Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  “I’m not in charge,” objected Josephine. “I find leadership roles restrictive.”

  “We’re doing what you say,” argued Carl.

  “That’s not me leading, that’s you being intelligent enough to recognize the most logical course of action,” Josephine said acidly.

  “Which always comes from you.”

  Josephine looked at him. “So far, yes.”

  “Gosh, being tired and hungry sure makes people grouchy!” said the Goldfish valiantly. “But hey, at least from here on you can rest and keep going at the same time.” I felt a weird moment of solidarity with it, like apparently we both had the job of uselessly trying to raise morale.

  But we cut another leaf boat and this time tried really hard to attach the Goldfish’s cable to it (“Duct tape,” said Josephine mournfully) and we couldn’t, so we looped a coil around Carl’s arm and we pushed the leaf out into the water and lay down, and the Goldfish pulled us onward as the sun vanished into the malachite sea.

  A leaf pad floating across the sea is a lovely place to rest, but not so good a place to actually sleep. It rocks all the time and not always in a nice, lullabyish way, and sometimes we got stuck in a tangle of puffball plants and had to get up and drag our raft over the leaves to clear water again. And it got cold in the night, under those clear, pine-green skies. Still, I did sleep a bit, off and on, and I woke up, to find an inky-blue dawn was spreading over the sky.

  The dawn wasn’t what woke me, though. I woke up was because Carl was coughing.

  I looked at him, but he just shrugged and made a face, so we didn’t say anything about it. At least it eased off once he’d been sitting up for a while.

  Then Josephine, who had been curled into a tight ball on the leaf beside me, started awake, as if by instinct.

  “Look,” she whispered, pointing.

  The sky ahead was full of lights. Green and white like the puffballs on the water, they illuminated a city like a three-dimensional spiderweb, metal arches piled upon arches into a tangled pyramid that rose through the dawn sky to pierce the clouds—twice, three times as high as any tower I’d seen on Earth. Homes dangled like fruit or rose like flowers from its curling heights. Little flying machines buzzed around its distant upper heights like fruit flies.

  And people—people—were emerging from their homes into the damp dawn air, people were spreading their wings and flapping off in great flocks like starlings (and yet also they were like crowds of humans at rush hour). People were riding sky buses; people were gathering in little airborne clusters to chat and hooting like airborne howler monkeys to greet a new day. You could see they were people instantly, even at this distance. You would have known even if you saw one alone, without the city they’d built. I can’t explain it. You can just tell.

  14

  You screamed, and I hastened down the ladder, afraid for your life.

  I didn’t scream. You were still spaced out on Takwuk, you probably heard it way screamier than it was. But okay, yes, I did make a bit of a sound as I jumped backward, and I heard the Krakkiluk make a low grrrrrkrr sort of noise.

  But—it was coming from behind the Krakkiluk. And down a bit.

  I felt Thsaaa land beside me in a rush of cold.

  The Krakkiluk didn’t move. It was facing me, but it wasn’t looking at me after all. It didn’t have eyes. And it didn’t have internal organs: it had a long split down its abdomen, and inside it was empty, like something very soft and squishy had pulled itself out.

  “It’s molted its shell!” I said, suddenly very excited.

  “Eeeeeeeee,” said Thsaaa. “That is disgusting.”

  “It’s not disgusting,” I said. “It’s interesting. Don’t any Morror animals shed their skins? Aww, I wish we could have seen it do it. And now it’ll have to wait for its new shell to harden, and I guess it’ll have to have all its decorations done again, and—”

  There was a splash from behind the shell.

  The shell was standing on, like, a special round shedding-your-shell platform, and a ramp led back from this into a bubbling Takwuk bath. The actual Krakkiluk was lying in the water, all pink and raw and floppy looking. Its eyes swiveled toward me, and it moaned and tried to sit up. It managed to lift a weak, rubbery-looking arm but sank back into the water, exhausted. I came a little closer, and it shrank back and sort of curled up behind all its legs.

  It was scared, I thought. It could hardly move, and with its new shell still growing, it was soft as a poached egg and weak as a kitten. I wondered if it felt naked, and embarrassed, so pink without any paintings or decorations. There weren’t any other Krakkiluks about, so I think maybe molting was very private. Even though it was twice my size, it couldn’t hurt me . . . but I could hurt it, I realized. I could probably even kill it. I mean, of course I wasn’t going to, but it—I mean, he or she or they—didn’t know that.

  I wondered if it was also a nice person, in a Krakkiluk kind of way, and whether there were Krakkiluks anywhere who didn’t agree with the kind of thing the ones we’d met had been doing. Not that it was very helpful right now if there were, but it was still sort of nice to think about.

  “It’s okay,” I said to it. “We’re just passing through. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  But there was no translator box, so it couldn’t understand me.

  “Quick!” breathed Thsaaa. “Before it recovers its senses and calls for help!”

  I looked around. The only obvious way out of the room was back up the lift shaft—there was a door, too, but we’d seen that the only way to open them was by DNA recognition or whatever.

  “Oh, wait,” I said.

  And I went back to the shell and took hold of the claw piece and snapped it off. The Krakkiluk managed to sit up a bit and groan some more when it saw what I was doing, but it soon flopped back again.

  “Sorry,” I said. The Krakkiluk’s eyes stared up at me despairingly from above the surface of the water. “I expect taking bits of other people’s exoskeletons is rude. But you know, so is kidnapping and trying to kill people, so you have got it coming a bit. You should get a different job.”

  It won’t work, I thought as I approached the door. There’s no way it’s going to actually work.

  I couldn’t reach the panel, even when I jumped. “Thsaaa, come over here,” I called.

  I held out the claw and apparently empty air took it, causing another round of alarmed groans from the pool. “Ohhh, I seeee . . . ,” Thsaaa said, and they reached up and laid the claw against the panel.

  The door opened.

  “Yes!” I said, and Thsaaa went “Wooooooo!”, flinging their tentacles wide. I know, because one nearly knocked me over. I don’t think I’d ever known them to get so enthusiastic about anything, except maybe tomato ketchup. “Did I not say, Noooooell?” Thsaaa cried. “We can do aaaaanything!”

  “Bye-bye!” I called to the raw Krakkiluk in the bath, as Thsaaa threw the invisibility gown over me again. It was silly, but maybe I was a bit hopped up on the Takwuk fumes too.

  We waddled down another corridor, past a mess room where Krakkiluks were eating things that all seemed to have been rolled up into balls—surprisingly tidily; you expected them to be maybe slobbering like jackals or something. The fresher air in the corridor cooled Thsaaa’s head a bit.

  “I think we should go back to the cells,” they said. “Now that we have the claw, we can free the others, perhaps. We know where to look for them, at least. But if we go onward—this ship is so large, even if we find the Helen, we might never find our way back.”

  I hesitated because we might be really close to the Helen, and if we found her, we could maybe go and rescue Carl and Alice and Josephine straight away. But Thsaaa was right. And Lena was so clever, she could probably help.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  So we doubled back, past the poor naked Krakkiluk and back through the Takwuk baths, trying not to get all giggly and full of ourselves, and through the cargo bay, and the sewag
e room—but we didn’t have to climb up the ladders this time, we used the lifts, and finally we were back on the same corridor that led to our cells. And there was the lift that should take us to where the others were being held.

  Thsaaa touched the claw to the panel, and the lift carried us upward. And yes, there was another row of cells like ours. Thsaaa opened the nearest one.

  “It would have been polite to knock,” said a voice.

  Lena Jerome was sitting against the back of the cell, her hands folded in her lap, calmly doing nothing at all. And she was wearing not only big fancy earrings but also big fancy bracelets and a big fancy choker necklace that I hadn’t seen before; they must have been inside her suit.

  She was a very unsurprisable person, but one eyebrow did go up a little bit when she saw the door open and didn’t see us.

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, that puts a different complexion on it. Hello, Thsaaa.” She snapped her fingers. “Resume,” she said.

  Her jewelry poured off her, like it had melted, and split into hundreds of tiny spider robots. They spread into a pool around her before reorganizing themselves into a little gold device which projected a virtual screen on which Lena was soon entering commands, her fingers a blur.

  “Wow, that’s awesome,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  She was, again, surprised enough to raise one eyebrow. “Noel?” she said.

  I stepped out of the amlaa-vel-esh. “It’s both of us,” I said.

  Lena nodded. “I imagine that must be very uncomfortable,” she said.

  “Yeah, it is,” I said. “Can I have a drink of water? Anyway, we’re rescuing you. You’ve gotta come with us.”

  “Hmm,” Lena said, getting to her feet. She is very tall. “I congratulate you on your escape. But how do you plan on rescuing me?”

  There was a pause. Thsaaa pulled off the amlaa-vel-esh, gave it an awkward little shake, and threw it over Lena’s head.

  Lena’s calves and feet stood there looking strange and large and completely visible. “Well, there we are. That won’t work,” said Lena. She pulled off the invisibility gown and gravely handed it back to Thsaaa.

  “Perhaps we can get down to the Helen and get a couple more invisibility gowns,” I said.

  Lena, already back at work, shook her head once. “It would give them too many opportunities to intercept you.”

  The door had slid shut behind us, but a column of gold spider robots crawled under it and joined the others.

  “What are they doing?” Thsaaa inquired.

  “Spying. Infiltrating,” said Lena. “Building on the data from the Helen’s scans. I’m developing a virtual model of the ship and, at the same time, analyzing its computers.”

  “You’re hacking the ship?” I asked.

  “Of course. Why do you think I wanted to delay our capture even when it was inevitable?”

  “How can that be possible?” breathed Thsaaa.

  “I am a genius aided by thousands of robots that experiment endlessly until they find something that works,” said Lena. “But yes.” She frowned at her virtual screen. “I did not expect to be successful. This is going remarkably well.”

  “Can you open the doors and let the Helen out?” I asked.

  “It’s going to take more than that,” Lena said. “But if this algorithm completes successfully, then yes, perhaps, and I may be able to put out the lights on most of the ship and tamper with the ship’s life-support systems.”

  “What, you mean, like, kill the Krakkiluks?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Probably not, but I have some other ideas,” said Lena, staring at her virtual screens. One showed strange shapes and dots that I think must have been the Krakkiluks’ writing, and the other was in Häxeri, like it was the translation.

  “That should allow you to rescue Mr. Trommler and his daughter and escort them to the Helen.”

  “What do you mean, we can rescue them?” I said. “You’re coming too, right? You can turn out all the lights, and then you won’t need an invisibility gown and it’ll be fine.”

  “The lift shaft that leads to the hangar is here,” Lena went on, ignoring what I’d said and bringing up another screen. It showed a map of the inside of the Krakkiluk ship—it wasn’t quite complete, there were big blank patches, but a lot of it was there. “I’m labeling this deck 571b for convenience. You’ll need to be able to override the systems.”

  She looked up. “You’ll be going without me,” she added. “When we have concluded this conversation, I will stay in this cell for perhaps another twenty minutes. Then I will head here.” She pointed to a detail of her map. “There appears to be a cavity between floors where I can continue to work without being detected.” She reached for the Krakkiluk claw and snapped off a joint. “Do you mind? I can use the robots to get through the doors, but this will save time.”

  “What?” I said, feeling, all of a sudden, very tired and helpless and a bit like crying. “Why would you want to stay on the ship?”

  “If they lose their hostages, they lose their power to blackmail either of our species,” Lena said.

  “But you toooooo are a hostage,” Thsaaa said.

  “Only one,” said Lena grimly. “Not very much leverage in only one.” And for a moment she looked down, and her mouth went tight. And I didn’t like it.

  “President Chakrabarty told Lady Sklat-kli-Slkak that her actions amounted to an act of war. But right now, Earth and Aushalawa-Moraaa have no idea where the enemy is, or where we are. We reached the Alpha Centauri system and then vanished, and our captors have succeeded both in sending communications through hyperspace and in disguising the source of the signal so that it is impossible to trace it back to our present location.” She looked at us patiently. “Are you following me so far?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a bit patronized.

  “They also have Rasmus Trommler, who has supplied ships and weapons to the military for years,” Lena went on, relentlessly. “And he is familiar with Morror technology too; he copied it to build the Helen. He knows more about the military hardware of both our species than anyone. Certainly more than I do. The Krakkiluks already have the advantage. If they learn what he knows, then any attempt to correct that imbalance will be useless if it comes to war. And suppose they torture him. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said again. “I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t want to leave Mr. Trommler even without all that. But I don’t see why this means you’ve got to stay on this stupid ship and probably get killed. I know you’ve got to open the doors and stuff, but why can’t you do that from the Helen?”

  “I might be able to open the doors of the hangar from on board the Helen,” said Lena. “I might be able to disable the tractor beam that brought us onboard in the first place. But I could not keep it disabled. Before we were a mile from the ship, I would lose any control over it, and the Krakkiluks would drag us back.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But you could, maybe, leave these robots behind to do your wooooork,” suggested Thsaaa.

  “They’ll need my supervision once the Krakkiluks realize they’re being hacked and start trying to fight back,” said Lena. “But there is another reason. I think I can hack the communication systems the Krakkiluks used to telephone Earth. I can contact Earth and Aushalawa-Moraaa. Through hyperspace, without the disguise on the signal. I will have to stay on the ship to keep the channel open for as long as possible so that Earth can trace it. I can transmit everything I have learned about this ship and the species that produced it, and all the data I have not been able to analyze. I can show them where we are. Information about the enemy is critical in a time of war.”

  “But there can’t be an actual war—we’ve just had one.” I groaned. “If we all get away, then the Krakkiluks can’t make Earth or the Morrors do anything, and then . . .”

  I stopped.

  “We can’t expect this to be the end of the Krakkiluks’ claim to Aushalawa-Moraaa,” Lena said
. “And they have Valerie. If they return, knowing her methods, I don’t know what will happen. But I can give our side a chance to respond to what has happened now, before the enemy makes their next move,” said Lena. “Earth may be able to send ships to rescue Josephine and the other children.” She paused. “And just possibly, me.”

  “But we can do that!” I said. “That’s, like, the whole plan! If we can get the Helen out of the ship, we can fly down to the planet and pick them up and then we’ll—”

  “No,” said Lena, with the most amount of expression I had seen. “Listen to me, Noel. If you make it as far as the Helen, you will not waste time and squander my work on a fool’s mission to that planet. Your sentiments are understandable, but you do not have time to indulge them. You must get yourselves and Rasmus Trommler as far out of Krakkiluk hands as fast as possible. You must get back to Aushalawa-Moraaa. The Helen should be capable of retracing her steps through hyperspace. The EEC and the Council of Lonthaa-Ra-Moraaa will take it from there.”

  “But my brother’s down there! I know he is. He must be! Because I was working really hard at knowing that all the time. And your sister, and Alice. We can’t fly off and leave them. Don’t you care?” I said. I didn’t mean to. I suddenly felt very angry about everything, Lena included. “Don’t you care whether you make it or not? Aren’t you bothered about Josephine? You talk like maybe someone else can rescue her as, like, an afterthought. Anything could happen by then! Maybe Earth won’t be able to send anyone back! But we’re right here now. And Thsaaa and I care about her, and Carl, and Alice, even if you don’t.”

  Lena looked up from her work and stared at me in silence so hard that I squirmed a bit. “I don’t wish to discuss this,” she said, not angrily, not like she was upset. She just said it. She turned back to her device and did something to it, and it separated again into thousands of robots. One part of the swarm broke off from the rest and remodeled itself into, like, a little gold rod, about the size of a chocolate bar, with a button on one end.

  “Take this,” she said. “Press the button, and you will have a virtual screen that operates much like a tablet. You should find it easy to operate. Use it to receive my instructions. Find a suitable hiding place close to Trommler’s location and await them.”