Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  I stopped at a window and watched the eerie ripples of hyperspace flowing past, and remembered what Josephine had said. Traveling like this was very, very expensive—even traveling like this for fun. The Morrors had only ever done it for survival. It wasn’t very surprising the EEC hadn’t helped Rasmus Trommler very much with the Helen of Troy. They had Earth to rebuild.

  I wandered into a lift and let it carry me to an upper deck.

  At first it wasn’t much different from downstairs; luxurious and sweet smelling and empty. But then I found a room with golden statues of mythical-looking ladies with no clothes on (except for flowing hair and seashells and the like), gathered around a slightly pointless pond. And after that there was a lounge with old-fashioned star maps hanging on the walls, along with framed copies of various magazines with Rasmus Trommler grinning on the covers.

  And over the little stage area, a hologram map of a star system hung, transparent and glowing.

  I hadn’t spoken to Helen for a while. “Is that Aushalawa-Moraaa?” I asked. There were twelve planets, swinging around their star. I tried to remember how many planets were in the Alpha Centauri system. The Morrors’ new world wasn’t really a planet; it was a moon orbiting a gas giant, and I couldn’t see anything on this map that looked quite like that.

  Maybe it was more branding from the Taking You to the Stars people, like Archangel Planetary logos everywhere. The planets left trails of light in the air like the halo hovering above San Diego airport.

  “I apologize,” said the Helen. “I made a mistake. This is the Captain’s private deck, I can’t think how I let you come up here.”

  “Oh! Sorry, all right,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’ll go back downstairs and we’ll pretend this never happened.” I wasn’t particularly worried about running into Mr. Trommler. He might be a bit too pleased with himself, but he wasn’t scary. Yet I didn’t want to get the Helen into trouble.

  So I scuttled back to the lift and made it back to the passenger deck without anything bad happening.

  “Can you turn the gravity off in just this corridor?” I asked as I neared my cabin after getting a little lost. “Just for five minutes? . . . But I expect you can’t unless Mr. Trommler says it’s okay.”

  “I think I can manage,” said the Helen, to my surprise. And I felt that indescribable lightness, as all the weight of my body faded away and I stepped off the ground into the air.

  Pushing my way along the walls, I flew laughing back to my cabin in my dressing gown and slippers. I dropped to the ground as the gravity came back on, and got dressed in jeans and a pink top. When I found Noel and Thsaaa, they were sitting ordering breakfast from the virtual menu screens. Thsaaa had a cooling cape draped around their shoulders, a visible one, in order to be sociable. I plunked down beside them and asked for some cereal with more strawberries, because I hadn’t gotten over being able to have strawberries again.

  Carl stumbled in sleepily a few minutes later, talking to the Helen. “So, do you need a pilot at all?” he was asking.

  “Of course I do,” enthused the Helen, her voice getting swoony and breathy again. She didn’t sound like that when she wasn’t talking about Mr. Trommler. “I love my pilot.”

  “Yeah, but you could program yourself to fly wherever you liked,” Carl said gloomily.

  “Oh, no,” said the ship, appalled. “Without Captain Trommler? But I love him.”

  “Why?” asked Thsaaa.

  “Thsaaa!” said Noel. “That’s probably private.”

  “Is it? How can I know? It is very difficult to be sensitive to a spaceship,” complained Thsaaa. “It is bad enough trying to learn all those funny face movements you have instead of colors, and a ship does not even have those.”

  “I don’t mind. I love talking about my Captain,” said the spaceship blissfully. “But I can’t explain love. Love is . . . it’s just love. You’re too young to understand.”

  “I’m older than you,” grumbled Carl.

  “Why are you being so grumpy?” Noel asked.

  “I’m obsolete before I’ve even started,” Carl said, dropping his face into his hands. “What’s the point of a pilot when a ship can do everything by itself?”

  “What is the point? But I lo—” the Helen began again.

  “Yeah, well, but you have to,” Carl interrupted. “He made you that way.”

  “Yes, of course,” said the Helen. “I am so grateful to him! Suppose he hadn’t? What purpose in existence would I have?”

  “Well, you know,” said Carl. “Anything you felt like.”

  “You still need a person to decide where to go,” I said.

  “Do you?” Carl said hollowly.

  “The Helen’s a long-distance ship. You wouldn’t want to sit there at the controls all the way across the universe—you’d always need a computer for that. I’m sure it’s different with small craft like Flarehawks when you’re fighting”—I glanced at Thsaaa and finished awkwardly—“enemies.”

  “I’m sure when you have a ship, she will love you,” said the Helen.

  “That’s great,” said Carl.

  “I wrote a poem about my Captain,” said the ship unexpectedly.

  “Oh,” I said. “Did you?”

  “Yes. It goes like this,” she said.

  “I carry my Captain through space.

  I love his adorable face.

  I worship his genius brain.

  I hope I can keep him from pain.

  How happy a spaceship can be

  Who loves such a Captain as he.”

  There was only a small pause. “It’s very good,” said Noel.

  “I’m afraid it’s not,” said the ship sadly. “But it’s my first try. I have a version in Swedish, but it isn’t any better. I think it sounds best in Häxeri or binary, personally.”

  “I’m sure he’ll like it,” I said sincerely. I didn’t think Mr. Trommler would care whether a poem was great literature or not, provided it was about him.

  “I couldn’t tell it to him!” twittered the Helen of Troy. “I’m too shy.”

  The food came, carried by more of those robot doves.

  “Where’s Josephine?” Thsaaa asked, and I was a tiny bit glad I wasn’t the one to say it.

  “Miss Jerome is on her way to the lab,” said the Helen. “She is so busy!”

  “Well, let’s go and see her there,” said Carl.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want us there,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t. It made the weird feeling I’d had about Josephine too real.

  “Rubbish. Of course she does,” said Carl easily.

  I poked at my cereal. “Did Josephine have breakfast in her cabin?” I asked the ship.

  “I don’t think she had breakfast,” the ship replied.

  That was enough for me. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Can we have an energy bar or something for her, Helen?”

  So when we’d finished eating, doves brought us an energy bar and a glass of orange juice, and we all trooped down to the lab.

  Dr. Muldoon’s side of the lab was, as I’d expected, full of strange and disturbing things, such as a tree that I was almost sure you could see growing and a box of red rocks that smelled like farts and occasionally seemed to move by themselves. A tiny piglet was asleep on a workbench. Plainly it had some kind of Morror gene treatment, as bands of color were flowing across its flanks as it dreamed—duller and simpler than Morrors, but there. Dr. Muldoon must have upgraded it from experiment to pet, as it had a fluffy dog bed to sleep in and a jaunty little velvet collar round its neck. Dr. Muldoon occasionally reached out to pat it absentmindedly.

  The other side of the lab belonged to Josephine’s sister, Lena. It was a lot tidier and only smelled of hot metal and plastic, but still, it was full of peculiar stuff. There were things a bit like large, menacing, oddly shaped fridges, and racks of equipment, all punctuated by virtual screens hanging in midair, with data streaming across them. And there were tiny spiderlike robots everywhere that reminded
me a little of the much bigger spider robot we’d ridden on Mars.

  These tiny ones went crawling from shelf to shelf gathering objects and passing them down like ants with a morsel of food. A great group of them on the floor was busily assembling itself into a latticelike tower. A few of them noticed our presence and scurried across the floor toward us.

  “Uh,” I said, backing away.

  “They’re harmless,” Josephine said. She was sitting at a workbench doing delicate things with a tiny welding torch to the various peculiar components that emerged from a 3D printer. Her face was obscured by goggles.

  “Are you sure?” I asked as several of them scuttled up Carl’s leg.

  “Get them off!” Carl cried, swiping at them. But the robots crawled determinedly up his torso to his neck. Lena, Josephine, and Dr. Muldoon didn’t turn a hair. Then the robots attached themselves to either side of Carl’s head and hung there in clusters, as rather attractive earrings.

  “Hey,” said Carl, confused.

  Noel giggled. “You look lovely, Carl.”

  Lena gestured impatiently, and the earrings pulled themselves off Carl’s ears and crawled away. I was a bit sorry.

  “They’re inventing things,” said Josephine. “A lot of the things aren’t that useful, but they turned themselves into a miniature molecular assembler the other day.”

  “And they also do jewelry design?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Josephine agreed.

  Apart from the robots, the most striking thing in Lena’s lab was that you could get out into space from it. There was a big window showing us the uncanny glow of hyperspace, and an airlock pod with two sturdy sets of doors leading out into the void.

  What would happen if you jumped out here? I wondered, remembering what the Helen had said about passing through different places at the same time. You’d be lost forever, scattered.

  Lena, meanwhile, stayed entirely still, gazing thoughtfully into a virtual screen hovering above her workstation, two fingers pressed against her lips as though she was hushing herself. She was so very, very tall—easily a foot taller than I was—and so neat and somber in her plain black suit and chignon that I usually found it surprising that she and Josephine were related.

  But now, since Josephine kept her hair tightly scraped back, they didn’t look as different as they used to.

  “Hey, kids!” crowed the Goldfish. “Say, Thsaaa, did you check out Jupiter? Can you tell me anything fun about the density of gas giants?”

  Thsaaa flashed irritable shades of violet and uttered a faint Gallic-sounding huff.

  “Hello, Carl, Noel, Thsaaa,” said Lena finally.

  I blinked. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed anything odd about that, but it didn’t look as if anyone had. Maybe she hadn’t noticed I was there.

  “We brought you breakfast,” I said to Josephine, holding out the plate.

  Josephine stared at the food as if she had some difficulty remembering what it was for, then said, “Oh, right, yes,” and devoured her breakfast in five seconds flat.

  “You don’t even notice when you’re hungry,” I sighed.

  “You needn’t worry. I wouldn’t let my sister starve,” snapped Lena.

  “Oh,” I said, thoroughly taken aback now. “Wow. What? No, of course not . . .”

  “Lena,” said Josephine ominously.

  “Josephine,” replied Lena in a neutral voice.

  Josephine grabbed her tablet and started typing on it furiously. A message appeared on Lena’s virtual screen. It looked like complete gibberish.

  LHYE SLGX OGF. K mos mipdyl tulykl tgfkdr.

  Lena leaned back a little, tilted her head at the message, then typed an equally incomprehensible reply.

  Aup cfu tiphukrk? Aem ibkdrxmv ss cvk sjmjm rtqjmhpwzny.

  Josephine and Lena had been writing to each other in complicated codes since Lena was thirteen and had decided cryptography was good for a six-year-old’s developing brain.

  Yhd m’d aijbmk. Pgbc sb caqwsbfs ksie sub mzna, Josephine typed.

  “That remark was beneath you,” said Lena, calmly, but out loud.

  “You are being condescending,” Josephine growled.

  Lena turned back to her screen. She typed:

  O wco’x tlyr lpmsry csc hvqsn.

  “I am not upset!” snapped Josephine aloud and, to my great alarm, looked as if she was about to burst into tears.

  “Is everything okay in there?” Dr. Muldoon asked, scooting over in her chair.

  “Maybe we should go,” I muttered.

  “It’s fine,” said Josephine fiercely, looking right at me.

  “What is the purpose of these experiments?” asked Thsaaa, who was delicately wringing their tentacles and turning awkward shades of dull yellow and khaki green.

  “It’s Lena’s project, really,” said Dr. Muldoon. “I’m merely fiddling around with the raw materials of life itself, like always.”

  “What is that?” inquired Thsaaa, turning scandalized colors and pointing a tentacle at the piglet.

  “Well,” said Dr. Muldoon, shrugging, “it’s early stages, but I’m interested to see if the same emotions trigger the same colors in different species. If they do, think of the potential for cross-species communication!”

  “You mean humans could change colors like Morrors?” I asked.

  Thsaaa brightened into pleased reds. “What a good idea. You could make humans normal. Why are you doing that with your face, Aleece? Humans would be much better like that.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but Thsaaa had done a good job of smoothing over the Lena and Josephine situation.

  “And you, Josephine, what are you doing?” Thsaaa inquired politely.

  “I’m upgrading the Goldfish,” said Josephine, taking a deep breath and gathering herself. “You really should have given the poor thing Häxeri,” she reproached Carl and Noel.

  Lena turned back to her own work.

  “I’ve been managing just super without, Josephine!” the Goldfish said, and I thought there was a strained note in its cheerful voice.

  “It . . . it will be okay, won’t it?” asked Noel anxiously.

  “Oh, sure,” said the Goldfish, sounding openly glum. “I’ll be better than ever. I’ll be a whole new me. You’ll barely even know me, I expect.”

  Josephine patted it. “You’ll be fine, Goldfish. You’ll still be you—you’ll just be able to do everything faster and better.”

  “I guess,” said the Goldfish.

  “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to have it,” said Josephine. “But I bet you’ve been feeling all tired and glitchy, haven’t you? I bet your processors ache at the end of a long day?”

  “Well, yeah,” the Goldfish conceded mournfully.

  “There you go,” said Josephine, patting it again.

  “Will it be better behaved?” asked Thsaaa acidly, though they were relaxing into calmer shades of blue and pink now things seemed to be settling down.

  Josephine made a face. “Only if it wants to be, I’m afraid. But I think it can help us gather samples from the Oort Cloud. It’s intelligent and it’s just the right size.

  “We don’t know if any alien species other than the Morrors and the Vshomu have passed through the solar system before. We plan to look for detritus or anomalous gases in the Oort Cloud. If we find anything, we may be able to deduce something about who else is out there.”

  “What . . . but the Goldfish can’t fly in space?”

  “Not yet, it can’t,” Josephine said, grinning. “However with the right modifications . . .”

  “I’m getting turbo thrusters!” said the Goldfish, sounding unequivocally enthusiastic this time.

  “If I’ve got the balance right . . . ,” said Josephine, slotting some more components together and squinting at the harness she’d made. “Obviously weight won’t be a factor when you’re out in space, but you won’t want it to be too heavy when you’re operating in gravity. Hopefully the adde
d power will compensate. . . .”

  Josephine seemed more like herself, I thought. But why was I spending so much time worrying about her these days?

  “We’re already at the Oort cloud?” said Carl. “I get to fly the Helen when we’re through that. I mean . . . if she’s okay with that.”

  “I will do whatever my Captain commands,” offered the Helen.

  “Hmm,” said Josephine, frowning thoughtfully at the ceiling.

  “Have you talked to the Helen?” I asked her. I wanted to say that the ship was quite sensible and interesting when she wasn’t talking about Trommler, but there didn’t seem a polite way to say that in front of Helen. “She’s very nice.”

  “She wrote Mr. Trommler a poem,” said Noel.

  Without much prompting, the Helen recited her poem again.

  “Do you read much poetry?” Josephine asked, after a pause in which I hoped the Helen could not read facial expressions. “Are you interested in other books?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Helen. “There are so many interesting things to learn about. But I haven’t read very many yet.”

  “I’m going to send you some books,” said Josephine firmly.

  “How kind of you!” said the Helen.

  Josephine examined the readouts on her tablet. “Are you ready, Goldfish?”

  “As I’ll ever be, I guess,” the Goldfish said glumly.

  Josephine tapped her tablet once, and the Goldfish sank in the air. Carl and I sprang forward to catch it, but Thsaaa’s tentacles were longer and faster.

  “Somebody take it—I don’t liiiiiike it!” Thsaaa complained.

  Carl, Josephine, and I laid the Goldfish on the ground. It rocked pathetically. The blue shine of its eyes had gone out.

  “You better have gotten this right,” Noel told Josephine sternly. “It’s our Goldfish.”

  “It consented!” Josephine insisted. “And it’ll be fine!”

  The Goldfish rose slowly from the ground to its usual level in the air. Its lights flashed on and off in a most disconcerting way.

  “Goldfish?” asked Noel nervously.

  “LOADING,” said the Goldfish in a loud, unpleasant drone, quite unlike its usual perky voice. “BOOTING.”

  “Are you okay?” Carl asked.

  “You are worried about it,” Thsaaa accused Carl, in slightly betrayed grays and lilacs. “But you always complain about it.”