Escape from the Pipe Men!

by Mary G. Thompson

  A whoosh of air came through the portal, and the whole thing expanded as if blown up from the inside. In an instant, it had become the size of the entire wall.

  Twenty-Three

  THE LIGHT COMING THROUGH the window behind me was now much dimmer. I stopped in my tracks, staring at the giant portal. “What happened?” I said to Becky. If anyone knew what was going on, she did.

  “Doggies!”

  Several Hottini fell through the portal onto the floor in front of us. Before I could react, the Brocine had fired their weapons. Thin darts shot from the muzzles of the little guns. Several missed, but as there were ten Brocine firing, all of the five Hottini I now counted were hit by something. There were strings attached to the darts, so that the Brocine were connected to their prey.

  The Hottini were a mess of legs, clear coverings, and shiny blue hair as they scrambled to right themselves. One tangled with the string from the dart gun and fell back on his haunches with a thud. The others glared at their fallen comrade, until one gingerly offered a leg, and the fallen one pulled himself to standing. They stood there, ignoring the darts attached to various parts of their bodies, glaring at us as if they owned the room.

  The Brocine soldiers jumped off the mattress and reformed their pyramid directly in front of the Hottini. Gript stayed behind on the mattress.

  “Declare your purpose,” said one of the Brocine soldiers, at the front of the formation.

  “The Earth child has what is ours,” said the Hottini in the middle, fixing his purple eyes on the calculator in my hand.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  Just then, a Hottini head appeared in the middle of the wall behind the others. It was Grav-e. He glared at me before barking something in their language.

  Two of the other Hottini turned to go back through the giant portal, but they were caught short by the darts from the Brocine soldiers, who still stood stiffly in formation. I couldn’t figure out how something so small could hold something so big. The Brocine didn’t seem to be straining at all.

  “Let them go,” said Grav-e.

  “You invaded our system! How did you get here?” shouted the Brocine leader.

  “You stole our prisoner,” said Grav-e, ignoring the question.

  “I’m cold,” said Becky.

  As soon as she said it, I realized I was cold, too.

  Becky was actually starting to shiver.

  The trapdoor that Gript had come through burst all the way open, and a stream of Brocine jumped into the room, chattering loudly in their language.

  Grav-e said something I couldn’t understand, and then the other Hottini began barking.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting my ears. Stop!” yelled Becky.

  No one stopped.

  I waved the calculator, and it shook even more than I intended, because now I was really shivering. “You all want this!”

  That did something. The Brocine pulled together in a pack, the soldiers rising to the top, still holding their weapons. The Hottini also moved closer together, leaving a space in the center for Grav-e’s head.

  “I’m cold!” Becky yelled into the sudden silence.

  The Brocine pack turned toward her as one. For the first time, I noticed that their hairs were standing up, and many of them appeared to be shivering too.

  “If anybody wants this, you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on!” I cried, waving the calculator. In the silence, my voice was louder than it needed to be, but at least all eyes were on me now.

  “We are farther from the suns,” said the pack, in its deep voice.

  Gript, who was still with Becky, separate from the pack, squeaked.

  I turned and pressed my face up against the window. It was darker outside, sure, and the suns had only just risen, but . . . it couldn’t be true.

  “And you must tell us what you have done,” said the pack, turning back to the Hottini.

  “It was hot underground,” said Becky. She crawled to the trapdoor the Brocine had come through. It appeared to be just big enough for a person to squeeze through.

  “Becky, we don’t know where it goes,” I said. But she was already stuffing herself into it. I grabbed my backpack from the remains of my mattress and jammed the calculator into it. Before I had finished, she was gone.

  Gript squeaked and jumped after her.

  I glanced back at the Brocine and the Hottini.

  “Stop!” The Brocine pack leaned menacingly toward me. Then they jerked backward. The Hottini were pulling them by their own darts. The pack fell apart into its Brocine pieces as the soldiers were pulled, screeching, through the portal behind the disappearing Hottini.

  I jumped into the hole and found I was still in the room from the waist up. I wriggled my legs into the tunnel below and squeezed myself downward, until I was on all fours. The tunnel was about the same size as the one we’d originally come through. Brocine dropped on either side of me. They scampered past me farther into the tunnel, where Becky and Gript were waiting. Becky was on her hands and knees, looking backward toward me, and Gript was standing behind her, waving frantically at me with one paw. I pulled the trapdoor shut and crawled forward.

  “Move,” said Gript to Becky. She seemed to understand and crawled forward over the cold, damp ground. The rest of the Brocine pack was now long gone, but Gript stayed with us as we slowly and painfully crawled down the dark tunnel. Out of some tiny pocket, he had pulled out a light no bigger than the dropper with my father’s cure. It shone a soft red color.

  “Gript, do you have any idea what happened?”

  “Obviously the Hottini interfered with your portal somehow. I did not know they had the capacity to do that.”

  “Not the portal, the planet! How could it move?”

  “How should I know? I sell spices for soup!”

  “In a spaceship!”

  “I don’t know!” Gript squealed. The paw holding the light was definitely shaking, and it wasn’t nearly as cold down here.

  “It’s okay, I just . . . We have to move the planet back!” I was trying not to freak out, but it wasn’t working. Farther from the suns?

  “The doggies are dumb,” said Becky.

  “Yeah, so dumb they figured out how to open a portal as big as a wall and stop us from getting to O-thul-ba,” I snapped.

  “You’re dumb too. Front should have given the calculator to me.”

  She was probably right. We crawled on in silence for a few long minutes.

  “I think they ripped something they shouldn’t have,” Becky finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the big portal. Portals aren’t supposed to move planets. They tried to change where your portal was going, and it did something bad.”

  “Becky thinks the Hottini tried to hijack my portal and messed up,” I translated for Gript. “But how could they?” I repeated it in English.

  “Tast-e went with us on purpose,” said Becky. “So they could track what planet we went to.”

  “It’s probably related to the probes they’ve been placing in our system,” said Gript. “They send new ones as fast as we can take them down. We had no idea they were far enough along with bok to attempt this.”

  Suddenly, it hit me out of nowhere. “Gript, do you know where they took the Xaxor?” The Hottini wanted the Xaxor back, too. The Brocine weren’t going to make protecting it a priority. What if the Hottini got to it and took it away before I could help it? What if they ruined everything, and I could never open another portal? What if we all froze to death because we were too far from the suns? I missed something Gript said.

  “What?” I gasped. “What did you say?”

  Gript stopped in his tracks and stared at me.

  “You’re talking English,” said Becky.

  I stopped crawling and closed my eyes. I had to get it together. It was still warm enough down here. We weren’t going to die. We were going to follow the other Brocine, and find the Xaxor, and fix this probl
em with the planet, and get back to O-thul-ba, and save Gript’s family, and get to my dad, and . . . I couldn’t take it. It was too much to do, too many impossible hurdles.

  “Ryan, come on.” I heard Becky’s voice, but it seemed to be coming from far away. I didn’t want to open my eyes. “Ryan.” I opened them to find her peering into my face. Gript was standing between us, shining the light up into my face. “Ryan, there’s a hole going down. Ask him if it’s the way to go.”

  “Earth?” said Gript.

  “Earth to Ryan,” said Becky.

  “Do we go down it?” I asked, taking a deep breath. My hands were shaking so much, I wasn’t sure if they were going to keep holding me up.

  “Yes, yes,” said Gript. “The pack will be down there.”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” I said.

  At the bottom of the hole was not another tunnel, but a cavern. Where we stood, the ceiling was just above my head, but it gradually got higher until it was nearly as big as the first one we’d been in the day before. A pack of Brocine were squished together at the center, so tightly I couldn’t distinguish any individual features. They were facing a giant, gaping black portal that seemed to be cutting through the entire cave. Whatever the Hottini had made, it was a lot bigger than the room we’d just been in. The portal was to my left, and the Brocine were to my right. On the far side of the pack, guarded by a group of soldiers, stood Tast-e. His covering was gone, and his hair was matted together in clumps. One ear hung limply to the side. But he stood up straight as he glared in our direction.

  On the side of the pack closest to us, unguarded and sitting on the floor, was the Xaxor. It jumped up and scurried lightly over. It seemed to have fully recovered from the water, and it was even walking on its injured leg. Its three eyes opened wide at me, and it blinked furiously in a pattern I couldn’t understand.

  The ten Brocine soldiers came through the giant portal, pulling the five Hottini along behind them by their darts. The Brocine were grinning their toothy grins, apparently quite satisfied to have gotten the upper hand again. Grav-e followed out of the portal, surveying the scene calmly. He wasn’t being pulled by any Brocine, and he didn’t even look at his ignominiously captured soldiers.

  The Brocine soldiers and the pack had a furious conversation in their language, with much squeaking and many high-pitched growls. Then they all suddenly stopped, and the main pack all stared pointedly at Grav-e, who serenely stepped forward past the soldiers.

  “It seems our home planets have been sucked together by the creation of the portal,” said Grav-e.

  “Your portal,” I said, stepping forward. “You did this.”

  Grav-e regarded me regally.

  “So you undo it,” I said. “Undo whatever you did, or we’re all going to freeze to death.”

  “You freeze,” said Grav-e. “We burn.” He turned to the pack. “Your two suns have added to our one.”

  “Wait a minute, your planet is here?” I asked.

  “Our planet is not here,” Grav-e said witheringly, still speaking to the pack. “The distance between us has been displaced, causing your suns to radiate heat to our system.”

  “If there’s an extra sun, why are we freezing?” I asked.

  “The portal has moved you away from all of them.”

  “But how can . . . ? Whatever. Just fix it!” I crossed my arms and glared right back at Grav-e.

  Grav-e’s eyes flicked almost imperceptibly from side to side.

  “You don’t know how to fix it.”

  Grav-e lifted his head and shoulders up even higher and stared past me. “This is the first time we have had occasion to interfere with a portal.”

  The Brocine burst into excited chatter. The soldiers stopped in unison and gave a sharp tug at their darts, pulling the Hottini awkwardly forward. Since the darts were attached to various body parts, the Hottini ended up sprawled in different positions. Boots thumped and scraped as the startled Hottini attempted to right themselves. The soldiers tugged, and the Hottini were dragged toward the pack, leaving Grav-e and me behind.

  “Unhand my soldiers!” Grav-e boomed.

  “Undo what you did,” the pack boomed back.

  “We have more soldiers. Shall I call them?”

  Something zipped past us near the floor. Grav-e slowly looked down. I followed his gaze and saw that a dart had lodged in Grav-e’s leg. At the other end, Gript stood, grinning with all his teeth.

  “I’d rather you stayed,” said Gript.

  “Wait!” I jumped between Grav-e and Gript, careful not to trip over the line between them. I knew if Gript jerked Grav-e around like they’d done to the others, we’d never get any help getting the portal closed. “The Hottini don’t know how to close the portal.” I looked pointedly at Grav-e, whose eyes focused on the ceiling. “But they want it closed too. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

  Everyone was silent for a minute. The pack sat completely still, but its various eyes moved, taking in the positions of the Hottini sprawled around the cave.

  “Fine,” said the pack. “We’ll sit. Let them move freely, and release the leader.”

  The Hottini raised themselves to their feet and, as calmly as possible, sat down on their haunches. Gript glared at me for a second, but he released the dart from Grav-e with a pop. Carefully, Grav-e sat. Tast-e made a move to come forward and join his comrades, but Brocine closed in around him.

  “Not him.” The pack pointed their collective noses at Tast-e as they spoke. “This one is a spy. We will deal with him later.”

  Tast-e sat down with a controlled thump, still behind his Brocine guards. Even sitting on their haunches, the Hottini managed to look regal and in control. But the Brocine looked fierce, with their weaponized noses and the sharp teeth that flashed as they talked excitedly with each other.

  “Go out there,” said Becky, pointing to the center of the cave, between the main Brocine pack and the Hottini. “You have to, or they’ll kill each other.”

  The Xaxor blinked at me. I could have sworn it was saying the same thing.

  “Okay. Listen to me.” I looked from the Hottini to the Brocine, ready to race between them.

  A sizzling, cracking noise filled the cave, making me jump. The Hottini all looked up and around, and the Brocine started to chatter. It was clear that no one else had expected this, either. I turned around to find Gript scurrying past me to the far side of the cave. The pack turned as one to follow him, then squeaked something.

  Gript stood up on his hind legs and poked the wall with his nose. With a quiet scraping, a section of wall slid upward into the ceiling, revealing a TV screen about as tall as I was.

  On the screen appeared a single Pipe Man, in a small room that was empty except for the Pipe Man and a row of assistant wires. It looked out at us with sixteen many-shaded purple eyes.

  Twenty-Four

  “HON-TRI-BUM,” I said.

  Gript scurried back over to me, opening his yellow eyes wide. “You know the Minister of Trade?”

  “It used to visit me in the zoo. Can it see us?”

  Gript turned back to the screen. “Yes. The screen is for internal communications between our planets. I don’t know how the Masters are using it.”

  Hon-tri-bum turned three of its eyes toward me, pointing the rest at the Brocine, the Hottini, the Xaxor, and Becky. “Ry-an, the Earth child?” Hon-tri-bum’s mouth opened in an O. It was the first time I’d seen Hon-tri-bum surprised.

  Without really thinking about it, I raised my arms up, brought them down quickly, and bowed deeply.

  Hon-tri-bum turned half of its eyes to Grav-e. “You have torn a rift of variable infinity, and you have also stolen our prized specimens?” Two eyes flitted to Becky and me.

  I raised my arms. “We’re fine,” I said, “but—”

  Grav-e cut me off. “You have no right to hoard bok or these specimens. We stole them right from your planet. If you don’t go away, we’ll cut a portal right next to O-thul-ba and push the wh
ole planet in.”

  “My eyes are vibrating in fear,” said Hon-tri-bum.

  I was about to say something, but Becky poked me in the side and gave me a pointed look. The Xaxor had come with her and was blinking furiously again. They were right. It was definitely better for the Pipe Men to think the Hottini had stolen us than for them to know we’d run away. We might even be able to go back if we wanted to.

  “The Hottini said they were going to sell us,” I said.

  The Xaxor shrank a little. It knew how I’d come up with that lie.

  The movement caught Hon-tri-bum’s attention. “A Xaxor? I’m not surprised to find the swarm involved in this. Strange creatures. What do they need all the legs for?” Hon-tri-bum squinted its top two eyes in laughter.

  “Strange? It should talk,” said Becky.

  I tried not to laugh myself.

  “This Xaxor tried to steal our specimens,” said Grav-e, ignoring the fact that he’d just claimed to have stolen us first. “It’s ours, and I’ll thank you not to interfere.”

  “Thieves of the known universe,” said Hon-tri-bum. “Its swarm just stiffed the Yum-Yoms for a very expensive batch of Yim. Don’t get mixed up with them, Ry-an. And if the Hottini ever release you,” he said to the Xaxor, pointing three eyes, “tell your swarm they are not welcome at any O-thul-ban spaceport until they pay the treble restitution.”

  “What’s Yim?” Becky whispered.

  “I think it’s some kind of candy. Sweet drink?” I asked the Xaxor.

  The Xaxor nodded its top section and wilted a little more.

  “How do they eat it without a mouth?” asked Becky.

  While we’d been talking, the Brocine pack had been quietly conferring among themselves. As one, they turned their noses toward the screen.

  “These warmongering Hottini have opened a rift they don’t know how to close,” said the pack. “We would thank the honored Masters for their generous assistance.”

  Hon-tri-bum pointed all sixteen eyes at the Brocine pack, then shifted them all to Grav-e and his soldiers. “Tell me,” he said, “why are the Hottini here in the first place?”

  No one was going to admit that they were fighting over a calculator stolen from the Pipe Men. Not being able to confer about the best lie to tell, Grav-e and the pack remained silent while Hon-tri-bum shifted various eyes from one group to the other.