The Planet Thieves

by Dan Krokos

  “Come on, Mason. Merrin,” Susan said.

  “This boy saved our lives,” the king told his daughter. “If you stay with me, I will make you one of the human ambassadors. You will still see your friends, and at the same time move both races forward to peace. Stay with me.” The king paused, bowing his head a little. “You are my daughter, Merrin. I don’t want to lose you again. Let me show you where you came from.”

  Merrin swallowed.

  Before she could answer, Jeremy broke through on the ship-wide com. “Uh, all crew. Get to a monitor.”

  There was one built into the wall next to the hatch. Everyone watched as a zoomed-in image of Nori-Blue’s surface appeared. “Serious seismic activity on the planet’s surface,” he said. “It appears almost volcanic.” Onscreen, a huge section of forest was breaking apart. There was a scale at the bottom that said it showed about one hundred miles. The forest was a green carpet more than anything, the trees too small to distinguish. As they watched, the ground began to disintegrate in the middle, the trees tipping over and falling into some kind of sinkhole. The circle grew, as more trees were swallowed up, and the diameter kept growing and growing—stretching into an oval shape—until the hole was an enormous black crater.

  “What’s happening?” Susan asked breathlessly.

  She didn’t have to wait long for the answer. From the hole emerged a ship larger than anything Mason had ever seen. It was as long as the hole, so nearly one hundred miles. It was too big to have a shape, really, other than the general shape of a rectangle. The ship had to have hundreds and hundreds of levels. It was as black as space. Dirt clods the size of mountains tumbled away and broke apart as the ship passed from the hole and began its ascent.

  The Fangborn knew how to fly.

  Child, why didn’t you tell us … Mason thought. He didn’t expect an answer so many kilometers away.

  But then Child said in a weak voice, I didn’t know.

  The Fangborn ship was still in the atmosphere when it fired a single white laser at two ships flying close together—one a crippled ESC supply ship, the other a Tremist Hawk that was venting purple and green gases. The blast was so bright on the screen, Mason had to squint.

  When the light faded, both vessels had vaporized.

  Chapter Fifty

  Mason had to make a choice. The ESC still in the holding bay would take too long to transfer. There was another flash on the screen, and two more ships just disappeared into dust that glittered in the blue sunlight.

  It was time to leave this cursed system. The rest of the ESC would have to wait—there simply wasn’t time to transfer them all, not when they could all be vaporized at any moment.

  Mason took two steps, grabbed Merrin’s arm, and pulled her onto the Egypt’s deck.

  “Sorry,” he told the king, “I need her to fly my ship.” He pressed the button that slammed the door down between them. Through the glass window, he saw the king’s black mask.

  The king said nothing, just stalked away. Perhaps he would’ve put up a bigger fight if the Fangborn ship wasn’t already in the upper atmosphere. Mason studied it for a moment longer. A long and thick horizontal line bisected the front of the ship, almost like lips. The line glowed dull red, like heat was building behind it. It made Mason colder than he already was.

  “Let’s move!” Susan said, and the five of them sprinted down the crossbar.

  They arrived at the bridge to find it fully staffed.

  With Commander Lockwood sitting at the nearest console. His burns were healing, but he was still in bad shape. Half his face was pink and shiny with new skin, one eye swollen shut. Whatever the cadets had done to him, it seemed like it was working.

  Jeremy stood up from the captain’s chair. “Finally. I’m done with this captain stuff.”

  Lockwood was so weak he just nodded to Mason.

  Mason nodded back. “Sir?”

  “I am not of sound mind or body,” Lockwood said. “The bridge is yours.”

  Tom joined Susan on the weapons console. “Weapons hot!” he said.

  Merrin sat down at the pilot console. “The Hawk has disengaged. We are free.”

  Mason retook his chair.

  The Fangborn ship was in space now. The crew didn’t quite gasp, but there were mutterings and astonished sighs. Through the Egypt’s dome, Mason saw it eclipse Nori-Blue’s sun. Both fleets were plunged into shadow.

  On the dome to the right, images of the king and Grand Admiral Shahbazian snapped on side by side.

  “All ships in Nori-Bluespace—” the grand admiral said.

  “Attack at will,” the king and grand admiral said at the same time.

  The shadows were banished as hundreds of lasers and particle beams lanced through the darkness …

  … only to bounce off the hull harmlessly. Every beam and bolt fired at the Fangborn ship ricocheted off on some new trajectory, some bouncing back and injuring the ship that fired. White light began to grow under the Fangborn ship, until two parallel beams appeared, brighter than any sun, and danced over both fleets, dissolving any ship they touched.

  Then the front of the Fangborn ship opened.

  The glowing line Mason had seen before now split apart, like a maw. A massive pair of jaws filled with fire inside. The bottom part swung down, like a yawning alligator, then swung up twice as fast, crushing and swallowing two small fighters that had gotten too close. There were small bursts of fire, and then nothing. Like chomping on fireflies. It was eating ships, literally eating them, and the maw was big enough to swallow both space stations whole. Somewhere on the bridge, a first year was crying.

  The grand admiral broke through the com: “Full evacuation! All ESC retreat on random vectors!” he said, as more and more ships exploded. There were so few left. The cadets were relaying information to each other, but Mason barely heard it. There was something new happening onscreen. The two space stations were trying to flee. But the Fangborn ship held them in place with some kind of force field that enveloped them both. It was a shimmery silver tractor beam that shot out like a laser, split apart, and then folded neatly around the stations. Mason understood why after a few seconds. No reason to destroy that many meals. The smaller ships were pesky and probably not worth the trouble, but if they could isolate both space stations—that would be millions of bodies they could capture and eat.

  Someone was asking him something.

  “Do we leave? Do we leave?” Merrin said. She was turned around in her seat.

  Space was nearly empty now: the ships that were able to flee did exactly that. Wreckage was all that remained. And the Egypt.

  And the king’s Hawk.

  Just then the king broke through on the dome’s screen. He didn’t waste time. “It seems we have a mutual mission.”

  “There’s no one left,” Mason said, then immediately regretted it. Whatever the Fangborn ship was doing to hold the two stations in place, it didn’t seem to notice the two remaining ships. Maybe there wasn’t enough power to destroy them just yet.

  “We’re left,” the king said. “And I won’t leave my station behind. Unlike the rest of your ESC. My scientists think the Fangborn ship will deflect all energy weapons, including—”

  “We have conventional weapons on board!” Stellan shouted, cutting the king off. He was more excited than Mason had ever seen him, no hint of fear. “We have a torpedo bay for when core energy has to be diverted to engines! We could fire them!”

  Too much risk, was Mason’s first thought. The Fangborn ship was simply too enormous to damage, or so it seemed. But could they really sit by and surrender both stations to the Fangborn? All those lives would be lost, and on Mason’s head if he gave the order to retreat. They had to try. He looked to Susan but she was already working on the weapons console, bringing the torpedoes online.

  “I will provide a distraction,” the king said smoothly. “We have no conventional weapons.”

  “Thank you,” Mason said.

  The king’s ima
ge disappeared, and Merrin looked over her shoulder at Mason.

  “Take us in,” he said.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The two ships that started as enemies now swooped in together as fast as their engines would allow. Mason glanced down at his armrest to find the speed meter rising too fast for him to read. The whole crew held its collective breath as the Fangborn ship grew in the dome, until there was nothing else to see.

  “Target the source of the tractor beams!” Mason shouted, gripping the arms of his chair. “Prepare to fire all torpedoes on that location.”

  Tom and Susan worked fast to make sure each torpedo was headed for the right place. They might not be able to harm the ship as a whole, but if they could break the tractor beams the stations would be free to escape.

  The maw opened wide, fire curling within. Red and black was all Mason could see. Then a dazzling burst of white that hurt even with his eyes closed. This is it, he thought. But the blast was indirect. An alarm screamed as the entire crewside of the Egypt turned into superheated gas. Mason barely felt it, but suddenly the ship was offtrack, the engines failing to compensate for the imbalance. There came a series of thunks as the emergency doors sealed off outer space from the crossbar. They began to spin crazily; stars twisted across the dome, then the two space stations, followed by the Fangborn ship again. Clouds of atomized metal swirled around them—remnants of the entire port side of the Egypt. They were going to die.

  But not before they took out the tractor beam.

  The Egypt seesawed left and right, but centered back on the Fangborn ship. Merrin’s voice pierced the multiple alarms. “Stabilized!”

  “Fire!” Mason screamed.

  Blue bolts of light sped out from under the bridge, giving off trails of rocket exhaust. They traveled fast and true, exploding on the underside of the maw in great bubbles of orange and red fire that faded as quickly as they came. All at once, the tractor beams were gone.

  Mason punched the com: “Olympus, you’re clear to go home!”

  From under the Fangborn ship, the familiar white light began to grow. Mason instinctively flipped open the cover on his right armrest and slammed his fist down on the big red button. The dome ejected instantly, rocketing away from the bulk of the Egypt. If the cadets hadn’t been strapped in, they would’ve been thrown to the ground. The Egypt ceased to exist a moment later, as the white beam turned it to dust like it had so many other ships in the last ten minutes.

  But the angle was wrong. Instead of firing the dome away from the maw, they were headed right for it. Mason saw inside of it, close up for the first and last time. The maw was filled with fire. He could see the smoldering wreckage of ships inside, like pieces of meat stuck between a carnivore’s teeth. But they had won: to his right, the part of his vision that wasn’t filled with a fiery mouth, he saw the two stations zipping away from the Fangborn ship. The Olympus already had its extra-large gate deployed.

  Mason could only hope the king would get his Hawk away safely, and eventually return the ESC crew where they belonged. He looked at Merrin first, then Susan, and wished they had more time. He wanted to say something to them; he wasn’t sure what. He wanted to tell Merrin he was sorry—she would’ve had the rest of her life if he hadn’t pulled her onto the Egypt’s deck. If he hadn’t needed her.

  The maw was closing now, swinging upward in a bright orange arc.

  Mason shut his eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Mason opened his eyes sometime later, after he regained consciousness. Later, he would learn that the dome was not equipped with gravity compensators, so when the dome was suddenly jerked backward at a speed too fast for the human body to handle, everyone on the bridge passed out. They were lucky no one had died. As it was, two cadets had ruptured blood vessels in their eyes, and one had a broken arm.

  During the fifteen seconds he was unconscious, Mason saw the history of the People. The book in his brain finally unfolded, and the birth and death of a civilization was in his mind. It was too much to fully understand at once, or maybe ever, but he saw the troubles the People went through. The same things humans had been going through for nine hundred years. It was greed, he figured. The People had wanted more and more, and it took a solar flare to knock some sense into them. The surface of Nori-Blue had once been a city. The whole planet, one giant city. But the flare reduced all of it to just metal mountains. Everything electronic had been destroyed. It was then the Fangborn truly split off and became their own race, and legend said the flare had caused the Fangborn mutation. The People wanted to find a new way to live: though their planet was dead, there were signs it would return to its pure forest state. The Fangborn didn’t care about changing, and so they warred.

  Before Mason could see the war, he woke up. He woke up with the content feeling that, no matter what had happened between the two races, Nori-Blue had returned to its pure forest state. Only to be warred over by two races who wanted to destroy it all over again, but that seemed to be changing. He had some vague but deep understanding that the universe was cyclical. But maybe that was the human side of him—there could be other aliens out there who were truly wise, who had learned from enough cycles.

  Mason’s first sight was through the Egypt’s dome: he was looking at the much smaller Fangborn ship. Smaller, because they were so far away, he realized. Behind him, the Hawk was at half thrust, engines glowing brighter than the stars. The dome was being towed along.

  As the groggy crew regained consciousness, the dome was towed into the storage bay, where the rest of the Egypt’s crew was waiting. The dome passed through the force field separating the Hawk from space, and then scraped along the floor to rest in the middle of the bay. The ESC swarmed around it, cheering, beating their fists on the dome. Every one of them was smiling.

  Susan stretched and then yawned, tears running down her cheeks. “There were six hundred thousand people on the Olympus today, little brother,” she said.

  Mason could only nod; he was shaking.

  Jeremy opened the doors on the rear of the dome, and the cadets piled out and were lifted onto shoulders and carried around the bay. No one cared that they were all still on a Tremist vessel. It was quite obvious things had changed. How they had changed was still to be determined, but change they had.

  The king showed up a few minutes later and beckoned Mason over to the dome. The king boosted him up the side, and then followed with a single leap to the top. The remaining Tremist had gathered in the bay, but their talons were stowed. Mason looked straight down at the captain’s chair, wondering if he would ever sit in one again.

  “We have a new enemy,” the king began, and together he and Mason explained to both races what Mason had learned from the book. While they spoke, mutterings rippled through the crowd and died away.

  “What about Earth!” someone shouted. It was echoed many times.

  The king held up his hands for quiet. “Earth is safe, and will be returned to your solar system when a new gate has been created. It is now a neighbor to our home planet. A place you will all visit soon, if we’re to find a way to stop this new threat.”

  Mason wanted another cheer to go up, but in truth the wounds between both races were still too raw. There was hope, though. Wounds beginning to heal, maybe. A few people clapped, but that was it.

  The ESC stayed in the bay for the rest of the trip. Susan found him later on and squeezed his shoulder and bent down to say something in his ear. “Mom and Dad would be proud,” she said, and Mason felt like crying again, but that wasn’t what a captain would do. Instead, he nodded.

  The trip was long and a little boring, so Mason gathered the others and they went back into the dome and powered Elizabeth up and made her throw battle scenarios at them.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Two weeks later it was two days before the start of Academy II. Mason was nowhere near Mars, however—not even in the same solar system. He was aboard the Tremist space station he had helped save. It was called t
he Will.

  The treaty ceremony took place in the central pod, which was a perfect recreation of a park. There was a pond and trees with blue and green leaves, and animals that chittered in the branches. Dark shapes swam under the surface of the pond, which was tinted pinkish gold. There was a clearing in the trees. The inky purple-black of space was visible above them, separated by a dome much like the Egypt’s. And through that space Mason could see two planets sharing the same orbit. Earth was the cloudy blue sphere, and the Tremist homeworld, which they called Skars, was a yellowish, slightly smaller orb.

  Grand Admiral Shahbazian stood with his entourage on one side, and the king stood with his on the other. The king was not wearing his mask. He was Merrin’s father, through and through. Violet hair, pale skin. And kind eyes, somehow. Mason didn’t believe it at first. He still wore his armor the color of dried blood. The king was flanked by four Rhadgast. Mason felt like they were watching him the entire time.

  In between the two groups was a podium, and on the podium were three pieces of paper and an ancient fountain pen.

  Grand Admiral Shahbazian said, “Today I sign this treaty in the hopes our great races might work together against this common enemy. That we might rediscover our past together and find the link that makes us brothers.”

  A few photographers snapped pictures. A video feed was being broadcast to both worlds, and every ship in between them.

  The king said, “Today I sign this treaty, for those things too.”

  Tom laughed. Susan nudged him. Mason couldn’t help but smile.

  “On one condition,” the king said.

  The manufactured breeze in the park seemed to stall, and there was nothing to hear except the shuffling of branches going still.

  “What condition?” Shahbazian said.

  Mason thought he knew. Merrin was standing next to him. She was in her ESC uniform, her violet hair tied back in a ponytail. He grabbed her hand, and she squeezed before he could. It felt like a goodbye squeeze. Mason almost opened his mouth to say something. Wait. Or, Don’t go. He never got the chance.