Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  I grabbed Carl by one foot. He flipped and twisted like a fish on a hook—trying to see what was happening. And I pulled him and Josephine pulled me and the Goldfish pulled Josephine, and we skimmed along in one crazy line like that through space, until I could no longer see the Krakkiluk ship behind us.

  There was something else here in orbit, I saw. Something shaped like a crown or a throwing star, made of red-painted metal, bristling with barbs and dotted with lights like eyes. A satellite, squatting above the planet like a spider in a web.

  Carl managed to arch up to look at us in amazement. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  Josephine pulled me toward her and we both grabbed at Carl until we were floating in a huddle, our helmets together again.

  “The Goldfish wants me to tell you: ‘Hey, kids,’” said Josephine.

  “Oh, god, oh, god, what the hell,” Carl said, which was probably what he’d been saying the whole time.

  “What next?” I whispered. “Where can we go?”

  “Only one place,” said Josephine. She pointed. Down toward the planet.

  “We’ll burn up in the atmosphere,” I said.

  “There’s probably no oxygen down there,” Carl moaned.

  “None up here, either!” said Josephine, almost cheerfully.

  “I guess . . . it’s worth a try,” I said.

  It wasn’t as if there was a real choice.

  The Goldfish ejected a cable from its tail. It wasn’t meant for grappling kids floating in space; it was an ordinary, plastic-coated data cable for connecting to other robots or computers.

  Josephine grabbed it, twisted it around her arm, and passed the end to me. I did the same and passed it on to Carl.

  “Hold on as long as you can,” Josephine said.

  We didn’t have a ship. We didn’t have a parachute. We had one fish-shaped teacher robot.

  It was too late to think about it—it had been too late ever since Josephine jumped out of the ship. The Goldfish dipped toward the planet, towing us with it. The atmosphere of the planet pummeled us, scraped at us like flying gravel; my ears screamed with pain; pressure battered me all over. I felt my skin scorch. The suit, I was pretty sure, was starting to melt. I saw sparks fly from my boots.

  Hello down there, I thought madly as we ripped through, into freefall above an alien world.

  Green-tinted clouds rushed up to meet us, looking as welcomingly soft as sponge. Of course we plunged straight through, though the wetness swept a little heat from my skin. Miles below us, a green sea glittered like a spill of emeralds against a red-and-gold continent.

  The upwinds wrenched at me. I tried to keep hold of the cable, but the howling sky tore me loose, away from the others, away from the Goldfish, and whirled me out of consciousness.

  I don’t know how long I fell like that. But then something hit me, and I came to, still hurtling helplessly through the air—but somehow I was moving through a steep arc, flying sideways, not plummeting straight down. Then it happened again: a hard, rounded shape knocked me sideways, and this time I clutched by instinct and found myself clinging to the Goldfish’s back. The Goldfish strained upward, against the current of my fall.

  “Gosh, Alice,” said the Goldfish conversationally, its voice tinny in my abused ears, through the roaring wind. “This sure is hard work!”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t see Carl or Josephine; they’d been torn away, just as I had, and the cable lashed loose in the air. I tried to grab for it, felt it whip against my arm, but then I slipped from the Goldfish’s back, into the fury of the air.

  The sea and the land below spun into a whirlpool of color. This time I glimpsed the others scattered through the air around me—but we were plunging so fast that I couldn’t tell who was who. And there was the Goldfish, swooping to meet another falling body, slamming it sideways, darting onward to the other, then speeding back toward me. The Goldfish was more or less juggling us, darting between us and bouncing us sideways, never stopping our fall but slowing us, soaking speed from us with each bruising strike.

  It won’t be enough, though, I thought. It can’t be enough. The planet was rising to meet us like the open mouth of a hungry animal.

  I could see separate crests of foam on separate waves now. On the land I saw glossy, vaselike structures of many sizes that might have been buildings or plants or volcanic vents for all I knew, and purple-red, moving specks that might have been—what? Vehicles? Animals?

  The Goldfish batted me sideways again. The sea was so huge and close that the huge expanse of ground had dwindled to a narrow golden band of shore, then even that vanished. I thought I heard the Goldfish say my name again, but there wasn’t anything else it could do to help me. I brought up my arms to protect my face.

  And then the surface of the water hit me like a brick wall, or at least that’s what it felt like for the split second I had to think about it. Because I think I passed out again.

  That only lasted for a second or two, I’m pretty sure. But it meant I had to go through the unpleasant business of waking up, which I guess is better than the alternative. Ow! What? Why? Help! I thought, if you can call it thinking rather than just an unspoken accompaniment to my muted screaming into my helmet.

  And then my brain began filling in what had happened, in a series of questions, none of which were at all reassuring.

  1.Alive, which is surprising, because . . . ? Oh. Yes.

  2.Everything green? Underwater! Help! Why underwater . . . ? Oh. Yes.

  3.Everything hurts because . . . ? Oh. Yes.

  I broke the surface and glimpsed the green sky, uttered a strangled yelp, then promptly sank again. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to swim in a pressure suit, but if you ever have to do it, try not to have just plunged from outer space first. You will be confused and upset and will have a limited grasp of what your arms and legs are for. Also make sure the water you’re swimming in isn’t teeming with little pink wriggling things—it’s off-putting.

  My helmet had miraculously survived, though it didn’t feel as if there was more than a puff of oxygen in it now. But at least it meant none of the pink things got inside, because I think that might have sent me right over the edge. The pink things were various sizes—mostly the size of a newborn kitten, I suppose, but some as big as a large dog, and they were six-legged and bristling with fluttering little rosy cilia and sometimes emitting little yellow puffs of I don’t know what. I’m not sure it was rational or fair to find them so disgusting when they squiggled past my face, but I would refer you back to the recently-kidnapped-and-nearly-murdered-and-fell-seven-miles-from-outer-space thing. Fortunately the creatures were at least as alarmed by me as I was by them and were wriggling away for all they were worth, and soon I was left in a clearing of empty water.

  “Hello!” I croaked into the green waves. The first human word to sound in the air of that strange world.

  The next words were not any more impressive, although they were extremely welcome:

  “Hey, Alice!” The Goldfish was hovering above me. It looked a little melted around the edges.

  I flipped open my helmet. There wasn’t any good reason not to; the air outside would either kill me or it wouldn’t. It was not as if waiting a few minutes would help matters.

  I did not instantly die. In fact, there was a kind of heady rush from the air that made me feel . . . not better, exactly, but a little more alert. It also smelled funny.

  “You’re okay!” the Goldfish exulted. “Boy, that was a close one, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Where’s—? Where’s—?” I wondered if I was in fact badly brain damaged, because I couldn’t seem to manage things like my friends’ names.

  “JOSEPHINE!” called a voice, most of the boom stripped out but a desperate quaver in it that made me feel as if I’d swallowed a lump of half-melted snow.

  “Carl?” I tried to shout back. “Goldfish, what’s wrong?”

  “Grab on, Alice,” sug
gested the Goldfish, spitting out the cable from its mouth.

  The Goldfish towed me through the water—it was water, I established, when some got in my mouth. It tasted awful, but at least it wasn’t sulfuric acid. And it was relatively warm. The strange blue sun was bright overhead, so hypothermia wasn’t going to be one of my immediate problems. I kicked as best I could, but you couldn’t really call it swimming, and the Goldfish had to do most of the work.

  Something colorful was bobbing gently on the water—a puffy cluster of squashy-looking spheres, each perhaps the size of a beach ball, gathered like grapes into heaped bunches as big as a car. The puffballs ranged from orange to yellow to white to violent blue, and a sickly sweet scent drifted off them across the waves and made me cough. I thought they might be something like flowers or fruit or maybe fungus, but if they turned out to be eggs on the point of hatching into something nasty, it would hardly be surprising after the kind of day we’d had. And enormous round scarlet leaflike things spread around the clusters like lily pads on the surface of the sea.

  Carl was clinging to the edge of one of the leaves, his helmet off, gasping as if he’d just surfaced from the water. “Josephine!” he shouted. Then he took a breath and forced himself underwater again.

  “Carl?” I called, splashing toward him.

  Carl’s face was pale when he surfaced. “She was here—she hit the water here—but she was tangled up in something—Alice, she didn’t come up.”

  “She had oxygen,” I said. “She still had oxygen.”

  But Carl shook his head. “Something was wrong, the oxygen tanks—it’s like they were pulling her down and I think they were broken; there were all these bubbles coming up. I couldn’t stay down, I couldn’t—and when I went back I couldn’t see her.”

  I flipped my helmet down again and ducked underwater. The great leaves had many thick, ropy stems under the water, all coated in a gooey golden fuzz, on which all kinds of creatures were happily feeding. Blue, blobby things with lots of eyes, and orange things with lots of mouths. And yet more of the pink, wriggly things.

  The water was murky. I couldn’t see any sign of Josephine. No bubbles, even.

  I couldn’t dive very well. Not only was every inch of my body vigorously protesting my doing anything at all, but the air in my helmet kept pulling me up. I grabbed one of the stems and tried to pull my way down, hand over hand, and the fuzzy stuff glued my hand to a stem. I tore it free only to trap a foot in a gummy loop. I wrenched back in a panic and lost a mouthful of air in a burst of gold-green bubbles. Someone yanked at my arm—Carl, pulling me free of the glue.

  I came up again. I’d barely made it down a few feet. I pulled my helmet off completely and tried diving without it, but the water stung my eyes so much I couldn’t keep them open.

  It had been too long. It had already been too long. It takes people about four minutes to drown. We’d hit the water much longer ago than that.

  And it’s an awful way to die. Lots of people don’t realize that. But I’d had medical training.

  I clutched at the edge of the leaf, gasping, and I glimpsed Carl’s face. It looked horribly young, younger than I’d ever seen him look before, and after that I couldn’t look at him at all. We both kept swallowing down air that might be lethal and ducking under the water and coming up and going down again—

  “Guys,” said the Goldfish quietly, “I think you should get out of the water.”

  “No,” I said to the rubbery surface of the leaf. Then: “Wait, yes . . .” I scrambled up onto the leaf, scanning the water and the red islands of leaves from this new height. “Maybe she came up somewhere else—maybe there’s currents. Maybe she couldn’t hear us calling. . . .” I filled my lungs again. “Josephine!” I screamed.

  My voice sounded so awful: desolate and wrecked. It shredded away into the air and nothing came back but the sigh of the greenish waves. It didn’t sound like someone calling to a friend out of sight. It sounded like someone screaming in anguish at what they’d just lost. Hearing myself sound like that horrified me.

  Carl heaved himself up and lay there on the leaf, his fists clenched beside his face.

  “She jumped out,” I said to the Goldfish. “Didn’t she? After the Krakkiluks threw me—she grabbed you and she must have hit that button and . . . she jumped out.”

  “Yes,” said the Goldfish, and for once in its life, it didn’t say anything else. It just kept staring at the waves.

  “She jumped out of a spaceship,” I repeated, a little louder. She’d saved my life. She hadn’t even been talking to me. And she’d saved my life. And she’d died doing it. “The stupid idiot,” I added. “How could she do that?”

  A soft wind was keening across the water.

  “She was my best friend,” I said very quietly.

  There was a splashing sound. Something heaved itself half out of the water onto a neighboring leaf pad and lay there, panting.

  “Guys, look!” cried the Goldfish.

  “Oof,” said Josephine. “Hi.”

  Carl claimed later that he did not jump a foot in the air and scream, but I was there, I heard him.

  “It wasn’t stupid,” Josephine remarked, pulling the rest of her body out of the water. “It was pretty clever in the circumstances. It worked, didn’t it?”

  I sort of folded up on the lily pad and sat there, staring at her.

  “Josephine, good to see ya!” cheered the Goldfish.

  “Jo,” Carl quavered. “What the hell. You were down there way too long.”

  “Oh,” said Josephine. “Well, yes. About that.” Looking slightly sheepish, she pulled down the neck of her tunic, and it occurred to me vaguely that she’d been wearing high-necked clothing the whole time we’d been on the Helen.

  There were rows of fine horizontal slits on the skin of her neck below each ear. Sort of like scars, but somehow not.

  “Gills? You got gills?” asked Carl.

  “Why have you got gills?” I demanded in a high-pitched voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Well, you know Dr. Muldoon wanted to get gills onto humans after photosynthetic skin went so well, and I wanted them, and we were working together, so . . . I volunteered. . . .”

  All of a sudden, I had never been so indignant about anything in my life.

  “WHAT?” I roared. “That is . . . APPALLING!”

  “Um, why? I think it’s pretty cool,” said Carl.

  “BREACHES OF MEDICAL ETHICS ARE NOT COOL,” I howled. I pointed a quivering finger at Josephine. “She is thirteen years old! Dr. Muldoon performed—medical experiments on a child.”

  “It’s just gills. She wouldn’t give me any kind of cortical implants,” said Josephine soothingly.

  “OH, WELL, THAT’S FINE, THEN.”

  “So I’m thirteen, so what? I wanted them. Like you wanted to go to space!”

  I made a noise like an injured bison and aimed a reckless kick at one of the puffballs. “What about the risks?” The puffball burst into a cloud of blue dust, and a swarm of flying creatures rose into the air, making a warbling sound.

  “Alice . . .” Josephine looked baffled by now. “Are you sure this is a good time to get upset about this?”

  “Jo, just guessing here, but that’s not actually what she’s upset about,” said Carl.

  “YES, IT IS!” I bellowed, all the more annoyed. I wanted to write extremely angry letters to everyone on Earth right then and there. “This is a disgrace. Dr. Muldoon should lose her license!”

  “That’s medical doctors,” said Josephine. “Biochemists don’t have licenses.”

  “WELL, THEY SHOULD,” I said. I was so upset by this failure of the scientific establishment, I was on the point of tears. “They should,” I repeated, sniffing.

  “Okay, Alice,” said Carl gently. “We’ll take it up when we get home.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t like my gills, but they work very well, and I would currently be dead without them,” pointed out Josephine. “Also, you know, you
could say thank you.”

  “AAARGH!” I said instead, and hurled myself at her. I wasn’t absolutely sure if it was affection or murderous rage when I was doing it, and it knocked her over. But it turned into a hug on the way down and also I kind of burst into tears.

  “You can’t do that!” I sobbed. “You can’t just jump out into space! You can’t get gills without telling me! And you can’t rescue me and then die!”

  Josephine lay there looking shocked and then patted me. “I haven’t died,” she said gently. “And neither have you. It’s okay.”

  But of course that wasn’t really true.

  “Look, normally I’m all for girls wrestling or hugging or whatever you’re doing there,” said Carl. “But you’re rocking the lily pad. And we’ve gotta figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Josephine detached herself from me. She looked around at the alien seascape, the floating orange leaves and the blue-and-yellow puffballs, the occasional splash of the pink wriggly things in the water, and pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “for starters, have we got any duct tape?”

  “No,” I said. “We definitely haven’t.”

  “Oh my god,” said Josephine.

  10

  Please. Turn that thing off. I know you’re really into history and culture and things, Thsaaa, but I don’t want to document my experiences for future generations right now.

  Can’t we just play I spy?

  If Weeseru-Uu had chosen to play I spy rather than to record the third battle of Swaleeshashalafay Athmaral-haaa-Thay, we would know nothing about the fall of the Aluufa-vem-ral-Faa, and the memory of their civilization would have been lost with our planet.

  If we survive this, Noel, a record will be useful to the Council of Lonthaa-Ra-Moraaa, and if not, it may be found by some explorer, some scholar, years from now.

  Please can you stop talking about us not surviving and about doomed civilizations and stuff.

  I think it is reassuring to think our story might at least be remembered.