“We all need to get away from the ship!” screamed Nicki. “Like, now!”
“Help me,” I rasped. Nicki and I hefted the Vorem up between us. Somehow we dragged him about thirty meters before we all collapsed onto the ground. Nearby I saw Becky standing stiffly. Hollins was sprawled on the ground, his eyes still closed.
I turned back just in time to hear a thunderous boom and see the starfighter go up in a twenty-meter-high cloud of flame. A few seconds later, we were showered with little bits of ash and smoking debris.
“Well, that sucks,” said Becky. She worked the stiffness from her arms.
It was only as I watched the T’utzuxe burn to the ground that I remembered the Q-sik. Where was it? I felt a surge of panic until I realized that it was still safely inside my pack, which—thank Great Jalasu Jhuk of the Stars—had somehow stayed on my i’ardas through the crash. I shuddered to think what would have happened if the Q-sik had been aboard that exploding starship. Jhuk had warned that any damage to the device might release the incredible energy it contained all at once, with devastating consequences.
Hollins was sitting up now, rubbing his face. One of his eyes was ringed with a dark purple bruise, courtesy of the Vorem’s boot.
The Vorem was still unconscious, lying in the grass and breathing shallowly. In the bright sun, he looked frail and gaunt.
“So what do we do with him now, Chorkle?” asked Hollins, frowning. I had no answer for his question.
“I think I have an idea,” said Becky, taking the blaster from my thol’graz. She scowled and pointed it at the Vorem. I closed my eyes. After a long moment, I opened them again. She had lowered the weapon.
“Okay, fine. I’m not going to just shoot him while he’s unconscious,” she said at last.
Nicki knelt beside him and began to check his vitals.
“Well, I think I feel a steady pulse,” she said. “Are they, uh, supposed to have pulses? Or is that a bad thing?” I shrugged. None of us knew any more about Vorem anatomy than she did. She started to dress his wounds—a big gash across his chest and the blaster burn on his arm. She was operating under the assumption that human first aid was better than nothing.
“Man, you’ve sure got a soft spot for aliens, don’t you, Chorkle?” said Hollins.
“I couldn’t just leave him there to die,” I said. “I shot him once already. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Little Gus prodded the Vorem with his toe. “So I get why we can’t just vaporize the creep now, without due process or whatever,” said Gus, “but couldn’t we just slap some bandages on him and leave before he wakes up?”
“Nope,” said Hollins. “He’s way too dangerous to be left alone.”
“Well, he sure laid you out,” laughed Becky.
“Yeah. And he lit you up like Times Square with his little zapper thingie,” said Hollins as he searched the Vorem for more weapons.
“That must be where all the missing tools from the hangar went,” said Nicki. “He was using them to build this.” She turned the strange little device over in her hand.
“He was probably stealing food too,” said Hollins.
“Hey! My phui-chips!” cried Becky, suddenly remembering. “Okay, I changed my mind. Let’s kill him.”
“What do you think this is?” asked Hollins as he pulled a small circular token out of the legionary’s pocket. It bore General Ridian’s crest on it—three black suns—and looked to be made of gold.
“Hey, I, uh, think that’s mine,” said Little Gus. “Can you believe he stole Becky’s chips and my, uh, special gold medallion that’s probably worth thousands of dollars?”
Hollins shook his head. “We’re not murderers, and we’re not thieves either, Gus,” said Hollins, shoving the token back into the legionary’s pocket. “Guy can keep his oversized commemorative coin or whatever it is.”
Just then, the Vorem startled us all by crying out in his sleep. “I . . . failed you. . . . ,” he murmured. “Sorry I’m weak . . . Sorry . . . General. . . .” And once more he was silent. The humans and I looked at one another, speechless.
Little Gus was the first to break the silence. “Ahem. Some of you may have missed it, since we were crashing at the time, but I just want to take this opportunity to offer another resounding I-told-you-so. This is the dude I saw running around Core-of-Rock in the fire! Maybe now you’ll believe me when I tell you important stuff. . . .”
I lost the thread of what Little Gus was saying as I noticed something curious about the Vorem. A little object was attached to his belt. Not a weapon. It looked like a featureless black screen a few centimeters in diameter. I knelt and examined it, then tried for the better part of a minute to activate it. No matter what I did, though, it wouldn’t turn on. At last, I figured it had been damaged in the crash, so I gave up.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Hollins was saying to Gus, “just spit it out. What other important information do we need to know?”
“Like I told you guys before, Pizza can say ‘hamburger’!” cried Little Gus.
“Wait, where is Pizza?” asked Nicki.
The thyss-cat was nowhere to be seen. We decided to survey our surroundings and search for Pizza. Hollins stayed behind with the blaster trained on our new prisoner and a grim expression on his face.
For the first time, I really took in the landscape. Somehow, this world was even greener than it appeared from space. In one direction, a sunny plain extended for thirty kilometers, toward a colossal mountain range just a shade purpler than Kyral’s lavender sky.
In the other direction, there stretched a dark forest of woody treelike plants. They had deep blue trunks and pale green leaves of oddly geometric shapes—pentagons and hexagons and sharply pointed stars. High above us, three black specks wheeled in between the clouds: birds (or the local equivalent).
Little Gus sniffed the fresh Kyral air (thankfully it was breathable; in my experience, breathing is one of the most important things). “Weird as this place is,” he said, “it somehow kind of looks like Earth. . . . I mean, it would if there were more parking lots and stuff.”
“The moons are kind of a giveaway,” said Nicki, pointing to the sky. I could just make out two faint circular outlines.
“Wait. Kyral only has one moon!” I said, suddenly terrified that I’d misidentified this planet completely.
Nicki smiled. “Chorkle, the little one is Gelo,” she said. I looked up again. She was right. It is an odd feeling to realize that your home is just someone else’s moon.
We found Pizza crouching in the tall grass nearby, yellow eyes peering off into the forest. The thyss-cat seemed to perceive something out there that the rest of us couldn’t. This time, of course, we heeded his concern.
Gus hung back with Pizza, while Nicki, Becky, and I ventured farther into the forest to take a look. Many trees were huge, a hundred meters tall with trunks as wide as a Core-of-Rock street. Their thick canopy nearly blocked out the sky. Only scattered patches of sunlight managed to find their way to the forest floor. My eyes, used to the subterranean environment of Gelo’s tunnels, found the dimness more agreeable. The occasional rustle of foliage or snap of a twig told us there were more than just plants here. We were surrounded by life. Once, I saw a little lizardlike creature flit among the branches on a pair of leathery wings.
“I’m sorry,” said Nicki, “I know that we’re supposed to be looking for danger right now, and I’m actively resisting the urge to be nerdy, but . . . I really just have to do this!” And she dashed over to a small—and to my eyes utterly unremarkable—shrub and snipped off a blue branch. “Don’t tell Hollins,” she said, and she placed the branch into a plastic bag and scribbled something on the label. Nicki had collected her first sample.
“Great,” sighed Becky. “And so it begins.” When Nicki had arrived on Gelo, she’d acquired roughly two tons of similar bags filled with e
very type of fungus our asteroid could offer.
“Look! Just look at this,” said Nicki, holding up the bag. “Look at how regular the branch structure is. It’s almost crystalline! So cool.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Becky. “But, sis, we really should concentrate on figuring out our location.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Every minute we wait is a minute Kalac and the others are in danger.”
“Well, I have a map of the planet on my holodrive, courtesy of the ship’s sensors,” said Nicki patting her pack. “The problem is figuring out where exactly on the map we are. Do you see any landmarks?”
We looked around. The forest spread out ahead of us as far as the eye could see.
“Do blue trees count?” I asked.
Nicki didn’t answer. She was already distracted, taking a cutting from another Kyral plant. This time her target was a hairy teal vine that wound its way up the trunk of a massive tree.
“Oh, come on, Nicki,” said Becky. “That’s probably space poison ivy.”
Just then I saw something sparkle in a distant pool of sunlight. I blinked and nudged Becky.
“Wow,” said Nicki, still distracted by her vine, “it does actually seem to be giving me a rash. Utterly fascinating—”
“Hush,” I hissed.
We all crept toward the glint. In the quiet, our footfalls suddenly sounded far too loud. Each crunch echoed off the surrounding tree trunks.
Ten meters away, we realized that we were looking at a piece of rusty metal. It sat atop a pile of vines and foliage in a small clearing. On its surface was a symbol painted in orange: a triangle with three dots over it. Intelligent life! It had to be the Aeaki.
On the ground in front of the scrap of metal, we saw something else. It was a strip of what appeared to be leather. In the center of it sat a pile of electric yellow berries, each of them a perfect little decahedron. While the metal could have been any age, these berries looked ripe and couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Someone had been here recently.
“Maybe it’s an offering?” said Nicki.
“Check this out,” whispered Becky. On the ground beside the path were several tracks: four clawed toes, several centimeters deep. “Whatever made these was big. Like, apex-predator big,” said Becky. “Is ‘splitting up to explore the mysterious forest’ starting to seem like a bad idea to anyone else?”
“Let me just collect one of those berries before we go,” said Nicki as she started toward them.
“Nicki, stop!” I cried. She froze.
Creeping forward, I found what I was looking for: a thin cord strung taut a few centimeters above the forest floor. A shadow passed across the ground of the clearing.
“What was that?” asked Becky, looking up. But the sky was just an empty patch of lavender. However, suspended above the edge of the clearing, we saw a net of heavy vines. It was a trap. The twins and I looked at one another.
At that instant, we heard Little Gus cry out. We turned and ran the way we had come, back toward the edge of the forest.
“Help me!” he screamed. As we approached, we saw him standing alone on the grassy plain. He was looking up in terror.
“What’s wrong?” cried Nicki.
Suddenly, a big shape fell out of the sky and darted toward Gus. He dove to the ground as it swooped past. It was a huge, winged alien creature covered in red and orange feathers.
The creature shrieked and dove again. This time Pizza leaped out of the grass at it. The thyss-cat wrapped its front paws around the flying alien and pulled it down to the ground. They rolled in the grass until the alien flapped its massive wings hard enough to throw Pizza off.
“Get it, boy!” cried Gus. “Get the giant space bird!”
A bolt of energy hit the ground near Pizza’s feet. I turned and saw another one of the avian creatures—practically identical to the first—crouched behind a rock. It was shooting at Pizza. The thyss-cat yelped in pain as one of the bursts of energy seared its shoulder.
“No!” screamed Little Gus. He charged the new attacker just as Pizza raced off into the brush.
The second avian squawked and shoved Gus back with the butt of its blaster weapon as he tried to pound it with his fists. “Ver’sald! Ver’sald!” it screamed over and over again. It was using the Xotonian word for “stop.”
“You speak Xotonian?” I cried in astonishment.
“You speak Aeaki?” it said, sounding no less astonished. Gus slowly stopped hitting it.
For the first time, I got a good look at the creature. It was nearly two meters tall, yet slender, so light on its feet that it seemed to weigh less than me. The body of the alien was covered with orange-and-red plumage so bright it even put Little Gus’s brilliant orange head-fur to shame. It had two broad wings—articulated at the ends for grasping—and a long neck that ended in a beaked head. It wore a simple tunic woven of dried brown grass. Two beady golden eyes darted around nervously.
“You shot Pizza!” said Little Gus, now speaking Xotonian.
“Pizza,” said the avian, lingering on the human word for a moment, “tried to eat Ikuna.” It raised its blaster again. “You are space aliens?”
Nicki, Becky, and I looked at one another. We shrugged and nodded.
“You have come to blow us up and rob our hunting traps?”
“No,” said Nicki. “We mean you no harm. Are you Aeaki?”
“Yes, I am Hisuda of the Oru,” said the Aeaki proudly. “Are you allied with the Uji or Esu?”
“No,” I said, “we’re not allied with anyone.”
“What about the Abi?”
I shook my head.
“Good,” said Hisuda, lowering the blaster, apparently satisfied. “We will crush them all.”
The second Aeaki—Ikuna, I presumed—walk-hopped toward us and cocked its head. To my eyes, the two of them were indistinguishable. Ikuna, though, seemed to defer to Hisuda.
“The blue monster-beast is still running free,” said Ikuna, glaring at Little Gus. “We should find it and kill it and take its hide.”
“No!” cried Little Gus. “Don’t hurt Pizza. He doesn’t mean you any harm. He just got scared and wanted to protect me. Why’d you fly at me like that, anyway?”
“Why were you touching our hunting traps?” snapped Ikuna, gesturing back toward the forest. I could see now that Pizza had taken a bite out of the feathers of its wing, leaving a bald spot.
“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know that trap was yours.”
At this, Ikuna snorted incredulously. “The Oru symbol is painted right on it!” cried Hisuda.
“We didn’t know that was the Oru symbol,” said Nicki. Hisuda shook its head in disbelief.
It was as though our ignorance of who owned which traps was the most incredible thing they’d ever heard. This garnered a much bigger reaction than, say, the fact that we had come to their planet from another world.
“We heard a great racket, and we came here to investigate,” said Hisuda. “Why did you burn up your starship?” The Aeaki pointed toward the plume of black smoke billowing into the air.
“It wasn’t exactly a choice,” sighed Becky.
“And if you are not thieves and raiders, what are you?” asked Hisuda.
“We came from up there,” I said pointing to Gelo in the sky, “to find three aliens. They look like me.”
“So . . . very ugly?” said Ikuna.
I sighed. “I guess. Here, let me show you something.”
I made a move for my pack, and again Hisuda pointed its blaster at me. I froze.
“I’m not reaching for a weapon. I want to show you a book,” I said. Hisuda nodded uncertainly. I slowly pulled the cyclopaedia out of my pack and opened it to Kyral’s entry. I pointed to the writing. “This is about your planet. Kyral.”
Ikuna squinted
at the book. “Magic spells,” said Hisuda dismissively. This Aeaki might speak my language, but apparently it couldn’t read it.
“Not spells,” I said, closing the book. “They’re just words that say the Aeaki and the Xotonians are friends. That’s what I am: a Xotonian. So maybe—maybe you can help me?”
Before either could reply, a third Aeaki joined us. It was virtually identical to the others.
“Two more outlanders,” said the new one. In one hand-wing it held an Aeaki blaster; in the other it clutched Eromu’s smaller one. Hollins trailed behind, his hands in the air.
“Hi, guys,” said Hollins to us. “Looks like we found the mysterious Aeaki, huh? And guess who woke up.”
The Vorem legionary stood beside him. He glared silently, clutching his wounded chest.
“Thank you, Aloro,” said Hisuda. Then it stared at the Vorem for a long time, cocking its head this way and that, before it spoke. “Do you all come from the new moon?” It waved toward the ghost of Gelo up in the sky.
“No,” said the Vorem. “I am Taius Sovyrius Ridian, son of Stentorus Sovyrius Ridian, legate of the Vorem Dominion. Humble servant of His Majesty Phaebus Onesius Aetox XXIII, the most glorious imperator of a thousand worlds.”
My mind was reeling. I didn’t understand. He called himself Ridian! But how could this legionary be General Ridian’s son? Ridian’s son was killed during the invasion, and I’d seen the legate buried myself. This Vorem had to be lying . . . didn’t he?
The humans gaped at me in disbelief, and I noticed that the Aeaki were no less upset than we were.
“Vorem,” snarled Ikuna. And both Ikuna and Aloro raised their blasters as though to vaporize Taius Ridian.
“Stop,” said Hisuda quietly. The other Aeaki lowered their weapons. Then Hisuda sighed and gave a bow. “Welcome, honorable Legate Ridian, to the Dominion world of Kyral.”
Chapter Nine
“Aloro, go and tell the Raefec whom we have found,” said Hisuda. Without another word, Aloro took off and flew away over the forest. The rest of us sat in the sun and waited.
For the Love of Gelo! Page 8