“Helen of Troy, do you read me? Come in, Helen of Troy.”
I sat up. It couldn’t be possible.
“Helen of Troy—please, is anyone there? Do you copy?”
“This is the Helen of Troy. I can hear you, Captain Dare,” replied the Helen. “Your daughter is sitting on my roof, eating pizza.”
The others all looked at me.
“No way,” said Carl.
“Oh my god,” I said, dropping my pizza, and I slid down through the hatch back onto the bridge, leaving a smear of marinara sauce on the Helen’s roof.
“Mum?!” I said as the others followed me down. “Mum, Mum, it’s Alice—is that really you?”
Mum let out a very long breath before she answered, as if she’d been holding it for a long time.
“I told you I’d catch up,” she said finally.
“Oh, Mum,” I said, trying not to cry.
“Alice, it’s going to be all right,” said Mum, and I wondered how long it had been since I’d dared believe that. “I need you to tell me who else is on the Helen with you.”
“Lena’s still on the Krakkiluks’ ship, and they took Dr. Muldoon off into the Grand Expanse to do science for them,” I said. “But the rest of us are all down here. We’re all alive.”
“All of you?” repeated Mum, incredulous.
“Hey, Captain Dare,” said Carl. “Yeah, we’re all here.”
“Thank god, thank god,” whispered Mum.
“And Mr. Trommler’s here, but he’s a really bad traitor, so Helen’s got him locked in a cupboard,” added Noel.
“Right, good to know,” said Mum, who is always good at adapting to new information. “Now, I’m a little busy up here, and there’s someone else I need to speak to.” And then, in a very different voice, she said, “Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak, on behalf of Earth and Aushalawa-Moraaa, I demand that you stand down. Renounce all claim to Aushalawa-Moraaa and return all hostages immediately.”
There was only a tiny pause, and then Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak spoke from the Krakkiluk ship and I heard her translated voice over Helen’s speakers. “What possesses the captain of a tiny fleet of humans and Morrors to make demands of the Grand Expanse? How dare you invade our territory? You are lucky I have not blasted your little ship out of the sky.”
“You’re the lucky one, so far,” said Mum.
“And why is that?” inquired Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak.
“Because,” said Mum, “my ship is full of Vshomu eggs.”
There was silence.
“Do you need a reminder of what Vshomu are? Some people call them Space Locusts. They’re small creatures. But they can survive in the vacuum of space, they can live on nothing but dust and rock, they multiply at speeds you can barely imagine, and if left to themselves they can eat planets. I’ve got a million eggs in suspended animation in my hold. One misfire from you, and you’ll get to see them for yourselves.”
The silence from Lady Sklat-kli-Sklat wore on for what felt like a long time. “If this is so, then you would never release them so close to Yaela. You would destroy the very planet that shelters your children,” she said at last.
“Oh, Vshomu are a manageable problem,” said my mum. “So long as you catch them early. But once they’re in your space, you’ll never get them out. You’ll be defending every planet you occupy from them forever. What is that going to cost the Grand Expanse, Your Ladyship? Because I’m sure you could buy a lot of Takwuk with it.”
Ningleenill abruptly descended into the cabin along with the Goldfish and began speaking flawless Krakkiluk.
“Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak,” translated the Goldfish. “This is Ningleenill. I hope you remember me.”
“Of course,” said Lady Sklat-kli-Sklat. “Ningleenill. How long has it been? I had supposed you dead. You were a credit to your species, before you turned traitor to the Expanse. Still, for old times’ sake, it is good to hear from you.”
“I remember you and your husband fondly,” said Ningleenill, astonishingly. “It is good to hear your voice again. But I remind you that millions of Krakkiluk spawn are swimming in our seas. My people are no longer bound to care for them. The well-being of your spawn depends on our goodwill. The Grand Expanse must recognize Yaela’s independence now.”
“I’m losing patience, Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak,” announced my mum, who hadn’t been able to understand any of this. “I have torpedoes packed with Vshomu eggs locked onto your ship. I’m sure the missiles will shatter off your armor, but the larvae will mature to eat through the hull within two days.”
The other Eemala had gathered around the Helen’s hatch, anxiously poking their heads inside.
Lady Sklat-kli-Sklak made a rattling sound in her throat. It began quietly but built to a clattering roar, and Kat-li-Yaka and Qualt-zu-Quo moaned and held claws.
At last she broke off and started talking again, quite calmly. “One stipulation. The criminal called Rasmus Trommler has stolen from us and betrayed us. He must be turned over to us for judgment.”
Mum didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. He’s a human criminal, and Earth will deal with him. And whatever cupboard he’s in on the Helen, he can consider himself under arrest. You are in no position to make these demands, my lady.”
“I will withdraw,” said Sklat-kli-Sklak. “Your citizens will be returned. But the Grand Expanse does not forget.”
The channel went silent. And that was that.
Hoolinyae erupted into the air with cries of joy, and Eenyo sat down and put both pairs of hands over his face.
“Alice, hold tight—we’ll get you out of there soon,” promised Mum.
Ningleenill gathered himself up into an upside-down bundle hanging from a vent in Helen’s ceiling, head on one side.
“Not such a bad old lady, Sklat-kli-Slkak,” he said.
“You know her?” I asked.
“She and her husband were Yaela’s governors when I was young. In her day, there were standards.”
The younger rebels seemed as shocked as we were. “She is a terrible tyrant!” cried Kat-li-Yaka.
“She has kept scores of worlds strangled within the Expanse’s collar!” said Eenyo.
“She threw us out of an airlock,” I said.
“She was an enemy you could respect,” insisted Ningleenill, letting go of the vent and flying out of the hatch. “Not like those useless young commanders they have now.”
“You mean there are worse ones?” said Carl, horrified, but Uwaelee had just hit Ningleenill with a thrown puffball, and he made an outraged face and flapped off to return fire.
And by then Hoolinyae and Eenyo had passed on the cry that the Krakkiluks were leaving, and the sky filled with it, and even the Wurrhuya raised their heads and bellowed their song into the green air.
And so we never got an answer.
Showering on a downed spaceship floating in an alien sea while everyone has a party is weird, but after you’ve been wearing the same melted-and-torn-up uniform for three days, you get to a point where you just have to do it.
It was one thing for the Krakkiluks to hand back Lena, but another for them to whisk Dr. Muldoon back from wherever they’d taken her, and Mum was up there waiting for them. So the party raged on, and Carl coaxed Qualt-zu-Quo and Kat-li-Yaka to take Noel on a Wurrhuya ride over the root forests while Eemala engineers came and did their best to repair the Helen. When I came out, I ran into Christa. She’d washed her face too and put on a little makeup, and you couldn’t tell she’d been crying. She looked at me, her jaw set.
“Hi,” I said.
“I saved you,” said Christa.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I could have been a princess. Of the world. But I made a different choice. It wasn’t easy, but it was the right thing to do.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy,” I agreed.
“What, you think it’s so hard for me to do the right thing? For anyone except you and your little friends?”
“. . . No,” I said, bearing in mind she’d
had a very hard day. Which, bearing in mind that I had had multiple extremely hard days, I think was fairly saintly of me. “I just mean . . . you did great.”
“Right. So you’d better write another book and make sure you put that in,” finished Christa, looming over me meaningfully. Then she tossed her head and walked off to her cabin.
So I have, and I do think it was very brave of her to help us, and she did kind of save the world. But we’re probably not going to be friends. But then I’m sure she wouldn’t want to be. And wherever she is now, I hope she’s doing okay.
Noel came back, starry-eyed and with a little gold device full of pictures of Wurrhuya, and telling anyone who would listen how the flying orange things were at least three different species.
Even with the Goldfish translating, the attempts to repair the Helen had been going slowly, but then a small invisible ship descended and three invisible Morrors got off it and started working on the damaged areas without bothering to tell anyone they were there. This disturbed the Eemala quite badly, but everyone got over it, and the sun was melting into pools of blue when the Helen sighed, “Oh, that feels so much better,” and rose a few meters out of the sea under her own power, dislodging a litter of human, Morror, and Eemala cups and plates from her roof.
“Leethalawaaaa ath-lel ishworuuuu,” called one of the Morror engineers, standing in the doorway of their invisible craft.
“They are ready to guide us all home to Earth,” translated Thsaaa, going pink and lilac with relief and hope.
We turned to our Eemala friends. I didn’t know what to say.
“Our worlds need allies,” said Hoolinyae solemnly. “Yaela will stand with Earth, and with Aushalawa-Moraaa, if you will stand with us.”
“We will,” said Josephine. I guessed she wasn’t really empowered to sign up for an interplanetary alliance like that, but I figured we’d sort it out later.
Uwaelee gathered the other Eemala kids into a mass around us. They lifted us into the air, and Uwaelee made Eenyo produce a kind of camera from his pouch belt and take a picture of us.
“Okay, guys, I guess this is it,” said the Goldfish as they lowered us back to the roof.
And I thought it meant it was time to climb back inside Helen and get going. But then it hovered away toward the Eemala kids, and turned from among them to look back at us.
“Goldfish?” I said.
“I’m going to stay here, kids,” it said simply.
“What?” I said.
“No!” cried Noel.
“But—why?” I asked. I realized as I said it that I knew why, really. I just couldn’t help it coming out.
“Well. I want to,” said the Goldfish. “And I guess it feels like time I made some decisions for myself.”
And while we were still speechless, it switched into WOya: “Leastways, if you’ll have me, sir,” it said to Ningleenill. “I’d love to learn about this world, and you guys’d set the curriculum, of course, but I’d pick it up real fast, and you guys have a whole new system of government to build. I think these kids could do with one more person to look out for them, right?”
“Hmmph,” said Ningleenill, sounding not very bothered either way, but Uwaelee and the rest cheered, “Waaaay!” So I guess it was agreement enough.
“The seas are full of Krakkiluk spawn too,” said Qualt-zu-Quo. “We can send many of them back into the Expanse, I hope, but I think plenty will remain. We can try to teach them different ways from those of the Expanse.”
“They will ALL keep their tleek-li,” said Kat-li-Yaka, gently running her claw over the bristles growing through Qualt-zu-Quo’s shell. “Will you help us?”
I noticed how battered the Goldfish was; slightly melted by atmospheric entry, and scratched and scraped from misadventures on more than one planet. But it lit up—quite literally—at the thought of all those kids waiting to be pestered into songs about atomic bonding. “Well, sure,” it said.
“Oh, Goldfish,” said Noel, his eyes bright with unshed tears.
“I know, kids,” said the Goldfish. “I wish it didn’t mean saying good-bye.”
“When did you decide?” Josephine said, in what was probably supposed to be a very businesslike voice but wasn’t, quite.
“Well, I didn’t know how everything would shake out,” said the Goldfish. “I had to stick with you guys as long as you needed me. But I promised them I’d stay if I could.”
I remembered the thing it had said to the rubbish dump kids—the thing it hadn’t translated, but that they’d all cheered.
“But Goldfish,” Carl said. “I never meant to make you feel like you had to leave . . . damn. We still need you.”
“No,” said the Goldfish fondly. “That’s just it. You guys are all growing up. You’re going to be fine. Heck, you’re going to be better than fine—you’re going to be awesome. But hey, more homework, less jumping out of spaceships, you hear me?”
It hovered back to us, and we hugged its plastic body as best we could.
“I’ll miss you,” said Noel.
“I will miss you too, Goldfish,” the Helen announced through her speakers. “Thank you.”
“You too, ma’am!” said the Goldfish, jaunty as ever. “Good-bye, kids.”
And as it sailed away among the Eemala children, all of them singing that math rhyme it made up, I had an unworthy impulse to yell to them that a time would come when it was chasing them around insisting that equations were friendly and the periodic table was a game, and they wouldn’t be so thrilled. But I managed to stop myself.
Finally we climbed back into the Helen, and the invisible Morror ship guided us up through the green sky into space.
And without the Goldfish, it seemed awfully quiet.
24
So we never actually got to see Aushalawa-Moraaa at all.
I mean, I guess we could have, because we did have to stop off in orbit there when we came out of hyperspace. But when it came to it, we all felt we still had a lot of urgent huddling under blankets and watching cartoons to catch up on, so we skipped it.
So we pushed on for home. There was a bit of drama on the way when Rasmus Trommler escaped and tried to take over the ship, but honestly, after everything else we’d been through, it wasn’t that big a deal.
Mum insisted on coming out of hyperspace and spacewalking from her ship over to the Helen, which honestly I think was an overreaction, and she arrested Rasmus Trommler again and sent him over to the other ship.
So that was the first time I saw her, and there was some hugging and crying and a certain amount of yelling that I don’t want to talk about.
We didn’t see Dr. Muldoon, or Lena, until we reached Mars, which is where Dr. Muldoon wanted to get off.
We landed near Schiaparelli Crater, a perfectly round lake like a panel of turquoise.
Thsaaa didn’t want to get off the Helen because Mars hasn’t got a magnetic field, which makes it very uncomfortable for Morrors. The rest of us stepped out into the thin air and low gravity. Noel was clutching Ormerod in his arms, but the rest of us began jumping, experimentally, feeling that amazing lightness, carrying you up so high you felt only one good leap away from flight. I couldn’t believe how green Mars had grown since I’d seen it last. The dark arctic grass was tall and thick, waving in the breeze, and a great flock of snow geese was paddling on the surface of the lake. There were creepers beginning to grow up the outsides of the windmills and greenhouse domes of Schiaparelli Station, cloaking the buildings in leaves. The air felt softer, warmer, fuller than it had.
I don’t want to oversell it; it was still cold.
The Morror ship had made it to Mars before us. It stood on the tundra in a shimmer I could only see out of the corner of my eye, two EDF soldiers standing guard outside it.
“Where’s Lena Jerome?” asked Josephine. Like there might have been another Lena or two on board the alien ship.
“She’s still being debriefed. She and Valerie Muldoon,” said one of the soldiers.
“You’ll need to be debriefed too,” said Mum. “And better to get it over with here—on Earth the media will be all over you.”
“Ha, debriefed,” said Carl, feeling somebody had to.
Then Carl and Noel’s parents came out of the station, and behind them was my dad.
And if I didn’t hurry things along a bit here, this part of the story would just be all hugging all the time.
Except that Josephine’s dad wasn’t there. I saw her quickly scan the group, almost expressionless, and when her mouth twitched, it wasn’t with hurt or disappointment, but with resignation.
I let go of Dad a bit faster than I wanted to. Like that would somehow help.
“Josephine,” Dad said suddenly. “Your father—they wouldn’t let him on the Space Elevator. Nothing to worry about, just an ear infection. He’ll be waiting when we get back.”
Josephine’s eyebrows lifted a little. “He tried to come,” she said. Not eagerly, not giving anything away.
“Well, of course! We’ve all been worried to death—he wanted to give you this.”
He took a small gift-wrapped box out of his pocket.
Josephine took it and read the card that came with it, with a cautiously neutral expression. Then she unwrapped the gift as if it might be booby-trapped.
It was a telescope, a beautiful, slender thing of shiny brass in a red velvet case, and it was inscribed TO MY DEAR DAUGHTER JOSEPHINE.
And I could tell that it would just about let you see what was going on at the end of the road. It was an expensive toy for a young child who’d just developed an interest in space.
“Hmm,” said Josephine. She extended it anyway and put it to her eye.
“Can you see anything?” Noel asked.
“A tree,” said Josephine.
“It’s pretty,” I said.
“It’s a nice thought,” said Josephine noncommittally, and closed the telescope up again.
“Where’s the fish?” demanded Carl and Noel’s mum. “What’s happened to that fish?”
“It’s happy,” said Josephine quietly, and Mrs. Dalisay noticed that Noel was starting to look upset, and wisely held back from more questions.
Space Hostages Page 25