Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  From up here, we could see the land beyond. The towering arches of wild root thinned out into lower, more sporadic loops, and between them spread a moorland carpeted with living gold velvet, something like moss and dotted with blue, beadlike flowers. And there were hundreds of the huge, purple creatures roaming, bending their necks to eat the blue flowers. They were oddly graceless, compared to the other creatures we’d seen—lumbering on stalklike legs, so disproportionate to their bulk.

  “They’re animals,” said Carl, sighing. “Bison. That kind of thing.”

  I felt this was probably true, but what if it wasn’t? Maybe the people here were perfectly capable of going to work or fighting wars or watching cat videos but just happened to like standing around in a field and eating flowers more. And if so, maybe they had a point. Or then again, maybe the golden flipper things that lived on the giant leaf pads were the people, or the blue buzzing things. Maybe the funnels were people, communicating with each other by the wind ringing through their chambers, though I hoped they weren’t, given that we’d picked and drunk a few of the little ones.

  I wondered if the Morrors had had any hilarious misunderstandings where they turned up and tried to explain to sheep or cars that they were colonizing the planet. But they’d been scanning Earth’s communications for a long time before they actually landed, so probably not.

  “We have to be sure,” said Josephine.

  Getting down to the ground was even more difficult than climbing up into the roots in the first place, but the purple creatures didn’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry, so we clambered around until we came to a tall funnel sprouting those ledges. These didn’t bear our weight as well as we’d hoped, but we at least hit the ground more gently than we might have done, and the golden moss turned out to be thick and soft.

  The nearest creatures raised their heads and looked at us. We picked ourselves up, wincing, and wandered about saying “Hello,” and feeling embarrassed.

  “This is useless,” said Carl. “We’re trying to make friends with, like, wildebeest.”

  “Maybe there aren’t people. Maybe the Krakkiluks just use this place for tourism,” I said before I could stop myself. Josephine grimaced.

  I pretended I hadn’t said anything. “Alice,” I said to the nearest alien, pointing at myself. “Human. You?”

  “Wurrrgh,” the alien replied.

  “US . . . FROM . . . UP THERE!” bellowed Carl, pantomiming appropriately, on the off chance the creatures would stop grazing and say, “Oh, sorry, in that case come this way to our conveniently located government headquarters/spaceport.”

  But they didn’t do that. Instead, whether because Carl had startled them or because they’d been going to do it anyway, they all began to move. They broke into a simultaneous charge that shook the earth, and wherever they’d decided they were going, we were in their way.

  So, as you would, we screamed and threw ourselves out of the way, which would have been fine if it was only one enormous charging creature instead of hundreds. The nearest creature did make an effort not to step on us, but the one behind it didn’t seem to notice us at all. We dived out of its path only to stumble into a collision course with another, and the faster we had to dodge, the harder it was to look where we were going and I tripped over a tussock of the golden moss and fell right under the feet of another charging beast.

  There was a sound like a million sheets being shaken open in the wind and a downdraft of air blasted over me. I’d curled my arms over my head by instinct; I lowered them to see the creature skimming into an impossible leap from which it wasn’t coming down. All around us, purple wings dappled with amber were unfolding from the creatures’ sides. Their funny little legs tucked under their bodies, and they rose as one, as elegant in flight as they’d been clumsy on the ground, their long, silly necks swanlike, their wings beating powerfully at first, then slowing as they caught the winds and were free to glide.

  “Wurrrrgh!” they cried, all that huge herd, but it sounded like singing now. They rose in deep, droning harmony, and the sky rang.

  For a moment we forgot that we were stranded and breathing poisonous air and that we’d nearly been trampled to death. We just sat on the golden moss and watched them. They circled in lazy loops over the meadow, chanting their enormous song, and soared away beyond the golden hills. I wished, suddenly, that I’d touched one, that I knew whether the mulberry pelts were as soft as they looked.

  “Oh, Noel would love it here,” said Carl, and then flinched and lowered his eyes from the sky, and the moment was emphatically over.

  “We’ll find a way off this planet,” I said. “We’ll find him. And Thsaaa.”

  “Yeah, that’s nice,” said Carl bleakly. “Except odds are good they’ve thrown him out of the ship by now.”

  “Dr. Muldoon said she’d do what the Krakkiluks wanted,” I said.

  “Did she?” asked Carl. Because of course he hadn’t been around for that. “But, uh, I’m noticing you’re not on that spaceship, Alice, so I guess they didn’t listen too hard.”

  “They have no leverage at all if they dispense with all their hostages,” said Josephine. “And they have only one human child left.”

  Carl shook his head and pulled clumps of the golden moss out of the ground, and I hoped that it wasn’t either a) people or b) poisonous.

  “The river curves that way, kids,” said the Goldfish, pointing with its nose toward the hills the purple creatures had vanished over.

  So we headed on instead of climbing back through the roots. The slopes of the hills were gentle and the moss was pleasant to walk on at first, but after a while it got kind of exhausting, like walking in snow; it soaked up the energy you put into each step and didn’t bounce any of it back, and the blue sunlight got hotter and hotter, and my burns and bruises began to ache and sting again.

  “Why didn’t they make you strong enough to carry people?” I moaned to the Goldfish, which was a mistake, because of course it told me.

  “So can you work out how much it would have cost to build a higher load-bearing capacity into my manufacturing process?” it was still chattering, a good fifteen minutes later.

  At last, we reached the crest of the hill. “Oh!” said Josephine again.

  The hills broke away before us into steep cliffs over the river. And standing astride the gorge, carved from russet stone, was an immense statue of something—no, somebody—a bit like a fruit bat and a bit like a gibbon, wings expanded and teeth bared. And though whatever it had once held in two of its four hands had fallen away with time, the other two still grasped what were very clearly swords. It stood guard over a city of arches and towers, lining the gorge as if the tangled forest we’d fought our way through had been tamed into ordered croquet hoops.

  “There are people!” breathed Josephine.

  12

  Eeeee. Be quiet. I can hear them coming.

  I don’t hear anything.

  There! Aaah. No. You are right. . . . I am sorry. I thought—I am so hooooooottt.

  Thsaaa? Thsaaa, are you okay? Okay, I’m going to take this thing off.

  No, no. It is not safe. I am well.

  I’m heating the gown up too much. I don’t like your colors. It’s fine, they don’t know to look here. There, you can have it. Oh, it’s weird how now I can’t see you.

  Does that feel better?

  Yeeeees. A little. This amlaa-vel-esh has been overtaxed.

  It’s going to be okay. We’re going to make it off this ship real soon.

  Keep going. You must finish your account.

  Are you sure? Maybe you should rest for a bit.

  I feel better—if I can think of something other than how hot I am.

  Okay. If it helps. So where was I?

  After . . . after we escaped the prison. We found we were in a wider passage, red, with windows to the stars. I said, we must seize the Helen. . . .

  Yeah. That’s right.

  “We can’t just seize the Helen,�
�� I said, like that was so easy. “We’ve got to rescue the others too.”

  Thsaaa said, “I do not think this trick will work again.”

  And yeah, they weren’t going to keep tramping into prisoners’ cells if that always ended up with the prisoners vanishing.

  “We’ve got to try,” I said.

  But we didn’t know where the others were. And we had only the vaguest idea of where the Helen was: down lots of floors and shut in the hangar.

  The corridor we were in was more like a tube. I mean, the floor was curved, a bit like the tunnels of an anthill. So that would have been cool, except everything was so red and humid, it was also a bit like being inside something’s guts or veins, which was kind of gross. Anyway I guess if you’ve got that many feet and they’re all pointy, you don’t need the floor to be flat, and everything was kind of nubbly like car tires so the Krakkiluks didn’t slip. Except there was a flat disc set into the floor by the door we’d come through, and there was a hole the same size in the ceiling above it, so I reckoned that was another lift.

  “Lena can’t be that far away,” I said. “You’d put all your prison cells together, wouldn’t you? Unless you had loads and loads of prisoners, but it doesn’t seem like they do. I don’t think there was anyone else back in that bit.” And I pointed at the door we’d slipped through.

  Thsaaa looked at the lift. “She maaaaaaay be above, or below, perhaps.”

  Then two Krakkiluks came back and we quickly put on the gown and had to shut up and concentrate on not getting stepped on. They were holding gadgets—I could see they were gadgets, like maybe they were for scanning for clues or something. And then another two Krakkiluks came along and they all clanked around and made crunching noises that maybe meant, “Where have those spawn prisoners gone?” and “I don’t know. Do you think we’ll get in trouble? Let’s kill them very hard when we find them.”

  Or maybe they were saying, “Who cares, they’re just spawn, it doesn’t matter where they are!” and “You’re right, I was overreacting, let’s go and relax.”

  That’s what I hoped they meant.

  So whether they were going to relax or not, the Krakkiluks did go away. The shiny black one touched a panel on the wall and stood on the lift and rose up into the ceiling, the others went clomping away along the passage, and we pressed as close against the round wall as we could. The way they each had four feet, stamping past us, kept making me feel as though there were twice as many Krakkiluks as there actually were, which was not a great feeling.

  We couldn’t hang out there against the wall forever, so we went and looked at the lift, and at the panel Shiny had touched, and we were worried about even trying because maybe it would tell the ship where we were. But eventually Thsaaa reached up a tentacle and touched it.

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe it recognizes Krakkiluk DNA,” I said. “Or, you know, what they have instead of DNA, because maybe it’s something different.”

  So that was bad, because it looked like we were stuck on that floor. We couldn’t go back or up or down or sideways, so we had to go forward. And so we were back to shuffling along together, and I fell over Thsaaa’s skirt and Thsaaa fell over me and basically we were like the world’s worst pantomime horse. The amlaa-vel-esh is very stretchy and clingy, so one Morror can move in it easily. But one Morror and one human, not so much.

  So we kept on picking ourselves up and falling over again and bumped and tripped and got annoyed with each other all along the corridor until we caught up with some Krakkiluks who were finishing up a crunchy conversation in an open doorway. And even though we didn’t want to be close to them, it was just as well or we wouldn’t have been able to duck through under their legs and we wouldn’t have gotten out of that corridor at all.

  The Krakkiluks finished talking and clumped ahead onto another lift disc. The doors we’d come through slid shut, leaving us alone in a kind of lobby with no windows.

  “So I guess we’ll try to find the Helen first,” I said. Because we couldn’t go back now.

  We also couldn’t use the lift, but there was an open door into another passage. And that led to this huge semicircular room—like, three times as big as my parents’ whole cinema—with lots of pipes and big tanks in it. And it was all steamy and red like everywhere else, and it absolutely stank. Like, wow. I thought I was going to throw up. It was kind of like rotting fish and filthy feet but a whole lot worse. And down below, an open vat of gray-black sludge was bubbling and pipes coiled up and led down to a big round tank of water on the other side of the space that was nearly clean but not quite, yet.

  “Uuuuuuchhh,” went Thsaaa.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Suuuurely the sewage works,” Thsaaa moaned. “What are they eating to account for this?”

  I felt a bit offended that the Krakkiluks kept their prisoners next to their poo. I know when people are throwing people out of airlocks already, nothing they do that’s less bad than that should really matter. But I don’t know, it still seemed really rude.

  But there were a couple of good things about the sewage works. One was that I guessed the Krakkiluks didn’t like it there much either. So it was nearly empty, just a couple of workers all the way down at the bottom, one cleaning out an empty tank while the other was mending a bit of piping. They were the only Krakkiluks I’d seen so far wearing actual clothes, sort of plastic-looking capes to protect their shells from anything icky. Also, it was noisy, because of the pipes and the horrible squelching and plopping noises from the tanks, so we could talk quietly to each other and not be heard.

  And another good thing about the sewage place was that it was so big; it was, like, four floors deep (we were on the highest level) with a walkway at each level running around the space. So we could maybe get somewhere else and not just go round and round the same floor forever after all.

  I couldn’t see how you could get from one level to another at first. Then one of the Krakkiluk workers went over to this long strip of heavy diamond mesh that ran vertically from floor to floor, and scuttled up it in no time at all and stood there in midair, hanging on with four legs with both upper arms free to work on another bit of piping. And then I realized that there were lots of these strips, and of course they were ladders.

  But ladders that were not built for people who only have two arms and two legs and are four foot three and a half and jammed under an invisibility gown with their Morror friend. The gaps between the joints were as big as I was.

  “Weeela splaflak!” said Thsaaa.

  “Yeah, I know.” I sighed.

  We watched the two Krakkiluks working. The one on the ladder swung off onto the second level and clattered around to check a panel on one of the walls that maybe said THE SEWAGE PLANT IS WORKING FINE—TIME FOR A BREAK or YOU ARE NOT MENDING THOSE PIPES FAST ENOUGH—WORK FASTER, but hopefully not HAVEN’T YOU NOTICED THOSE ALIEN SPAWN WATCHING YOU FROM OVER THERE?

  “We can’t climb down if we’re both in this,” I whispered, plucking at the freezing folds of the invisibility gown.

  “No,” said Thsaaa. “You must wear it,” they added bravely, after a pause.

  “That’s really nice of you,” I said. “But you’re used to wearing it. I’d get all tangled up in it and fall off. And anyway, what if you go bright yellow or something? You’d show up too much.”

  “I have more control than thaaat,” said Thsaaa huffily, but didn’t press it. So we bump-tripped around to the ladder farthest from either of the Krakkiluks, and I slipped out of the gown and stood there completely visible to anyone who happened to look over, although at least there were these big coils of piping in the way.

  I stepped out onto the ladder. That was okay. Getting down to the next diamond-shaped hole in the mesh was not so easy. I had to sort of, like, sidle down, hanging on to the sides of the diamond, until I was crouching, with my bum hanging out into space, right over the horrible vats of sludge, and then I had to sort of slide my feet diagonally down o
ne side of the next diamond, and then do it all over again.

  A flutter of cold air told me Thsaaa was still climbing beside me. Otherwise, it felt as if I was completely alone. I was sure they were climbing slowly on purpose, to stay next to me, because it had to be easier for them with all those long tentacles. Carl would be better at this than me, I thought. He’s taller, which would help, but he also likes climbing things more than I do, and he is better at just doing things rather than thinking about all the ways they can go wrong.

  We’d just cleared the third level, when one of those round doors opened up, and Krnk-ni-Plik and Tlag-li-Glig clanked through onto the second level. As in, right below us and right opposite us.

  “Aaaah!” cried Thsaaa, very softly, and there was a chilly whoosh as they lunged sideways and sort of hugged me in their tentacles, wrapping me up in folds of amlaa-vel-esh as best they could, and we both froze. I almost literally froze, actually. I couldn’t feel the warmth of Thsaaa’s body through the amlaa-vel-esh from the outside, just the cold, cold, invisible fabric.

  “Clunk! Crack! Splunk!” said Krnk-ni-Plik, and the two worker Krakkiluks came to attention, bowed, and then hugged each other.

  “Splack, clap, slop,” they said apologetically. I buried my face in Thsaaa’s freezing invisible shoulder and clenched my teeth to stop them chattering.

  I knew that I was only partly invisible, and if the Krakkiluks looked, they’d see my head and maybe one hand and half a leg floating together by the ladder.

  Tlag-li-Glig and Krnk-ni-Plik started patrolling around the walkway. I mean, maybe this was just something they did every day, but almost certainly they were looking for us, and Tlag-li-Glig came around to our ladder. If he started climbing up, if he even looked up . . .