Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  We were in . . . well, a wider corridor. But this one had some windows on it, at least. I could see the golden planet. I wanted to go and look at it, like I’d maybe be able to see Carl and Alice and Josephine down there, somehow okay.

  “Well,” I said. “Here we are. Now what are we going to do?”

  “We must try to seize the Helen and escape,” said Thsaaa.

  11

  So, we had no duct tape, though arguably that was not as bad as the fact that we had no first-aid kit, and definitely not as bad as the fact we had no spaceship. The Goldfish had said we were about three miles from land, and we were absolutely in no condition to swim that far.

  What we did have, once we managed to break the visor of Carl’s helmet into shards, was a kind of knife.

  “We need to cut this leaf away from the stem,” I said. “Then we’ll have a raft.”

  Although by “we,” I really meant “Josephine.”

  “I don’t think it’s my turn to go back in the water,” Josephine said.

  “You signed up for all the underwater jobs when you got gills,” said Carl.

  “I didn’t sign up for wriggling pink things,” complained Josephine. But she slid into the water with her ceramic-shard knife and ducked under the leaf. Carl and I lay back to soak up the possibly carcinogenic sunshine and felt the leaf bobbing as she worked.

  The sky above me was pale jade, the water deep emerald. The sun was light blue. I lay on the leaf, wondering if I might have broken a bone or two in my foot when I hit the sea. Apart from the whisper of the waves and the occasional splash of the wriggly pink things, it was utterly silent. It was kind of peaceful. In fact, it was very peaceful, except for how we had to keep an eye out in case any enormous sea monsters showed up to eat us or, alternatively, in case someone whooshed along in a boat or a spaceship in order to rescue us.

  Neither of those things happened.

  At last Josephine pulled herself back onto the leaf. “There,” she gasped, and she coughed a little, then leaned over and, rather disgustingly, ejected all the water she’d just breathed from her gills. I managed to limit myself to yelping quietly and adding a paragraph to the Outraged Letter about Dr. Muldoon’s behavior I was writing in my head.

  “My hair,” Josephine moaned, plucking a few strands of wet goo from it. She gave up, pulled her hair out of the soaked and mangled braids, and tied it back with a torn-off length of lining from the collar of her space suit.

  I found this oddly encouraging. She looked like a revolutionary or a pirate queen—or, that is to say, like my friend.

  “There,” she said. “A raft.”

  Carl and I cheered raggedly.

  “Let’s go, kids!” chirruped the Goldfish. I don’t think there was any way we were up to making a sail or oars, even if there was a way to do it from the materials available. In the end we had to just hold on to the Goldfish’s cable while the Goldfish towed us toward land.

  “At least we got stuck on a warm planet this time,” said Carl drowsily, spread-eagled and dripping in the sunlight.

  “And there’s oxygen!” said Josephine.

  I kept quiet. There was something worrying me about that, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it—or if there was, at the very least we’d have to get out of the sea first, so there wasn’t any point worrying anyone else. In any case, I might be wrong.

  We weren’t the only living creatures out on that floating leafscape. There were the buzzing blue things, and little gold creatures about two feet long that went hopping from leaf to leaf on three pairs of flippers to nibble with sharp green beaks at the puffballs, while others lay basking in heaps in the sun, their slick fur or feathers (or maybe something between) drying to a soft amber fuzz. They didn’t seem at all afraid of us.

  “Maybe we can eat them,” Carl said.

  I wished he hadn’t, because I hadn’t noticed being hungry before that. I’d been thinking how cute the golden creatures were, but now they did look temptingly edible.

  “Probably poisonous,” said Josephine.

  The land rose slowly onto the horizon. The puffball plants grew thicker and thicker in the water, until the Goldfish couldn’t tow us any farther. So we had to leave our leaf raft behind and make our way from lily pad to lily pad on foot for the last half mile.

  The gravity was a little lower than on Earth, I thought, but not as low as on Mars. I wished it had been; we’d have been on dry land in a few effortless leaps. As it was, we were panting and sweating by the time we stepped off the last leaf pad onto the shore.

  At once, I felt somehow ten times as exposed as I had on our peaceful little leaf on the water. We had no way of knowing who, if anyone, lived on this land, but we were trespassing. We were uninvited, and almost helpless, and maybe we were going to get in terrible trouble.

  For the moment, though, no one came charging over the hill, either to kill us or to ask to see our identity papers.

  “So, those lobster guys,” said Carl. “This is their planet, right?”

  “They talked about an Expanse, but I think they meant an empire,” said Josephine. “They’d claimed Aushalawa-Moraaa. They’ve got lots of planets.”

  But if it wasn’t the Krakkiluk planet, that still meant it was probably a Krakkiluk planet.

  “It’s better than asphyxiating in space!” exclaimed Josephine, as if she’d been accused of something.

  “No one’s saying it’s not, Jo,” Carl said.

  “Earth’ll find us,” said Josephine. “Or Aushalawa-Moraaa; the Morrors have more experience with hyperspace. If it’s possible to send a transmission through, it must be possible to pinpoint where it’s coming from. They’ll be working on that now. And Lena . . . We just have to stay alive.”

  I thought again about the thing that was worrying me about the air, and I didn’t say anything.

  We trudged up the beach. The sand and pebbles were just ordinary like you might get on Earth, and the beach rose like any other up to a shallow scarp. But a thick carpet of red-and-orange egg-shaped blobs was growing on the scarp, and that wasn’t Earthlike at all. We climbed up onto it, and the blobs squished a bit underfoot, like rubber, but didn’t burst. Farther back from the water, some of them had little holes at the top, and some of them opened out into funnels like tiny vases. And ahead there were much bigger funnels, of deep red and bright gold, as tall as trees.

  We flopped down in the shade of one of those funnels and lay there in a heap for a while.

  Our space suits were far too hot by now. Josephine was the first person who could summon the energy to move; she began hacking the sleeves of her suit off with the ceramic shard from the helmet and cut her neckline a bit lower. She passed me the blade when she was done, and I did the same and then passed it on to Carl.

  “Oh, dear,” I said, looking at the array of scorches and bruises we’d just revealed.

  “Duct tape,” said Josephine mournfully.

  “I’m so thirsty,” said Carl.

  “The seawater isn’t salt,” I said. “But I don’t think we should go ahead and drink it,” I added, thinking of how nasty it tasted and also how much yellow stuff the wriggly pink things were spraying into it.

  “We have to filter and boil it,” said Josephine.

  Carl and I groaned, because that was plainly going to be a real pain in the neck.

  “Okay, helmet as cooking pot—that part’s obvious,” said Carl.

  We used his helmet, seeing as we’d already smashed the ceramic visor out of it. We stripped out the lining and the microcircuitry as best we could and filled it with water.

  Then we looked for firewood, which was difficult because none of the plants we found seemed to produce anything as basic as a stick. But some of the funnel things were dead and dried out and broke into flakes when you poked them.

  Which left the matter of how to actually set them on fire.

  “If I had my warning and defense unit . . . ,” mused the Goldfish darkly.

  “Well
, you don’t,” said Carl, irritated.

  “It’s okay,” said Josephine. “We can use the sun.”

  We made a little hearth of stones on the beach and piled the dried-out flakes inside. Josephine angled one of the helmets that was still intact until a bright speck of focused sunlight appeared on the kindling.

  I didn’t think this would work. But the next second, there was a flash and a huge plume of fire burst out of nowhere, and if we hadn’t been on the beach, I think we’d have started an ecosystem-wrecking inferno right there. As it was, the only really flammable stuff about was us, so we screamed and fell over and threw ourselves into the waves.

  “Eyebrows?” Carl was saying urgently. “Have I still got eyebrows?”

  We established that no, no one had quite as much hair as they used to. We grieved for its loss, and we went back to look at the blackened wreckage.

  “Right,” said Josephine. “So, there’s a lot of oxygen on this planet.”

  “At least that’s better than the other way around,” said Carl.

  “Actually,” I said, and stopped. The others looked at me.

  “What?” said Carl.

  “Too much oxygen is . . . kind of . . . bad,” I said reluctantly.

  There was another pause.

  “How bad?” said Josephine, her voice flat.

  I twisted my hands together. In other circumstances, getting the chance to tell Josephine something scientific that she didn’t know might have been kind of fun, but in this case, I wished she’d looked up “oxygen toxicity” the last time she’d happened to be bored. But she wasn’t the one who wanted to be a doctor.

  “Well . . . it’s just that sometimes, when people have hypothermia and frostbite, you can treat them with high levels of oxygen,” I began. “But you have to be careful, and give them breaks with normal air, because things can happen. Though it depends on how high the oxygen levels are, and the air pressure . . .”

  “How bad?” repeated Josephine.

  Somewhat ironically in the circumstances, I took a deep breath. “Disorientation . . . breathing difficulties leading to pneumonia . . .”

  “Spasmodic vomiting, drowsiness,” chimed in the Goldfish helpfully.

  “Neurological damage affecting vision and balance, and with prolonged exposure, eventually . . .”

  “Death. God, we get it! Eventually death!” exploded Josephine. She sat down on the ground and stared straight ahead. “How soon?” she asked quietly.

  “Oh, I think we should be fine! For at least . . . four days?” I said as positively as I could.

  “Gosh, Alice, you’ve been studying hard,” said the Goldfish after another pause, and scattered a spray of holographic golden sparkles over me.

  “Well, I try,” I said dolefully.

  “Okay, so we’ve got to get off this planet,” said Carl.

  Josephine nodded jerkily, not looking at either of us. “We’ve got to find help,” she said in a small voice.

  The Goldfish led us up into the depths of the vase forest.

  We’d limped along the shoreline until we’d come to the slow, nameless river, uncrossably huge and electric green under the crimson forest. On the far bank, the funnels spread as far as the eye could see, with a complete lack of encouraging things like houses or multistory car parks to disturb their peace.

  “There must be settlements on the river,” Josephine said as we floated along. “Civilizations always build close to water.”

  “What if we landed on a deserted island?” said Carl.

  “Oh, shut up!” I moaned. “And anyway, it’s a continent—I could see that much when we were falling.”

  Carl nodded, but he didn’t have to point out that that might take care of the “island” but didn’t address the “deserted” part of the issue.

  At least we weren’t thirsty anymore. There were tiny pools of freshwater in the funnels—at first we only dared to lick drops from our fingertips, and it tasted a little odd, kind of rubbery, but not obviously lethal. So we plucked teacup-sized funnels—warily, in case this caused the plant to come to vengeful life and attack us. It didn’t, so we drank, first in cautious little sips with pauses to see if anyone died, and then with desperate abandon.

  “I think maybe these are just one underground plant,” Josephine said, looking a little bit more like her old self. “Or maybe more than one, but I think all the funnels are sucking water and sunlight down to one big root system. . . .” She trailed off. “This planet belongs to a culture with spaceships,” she announced abruptly. “It has to be unlikely that there’s no way off it.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ll find the spaceships. There was a satellite, at least. I saw it, up there.”

  Carl was trying to angle away the dubious expression he was making so Josephine wouldn’t see it, but she did anyway, or maybe she sensed it.

  “Yes, the spaceships may belong to the same species of people that threw us out of a spaceship in the first place,” she said with exaggerated patience. “But we have only met a handful of Krakkiluks. It would be illogical to assume we know what all of them are like.”

  “Yes. Illogical,” agreed Carl, this time trying to go for no expression at all.

  “And there might be other people. If the Krakkiluks aren’t using this planet to live on, and they aren’t using it to grow Takwuk, maybe they’re using it for labor. In which case the locals are our natural allies! The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”

  But so far there was no visible sign anyone else was using it for anything, unless you counted the flippery gold creatures basking on the floating leaves. They were having a great time.

  The forest was not silent. The funnels sang in the wind like a choir of ghosts, and the creatures nestling in their ledges or gliding on double wings across the river chittered and warbled and hooted. On the banks the funnels spread wide and low, casting crimson shade over the water. The landscape changed as we floated on. Hills heaped high on either flank of the river—and then gray arches emerged from the ground amid the spreading funnels.

  “Architecture?” muttered Josephine eagerly.

  But it was soon obvious the arches hadn’t been made by people. They supported no roofs or roads or waterways. They were of all sizes, some dried-out silver, some tinged with living red, though as we floated on, they grew larger and larger, serpentlike lengths piling up on one another in crazy loops and spirals as high as skyscrapers before burrowing into the earth again. And as the river narrowed and turned, they cascaded down a bank and reared in tangles over its course.

  “Roots!” I said. “Like you said!” Because there were red-and-gold buds on the arches’ sides, opening here and there into more funnels, some spreading out toward the sky like those that rose from the earth, some hanging down like bells. And creatures scampered and swung and dangled from the loops and warbled within the funnels.

  “If you’re stuck in a jungle,” said Carl, “you can tell what’s safe to eat by watching what the monkeys eat. If you’re in a jungle with monkeys, obviously.”

  “We’d better not eat anything,” I said gloomily. “Poisoning can kill you a lot faster than starvation.”

  “Hey, kids,” said the Goldfish suddenly, in an unusually hushed voice, stopping in its flight. “Looks like we found somebody!”

  A huge, furry face, plum colored and large as the wheel of a car, was watching us from above a loop of silver-gray root. It was round and flat as a dish, except for a snub snout right between its two pairs of round black eyes. Apart from the number of eyes, and the color, and the long, snakelike neck—okay, apart from lots of things—it reminded me of a sloth’s face; it had the same sleepily placid look.

  “I think you should say hi,” suggested the Goldfish brightly.

  “I guess,” said Josephine faintly, and the Goldfish towed us toward the bank.

  Two more mulberry-purple faces suddenly appeared among the tangle of vegetation and blinked at us. Probably three different creatures, not one with three hea
ds, I told myself, biting the inside of my cheek.

  Josephine set her jaw and stepped from the leaf to the bank. Carl and I went after her, not liking to seem wimpy.

  “Hi,” I said, hoping that didn’t sound like “Your mother is ugly and I would enjoy being slaughtered now” in their language.

  We stood there feeling scared and silly. First contact is incredibly socially awkward.

  “Wuuuurrrgh,” responded the first creature affably, in a deep, rumbling bass.

  “Wuuuurrrgh!” agreed its companions, in unison.

  “WURRRRGH!!!!” volunteered Carl gamely, and at enormous volume.

  Here the conversation ground to a halt. The aliens looked mildly startled, and snaked their necks around, and continued staring at us while we stared back.

  “So, uh, yeah, someone else say something,” said Carl.

  “We were hoping you might have a hyperspace-capable ship,” said Josephine helplessly.

  One of the aliens (though, of course, really we were the aliens) waddled down the bank to get a closer look at us, revealing a large, shaggy, egg-shaped body the size of an elephant’s. Oddly, it moved on four short but slender legs, when everything else I’d seen here had six. We flinched together on instinct—it was very large, and coming very close. When it reached us, it put its face close to my chest and sniffed, started back in surprise, then sniffed the others.

  “I think these are maybe . . . animals, not people?” Carl said as the creature ran its face curiously over his chest.

  “How are we going to know?” I asked.

  “People don’t sniff you,” said Carl. “That’s just basic.”

  “They might. For all we know that’s polite around here,” I said.

  But the alien appeared to lose interest in us. It bent its neck to lap briefly at the river, then turned and galloped up the bank to join its friends and disappeared among the loops of root.

  “Come on!” said Josephine, charging after it. So we followed, because at least the creatures hadn’t tried to hurt us, and they were the first things that had interacted with us in any way. We scrambled up the bank and through the coils of the roots until the tangles of gray stem got so thick, we had to start climbing from loop to loop, then walk along the spine of a root that rose high as a cathedral like a bridge to nowhere in the air.