Petrick went first, with Clarke clicking quietly behind him, tail up and alert. He ran quickly and lightly on the toes of his feet from their cover to the next set of shadows. He paused, as Suzy had done and Haber had instructed, and listened for sounds that might indicate he’d been spotted. Clarke dutifully paused beside him. From the ship there was more clanging and thudding, along with a shout or two, but nothing of the sort that one would cry if they’d spotted a child running through the night.
He heard a hissed noise from behind him and saw that Barry and Haber were motioning for him to keep moving so they, too, could run their route through the shadows. Petrick again tiptoe-ran to the next set of shadows, and then the next, and then the next. Clarke glided along with him with little paw clicks.
As Petrick made his way around the tarmac, shadow by shadow, he had the opportunity to get a good look at the outfitting of each of the docking bays. Their moorings had once been highly adjustable, indicating to Petrick that ships had come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Now they were rusting, broken, and in some cases stripped of their components. Those were now rotted and dangling precariously, as were the multitude of pipes and cords and hoses that undulated over each other on the filthy floors like a nest of dead snakes. Slicks of fluids and oils sat spread out and undisturbed with no one to clean them up, and between them, cracks in the concrete were giving way to small signs of nature reclaiming the ground for itself as grasses and moss crept through. Clarke frequently had to hop or change course so as not to collect the sludge in his fluff.
If Petrick hadn’t been curiously gazing into each of the bays as he moved between their shadows, he would have completely missed Suzy and passed right in front of her. She’d compressed her petite frame down into a crouch so small that the depth of the docking bay’s shadows almost entirely obscured her from view. As he caught sight of her, she put a finger up to her lips and motioned for him to come join her. Petrick did so as silently as he could.
“I almost didn’t see you,” he said when he reached her.
“That’s the point,” she said with an Of course tone to her voice, though it was also through a smile. Petrick smiled ruefully back. She was definitely the best sneaker-arounder of the group, and she was enjoying herself.
“I don’t think they’re pirates,” she said, pointing. “At least, not those two.”
Petrick followed her finger and saw that although they were still quite a distance away from the ship, their angle of view had changed such that they were looking at the nose of the ship and could now see the far side. A man and a woman were standing there holding each other, arms interlaced across the back of each other. The man was the taller figure from before, and the woman was new. The woman had leaned her head on the taller man’s shoulder, and they were both watching as a wide variety of objects, some in boxes, some out in the open, were hauled up through the Red Robert’s open cargo door.
Suzy took note of the mechanized contraption. “It looks like the crank at the river mill,” she said, trying to wrap her head around what she was seeing. “But there’s no water.”
Petrick nodded. He wondered how Suzy could get stuck on something as simple as a conveyor when the giant ship was sitting there in all its glory.
Clarke pawed at Petrick’s pants, then peered up at him on his hind legs, front paws balancing on his thighs. He wanted to be picked up and see what everyone else had been looking at, but Petrick shook his head. He didn’t want to chance anyone seeing Clarke’s eyes catching the light and shining from a distance.
It was a valid concern because just as the thought had crossed his mind, Barry arrived along with Haber at their little hiding place, and the other figure strode brusquely out of an entry hatch at precisely the same moment. The two must have made a sound while joining Petrick, Suzy, and Clarke because the burly man paused on the short gangplank and shot a look right in the direction of the incognito group.
They all held their breaths collectively—except perhaps for Haber; it wasn’t clear if he needed to breathe or not—as the man cast a squinting gaze in their direction...except that it wasn’t a man. It was a woman. She leaned forward as if it would help her get a better view. From their vantage point, they could see that her face was shadowed with thick layers of oil and grime; she wore a shoulder-to-boot faded trench coat; two shiny gold somethings that looked like weapons were slung from her hips; and her eyes looked weary and uninviting. Her tattered clothing, including the coat, had certainly seen better days, but it still shone with artifice in the right light. She was not particularly tall, but what she lacked in height, she made up for in heft.
Finally, she seemed satisfied that there was, in fact, nothing out in the darkness, and she turned about and walked in the opposite direction from their hiding place. The kids all exhaled as quietly as they could.
“She looks like a pirate,” Petrick whispered to Suzy.
She nodded and then turned to Barry and Haber. “I don’t think the other two are, though,” she said to them. “The man and the woman over there.”
“What leads you to that conclusion?” Haber asked.
“The way they’re dressed,” she said. “That woman who just looked at us, she’s clearly not of Mother Indacar, her clothes are too weird. But them”—she pointed to the other man and the woman—“their clothes are like ours. Separatists.”
It was true; the couple was adorned in simple, humble fabrics in the plain earth tones preferred by the Indacaran people.
“No way,” said Barry. “Indacarans would never get on a spaceship.”
“Hey, we’re about to,” said Petrick, realizing Suzy was onto something. “They’re also really careful with whatever they’re loading into the ship. Why would you be so careful unless those things were actually yours?”
“I can think of a quadrillion reasons to be careful with stuff that isn’t my own stuff,” Barry said.
“Call it a guess then,” Petrick said.
Various shapes moved on the conveyor into the ship. They could see a table, and then a chair, and another chair. Then came a pile of what looked like chairs, a distinctly Indacaran hand-made table, and some boxes. It was all furniture.
“They could be furniture pirates,” Barry offered.
“A fair assessment,” Haber said to Petrick and Suzy. “Excellent deduction.”
“So, how do we get on board?” Petrick asked, his mind leaping toward what their next step should be.
“Well, it’s a good thing that they’re not pirates,” said Suzy. “Right? Maybe we could try to take them.”
“Take them?” Barry whispered incredulously. “Why am I even friends with you?”
“We will do no such thing,” said Haber firmly. “Stealth has been our modus operandi thus far, and it shall continue to be.”
Barry screwed his face up like he did when someone spoke in riddles, and Petrick headed off the inevitable question.
“He means, we stick to hiding.”
“So, what I said,” Barry affirmed. “We sneak in.”
21
THE CHILDREN WERE SCREAMING.
One of the squat, unassuming buildings to the left was on fire, and another was smoldering in ruin. The tactical team, at Slink’s insistence, had come in firing. It had been night, and he’d wanted shock and awe to join the element of surprise in subduing whatever primitive and backward people lived here. Once they’d set down their scout ship four miles distant and traversed the low-lying terrain to the oddly walled compound, they’d selected a building, a church of some kind from the looks of it, to demolish instantly. Another they’d targeted to set an ongoing example, which was the dorm still on fire to the left.
Slink’s soldiers were working on rounding up the screaming children, who were stumbling this way and that in their panic. The orange fire lit their wild faces. Slink knew the look intimately. He’d have to ask the Master Purveyor if he could take some of the children with them, once they found what they were looking for, of course.
> Slink’s Companion tensed, and Slink turned to face the man who was approaching.
“Unit at the south wall reports that the village beyond this compound is keeping its distance,” said Wiers, the commanding officer. It wasn’t that Slink suddenly remembered the dolt’s name; now that they were planet-side and all suited up in their armored fatigues, his name was plastered across his left breastplate.
“And the signal?” Slink asked.
“Yes, sir. It’s . . .” Wiers tapped the small handheld homing device they’d used to navigate themselves this close to where the signal had reached its terminus. “This way.” He pointed toward a building at the far end of the common-area courtyard.
The officer started off toward it, and Slink moved to follow, punching a probability scenario into his arm pad. Nothing came back, and he frowned, slowing.
He jerked the cord to his Companion, annoyed. How many times was he going to have to do that? It moaned, but the pad’s screen remained blank.
Wiers was several paces ahead when he realized that his superior was not following him. He turned back questioningly.
Just in time, Slink saw the officer’s face twist in shock.
“Sir!” It was all he had time to shout.
One of the natives was charging from an open doorway in the building beside them. The someone was wielding something shiny and sharp. Slink ducked, and heard two sounds in quick succession, the distinct crunch of metal crushing bone, and the whine of an energy weapon discharge.
Through gritted teeth Slink exhaled into the dirt cradling his face. There was a sharp pain slicing into the back of his head. Had the local maniac dealt some critical blow? Would he die here on this backwater swamp of a planet? After all this . . .
Two feet stepped into his field of vision. A hand extended downward for him to take.
“I got the bastard,” Wiers said. Slink looked up at him. “You moved when I saw him,” he said. He then looked at another body and shook his head. “I thought your . . . that was supposed to let you know when something like that was coming.”
Slink gripped the burly officer’s hand and stood, taking inventory of his injuries. To his surprise, he found he had only one: the slicing burn where his neural link with his Companion had been severed. The cord was still connected to the Companion, who lay ever so still on the ground beside where Slink had fallen. A large kitchen knife was half-buried into its chest. A single trickle of blood was oozing from the wound.
“Is it dead?” Wiers said, trying to peer in beyond the tinting of the helmet and see the obscured face inside.
Slink had no need to look. The searing pain from the link was all he needed to know. “I assure you,” Slink said through gritted teeth, “definitely dead.”
“It tried to get you killed,” Weirs said. “Didn’t it?”
Slink stood there for a moment, then looked over at the Indacaran who had tried to end both of their lives. He was short, stocky, wearing an apron. Through the smell of burnt flesh, he still smelled faintly of alcohol. A chef of some kind, Slink thought. There was a hole in his face from Wiers’s weapon.
“Let’s move on,” Slink said to Wiers. He took the cord in his hand and ripped it from the base of his skull. He didn’t allow himself to cry out in pain, not in front of anyone, but it was excruciating. “We haven’t much time.”
The officer nodded curtly.
Slink knew he’d have to be more careful with the next Companion. This one hadn’t intended to kill him and failed.
No . . . it had intended to kill itself and succeeded.
22
IT WAS appropriate that Suzy was the first to spot their biggest obstacle: the gleaming android moving about in the cargo hold. It was he, or it, who accounted for the vast majority of the clanging and thudding they’d heard echoing around the vastness of the tarmac.
They’d inched themselves closer to the ship over the better part of twenty minutes or so, taking advantage of lulls in activity as the burly woman was on the other side of the ship and the couple was off in the shadows gathering more of their things. Moving closer, ducking behind various discarded and smelly piles of garbage or broken fueling tanks, they gradually got a better view of both the gangplank leading to the ship’s interior and the cargo hold that opened into the side of the lower belly. It was their new, closer vantage point on the cargo hold that had revealed the metallic monstrosity moving about inside.
“Metallic monstrosity” was an appropriate label. Unlike Habersham, this synthetic biped had no “skin” covering his shiny frame, and there were no “eyes” or any other humanlike features to help one suspend disbelief about who, or what, precisely it was. It moved about with lumbering, thudding gestures, and it had two red points on its “face” that moved this way and that as it hoisted the boxes and furniture arriving up the conveyor like they were leaves of Litarian lettuce. It picked up an entire wooden table with one of its massive chrome arms, and Barry gasped at its strength.
“No way I’m flying with that thing!” he exclaimed in a whisper, eyes widened again with fear.
“Yes you are,” Suzy said back. “We all have to.”
“We can do it,” Petrick said. “That cargo hold looks plenty big enough to hide in.”
“That thing will kill us,” Barry countered.
“You would not be traveling in the cargo hold in any scenario,” Haber said, motioning for the suddenly excited children to hush up. “I doubt that it pressurizes for life support.”
“Meaning we’d freeze in there,” said Petrick, nodding.
“Most likely suffocate first,” Haber added.
“So, we have to sneak into the cabin,” Suzy said. “Great.”
It was not great. The gangplank up into the cabin was a handful of feet from the conveyor that was hauling things up into the cargo hold. That meant their metallic friend was in direct view almost anywhere he went, except when he was in the deepest corners of the hold. Not to mention that the “pirate captain” seemed to spend most of her time somewhere entirely unknown in the cabin area. Even if they did have a chance make a break for it when the metal robot disappeared in the hold, they could be running directly into the captain.
“You think there are places to hide in there?” Petrick asked, eyeing the cabin.
“It is highly improbable that this ship is without open or hidden compartments of some kind,” Haber answered.
“Think about it, guys,” Petrick said, seizing upon Haber’s reasoning. “They’re definitely up to something. People who are up to something have things to hide. And that means they have places to hide them.”
Barry nodded. That made sense. Finally, something did. These were his kind of people. Barry was himself a master hider of all sorts of objects. He’d learned the skill early on at Childer’s. He’d hide parts of his meals in napkins and pockets and bags so that he could eat later when his stomach began to growl in the afternoon or late at night. And if you didn’t hide the special stuff, like the strawberries or gunya fruit when they were ripe and perfect, then someone else would eat it.
He patted his pocket as he thought about that, feeling the two juice boxes in there that he’d packed at the lab. The last two. They felt solid. Real. Reassuring.
“Guys!”
The whispered exclamation was from Suzy. She was pointing toward the cargo hold. The couple had reappeared, and they were wheeling a heavy wooden armoire toward the conveyor. Seeing them arriving with the large piece, the metallic android was clomping out to meet them. The couple, however, had reached the conveyor first and were lifting it on their own.
It wasn’t a wise plan. The piece of furniture easily outsized them two to one, and as they grunted to lift it, it immediately became apparent they were in over their heads. The armoire began to tip, leaning toward the conveyor.
“What are you doing?!” a voice bellowed from inside the ship, and the bulky captain raced from the bright interior down the gangplank and toward the slowly developing disaster. “I told y
ou not to—!”
The piece of furniture slipped entirely from the man’s grasp. It toppled outright, and there was a loud clunk as it hit something hard. That ‘something’ reached a glistening arm over the back of the leaning armoire and struggled to right it. The android had apparently lumbered over just fast enough to catch the big thing before it crashed into the conveyor. The pirate captain had watched the whole thing unfold with horror from the gangplank, but now that the crisis had been averted just in time, she stomped over to where the couple was standing.
There was a lot of gesturing from the ruddy captain and shaking of heads and wiping of brows from the couple as the android managed to lift the piece of furniture onto the conveyor. The captain was letting the couple know in no uncertain terms that they had screwed up and she wouldn’t tolerate it again. The one-sided conversation continued as they followed the piece of furniture up into the cargo hold, where the android lifted it onto a wheeled dolly, and then all four disappeared deeper inside.
Suzy was absolutely spot-on.
This was their chance.
As far as they could tell, nobody was inside the ship’s cabin.
“Go!” Haber prodded, and then they all broke from behind the rusty crates they’d been peering through.
They went as a group, Petrick holding Clarke in his arms now, with his traveling pack over his shoulder. He didn’t want to risk the dog’s getting distracted by something and running off, or worse yet getting scared and making noise. The four of them moved swiftly to the gangplank, which was a good sixty feet or so away. They could hear the continued sounds of the burly captain disparaging the couple and the wheezing and clanking of the android’s movements. They reached the foot of the gangplank in short order and started up single file.
They were two or three strides up the ramp when Barry took a misstep and fell. Petrick, who had been right behind him, couldn’t avoid getting tangled in Barry’s feet, and he crashed forward as well. They hit hard on the textured metal of the gangplank.
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