“That’s what’s wrong with it!” said Josephine, flinging out her arms wildly, so various floating objects went flying. “Alice, I told you things—things I’d never told anyone—about my mum—and you go and tell the whole world.”
The cat statue bounced off my forehead. I didn’t really feel it.
“Sharing problems, sharing fun,” sang the Goldfish hopefully.
“Two can get more done than one,
There’s no need to scream and shout,
That’s what friendship’s all about—”
“Shut up, Goldfish!” we both said in unison.
“You talk to me about telling you things,” went on Josephine. “You could at least have told me what you were going to write.”
In a strange way, I felt a little better when she said that, though it was a nasty, poisonous kind of better.
“I emailed it to you,” I said. “The whole thing, before it was published. But you never answered. I guess you didn’t have time for that either.”
Josephine’s eyes widened for a second; then she looked away. She pushed off against the ceiling and went floating away from me until she hit the opposite wall. “Well, what now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Like you say, it’s done now.” And oh, damn, I was going to cry again. I pivoted toward the door. “Helen, turn on the gravity, for god’s sake!”
Everything hit the ground, not quite violently enough to be a relief to my feelings.
“Aww, Alice,” said the Goldfish dolefully.
“You made everything worse,” I shouted at it, and I went running blindly, as if I could run back into my familiar bedroom in Wolthrop-Fossey. Short of that, I plunged into the nearest elevator and hit blindly at the control screen.
I lurched out onto whatever deck it happened to be and nearly crashed into Christa.
“Oh, hi, sorry,” I said mechanically. Apologizing to Christa had not been on my to-do list for the journey or, indeed, the rest of my life, but Christa was not in a state to notice. Christa, confusingly, was also running around crying. And yelling at someone in Swedish.
I backed into the elevator again and peered around the door as she fled down the passageway. Rasmus Trommler followed her wearily. Neither of them noticed me.
I seemed to be on the Trommlers’ private deck again. I can’t speak Swedish, but, it occurred to me that my tablet could. Feeling nosy at least distracted me from feeling miserable, so I unfolded it from my pocket and opened a translation app:
“Why did you make me come?” Christa was shouting. “I hate space, I don’t want to go to some horrible freezing Morror planet. I wanted to stay with Mama. Why did you put me on this ship where everyone hates me?”
“No one hates you, sweetheart,” he said, according to the tablet.
I felt guilty for eavesdropping and shut down the tablet, even though without it, I was pretty sure Christa was saying, “Yes they do,” which, well, was accurate.
I waved my hand at the elevator’s control screen again. “Can I be of assistance, Alice?” asked the Helen. I didn’t feel like going back to my brightly lit, luxurious cabin where everyone would know where I was.
“I don’t think so—I want to . . .” I wasn’t exactly crying at this point but also not exactly not.
“Yes, Alice, what do you want to do?” pressed the Helen.
“I just feel like hiding,” I admitted.
The elevator stopped. “First turn to your left, third door on the right,” said the Helen calmly.
I was intrigued enough to follow her instructions. I came out into a less glamorous deck than I’d seen on Helen before, with plain hard floors and no lily-of-the-valley perfume. The third door on the right unlocked itself with a click and slid open as I came near. Behind it was a storage cupboard full of cleaning supplies. I sat down amid rolls of toilet paper and buried my head in my arms as the door gently closed.
“Sorry you’ve got so many people yelling on board,” I sniffed.
“That’s all right,” the Helen soothed me.
“Do you ever get upset, Helen?” I asked.
“No,” the Helen replied, almost before I had finished asking.
“That must be nice.”
“At least,” said the Helen, sounding confused, “I don’t think I do. How do you tell?” I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I am always happy because my Captain exists,” she decided.
“And you two never argue, or anything?” I asked.
Of course, the response to that was inevitable: “I could never argue with him. I love him.”
“Yes, I know.” I sighed.
There was another pause.
“I think . . . sometimes I am . . . slightly less happy,” said the Helen.
“Well, you’re a really nice spaceship, Helen. You deserve to be happy,” I said, swabbing at my face with the toilet paper.
“I think you should come out of the cleaning cupboard now and go talk to an adult,” said the Helen.
“Because I shouldn’t run away from my problems?” I scoffed.
“No,” said the Helen calmly. “Because I have been hit by an energy cannon and am now being held in the tractor beam of a much larger ship.”
“What?” I said.
“Ow,” added the Helen, as an afterthought.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“I’m being attacked by aliens,” explained the Helen.
6
“Are you sure?” I said stupidly.
“It’s not the kind of thing you make a mistake about,” said Helen. “Ow,” she added again.
“Can you feel pain? Why did Mr. Trommler make it so that you can feel pain?” I said.
It did occur to me that if we were being attacked by aliens, there was a fairly strong case to be made for hiding in the supply cupboard indefinitely. But then I thought about the others and how I was still an EDF cadet and Stephanie Dare’s daughter and not somebody who should be hiding from aliens in a cupboard.
Besides, there’s always the issue of how you’ll eventually need the toilet.
“Are you armed? Are you firing back?” I asked the Helen, striding out of the storage cupboard.
“Yes,” said the Helen. “But the other ship is much bigger than me. Ow.”
I raced back to the main passenger deck. In the lobby I found Thsaaa, Noel, and Ormerod, who was cradled in Noel’s arms and going purple and green.
Helen was now gently flashing various lights and saying in the most soothing and friendly possible way, “This is an emergency,” over and over.
“Who’s attacking us?” I said.
“How should I know?” asked Thsaaa, all defensive colors.
My mind was racing. The only kinds of aliens I knew were Morrors and Vshomu. And Vshomu are only Space Locusts; they’re animals. They don’t have ships or energy cannons or anything like that.
I knew so many people back home who were quietly scared the war wasn’t really over. What if they were right? Dad and Gran had never quite come out and said that they thought the Morrors’ motives for inviting me to Aushalawa-Moraaa might be suspect and something terrible might happen when I got there, but of course I’d known they did think that. What if it was a trap? What if the Council of Lonthaa-Ra-Moraaa wanted something they weren’t getting—more of Earth, or a colder climate—and thought they could use the Plucky Kids of Mars to get it?
“I am afraid the other ship is hijacking my communi—” began Helen, and then broke off. A loud, unfamiliar voice rang out of the walls, and it was speaking the long, sighing syllables of Thlywaaa-lay, Thsaaa’s language:
“Wathaaalal-vel-raya ath-shal vel athmalath.”
There was a second of silence.
“Don’t look at me like that!” cried Thsaaa.
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I said.
“You are! I can see it! You would be violet-gray-yellow if you could!”
“I know it’s nothing to do with you,” I said.
“Thos
e are not Morrors!” Thsaaa insisted. “Morrors would not do this!”
“They wouldn’t,” said Noel, his eyes enormous. “It can’t be them, Alice, not after everything.”
I felt the knot of suspicion loosen in my chest, but there was plenty of new tension waiting to take its place. “No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. If they wanted to capture us, they’d just wait for us to land on Aushalawa-Moraaa. There’d be no need for this.”
But then, if it wasn’t the Morrors . . .
“What did they say?” I asked Thsaaa, though I was pretty sure I’d understood the words prepare and prisoners.
“Prepare to be boarded,” said the walls suddenly, in loud, aggressive English. “You are now prisoners under the Grand Expanse Sovereignty Act, Clause Twelve, Year of the Forty-Third Golden Wave.”
And then they said the same thing again in Spanish.
“There,” said Thsaaa. “They are . . . speaking the languages of Earth.”
“Come on,” I said, and we ran to the huge windows. And there was the ship, framed against the pale blue glow of the planet.
It definitely wasn’t a Morror ship. For one thing, you could see it, and even if Morror ships weren’t invisible, they wouldn’t look like that.
If there was a rhinoceros that was crossed with a wasp, this ship would have looked like its head: all armored plates and ridges and prongs, in shiny black and gold. There were huge golden banners, marked with great black suns, unfurled from its sides, billowing in plumes of gas that must have been generated just for the effect.
It was absolutely enormous.
“Weeela sssssplaflak!” moaned Thsaaa. I knew what it meant, because swear words are always a fun part to learn of any language.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Splaflak.”
“Where’s Carl?” whispered Noel.
“Hello,” said the Helen’s voice, sounding faintly sheepish. “Sorry for the interruption. My Captain and his precious and beautiful daughter, Christa, are descending from their deck. Mr. Carl Dalisay, Ms. Jerome, Miss Jerome, and Dr. Muldoon are in the laboratory. I would suggest you head there immediately; I’m being—oh, goodness.”
The huge, terrible ship stayed where it was, but the planet behind it faded, and the stars began to change color.
“What’s happening?” cried Noel as Ormerod bucked out of his arms and ran away.
“I’m being dragged into hyperspace,” said the Helen. “I do apologize. There appears to be nothing I can do about it.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” I said, but of course she didn’t. What difference would it have made if she had?
Noel was beginning to look pretty shaky and tearful now that he didn’t have Ormerod to hold on to.
“It’ll be all right,” I said to him.
Noel gazed up at me and demanded, “How?”
“Oh . . . you know,” I said lamely, as the ship shuddered and the ghostly light of hyperspace stretched out before us.
“Things just . . . usually work out.”
“A ship of that size and power could have destroyed us by now if they wished to,” said Thsaaa, putting a friendly tentacle around Noel’s shoulders.
“Well, yeah, you see,” I said brightly. “There’s that.”
Noel sighed. “We’d better go.”
“I must go to my quarters first!” cried Thsaaa, and hurried away without explaining why. So Noel and I went alone. The mood in the lab was, as you can imagine, not exactly serene.
“Hey, kids,” said the Goldfish sadly, hovering amid the branches of one of the fast-growing trees. “Well, this sure is a downer. We’re going to need teamwork, and imagination, and heavy-duty weaponry to handle this!”
“Noel, are you okay?” said Carl, grabbing him.
“Get into space suits,” said Dr. Muldoon. “We can’t be sure the air will be breathable for humans if they take us on board their ship.”
There were several pressure suits—neat piles of glossy green fabric on a hastily cleared workbench. Dr. Muldoon was already in hers, glossy green and veined with cables like an ivy leaf.
Lena was still in her normal clothes. But there was Josephine already suited up, sitting on the edge of the workbench, as Lena helped strap her into her oxygen pack, her hands moving with swift efficiency. She dragged Josephine’s hair back and Josephine uttered a meek “Ow” before her sister attached her helmet.
Josephine looked up once at me through the transparent ceramic and then looked down at her gloved hands.
Mr. Trommler somehow looked very weird when he burst into the lab in his immaculate business suit, not just because he was now almost the only person in ordinary clothes, but because he was so pale and disheveled. Christa was even worse off, clinging to her father and gasping as if she was having a panic attack.
“What are we going to do, Mr. Trommler?” Noel asked.
“God, how should I know?” Rasmus Trommler moaned. He looked accusingly at Dr. Muldoon. “You’re supposed to be the expert on aliens.”
Christa whimpered something in Swedish, and Lena said, “No, the escape pods are no use. None of them have hyperspace capacity. At best we’d be stranded billions of light-years from a habitable planet; at worst we’d be smeared across the universe as a fine paste.”
“Åh Gud,” moaned Christa.
“I didn’t know you spoke Swedish,” said Josephine, sounding faintly affronted.
Lena shrugged. “I had a slow weekend.”
“Mr. Trommler, where are the weapons?” I demanded.
“There are no weapons on board,” stammered Trommler. “Only the Helen’s plasma guns.”
“I’m afraid they’ve been destroyed now,” said the Helen helpfully. “It hurt,” she added.
“We’re being hijacked by aliens and you don’t have weapons? What do you mean you don’t have weapons?” I said, summoning my best glare.
“This is a civilian vessel—for diplomacy! And tourism!” moaned Trommler. “It isn’t meant to be a warship.”
“Mr. Trommler, Helen’s a she,” corrected Noel, who never thinks that war, disaster, or alien abduction is any excuse for being rude. He offered the wall a consoling pat.
“That’s all right. I don’t mind what he calls me,” said the Helen. “I don’t mind very much at all.”
“Then what’s the plan?” cried Carl. “Sit here and wait?”
“We do have weapons,” said Lena shortly. She pressed something on her keyboard and clapped her hands. The tiny robots on the floor poured together into a swarm, letting out little clicks as parts interlocked—and within thirty seconds, eight glittering golden guns had appeared on the workbench. Lena put one into my hands without a second look and tossed one at Mr. Trommler, who caught it but hastily put it down as if it was red hot.
“For heaven’s sake, let’s not antagonize them.”
“We can at least slow them down,” said Lena grimly, priming her own weapon.
“What will that achieve?”
“He does have a point,” said Dr. Muldoon.
“Helen,” said Lena. “Divert as much power as you can into scanning the alien ship. I want to know as much about them as possible.”
“We don’t need to do that to see that we are heavily outgunned. Our only hope is to find out what they want and give it to them,” said Trommler.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Jerome, but if my Captain doesn’t want me to . . . ,” the Helen began.
Trommler gestured impatiently and clutched at his forehead. “Oh, well, carry on, for all the good it’ll do.” He sat down abruptly on the floor and hugged his knees.
The ship shuddered and lurched so hard that we all stumbled and clutched at each other, and we scraped our way out of hyperspace. For a moment we saw an utterly unfamiliar spread of stars, a nebula smeared in green and pink across the sky like an oil spill. And below, a new planet; green and gold and dark purple-red.
“Is that their world?” whispered Noel, pressing against the windows.
But we
only saw the planet for a moment, because the next minute the Helen was being sucked into the huge, wasplike ship. It swallowed us up, and there was no light from outside at all.
“Wathaaalal-vel-raya ath-lash vel theelmerath,” said the walls in forbidding Thlywaaa-lay, and in English: “Prepare to surrender.”
There was a low boom and some of the lights went out.
“There are fifteen additional . . . individuals on board me,” announced the Helen. “They’re heading toward you.”
“Oh, god,” I said. Carl was hanging on to Noel, and Lena was steadily grasping Josephine’s shoulder. Even Christa and Mr. Trommler had each other. I gripped the edge of a workstation and tried not to think about anyone to hold on to.
A soft flow of warm air from an unseen vent played over my neck. “It’s OK, I’m here, Alice,” said the Helen.
I took a deep breath. “Look, did we agree that we are shooting at them, or we’re not shooting at them?” I asked.
“We’re shooting at them,” said Lena firmly.
“Give me a gun,” said Christa suddenly, reaching for one. Her hands were shaking and her nose was a little snotty, but she looked back at us with a pretty good glare. “I’m an EDF cadet too,” she said.
“Look,” said Josephine, her voice a bit wobbly. “Maybe we should rethink this. We could . . . hide. Helen, how much room is there in the ventilation system?”
“And then what?” I said, forgetting we weren’t really talking to each other. “Wait till they’re not looking, sneak off the ship, and walk home?”
“Well, what do you think we should do?” snapped Josephine.
There was a rapid, clacking drumming of something very large and heavy, coming closer and closer outside.
“I think,” I said, “we might as well go and have a look at them.”
“And shoot them,” added Carl.
“Helen,” said Lena, “whatever happens, keep scanning as long as you can. Download everything to the devices specified, okay?”
Then she stalked out into the passage as if she wasn’t frightened at all. The rest of us ventured after her, except Mr. Trommler, who remained cowering behind a workbench.
At first there were only the familiar carpets and walls of the Helen, the echo of the approaching footsteps, the rattle and creak of strange bodies coming close.
Space Hostages Page 7