Starstuff (Starstuff Trilogy Book 1)

by Ira Heinichen

  The entire group stopped in their tracks. Haber and Suzy whirled back to look at the two of them. Petrick and Barry extricated themselves from each other, both with eyes as large as the twin moons. Haber, however, waved his arms for them to stop what they were doing immediately. The burly captain had appeared at the lip of the cargo hold, and she was looking out into the darkness of the tarmac.

  She heard us, Petrick thought, his mind racing. He stayed absolutely still, as did Barry, though he could hear his friend’s breaths, each sounding like a hurricane. Suzy and Haber were far enough up the plank that only their feet would have been visible from the captain’s vantage point, but Barry and Petrick were in full view, even lying on the ground as they were.

  The captain looked directly at them.

  Petrick’s heart dropped. The game was up. The woman was going to cast them off her ship, or worse. Their only way off this planet, their only way to escape to try to help his father, was now lost. In an instant.

  The woman squinted as she looked at them, and Petrick could feel Barry tightening up. It wasn’t a friendly face. Petrick thought perhaps he should raise his arms and preemptively declare that they meant her no harm and that they would happily leave if she please wouldn’t hurt them.

  The words were just being formed by his lips when, inexplicably, the woman started scanning the rest of the tarmac again, squinting her eyes in the same manner in which she’d looked toward Petrick and Barry. She did this for several more moments before she shook her head and walked back into the cargo hold.

  “Colossus!” the pirate captain shouted, with her receding back now toward them. “What are you doing? Didn’t I tell you big pieces over here?!”

  And she was gone. Barry and Petrick looked back at Suzy and Haber, stunned. Suzy was white as a sheet and Haber was still holding his hand out toward them, indicating they should stay put. The tall android craned his neck to confirm the captain was gone and then motioned quickly for them to get up and move.

  Petrick and Barry gladly did so, scrambling as quickly as they could up the rest of the way and into the cabin of the large ship.

  “She looked right at us,” Barry hissed to Petrick. They moved as swiftly as their short legs would take them.

  “I know!” Petrick hissed back. “I don’t get it either.”

  “Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth,” Haber whispered, having picked up their conversation. He motioned them the rest of the way inside.

  “What’s a gift horse?” Barry said, a puzzled look replacing the shock on his face.

  “Never mind that,” Haber replied, scanning their new surroundings. “We must hide.”

  Petrick set Clarke down on his feet, and the four bipeds took stock of where they were standing. The cabin of the ship was less spacious than one might imagine. The hallways were littered with hoses and pipes and other various rubbish. Suzy wrinkled her nose at the stench that began to set in.

  The deck they were standing on was made of a metal grating, and below Petrick could see more of what had been left out to tangle in the hallways; pipes, wires, hoses, dust, and rubbish. Clarke seemed to confirm precisely what Petrick was already thinking, and he pawed at the grating, looking down.

  “Maybe we can hide down there,” he said, pointing.

  “Oh, please no,” Suzy said, shaking her head.

  Haber had busied himself in the meantime going a short way down the hall to their right and then craning his neck around the circular curve of the one to the left.

  “I’m afraid that may be your best bet,” he said, turning his head back toward the three children and the dog. Haber motioned for them to follow him. They did, and after a few paces down the curving hallway, he stopped them. “This ventilation system seems to run underneath the length of this decking,” he said, pointing to two vent-like rectangular openings underneath the grating on opposing sides of the hallway. They couldn’t have been more than two feet in height, but they were wide and otherwise spacious. “It should provide ample space and cover for the lot of you to hide for a significant period of time.” He stooped and lifted up a square section of the grating. “I suggest you enter with haste.”

  “Big enough for us, but what about you?” Petrick asked. “There’s no way you can fit down in there.”

  “We do not have time,” Haber answered with urgency. “In you go.”

  “No!” said Barry, crossing his arms. “No way you’re not coming with us, Mr. Robot. We stick together.”

  “Agreed,” said Suzy, nodding.

  “Even if we had the time, which we don’t,” Haber reminded them, “I sincerely doubt there is any space that those three full-sized adults and their android will not be occupying with regularity on their journey. You must hide where they will not be.”

  “We can’t leave you behind, Haber,” Petrick insisted.

  “I would never suggest such a thing,” the android replied with cool urgency. “I can survive the vacuum of the cargo hold, which has significantly more potential hiding places than the cabin offers. You children cannot.”

  The children considered that for a beat. Petrick looked up at Haber’s pale face and squinted as if trying to determine whether or not he was attempting to put one over on them. He was very hard to read.

  “How are you not gonna get caught?” Barry asked, sounding just as skeptical as Petrick looked.

  “Leave that to me. Now: Get. Inside.”

  Barry, Suzy, and even Clarke turned to look at Petrick.

  “Okay, fine!” Petrick said. “But you can’t get caught, Haber.”

  “I can promise you, young master, I have no intention of doing so.”

  Petrick looked into his bright, artificial eyes and gave in to a sudden compulsion to hug the tall android. After a moment, he noticed that Barry and Suzy were doing the same thing. It was the first time since their journey had begun that they wouldn’t all be together. Clarke, meanwhile, jumped down into the open grate and gave a small whine, looking up at the group hug. Haber patted each of the children on the head.

  “The dog is quite right,” he said. “Down you go. Before it’s too late for me to sneak outside and into the cargo hold.”

  Barry went in first, then Suzy, and Petrick followed. It was a tighter fit than they’d thought it would be, mostly due to the packs they were each still carrying. Haber made sure all three of the children were stowed down below before he knelt to offer one last piece of advice.

  “Do not come out for any reason,” he whispered. “Use the food rations in your packs, and stay out of sight. Once we reach the next port and this ship takes on fuel, we will have our chance to slip out unnoticed.”

  Petrick nodded for the three of them. It seemed a tenuous and perilous plan, but they all knew it was the only option they had.

  “Do not come out of hiding,” Haber repeated, and then he lowered the grating with a soft thud. “I will rejoin you once the ship has landed.”

  He turned around and didn’t look back. He was out of sight in seconds. That’s good, Petrick thought as he wedged in between Barry and Suzy at the vent opening. At least Haber seems like he can move quickly and quietly.

  Moments later, he heard the sound of voices coming from the direction of the gangplank and the children instinctively shrank back deeper into the vent. Petrick pressed himself to the floor to make sure he still had a view of the hall, and kept a hand on Clarke.

  The pirate-looking captain came in first, followed closely behind by the couple that must have been her passengers. As they passed, Petrick knew for sure they were Indacaran. Northern Province, perhaps, from their thicker, warmer clothing. He was aware that there were several settlements up there and that they dressed funny by southern standards. They sometimes came to Choosing Day.

  “You two are down that hallway there,” the captain said, pointing. “The head is on the left, your bunks on the right.”

  They nodded and moved off in that direction, the man putting an arm over the woman’s shoulder. P
etrick thought that he could hear a sob from her as they walked out of sight. The pirate captain pulled a thin, metal canister from her pocket, uncapped it, took a quick sip, and let out a loud belch (which made Suzy grit her teeth next to Petrick). It was then that she was joined by her lumbering metal companion. There was a loud clank that came from the direction of the gangplank.

  “We sealed and ready for takeoff?” asked the captain.

  The giant robot, which Petrick remembered the pirate captain had called Colossus, nodded its shining head.

  “Then let’s blast this rock,” the pirate captain muttered.

  The two walked directly past and over the children’s hiding place, and further down the corridor to where, undoubtedly, the cockpit was located. It struck Petrick that a map of the ship would definitely be something worth quickly finding if their air duct system proved to be less extensive than Haber had hoped. It certainly seemed crowded for the moment, with Barry and Suzy starting to get wiggly from the cramps even Petrick was beginning to feel himself.

  There was a bone-rattling rumble, and the three children felt the atmospheric thrusters of the Red Robert kick on. With a jerk, and then the telltale chattering of the deck above them, the children instinctively knew that their newfound ship was taking off.

  “Petrick,” Suzy hissed from a few feet away. She’d ventured out the vent and back down the hallway toward the gangplank door.

  Petrick’s heart jumped for a second—he thought she’d been spotted—but she turned her head back to him, and her expression was filled with awe and excitement. She motioned for him and Barry to join her. They did, with Clarke padding behind them. The rumble of the ship drowned out any sound they made.

  She had been looking up through the deck grating out a pair of small windows on either side of the airlock door. Outside, lit up by the Red Robert’s thrusters, clouds whipped past in a blur of reds and oranges, and then suddenly there was nothing but black. Eventually, even the sound of the thrusters faded into silence, though the shaking of the ship remained. Barry asked if that blackness was what space looked like. Before Petrick could say yes, a bright silvery light lit up their small window and the curving horizon of Indacar.

  It was the larger of Indacar’s moons, larger and brighter than Petrick could have ever imagined, and so close. The ship sailed right past it, and from the far side, the smaller moon looped into view, even brighter. The children shielded their eyes. There was a flash of golden light as the starstuff drive of the Red Robert kicked in, and the moons, Indacar, and the only home the children had ever known . . . were gone.

  23

  “BUT I’M HUNGRY!” Barry’s whisper in response to an elbow in the ribs from Suzy could hardly classify as such. It echoed down the ducting that surrounded the children.

  Getting caught had pretty quickly slid down a few notches on the hierarchy of their concerns, at least as far as the volume of Barry’s voice would indicate. It had been somewhere between six and seven hours, and neither the couple nor the pirate captain had emerged from their respective cabins. It was from the pirate captain’s cabin, however, that the smells of cooked meat were now wafting, and Barry was about ready to mutiny.

  Suzy and Clarke had ventured back into the further recesses of the ducting system once the captain had engaged the stardrive and lumbered into her cabin. Petrick and Barry had shimmied after the smaller, more adventuresome two, and a veritable palace was what they found. Each of the ducting junctures, of which there were several, was almost large enough for the children to stand completely upright. And the ducts crisscrossed through the ship, which meant that they could travel virtually anywhere they pleased, as long as they were able to keep quiet. That was the current issue: keeping quiet. All the tunnels in the world wouldn’t matter if Barry couldn’t keep his voice down.

  “They’ll hear you!” Suzy hissed right back at him.

  “She’s right, Barry,” Petrick interjected. “And we cannot get caught.”

  “Why not? They don’t seem so bad.”

  “Because they’d probably turn right around and take us home,” Suzy said.

  “But they have food,” Barry persisted.

  “We have Haber’s ration bars in our packs. We can eat those.”

  Barry harrumphed and folded his arms, pouting. “Those things taste like pterran beetle dust,” he said.

  Petrick had to give that point to Barry. He was right. They were pretty terrible.

  “It doesn’t matter if that food smells like summer dumplings,” said Suzy. “This isn’t the dining hall. We’re stowaways on a pirate ship. We can’t have any of it because we can’t get ourselves caught.”

  Barry threw his head back and groaned, which made Petrick wince.

  “Can we just crawl over and see what it looks like?” Barry offered.

  “No,” Petrick said firmly.

  Petrick tossed Barry a ration bar to stifle any further protesting from his rotund companion. He opened it with a loud crinkle. Suzy shot him another stink-eye look, and he stuck his tongue out back at her before, more quietly, opening his bar the rest of the way and taking a bite. He made a face at the taste, but he kept munching.

  Petrick ignored his own grumbling stomach and turned his attention back to the small pile of parts and wiring that he’d pilfered from the lab and slipped into his pack. He knew there was some way to modify the vocal projector he’d made once with his father so they could talk to each other from a three-hundred-foot distance and reverse that effect, muffle the sound. A sound reducer could mask their hiding place, perhaps, and save them from Barry’s mouth. But so far it had been a dead end. An idea occurred to him, and he reached over for his pack to find a new power cell . . .

  And he noticed that Clarke wasn’t in the juncture with them.

  Surprised, Petrick half-stood and looked around between their packs for the fluffy dog. Suzy looked up.

  “Where is Clarke?” Petrick asked.

  Barry shrugged his shoulders and took another painful bite from his substandard meal.

  “He was just here,” Petrick said, beginning to look down the different ducting routes that met at their hiding place.

  If he’d looked two seconds later, he would have missed Clarke’s pom-pom tail rounding the corner of the duct that led . . . directly toward the pirate captain’s cabin.

  “He’s going after the food!” Petrick whisper-cried.

  Petrick scrambled into the duct tunnel, then immediately slowed to a crawl when he realized that any noise he made might completely nullify any attempt to stop Clarke from being discovered. He glanced back and saw Suzy and Barry crawling along behind him, motioning for him to hurry up.

  The sides of the ducting were a type of fitted metal, and except for the sections that ran directly underneath the grated walkways, they were mostly clean. They also seemed to be molded directly into the walls of the ship, as opposed to thinly walled tubes hanging in open space. This was a good thing considering that they did a decent job of muffling movement.

  They rounded a corner and Petrick nearly cried out involuntarily at the sight of his naughty dog. Clarke was standing right beneath a grating that appeared to open up into the ship above from the telltale pool of yellow light that poured down into the ducting. From the grunting sounds and the hiss of cooking oil, it was the personal cabin of the pirate captain.

  The trio instinctively froze at the sight and sound, but Petrick gathered his wits after a moment and continued crawling slowly toward Clarke. He didn’t dare call out to the dog, but he did try to get his attention by motioning with his hands and arms. Alas, Clarke’s attention was solely occupied by the same thing that had transfixed Barry a few moments earlier: the cooking food.

  As Petrick neared, he could see up through the grating to the underside of their dreaded pirate captain. She was standing at a small stove, the source of the delicious smell . . . and it was delicious. Petrick realized even his own mouth was watering. He had just about reached Clarke’s hindquarters when
there was a sudden clanging sound that caused Petrick to freeze. It took him a moment to realize that it was coming from the pirate captain’s door. The woman muttered to herself and waddled over grumpily.

  When it creaked open, it revealed Colossus standing in the doorway. The pirate captain grumbled something along the lines of “This had better be good,” and the silver robot responded with a series of mechanical grinding sounds and clicks and beeps. Whatever he said, the pirate captain let out a frustrated sigh and walked over to her stove, turned it off, then strode out of sight after Colossus.

  Petrick could hardly believe their luck. He could grab Clarke and retreat into the ducting with no one being the wiser. His hope turned to despair, however, when his eye caught Clarke’s fluffy tail slipping through the grating and into the cabin. How did he even open the grating?! Petrick muttered a quiet curse to himself and then scurried forward as fast as his arms and feet would take him. He glanced back at Suzy and Barry for the briefest of moments before slipping himself through the grating; their eyes were as wide as dinner plates.

  The grating opened at a side hinge without resistance. No wonder Clarke had been able to get out so easily. Petrick stood and could see his dog, now up on the counter, prancing toward the skillet, where four strips of delectable-looking meat were still sizzling.

  “Clarke, stop!” Petrick whispered as quietly and as loudly as he could, all at the same time.

  It was too late. Petrick reached the naughty dog right as he slipped one of the strips into his mouth. He was chewing contentedly by the time Petrick had him snatched up into his arms. Petrick cursed again to himself. The woman was sure to notice that her four strips had magically become three. He looked back at Barry and Suzy, still inside the ducting, but now pressed up against the grating, watching the entire scene in silent horror. What do we do? he thought silently to them.

  He was answered by their attention even more horrifically turning to something behind him. Petrick looked to see what it was.