The Planet Thieves

by Dan Krokos

  Nori-Blue was perfect for a race that had outgrown its own planet.

  Which is exactly what the Tremist had done, too.

  Not much was known about them. First Contact with the Tremist happened in 2640, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago. An earlier version of the Hawk was seen circling an ESC installation in Neptune’s high atmosphere—the first ever sighting of an alien spacecraft. The installation sent a radio message to the Hawk, just a simple ping, in the hopes of saying, Hey! We see you! Want to chat? The Hawk didn’t want to chat: it sped away and disappeared.

  Then came Second Contact four years later, when a trio of Hawks bombed Academy I on Mars. Thirty-eight cadets were exposed to the atmosphere and died.

  Immediately the Tremist were designated hostile.

  But one hundred years passed before they were seen again.

  It wasn’t until Nori-Blue, or Earth II as some called it, was discovered. The ESC built a massive cross gate in the low altitude of this new planet. People would step through a gate on Earth and onto a platform a mile above the ground on Nori-Blue. A city was being built on the surface, near the water. They called it Hope. It would run on energies that wouldn’t adversely affect the planet and atmosphere. Humans were going to do it right this time.

  In 2740, when the gate neared completion, the Tremist arrived in 286 separate ships. Hope was destroyed, literally. The gate was vaporized, along with any hope of a colony. The SS Norway received a call, and on the viewscreen the crew watched as a Tremist with shimmering plate armor and a mirrored mask for a face decreed that Nori-Blue belonged to them now.

  Tell everyone, the Tremist said.

  The Norway crew sent out its final transmission to Earth, and then it was destroyed too.

  After that, there was only war.

  In the following decades, after countless skirmishes and attacks, just one Hawk was ever captured. The ESC bristled with excitement at the possibility of finally learning about their enemy’s biology. But the Tremist aboard had all died in some kind of superheated explosion, which destroyed all their DNA, which destroyed any hope of finding out what they looked like under all that armor.

  Susan wouldn’t give Mason any more details. She scared him one night by saying she could be court-martialed just for sharing that with him. The official story was that the Hawk had been empty all along.

  The Tremist homeworld was a mystery too, although ESC scientists claimed it had to be similar to ours, simply because the Tremist had evolved in much the same way as humans. They had two legs and two arms, and presumably two eyes behind their oval masks.

  But who really knew?

  * * *

  The Egypt was under attack; there was no doubt of that now. The quarters suddenly seemed too small, with too many bodies breathing too much air. Mason hadn’t left the brig just to become a prisoner here.

  Clearly the commander didn’t mean they had to stay there no matter what—that would be dangerous. Clearly the commander would’ve added this stipulation, had he not been so distracted.

  Mason was the first to his feet. Merrin was sitting on the floor, holding her palm to a purple bruise on her forehead. “I really wish they’d stop knocking us down,” she said.

  She jumped to her feet before Mason could help her, and together they jogged for the door. It was sealed, as expected. Next to the door was a computer terminal that linked to the ship’s core. He could access it and sift through menus to find a way to override the door lock, but Tom was faster and Mason knew it.

  Merrin put a hand on his shoulder. “Remember what Lockwood said. You don’t want to miss a year of school.”

  “I know,” Mason said. Yet that didn’t seem to matter now.

  The younger cadets stood up and looked out the window again with minimal words. Tom joined them at the door, followed by Jeremy and Stellan. Stellan was the tallest of them, and bone thin, with hollow cheeks, like he never got enough food at mealtime. His hair was so blond it was almost white. He was from a country called Sweden (the SS Sweden, another ESC ship in the same class as the Egypt, was destroyed by a Tremist Isolator two months ago) and Mason wondered if all people from Sweden looked like him. At Academy I, people looked different, but they seldom talked about what country their ancestors came from. Millions of miles away, it didn’t seem to matter.

  After Mason’s fight with Tom, Stellan took Mason aside and sprayed some anti-bio fluid on Mason’s split lip to keep it from getting infected. Mason squinted at the sharp taste, and Stellan said, “Next time, maybe use your words.” Mason figured that Stellan’s willowy frame meant he used words more than fists when it came to cadet disagreements. Mason admired that; everyone had to play to their strengths.

  At the time, Mason had wanted to point out that Tom had swung first, but he only said, “I’ll try.”

  Jeremy was short and muscular and liked to brag he could grow a beard. Mason had watched him do it over two weeks at A1, but it had grown in patches and an instructor eventually made him shave it.

  Mason and Jeremy were bound by a shared fight. Two years earlier, Mason was scrapping with four cadets from Academy II. They’d been picking on a thin-limbed A1 second year in the gym, pushing him around, shoving him against the equipment. Mason said to the group, “Stop.” Just once, because he wanted to give them a chance.

  They didn’t stop. The biggest kid just backhanded the second year casually and knocked him to the floor. So Mason waded in, fists and legs lashing out at their weak spots, but it was still four on one. Jeremy showed up just in time, and their combined fury drove the four cadets away with injured knees and black eyes.

  Afterward, as they were helping the younger cadet to his feet, Jeremy said, “It didn’t look fair.” He shook both their hands, then left.

  The cadet told Mason, “You shouldn’t have done that. Thank you and all, but you embarrassed them. They’re only going to come back at me harder. I would’ve taken the beating.”

  The idea baffled Mason; he hadn’t stopped to consider that his help wasn’t welcome.

  Mason told this to Jeremy in a message, and the two of them visited the four attackers in their quarters later that night, to make sure they knew what would happen if they retaliated against the second year. As they were leaving, Jeremy said, “That’s neat. We didn’t even have to hit them.”

  “Sometimes you can talk to people,” Mason said. “Or maybe they’re just afraid of us.”

  Mason only saw Jeremy whenever units would join together for group exercises, but they seemed to automatically remain friends.

  “You try the door?” Jeremy asked now, cracking his knuckles.

  “Uh, Commander Lockwood just told us to stay here, like five seconds ago,” Stellan said. He was hovering behind Jeremy and Tom, wringing his hands nervously.

  “Relax,” Mason said. “We are. We just want to make sure we can get out if we need to. You know, in case the Tremist show up.”

  Merrin smiled with one side of her mouth. “I almost believe that.”

  “Quiet!” Tom hissed. His fingers danced over the terminal. The screen flickered for a second, then flashed red. “It won’t let me out. Which is actually okay, since this means we can follow orders for once.”

  “See what the ship is doing,” Mason said, peering over Tom’s shoulder.

  “Is that an order, Captain Stark?” Tom said. He raised an eyebrow.

  “You know you want to see too, so don’t give me a hard time.”

  Apparently Tom did want to see: he pulled up a new screen, which showed a top-down image of the Egypt. A small red dot at the very front of the port cylinder showed their location. On the far side, the starboard side, near the engineering level, it showed the Tremist ship connected to the Egypt’s main hatch.

  “That’s not good,” Jeremy said. “We should be out there cracking Tremist skulls.”

  “No, we shouldn’t,” Tom said. “We should follow orders like actual soldiers.”

  Mason put a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.
“Relax, Jer. We don’t have weapons, and we don’t know where the defenders are deploying—”

  “We’d get in the way,” Tom said, less delicately.

  “So we just wait here?” Merrin asked, hands on her hips. “What if they overtake the ship?”

  “Waiting here is a fantastic idea,” Stellan said. He didn’t look afraid, exactly; Stellan just respected authority. He figured the fastest way to captaining his own ship was to follow orders, always. Mason could respect that. He tried to be the same way, but sometimes following orders was nearly impossible for him. Or rather, he found himself questioning every order, and he found the dumb ones hard to follow. He would ask himself Why? and if there wasn’t an obvious reason, he had to grit his teeth while carrying the order out. Why clean the urinals in the boys’ bathroom? They were just cleaned twelve hours earlier by another cadet and were still utterly spotless. It was discipline, Mason knew—they were trying to teach him discipline. But there had to be another way.

  Once, Instructor White caught Mason laughing at a joke in class, and then ordered Mason to stand in one spot for six hours, out in the hallway with his hands held above his head, so everyone passing would know why he was out there. He made it thirty minutes before he left, because it was stupid. It was a stupid order. But his refusal had only gotten him sent to Headmaster Oleg, where he got another order to reorganize the headmaster’s library of actual paper books. Mason took hundreds of the covers off and put them on other books, so no cover matched what was within the pages. That was three years ago, and still the headmaster never sent for him. And Mason never expected him to—the books had been so thick with dust it was clear they were never read. Stupid orders.

  Small blue dots began to flash on the Egypt’s starboard side, right next to where the Tremist Hawk was connected.

  “What does that mean?” Merrin said. They were all crowded around the screen.

  Tom visibly paled and his mouth fell open. “They’re firing weapons inside the ship.”

  “Attention all crew,” someone said over the shipwide com. “All able hands report to an armory. The Tremist have boarded.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. Mason’s mind spun, and his heart hammered: having the enemy inside the ship was so different than fighting them on a planet’s surface. Here there was metal surrounding them, like a cage. No place to run. And if one of the energy weapons somehow melted through the hull …

  “We’re able hands,” Jeremy said. “That’s us.”

  “We’re trained,” Mason added immediately, hoping the idea would catch.

  Stellan stepped back. “Lockwood’s orders supersede any thoughts of heroism you might have. You saw his face—he was dead serious.”

  Tom nodded absently. “You are correct. I’m not even going to cite the code on that one.”

  Mason clenched his teeth. There had to be some loophole in the codebook, some way they could avoid a punishment that severe.

  “Can you tell who’s winning?” Jeremy asked quietly, which meant he was frustrated. Jeremy only got quiet when things weren’t going like he wanted.

  Tom shook his head. “No, but I’m sure we’re winning. Engineering is a maze of levels and corridors that only we know. We have the advantage.”

  He tapped the screen again and a video expanded from one of the security cameras. It showed a catwalk with steam rising in the background, red lights flickering on the metal. It was the coolant level on the engineering deck, where the Egypt’s pumps were located. Susan showed him once, pointing out the massive tubes that ran parallel to the engine, keeping it from melting the rest of the ship.

  Right in the center of the screen, two Tremist crouched in their magnificent armor. It resembled plate, like knights in ancient Europe once wore, but this was not dull hammered metal—the surface of the Tremist armor shone weirdly, like oil, shifting colors depending on the angle. Sometimes it had a near-mirror finish, close to silver, but most often it shifted between purple and black. The Tremist were as tall and wide as men, with arms and legs like men, with helmets that covered their whole heads. The helmets were the worst part—the face was an oval, the shape a normal face would be, but it was a pristine mirror, so to look at a Tremist head-on, it was said, you saw yourself. The last thing you saw was the terror on your face. A perfect image of your head, floating atop a Tremist body.

  Watching them kneel, Mason knew they weren’t men underneath. They were too graceful, slinking like wolves. The plates seemed forged and fitted for each individual Tremist. The slim suits of armor moved with ease, as if aided by delicate machinery underneath.

  “The Tremist have—” the same voice said on the shipwide com, but was cut off.

  The five last year cadets watched as both Tremist raised long, elegant rifles to their shoulders and fired thin green lasers at some of the Egypt’s crew, who hid behind a huge tank hanging off the opposite catwalk. Mason could see the intense beams of light reflected in the nearest Tremist’s mirror-face. Captain Renner was there, along with two other crewmen, firing back with short bursts of condensed, spherical light from their photon cannons. The camera flared as the white and green light flew back and forth.

  Mason figured out what the Tremist were trying to do before everyone else; immediately he searched the screen for Susan.

  The lasers cut into the catwalk in front of the crew’s feet, slicing through the metal in a flurry of white sparks. They weren’t shooting at Captain Renner anymore, or the defenders who fought with her.

  The Tremist were shooting at the metal supports holding the structure up. The catwalk melted and buckled under the onslaught, and finally collapsed, falling ten levels to the bottom of the Egypt.

  Chapter Four

  Tom didn’t say anything, just stared at the screen where the catwalk used to be. The catwalk where his mom had been standing. It was impossible to survive the drop. The camera didn’t move; it just showed the now-empty space on the coolant level; it showed the Tremist glide past the damaged area like ghosts, until they disappeared from the screen.

  Tom had something in common with Mason now. A few seconds ago, he hadn’t. Mason was suddenly glad his parents died when they did, when he was young, before he could form the kind of memories that would last forever. Mason mostly had glimpses and sensations, a smell here or there, the feeling of his mother’s soft hands picking him up. The sound of his father’s laugh.

  It was 2792, eight years ago, when a lone Tremist ship entered Earth’s atmosphere and dropped a single bomb on the Earth Space Command headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. His parents were in the middle of giving a presentation to the admirals, trying to convince them it was possible to attain peace with the Tremist.

  The bomb vaporized everything inside its blast radius. The ground was turned into a sheet of glass.

  Mason had been four miles away, at primer school. The hair on his arms stood up as static electricity washed over the city. He didn’t know for another five minutes that a bomb had been dropped, didn’t know for another four hours that his parents were gone.

  At the time, Mason was two years shy of Academy I, but at age fourteen, Susan was already in her second year of Academy II. They let her take a shuttle from Mars to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Mason met her at the memorial service, seeing her for the first time in a year. Mason remembered her as looking older than she did now. She had bags under her eyes and her mouth never moved except to talk.

  The ceremony took place on the street, next to the land that once held the headquarters. The Tremist bomb hadn’t made a crater—instead it simply erased everything inside a circle the size of a few blocks. Where Mason stood, buildings were perfectly cross-sectioned, their walls sheered away, leaving them structurally intact until work crews could rebuild them. At the edge of the blast radius, he could see couches and tables and wirings and plumbing and insulation in the buildings. He could see a quarter mile away, where the glassy ground ended and the split-open buildings began again. His parents had died somewhere
in there, broken down into their separate atoms.

  He couldn’t even think about it. His mind would turn fuzzy and gray, and he would think, How can they just be atoms?

  Mason wanted to hate the Tremist then, and he felt guilty that he didn’t. He only felt confused.

  Why had they attacked? he asked himself. For what?

  Susan had held his sweaty hand within hers, and Mason watched the president say words he didn’t hear. After, Susan kneeled in front of him and said, “I don’t know what they’re going to do with you. I’m too young to be your guardian, and they won’t let me stop my studies.”

  “I don’t want you to stop your studies,” Mason replied. He wanted his sister to become a soldier, to fight the enemy. The Tremist had made the war personal. Now he felt something. He was almost shaking. He couldn’t wait until he was old enough to join her. Not because he wanted to fight or kill anyone, but because his parents defended Earth. It was what they believed in. Serving the human race in the protection of others was the highest calling, his mother had said once, when Mason asked, “What’s a good job?”

  For two years after that Mason was in a group foster home full of ESC orphans. He watched television and exercised like his father had, sometimes sneaking out to run on the streets at night. After one year he was through waiting: he stowed away on a ship, met Merrin, and was sent home for the last painful and lonely year. But then he returned to Academy I. There he learned how to fight, and fight well.

  * * *

  The room was quiet. The other cadets hadn’t noticed; they were busy against the window, craning their necks for a view outside.

  Mason slowly reached out to put a hand on Tom’s shoulder, but hesitated, stopping an inch away. He was almost afraid to touch Tom, who was as motionless as glass. Mason worried he might break the same way.

  Merrin wasn’t afraid; she pulled Tom into a hug, which Tom allowed for three whole seconds before gently breaking free. His eyes were bloodshot and he was taking deep, slow breaths. “I’m going to kill those alien freaks,” he growled in a voice Mason had never heard before.