Space Hostages

by Sophia McDougall

  “You knooow where he is?” Thsaaa asked.

  “Yes. There is a map of the ship already loaded on the device you’re holding. But perhaps this would be easier still.”

  She held out her hand. A single spider robot scurried in excited loops around her palm.

  “Put it on the ground and follow it,” she said. “It will take you to Trammler. You’d better leave now. I will contact you when it’s time, once you’re safe on the Helen with Trammler and Christa. You will not attempt to rescue the others. Do you understand why not?”

  “Because it won’t work,” I said crossly.

  “Because it will wreck the chances of escape for any of us,” said Lena, looking a little desperate. “Please. I have to be able to trust you.”

  I scuffed at the rubbery floor with my boot. “All right,” I said in a messed-up little voice.

  “Good. Then follow the spider.”

  I reached for Thsaaa and felt the amlaa-vel-esh sweep over me. I was glad. I wanted to get out of the cell. I’d thought finding another human would make me feel a lot better than it had.

  “Noel,” Lena said, as Thsaaa opened the door. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I looked back. She was trying to look at where she thought we were, but she hadn’t gotten it quite right.

  “I saw what appeared to be a forest fire on the planet,” she said. “And when I was left alone in here, the first thing I did was instruct the robots to assemble themselves into a spectrometer. Examining the sunlight through the planet’s atmosphere, I observed clear A and B bands in the Fraunhofer lines.”

  “So what?” I said sulkily. I didn’t know what any of that meant, obviously.

  “It all indicates oxygen on the surface,” said Lena. She sighed. She looked kind of younger. I mean, she acts like she’s about a million, but when you think about it, she’s only two years older than Christa.

  “I wish . . . ,” she said, and broke off.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I wish I had some duct tape,” Lena said.

  The tiny gold spider got its bearings immediately and ran away down the corridor.

  It led us right out of the prison block, which was surprising—unless Lena was wrong or the spider wasn’t working, Mr. Trommler was being held in a completely different part of the ship. We followed it to one of the lifts, and when Thsaaa touched the claw to the panel, the spider crawled up their tentacle and flashed rapidly, which I think made us whoosh past a lot of floors without stopping so the Krakkiluks couldn’t get on or stop us.

  We heard angry crunching sounds and clatters as we zoomed past—the Krakkiluks knew by now that someone invisible was running around their ship, and they wanted to catch us. But they couldn’t; the lift stopped, and the spider jumped off so fast we barely had time to follow before the lift rocketed on down and then almost immediately zoomed back up again. We watched it for a few seconds, bouncing up and down the shaft like a crazy ball, and then stopping, somewhere above us. So I think that made it hard for the Krakkiluks to know where we’d gone. Hope so, anyway.

  And the spider led us on, past exercise grounds, and through a really tall room that I think was, like, the energy reactor, and then up again, into another prongy bit, where there were lots of meeting rooms, I guess? They were big and covered in gold and paintings. The spider stopped outside a door. There was a window too, but neither of us was tall enough to look through it into the room—but we could hear.

  Mr. Trommler was in there talking in Swedish—and so were the Krakkiluks, through their translator boxes. So all I could understand was that Mr. Trommler was saying “Nay” a lot, which must mean no, and he sounded very scared and very miserable. But we couldn’t do anything—we can’t do anything, until Lena calls to tell us what to do, or she makes the lights go out or something.

  So we went and found this cupboard place in the meeting room a few doors down from Mr. Trommler and we’re here now. We’re hiding here and waiting for something to happen. And it’s true, the screen does work pretty much like a tablet, so we’ve been using it to record all this. But I don’t know how to transmit stuff through hyperspace, so unless we do manage to get to the Helen and fly home somehow, I don’t see how anyone’s going to get to listen to it except us.

  If Lena is right—if my people and yours send their ships . . .

  I just . . . I don’t know if I think they’ll do that, Thsaaa. Even if they know where we are, it’s such a long way. And we don’t have many ships that can do hyperspace, have we?

  I hope Lena does something soon.

  Because I’ve been in this cupboard a long time, and now I really really need to pee.

  Oh, Noooooooell. Why did you not use the convenience in Lena’s cell?

  Because you and Lena were both there.

  We would have looked away.

  Yeah, but you could’ve heard and I just couldn’t, not in front of you, and definitely not in front of Lena.

  Your scruples . . . are . . . absurd.

  Well, I don’t care, I’m going to wait until we’re on the Helen and there’s a proper toilet.

  You okay, Thsaaa? How are you holding up?

  Hot. Veeeeeerry . . . hot.

  It’s going to be okay.

  It can’t be much longer now.

  PART 3

  15

  “So, are we just going to roll up and say hi?” I asked, my voice getting slightly squeaky at the thought. None of the fruit-bat people had noticed us yet.

  “I think we should get closer and watch awhile first,” said Josephine. “We don’t want to say hi to the wrong people.”

  “Yes!” I said. “Just . . . ease into it. That sounds fine.”

  “Goldfish, dim down!” Josephine said. The Goldfish did, until it was just a blue pair of lights in the shadows.

  We waded ashore and picked our way through the tangle of roots and funnels, toward the very edge of the city. Here and there between the arches we could see white columns of water descending from upper tiers and the fruit-bat people flying in and out of the spray, drinking—washing, like birds at a waterfall. Some of them swung upside down from arches to preen themselves, others filled pots and swooped off to lower levels. They had no more need for clothes than the Krakkiluks; they were covered in fur whose color was hard to make out in the electric light. But when we were closer still, we could see that they wore jewelry—flashes of gold at their throats and wrists and feet.

  Except some of them did wear a little more than that. “Look at those guys,” said Carl.

  “What?” I said.

  “In the flying car thing.”

  The flying car things were a bit like Roman litters; platforms mostly open to the air and the passengers reclining inside, but borne up on four rotary blades, one at each corner. I’d noticed several making leisurely circuits of the lower reaches of the city before soaring away.

  “Which one?”

  “There—oh, they’ve gone. They were wearing, like, armor,” said Carl. “Breastplates and things on their arms and that.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “Painted armor. And covered with beads and stuff. Don’t you get it? Trying to look like Krakkiluks.”

  I thought about the social and cultural implications of this.

  “Oh, dear,” I said.

  “Well, we’re not going to talk to them.” Josephine said.

  “How much say do you think we’ll have?” said Carl, and I remembered the cough and the imperiled little brother and managed to stop myself from snapping at him. I was starting to have trouble remembering the last time he’d said anything that wasn’t about how everything was going to go wronger than it already was.

  Carl glanced at me and maybe sensed what I was thinking, because his expression softened a bit. “What is that smell?” he asked, after a pause.

  The smell was not nice. Climbing up onto a higher loop of root, we could see that while the city was like a tower of lace glittering in the morning dew and hu
ng with houses like colored lanterns, it also had a giant rubbish dump heaped beneath it. There were far fewer lights down there among the lowest arches, just occasional strands of bright filament strung between them.

  But some people obviously lived there. We could see them emerging and flapping up to join the throng above, from hundreds of basket structures that looked as flimsy as paper lamps, dangling just above the mess.

  And there were people living even lower down than that. People perched atop arches choked in rubbish or dangling from webs of rope with nothing but homemade canopies of lily-pad leaves to shield them from wind and rain.

  We crept closer through the heaped coils of roots, the Goldfish hovering low, to where the gray root cables twisted around a massive strut right at the city’s base. We crouched at the base of a red funnel that spread into a wide trumpet-shape above us, and as the daylight grew stronger, we could see people fluttering about over the dump, picking at things, among a flock of little flying scarlet animals scavenging like seagulls back at home. The people were all kinds of deep red and warm purple, from bright burgundy to deep magenta to violet, and some were a pale, silvery lilac. Every now and then one would fly up and tie their pickings to a growing store of booty dangling from a crown of an arch; sometimes there were tussles in midair, sometimes one would find some kind of prize amid the litter and soar up, whooping, while the others gathered around to see or share or try to snatch it.

  They were small, these rubbish-dump people. At first it was hard to get the perspective right, because nothing in sight was familiar, but then a group of larger fruit-bat people swooped up and perched on an arch, and the little ones gathered around with the bundles of things they’d collected, and something changed hands—food, or money, maybe, and then the bigger fruit-bat people gestured and flew off, and the little ones got back to work.

  “They’re kids,” I said. “Kids living in a rubbish dump.”

  At this point, we very nearly got discovered. A trio of fruit-bat people adults came swooping from some of those lower basket houses and out a little into the forest, and hung together from a loop of root barely thirty feet from us, chatting and eating breakfast. We froze. There was no other way to hide. Their voices were high and musical and very loud; they sang, almost, like birds. One fruit-bat person was a deep garnet red and two were plum purple; they wore sensible belts with pouches at their waists, and the bare skin of their wings was painted with swirls and spirals of yellow and blue. They shared a package of something like fruit and something crumbly that looked a bit like cheese but almost certainly wasn’t, and my stomach growled. Thirty-four hours since we’d eaten, now.

  The fruit-bat people finished their meal, sighed gustily, dropped their litter into the forest, and flipped themselves around so they were standing upright on the arc of root.

  I noticed that none of them were wearing colorful jewelry or Krakkiluk decorations—but they all had plain, tight-fitting black collars around their necks. One of them tapped their collar and cocked their head meaningfully at the others before all three flew away. Now I thought about it, the ones in the flying cars had been wearing the same thing.

  “We should maybe have said something to them,” I said. Our instinct had been to stay still and hope they didn’t see us, but they hadn’t been particularly scary looking. How were we going to pick the perfect person to reveal ourselves to?

  “I think rush hour’s over,” said Josephine. And it was true that the city’s heights were growing quieter. A great flock of flying vehicles and fruit-bat people flapping along under their own power were heading out across the sea.

  “Maybe they have a very active fishing industry?” I wondered.

  “Look, this is not going to work,” said Carl. “If anyone has a spaceship here, it’s going to be the ones who are literally on top, and those guys? Are dressed up like Krakkiluks.”

  Josephine scrubbed her hands over her face. “Okay,” she said. “So, what do you want, Carl? If I ever was at all in charge, I abdicate and anoint you leader. So. You decide.”

  “I want to not be here, to begin with,” said Carl, and there was a dangerous flash of something between him and Josephine.

  “Well, let us know when you’ve got a plan to make that happen,” grated Josephine.

  “Carl, she saved our lives,” I said.

  “Did she?” said Carl.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?” said Josephine.

  “Hey, kids,” chirped the Goldfish desperately. “How about we all—well, maybe no singing what with the oxygen situation—how about a, no, guess it’s not a group hug moment . . . how about a time-out? Five minutes, everyone cool down, breathe, but not too deeply. . . .”

  It was actually a pretty good idea. But it was also too late.

  “Jo,” Carl said roughly, “to me it looks like Alice and me are going to die slow instead of quick, and you’re going to die for no reason at all.”

  Josephine’s skin went ashy. Without another word she turned and stalked away among the roots.

  “Hey, wait, Josephine!” said the Goldfish, bustling after her.

  I dithered, not sure whether to go after her or stay and yell at Carl. I thought I’d decided to follow Josephine, but somehow I found I had too much yelling to do and swung back to make a start on it.

  “For god’s sake! Why did you have to say that?”

  “She might have been okay,” said Carl emptily. “If she’d stayed on the damn ship. Dr. Muldoon was going to do what they wanted. You said that, Alice. She’d have been okay.”

  “Or she might have been thrown out without the Goldfish and without oxygen! God, Carl. None of us wants to be here. None of us wanted to get kidnapped by Krakkiluks! But we’re not dead yet. Can you just . . . just be a bit more positive for five seconds? You did it on Mars, and we got through that, and this is not that much worse.”

  “Yeah, it is, and I can do the whole bright-side thing for Noel, and he’s not here,” said Carl, and to my horror his eyes were glistening and his voice cracked.

  “Well, what about me?” I said, and bad things were happening to my voice too. “What, you could keep it together if Noel was here? Then why can’t you damn well try and do it for me? I’ve been doing it for you.”

  Carl blinked rapidly and opened his mouth to say something but ended up coughing instead.

  “Yalu! LuWEEma!” interrupted a new voice.

  And suddenly, hanging between us, was an upside-down, pointed lilac face. It turned from Carl to me and back, four round black eyes considered us. Carl and I stared back at it.

  “Hello,” I said weakly.

  The dangling lilac person extended a small three-fingered hand and poked Carl hard in the forehead.

  “Ow,” said Carl, and “HEY yalu!” the lilac person exclaimed.

  “OOO ma HIN-NIN!” yodeled another voice, and something hit me on the shoulder. It was a hunk of a broken pot.

  The kids from the rubbish dump had us surrounded. A group of them was holding Josephine, her hands already tied behind her back. Many were holding lengths of metal pipe and stones. The Goldfish was nowhere to be seen.

  “Um. We come in peace,” said Carl.

  16

  “So, well, this happened,” said Josephine heavily.

  Now the rubbish-dump kids were close up, I could see that some wore necklaces and bracelets of colored plastic, others had shaved strips into the fur of their chests, and they all had patterns painted on the insides of their wings. But none of them wore the collars we’d seen on the adults. Lilac Fur had pierced ears, though ribbons of bright plastic were threaded through the holes instead of earrings.

  Lilac Fur fluttered down in front of us to grab a handful of my hair, exclaiming it with intrigue. Then she/he/they seized Carl’s arm and wagged it up and down, apparently fascinated by the absence of either wings or additional legs.

  “HIN-NIN ulanae lalOONha, Uwaelee,” pleaded another of the kids, a tall, plum-colored one, who maybe thought Lilac was a
bit too happy to get their hands all over the alien invaders. I’d never heard anything like the way their voices leaped from a solid chest voice to ringing soprano within a single syllable, as effortlessly aerial as their bodies in flight. It was dizzying to listen to.

  Carl was trying to communicate through improvised sign language: he pointed at the sky, mimed a rapid descent that ended with a splat, and then walked his fingers across his palm and finished up with his hands spread in a “so now here we are” gesture.

  Lilac tipped their head this way and that, interested, but it was hard to tell what they’d understood. And then decided to grab my hair again.

  “Ow,” I said as Lilac yanked rather hard, and I tried to twist away. This alarmed the onlookers, and a small indigo kid with a green plastic pouch belt around their waist threw another lump of rubbish and hit Carl on the head.

  Fortunately, it was something squashy and smelly and Carl was not seriously damaged. But Lilac flapped over to Small Indigo—using me as a jumping-off post on the way—and, as far as we could tell, delivered a good telling-off.

  “BULin-NIN aelOONya,” complained Plum, who I was going to assume was either Lilac’s second-in-command or joint leader, and then Lilac and Plum flew up a few yards among the tangle of roots to hold an animated conference in midair. They somersaulted and hovered, sometimes gesturing at us or at the group—several of whom, in the meantime, indulged themselves in experimentally poking us.

  And then all of a sudden, Plum and Lilac reached some kind of agreement. “HIN-nalay!” called Plum, and the whole gang closed in on us. Four small hands seized on each limb, and with some difficulty, they hauled us into the air.

  “Yalu, EEN naweeta,” grumbled the one straining with my right arm.

  Flying is, in theory, a wonderful thing to do. But dangling facedown between grabby fruit-bat people was horribly uncomfortable, and hurtling through the forest with no way to even shield our faces from arcing roots was pretty terrifying. They didn’t fly us far, though. In barely a minute, we were under the city and above the dump, where they dropped us. Unsurprisingly, it smelled even worse close up. Plum swiftly tied my hands and then Carl’s with a length of twine—which had the effect of removing what little ability we had to even try to talk to them, as we weren’t going to get very far by speaking English loudly and slowly.