StarChaser

by Angie Sage

  “The days and nights were long on this planet, each lasting seven of our days. The very last Egg was due to be flown down when, as the band of twilight moved across the planet and day began at last to dawn, the watchers on the PathFinder ship were horrified. The shamans’ tower was gone and in its place was a great pit, and curled at the bottom of the pit was a giant yellow wurm. They sent a pod down to see what had happened but it never returned. And so, in great sorrow, the PathFinders decided to come home.

  “As you know from the MidSummer Circle, our homecoming was not a happy one. This is true. But what is not true is that the PathFinder landed on the spot where the village bell now is. It actually crashed into the sea.”

  “So the people from the Trading Post didn’t take the PathFinders prisoner after all?” Tod asked, thinking that all on board must have been killed.

  “Oh, they did that, all right,” Dan said. “The PathFinder landed on the seabed intact and many managed to escape. They walked home, following the rising seabed.”

  “Wow, that’s amazing,” Tod said.

  “It was,” Dan agreed. “Legend has it that you can still see the path they made along the seabed. It didn’t do them much good, sadly. When at last the PathFinders struggled up the beach, weighed down by their space suits, they were attacked by the Trading Post people who had taken over our village. Many were killed and the survivors taken prisoner. Terrible.”

  Rosie was still in a combative mood. “Well, Dan, you can understand it. They see a fireball coming down from the sky and then strange creatures walking out of the sea. They must have been terrified.”

  Dan did not agree. “What I don’t understand is why they kept our people imprisoned in the Far Fortress for so many generations. So cruel.”

  Rosie could not disagree with that. But there were still things Rosie had to say. “And what I don’t understand, Dan Moon, is why this amazing story is a secret. We should be proud of what our ancestors did.”

  “Rosie, think about it,” Dan said. “First you tell a bunch of young teens that one in ten of them have gills and can walk underwater, and then you tell them there is a path under the sea that leads to our old PathFinder starship. Who, at the age of twelve, could resist the temptation to walk into the sea to explore that ship? It is easy to find; the old white post on the Circle beach marks the spot. Every year there would be some who would walk straight into the sea and never come home. We would lose virtually all our children.”

  Rosie sighed. “You are right, Dan. The bravest and best would go.”

  Tod felt the anger between Rosie and Dan melt away. “And that, Rosie,” Dan said, “is exactly what happened. The bravest and best did go. This story was not always a secret. In the days when many more of us had gills, there used to be guided expeditions to the ship on MidSummer’s Eve. One year they did not return. Worried villagers set out to see what was wrong and found the sea above the starship red with blood.”

  Rosie and Tod gasped.

  “A brave villager went down, only to discover a nightmare. A great hole had been punched in the side of the ship and a horrendous beast was devouring what was left of our beautiful children. The generation was decimated. Our ancestors swore never again to visit the PathFinder, but to leave it as a sacred place. They decided to keep it secret to avoid any danger of others being devoured by the beasts that now lived there.”

  Dan stared down at the dusty list still in his hands, waiting for what he knew would come.

  “Dad,” Tod said. “That story means there is still an Orm Egg on board the PathFinder.”

  “Yes. It does,” Dan agreed with a heavy heart.

  Tod held up her silver star. “And you said this was a . . . a pod key?”

  “I did,” Dan said.

  “A pod on the starship?”

  Dan nodded.

  “An Orm Egg pod?” Tod asked.

  “I have no idea,” Dan said. “I am not proposing to find out. And neither, Alice, are you.”

  Tod was silent.

  “Promise me,” Dan said, looking Tod in the eye, “that you will not go—”

  But a sudden sound of pounding feet and the appearance of Oskar stopped Dan midsentence. Rosie leaped up. “Oskar! Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

  “Jerra . . .” Oskar puffed. “Jerra went to sleep and he won’t wake up.”

  Dan was on his feet at once. “I knew I shouldn’t have left him. I’ll go straightaway.”

  “You’re not going alone,” Rosie said. “Jonas will go with you. And Annar. I’ll go and find them.” Dan did not object. He had had enough of arguing with Rosie.

  Rosie, Tod and Oskar spent an anxious afternoon. Rosie planted endless rows of winter kale. Oskar did what he always did when he was upset: he went out snake tracking. And Tod tracked Orm Eggs.

  To the rhythmic sound of Rosie’s digging, Tod went over every detail of The Path. Her persistence paid off, for tucked inside the back cover she found a folded diagram. As Tod smoothed it out on the kitchen table, a thrill of excitement ran through her. It was the Metal Fish—the PathFinder starship. She ran her finger over the lines, looking for something that she knew no one else would have searched for: an ovoid with a dot in the middle. Tod made a bargain with herself: if she didn’t find the symbol, she would do as Dan had told her. She was still looking when from the garden below she heard Rosie greeting Oskar and Oskar offering to help make supper. Tod knew that once Oskar was in the kitchen she would not be able to think straight. He would be chatting to her and wanting her to explain things. If she didn’t find what she was looking for now, she never would. In a last burst of concentration, Tod scanned the diagram looking for shapes rather than meaning. As she heard Rosie telling Oskar to wash his hands in the outside sink, something caught her eye: distorted and made faint by a crease of the fold there were two circles, one within the other, and in the middle was a central dot. Tod felt a shiver of excitement run through her—could this be an Orm Egg inside a pod? The more she looked, the more she was convinced it was. There was the last pod, deep in the tail section of the starship, just waiting for her to go and get it.

  TRIBE OF THREE

  There was a preoccupied atmosphere in Rosie Sarn’s kitchen as supper was prepared. Rosie’s and Oskar’s thoughts were with Jerra, and Tod could not get the image of the Orm Egg out of her head. While Oskar filleted the fish and Rosie put together a pot of vegetables, Tod laid the table—all the while casting glances at the wooden box on top of the shelf where The Path now lay with its secrets locked within.

  They were sitting down at the table and Rosie was pouring out a jug of her smashed-fruit juice—which Tod loved—when they heard a voice call up from below, “Mum!”

  Rosie went pale. She leaped to her feet and ran to the door. “Ferdie! Oh, Ferdie, what is it?”

  Ferdie came running up the ladder and threw herself into the room. “It’s all right, Mum!” she said, trying to catch her breath. “Dan told me to come home so you didn’t worry. Jerra’s okay. Annar gave him some stuff . . . don’t know what . . . but he woke up.”

  Rosie sank down onto the nearest chair. “Oh, Ferdie. Oh, thank goodness. And you came all that way on your own.”

  “Mum,” Ferdie said, “I am perfectly capable of walking through the Far.”

  Tod suppressed a smile. Ferdie sounded just like Lucy Heap.

  Rosie caught the new confidence in her daughter. “I suppose you are, dear,” she said.

  Oskar heard the weariness in his mother’s voice. “Mum,” he said, “after supper you are going to bed and we are doing the clearing-up.”

  Rosie smiled at her twins, amused but touched at the role reversal. “All right,” she said meekly. “I think I might just do that.”

  Tod helped the twins wash up and lay everything out for breakfast, then they took a lantern and went to sit out in the warm summer evening. It was everything Tod had dreamed of during the long winter in the Castle and the tedious hours spent in lectures in the Wizard Tower: the smell o
f warm sand, the whisper of the breeze through the dune grasses and the distant sound of the waves falling upon the beach like a regular heartbeat.

  But Tod’s thoughts were distracted. There was something she wanted to talk to Ferdie and Oskar about, but she knew how voices traveled upward, and Rosie’s bedroom window was right above them, wide-open to catch the evening breeze. Tod stood up and casually said, “I haven’t seen the sea yet. Shall we go to the beach?”

  It was a beautiful night. The moon was rising and the sea glittered darkly through the gap in the dunes. The tide was low, and as they walked out of the dunes a wide swathe of perfectly smooth sand was stretched before them, the strip beside the dark water shining like a satin ribbon. As they made their way down the soft sand at the foot of the dunes, Tod was surprised to hear Ferdie say, “So, what’s up, Tod?”

  Tod smiled. “How can you tell, Ferd?” she asked.

  “You’ve been scratchy all evening,” Ferdie said as they wandered slowly toward the sea. “And when Dan arrived at the Hub he seemed kind of scratchy too. And he kept calling you Alice. Have you two had an argument?”

  Tod sighed. “Kind of,” she said. “There’s something I want to do and Dad doesn’t want me to do it.”

  “They get like that sometimes,” Oskar said. “It’s really annoying. When I wanted to go to the Manuscriptorium, Dad said no for days before Mum made him say yes.”

  “But this is different,” Tod said. “This is . . .” She stopped. She was going to say really important, but she knew that Oskar would not take that well. “This is really weird,” she said. She looked at them. “Tribe of Three?” she said.

  Ferdie and Oskar knew at once what Tod meant: that whatever Tod was going to say was between the three of them only. “Tribe of Three,” Ferdie and Oskar replied.

  They wandered along the shoreline and Tod told them about the Orm Egg that lay not so very far away beneath the sea. But she did not tell them everything—she did not mention the beasts in the starship. She was afraid that if she did, Ferdie and Oskar would beg her not to go. And Tod realized that she had already made up her mind—she was going to get that Orm Egg, whatever her friends said. But she would rather go with their support than without it.

  When she finished there was silence, unbroken but for the swish-swash of the wavelets lapping at their feet, while they looked out over the moonlit ocean, thinking about its secrets below. Tod was determined not to speak first. She knew what she wanted her friends to say, but it had to come from them.

  “You have to do it,” Ferdie said. “You have to go and get the Egg.”

  A wave of relief washed over Tod. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  “We’ll help you,” Ferdie said.

  “We’ll do anything we can,” Oskar said. He looked at Tod. “I’d love to come too,” he said. “Swimming down under the water to see our starship. Wow . . . what a thing.”

  “Oskie,” Tod said. “You know you can’t find out whether you have gills without risking being drowned. There is no way you can come down with me. No way at all.”

  “So you say,” Oskar said.

  “Oskar Sarn, do not even think about it,” Tod told him sternly.

  “Yes, miss,” Oskar said, and stuck his tongue out at Tod.

  They retreated to the dunes to watch the tide come in and discuss their plans. As the water crept up the beach, clouds drifted across the moon, and the air grew colder, the frightening reality of what she had decided to do began to dawn upon Tod.

  Late that night in Ferdie’s room while the house was quiet with the sounds of sleeping, Tod asked Ferdie to show her how to unpick the stitches in a soft leather ball and then sew it back up again so that it would still bounce. Bing was to go on a mission. If she found the Orm Egg—which Tod hardly dared hope for—then they would need a way of getting it to the Eastern SnowPlains. And she had an idea how to do it.

  While Ferdie opened a small gap in Bing’s tiny, tight stitching, Tod explained that she wanted to send a message inside the ball. Ferdie grinned and produced from her pocket a length of white string. “Message string,” she said, and handed it to Tod.

  “Huh?” asked Tod.

  “It’s William’s favorite game,” Ferdie explained. “We send secret messages in string. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Instructed by Ferdie, Tod untwisted the string and on one of the strands wrote a short message to Septimus and then allowed the string to twist back into shape. Ferdie threaded the string inside the ball, and while Tod held the edges together, Ferdie stitched them, leaving a tiny bit of string poking out. “To show there is a message there,” Ferdie said.

  At last they went to bed. Tod wrapped Bing in the handkerchief Septimus had given her after they had laid the Ormlet to rest. Then she put the Tracker ball under her pillow and fell quickly asleep. She slept fitfully, dreaming that she had an Orm Egg under her pillow.

  GONE FISHING

  Early the next morning they left Rosie a note to say they were going fishing, and set off to the beach. They pulled Dan’s small, open boat named Vega down to the waterline and began to load up.

  Tod put in a lightweight fishing net, a long rope, Dan’s fishing weights and her FlashLight. In her pocket was Bing, primed and ready to go. Oskar added his own bag of “stuff,” as he called it, and Ferdie a picnic basket.

  “Okay,” Tod said. “Let’s go.”

  Because Vega had to follow a precise path, Tod had decided to row rather than sail. They took Vega along the shoreline, over the sand spit to the beach where the MidSummer Circle took place. It was here an old white painted post stood, battered and unremarked, its lower part now underwater. Tod looked at the post with new eyes. “There it is!” she said, pointing it out to Ferdie and Oskar. “That’s where they came ashore.”

  “And I thought it was just a boring old post,” Oskar said. “Although I did wonder why every now and then someone bothered to paint it.”

  “So did I,” Tod said.

  “But you must have found all that out last year in MidSummer Circle?” asked Ferdie.

  “No,” Tod replied. “They didn’t tell us. Or rather, Dad didn’t tell us,” she added crossly. “Like he didn’t tell us lots of things.”

  The MidSummer Circle beach could not be seen from the village, and because of the nearby shallows it was not used for fishing boats. It was empty and, that morning, felt a little desolate. As Ferdie and Oskar rowed closer, Tod began to feel nervous. What was she thinking of, walking into the sea to find an Orm Egg in a sunken starship? Was she totally crazy?

  “All right, Tod?” Oskar interrupted her thoughts and then grunted as he struggled to pull his oar from too deep a plunge into the water—Oskar was not a natural rower.

  Tod nodded. Her mouth felt too dry to speak.

  They tied Vega up to the white post and the boat sat rocking gently in the morning sun. Ferdie opened the picnic basket and offered Tod a sandwich. Tod shook her head. She felt sick with nerves. Ferdie closed the basket. “We’ll have the picnic when you get back,” she said. “To celebrate.”

  “We can use the Orm Egg as a table,” Oskar joked.

  Tod tried to smile but did not succeed.

  Ferdie hugged her. “We’ll be right here, all the time,” she said. “As near as we can possibly be.”

  “Just look up and you’ll see us,” Oskar added. He rummaged in his bag of stuff and took out a pair of goggles. “For you,” he said, offering them to Tod. “You’ll be able to see so much clearer under the water.”

  Tod broke into a smile. “Wow, thank you, Oskie,” she said. “They’re just perfect. They’ll make such a difference.”

  Oskar grinned delightedly. “They’re Manuscriptorium goggles. I found them last night. I must have put them in my pocket and forgotten about them.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did,” Tod said, putting the goggles on her head.

  Tod began to get ready. She took Rose’s Charm bracelets out of her pocket and slipped them on. Helped by Ferdie
and Oskar, she got into her waterproof all-in-one, which was tight over her three layers of fishing jumpers and woolen leggings. Then she put on a safety belt (normally worn in bad weather in order to fasten the occupant to the boat) and tied one end of the rope to it, giving the other end to Ferdie. Ferdie solemnly took the rope and wrapped it around her hand to show Tod that there was no way she was going to let go.

  Tod clambered out of the boat and suddenly remembered her message to Septimus. She retrieved the Tracker ball from her pocket. “Find Septimus. Go alone,” she told it. Then she threw Bing into the water.

  “Will it go underwater?” Ferdie asked doubtfully.

  “If I can, then I reckon a Tracker ball can too,” Tod said.

  Ferdie peered over the side of the boat. “It’s doing it!” she said. “Running along the sand . . . going deeper . . . I hope a fish doesn’t eat it.”

  Oskar hoped a fish didn’t eat Tod, but he knew better than to say so.

  Tod was back on her mission. She checked her Charm bracelets were in place—these would help keep her warm in the chill of the water—then she put on her fishing vest and said tersely, “Weights, Oskie.”

  One by one, Oskar handed over the lead weights. And Tod slipped them into various pockets, taking care to distribute them evenly. Then, with her feet sinking into the sand, she took out her FlashLight and switched the beam to its underwater setting. It shone pale green—almost invisible in the daylight, but perfect for beneath the sea. “Time to go,” she said.

  “We’ll be with you every step of the way,” Oskar promised.