together on the other side of the hangar, laughing.

  “Seriously, though,” said Becky. “Good for those crazy kids.” She was smiling.

  “Wait, what? Oh. But I thought you and Hollins, uh . . .” I said. Human interpersonal dynamics were still mysterious to me. Becky’s in particular.

  “Chorkle, gross,” she said simply. And she boarded the ship. I followed her.

  Becky flopped down in the cockpit and adjusted the seat. Hollins’s face appeared on the com screen. He was in the other ship now, and Nicki stood behind him.

  “You guys ready?” he said. “Let’s do this and then go home.” His voice was calm, and his face was serious.

  “Just so I understand the ‘plan’—and I’m using that term loosely,” said Becky, “two children are going to fly a couple of ancient spaceships against an evil alien empire of untold power. Is that it?”

  “Yeah, I think that about covers it,” said Hollins.

  “One heck of a college entrance essay,” said Becky as she powered up the engines. “FYI, I’m just going to ignore about eighty percent of this stuff.” She indicated the ridiculously complicated array of meters and displays on the instrument panel. Even after working with the ships for the past day, there was still much about the ships we didn’t understand.

  “Maybe we can figure out the rest of it later,” said Nicki cheerfully, “if we don’t die.”

  “You’re a real ray of sunshine, sis,” laughed Becky. She seemed oddly lighthearted to be only minutes from risking her life in an incredibly dangerous flight mission.

  “Wait,” I said, suddenly gripped with panic. “We can’t do this. There’s no way it will work! It’s impossible—”

  “Chorkle, it’s not impossible,” said Nicki. “‘Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.’ Didn’t Teddy Roosevelt say that, Hollins?”

  “Yeah, I—I think he did,” said Hollins, his eyes wide with admiration. “I didn’t know you were into T. R. quotes.”

  Nicki shrugged and smiled.

  Becky rolled her eyes. “Okay. Can we please just fight the Vorem before I throw up? You good, Chorkle?”

  I tried to say something, but no words would come out.

  “I choose to interpret your silence as a yes,” said Becky.

  Ghillen appeared on the com screen. “Opening the hangar bay now,” said the Observer. High above us came a creaking mechanical noise. The hinges of the massive doors slowly swung outward with a rush of air.

  I took my seat in the blaster turret as the ship lifted upward on vertical thrusters. The starfighter containing Hollins and Nicki floated up beside us.

  Kalac took the controls of the Q-sik in its thol’grazes. “Ack’cer dor,” said my originator. Xotonian for “good luck.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The blaster turret was a transparent dome on top of the starfighter. Inside was a small com screen and controls that allowed the blasters to pivot and swivel 360 degrees, giving them a full range of motion.

  This transparent bubble offered an amazing vantage point as we rose out of the gravitational field of the asteroid. The surface of Gelo diminished beneath us. T’utzuxe grew larger, and the glittering void of space lay beyond it, calm and cold and beautiful.

  I tried not to throw up.

  “Go time,” said Hollins’s voice over the radio. “Nicki and I will hit the ones on the ground. Fly by once and hopefully take them all out, quick. You go for that cruiser.”

  “Got it,” said Becky. “Or ‘roger.’ Whatever.” Becky whirled our ship. Ahead of us, in the distance, Ridian’s battle cruiser now loomed. The Observers’ telescopes had not done it justice—it was somehow even bigger and more threatening than they’d made it seem. Triremes flitted around it like angry insects. Every instinct I had said we ought to be moving away from that black engine of death, fleeing as fast as we could.

  Instead Becky said, “Hang on.” And she punched the forward thrusters. We were flying right at it.

  I spun the turret and looked back toward Gelo. Some distance behind us, Hollins was flying his fighter low and fast across the surface, coming up on a landed trireme. Nicki began to fire green bolts of energy from her own turret, strafing the ground.

  The Vorem were unprepared for this, surprised that we possessed any ships at all. We had to take advantage of it while we could.

  One of the triremes on the surface flew to pieces as it silently bloomed in flame.

  “Got one!” crackled Nicki over the radio.

  “Nice shooting, Nicki!” I cried.

  “Wait, got two more,” said Nicki. Down on Gelo, more explosions.

  “Chorkle,” cried Becky, “pay attention. We’ve got incom—”

  Our ship shook as we took fire from one of the triremes protecting the battle cruiser. They’d seen us now, and they were beginning to coordinate a response.

  The trireme was flying right for us, leading with a hail of red lasers. I spun the turret around and began to shoot. Another blast took a chunk out of our ship.

  “We’re hit. Something’s beeping,” said Becky. “I hope it’s not important.”

  As I started to fire, the trireme peeled off and began evasive maneuvers, weaving and rolling and changing its direction.

  And somehow, I just couldn’t hit it. Wherever I shot, the trireme was no longer there. These Vorem ships were incredibly agile or their pilots were incredibly skilled—or both. My Xenostrife skills were coming up short.

  “Come on, Chorkle,” said Becky.

  “It’s a lot harder than the game!” I said.

  “It’s not a game,” said Becky.

  I stopped firing for a moment and tracked the Vorem ship’s zigzagging progress now. I took a deep breath. Then, instead of firing where the ship was, I fired where it would be.

  The trireme burst in a flash of light.

  “Nice!” yelled Becky.

  I replied with one of the human expletives that I’d been told to use sparingly. Two more Vorem ships were now between the battle cruiser and us, flying right at us in tight formation and shooting all the while. Their laser blasts whizzed past the turret, half a meter from my head.

  “They don’t want to let us at the battle cruiser,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Becky. “We can get past them. I’ve done this before. . . .” And she punched the thrusters, hard. The force of the acceleration pressed me back in my seat. We were hurtling toward the two triremes at high speed now.

  “Of course, when I did it before,” said Becky, “it was on a rocket-bike.”

  “Has the human gone crazy?” cried Kalac, staring out the viewport. “Chorkle, what is she doing?”

  “Jalasu Jhuk help us,” I said, “I think I know.”

  Any moment now we were going to smash right into the two triremes. There was no longer time to decelerate or turn aside, even if Becky had wanted to. And she didn’t want to.

  There would be a crash. An explosion. Perhaps we would all meet again—Xotonian, Vorem, and human alike—in the Nebula Beyond. I braced for impact.

  “Let’s see Hollins do this,” said Becky.

  At that moment, she rolled the starfighter—wider than it was tall—onto its side. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Our ship scraped right between the two triremes.

  Becky had repeated her move from Jehe Canyon. Only instead of a rocket-bike, she’d used a starfighter. And instead of boulders, it had been Vorem starships fixated on our destruction.

  From my vantage point on top of the starfighter—which was now the side—I could clearly see one of the Vorem pilots in his cockpit. As we hurtled past, he threw his arms up in slow motion, an expression of terror or anger or admiration. Perhap
s some combination of all three.

  I whipped the turret around backward and put three holes right in his engine. His trireme powered down, trailing black smoke.

  Now there was nothing between us and the battle cruiser.

  “I’ve got two on my tail, and I can’t seem to get rid of them,” crackled Hollins’s voice. I spun and saw Hollins and Nicki’s ship coming toward us with two triremes close behind, the two that they hadn’t destroyed on the surface. The triremes must have taken off and followed Hollins back.

  I looked for a shot, but I couldn’t find one—not without accidentally shooting my friends.

  Just then, one of the pursuers exploded. Nicki had nailed him! But their fighter was still taking heavy fire from the other. The starfighter spewed smoke and flames.

  The battle cruiser was just ahead of us now, massive and foreboding. I spun the turret toward it and began to shoot. The lasers made small scorch marks wherever they hit, here and there dislodging a piece of metal or machinery. It seemed an almost futile gesture.

  “All right, this is it,” said Kalac. “Powering up the Q-sik.” And my originator did. Even in the midst of the battle, I felt something different, some change in fundamental particle flow around us. The Q-sik seemed to pull energy toward it.

  “How many triremes left?” said Becky, snapping me back to reality. “Three? Four?”

  I wasn’t sure. In the chaos, I’d lost count. There was still the one we’d flown past and one following Hollins and—

  Two more triremes flew at us from above, pounding our ship with laser fire. Our starfighter rocked and sparks leaped from the consoles. More beeping. Louder this time. Oily smoke began to fill the interior.

  “I think we lost an engine!” cried Becky.

  I spun the turret upward and fired on the two ships. But when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened.

  “They must have hit something important. The blasters are dead. No power,” I said. The two triremes continued their punishing barrage of lasers. Becky was flying evasively, but with one engine down, the ship was sluggish and unresponsive. We were getting hit. Hard.

  “I think—I think I’m done over here,” said Hollins over the radio. Apparently Nicki had taken out another Vorem in the meantime, but their starfighter was also heavily damaged. It tumbled senselessly under the force of its own momentum. One of its engines fired sporadically. Still the remaining trireme kept on shooting at it.

  Worst of all, it seemed that the crew of the battle cruiser had finally realized what was happening—that they were under attack. Slowly, the massive ship wheeled to face us.

  “When is that Q-sik going to fire?” screamed Nicki. She was struggling to keep the nose of the ship aimed at the battle cruiser.

  Though it seemed the length of a lifetime, we’d been in the air for all of three, maybe four, minutes. And now everything was coming apart.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The plan was never going to work. After all, we were only children, Xotonian and human children. I’d just wanted to help them get back to their parents. But somehow we’d all ended up fighting a war, trying to alter the course of history. In a way, it was impressive that we’d even come this close. We’d taken out seven of the ten triremes. We’d almost fired the Q-sik. We’d nearly saved Gelo and Eo.

  We’d done our best. Better than anyone could have expected. But we’d been defeated. Both of our ships were defenseless now, rapidly being shot to pieces by the Vorem. The gun batteries of the battle cruiser had turned—now they were firing on us too. We’d be destroyed before the Q-sik could fire. It was never going to work. It was impossible.

  “Goodbye, Kalac,” I said.

  “Goodbye, Chorkle. I love you.”

  Ridian would have the Q-sik. The Vorem would have Gelo. And Earth. None of us would make it back to our homes. I thought of Linod and Commander Hollins and Hudka and Little Gus.

  Little Gus. I could almost hear his voice coming over the radio. . . .

  “Yo. Miss me, dudes?”

  From out of the corner of my fifth eye, I saw a flash—one of the wings had been blown off the Vorem trireme that was attacking Hollins’s ship. A greenish blur was coming in fast.

  “What the hell?” said Becky.

  It was the third starfighter! Suddenly, two of the battle cruiser’s gun batteries exploded to bits in a hail of laser fire.

  “Little Gus is the original king!” he screamed over the radio. His ship swooped around. Now he was flying right at the last two triremes, lasers blazing. Whoever was in that blaster turret was an amazing shot. As I thought this, I realized who it must be.

  “Exciting, isn’t it, Chorkle? I feel positively young,” cried Hudka. “Like I’m a hundred seventy-two all over again!” My grand-originator gave a salute—still shooting—as they whizzed past. One of the triremes attacking us burst into a cloud of fire and glass and shards of black metal. Only one left now.

  “Little Gus,” cried Hollins, “how did you—”

  “We followed you. Had to knock down a couple of Observers to get into the ship,” said Little Gus. “Worth it! Now you have to admit that I am the greatest pilot that ever—”

  And Little Gus crashed his starfighter right into the final trireme, sending both spacecraft spinning.

  “Crap! How do you stop these things?” asked Gus. “No brake pedal!”

  More gun batteries on the battle cruiser turned to fire on us.

  “C’mon!” screamed Becky, fighting with the control stick. “When is this thing going to—”

  “It is ready,” said Kalac. There was fear in my originator’s voice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The universe began to vibrate. The stars and the planets and the ship and the atoms of my body shook. And just when everything seemed as though it might fly apart into its constituent subparticles—

  All was white—or something brighter than white. A nameless shade, so bright I’d never seen it before. So bright that I knew it would be burned into my memory forever. For an instant or an age, this whiteness lasted. I closed all five of my eyes and clapped my thol’grazes over my face. This had no effect.

  When at last I opened them again, I saw a cone of pure, radiant energy firing from the nose of our ship.

  This beam of light cut through the battle cruiser—shredded the hulk of black metal as easily as if it were a particularly complex paper model. No, more easily than that. It was as though, to the light, the battle cruiser didn’t exist. And if we had pointed the Q-sik at something else—an asteroid or a planet or even a star—the light would have cut through it just the same. Somehow I knew this.

  Behind the cruiser, space itself seemed to bend and warp where the Q-sik had fired. Punched inward like a sheet of taut rubber.

  This was what Jalasu Jhuk was trying to protect the universe from. The weapon to end all weapons. In the wrong hands, it could create destruction on an incomprehensible scale. Perhaps even in the right hands?

  At this moment it struck me that we didn’t even know the full extent of its powers. Ridian had called it the “Universe Ender,” and as I saw its power, I believed him.

  And I knew that as long as the Q-sik existed, we would be tempted to use it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Holy . . . crap,” said Gus over the radio. I blinked as the glow of the Q-sik faded from my eyes. Out past the battle cruiser, the vortex of warped space still shimmered. It looked like the sky had been . . . punctured.

  “We did it,” said Becky.

  “By Jalasu Jhuk,” said Kalac, though I couldn’t tell if he spoke in triumph or horror.

  Nearly half of the battle cruiser was gone. Just gone. Burned away cleanly. What was left of the hulk spun oddly; most guidance and propulsion systems had surely been disabled or destroyed by the blast. None of its gun batteries moved.

  The final t
rireme was flying back toward the crippled battle cruiser now. Retreating.

  “What about that last one?” asked Little Gus.

  “Let it go,” said Hollins. “We’ve beaten them.”

  “You must have disabled their communications systems!” radioed Ydar. “They’re no longer jamming surface transmissions.”

  “Can you contact the Phryxus?” I said.

  “Just a moment,” said Ydar. “Yes, I see the human ships. They’re not far now, less than a hundred thousand kilometers from Gelo. Okay, patching them through to you.” The High Observer punched some controls off screen.

  Now the com screen showed Commander Hollins. “Danny! Kids!” she said. “Are you safe?”

  “Define ‘safe,’” said Becky.

  “Yeah, we’re all fine,” said Hollins.

  “Kids, we detected a massive energy spike and several—well, they look like spacecraft, near 48172-Rybar. Do you know what’s going on there?”

  “It’s over now, Mom,” laughed Hollins. “We won. We beat them. And the asteroid isn’t called ‘Rybar.’ It’s Gelo.”

  “And these aliens—these ‘Xotonians’—haven’t hurt you?”

  “Does the oog-ball match count?” asked Nicki quietly.

  “No,” said Hollins. “They haven’t hurt us. In fact, I think they may have just helped us save Earth.”

  “Well, that’s—that’s good,” said Commander Hollins. “Look, we’ll be landing on the asteroid in two hours. We’re going to bring you all home.” She was openly crying now.

  “Sure, Mom,” said young Hollins. “I can’t wait.”

  “Commander Hollins,” said Becky, “can you tell my mom and dad something for me?”

  “Yes, Rebecca, anything,” she said.

  “Can you tell them I want a car?” she said. “A nice one.”

  “Me too,” said Nicki.

  “I’ll tell them,” said Commander Hollins.

  “You know, I’ll take one too,” said Little Gus, “if the Garcías are just giving them out.”