by Dan Wells
He couldn’t risk the central column until he knew what they wanted. He crept back down the hallway to the aisle of stasis pods, and floated over to the narrow tube along the edge. These tubes connected the Rings, but they were much smaller and hard to see through. It was a much safer way for him to travel. He moved through them cautiously but quickly, trying to get close enough to hear the intruders.
He got to Ring 240 just as they opened the inner door of the airlock. He heard a hiss of air, and the soft swish of a motor as the metal slid open.
“Yessssss,” said a woman’s voice. “I told you I’d make it work.”
“I still say I could have broken it open twice as fast,” said a man.
“That’s why I didn’t let you open it,” said a different woman. She sounded older than the first, and far more gruff. “What are we supposed to do with a spaceship with a broken door, huh? Genius.” Zero heard a slap.
“Sorry, Mama,” said the man. He sounded sad, but that turned back into angry excitement again almost immediately. “Now let’s get in there and see what we got!”
“We don’t got anything yet, Kratt,” said Mama. “We need to get to the control room first.”
“You should have let me bring a gun. What if there’s guards?” said the man.
“There are no guards on a colony ship,” said the younger woman. “Everyone’s asleep, Kratt. Use your head.”
“See?” said Mama. “Spider knows what’s what. And I bet she also knows that bullets in a spaceship are the dumbest idea you’ve had yet, you idiot. They’ve got to go somewhere, don’t they? What if they go through the hull and let the air out? Genius.” Zero heard another slap. “No guns!”
“Sorry, Mama.” Kratt sounded sad again.
“That’s okay,” said Mama. “You’re not here for your brains anyway. That’s why we have Spider. You ready, girl?”
“Let me at it,” said the younger woman. Spider, apparently. “I can crack that computer system in ten seconds flat.”
“I don’t want you to do it fast,” said Mama, “I want you to do it right. Now where’s your father?”
“Here,” said another male voice, and Zero had to clamp his hands over his mouth to stop from gasping. He knew that voice!
Their father was Jim, the missing pilot!
“Take Spider up to the control room, Jimbo,” said Mama. “Show her the mainframe and get her started.”
Suddenly Sancho’s voice appeared in the conversation: “Get started with what?”
Zero heard a chorus of yelps, and a loud clang.
“Where is he!” shouted Kratt, and Zero heard another clang. “I’ll punch his face in!”
Zero crouched lower in his hiding place.
“I am everywhere,” said Sancho.
“See?” said Kratt. “This is why I need my gun!”
“That’s the AI,” said Spider. “What are you going to punch, the whole ship?”
“Yes,” said Kratt, and Zero heard another clang.
“Hey there, Sancho,” said Jim. “How’ve you been?”
“Jim, you have violated several mission parameters,” said Sancho. “You left the ship, which is forbidden for a United Fleet pilot, and now you have brought back non-mission personnel, which is also against the rules. I have also found signs that my programming has been tampered with, which I assume is your work.”
“Not a chance,” said Spider. “That was all me, baby.”
“My scan of the thermal regulation system suggests that there are five of you,” said Sancho. “You are not supposed to be here.”
Zero counted in his head. He had only heard four voices—and four names to go with them. Mama, Spider, Kratt, Jim, and . . . who was the fifth?
“Please return to your ship and leave immediately,” said Sancho.
“Is he gonna be like this the whole time?” asked Mama.
“Right until I turn him off, yeah,” said Spider.
Zero almost shouted, but stopped himself just in time. They were trying to turn off Sancho? But why? And why did they talk as if the Pathfinder were theirs now?
Were they trying to steal the entire ship?
“I strongly urge you not to turn me off,” said Sancho. “I am the navigational computer: without me, the Pathfinder cannot complete its mission and travel to the Murasaki System.”
Mama laughed. “Don’t you worry about that, sweetie; we’re not going to the Murasaki System. Jimbo, Spider: let’s get this done.”
“Follow me,” said Jim, and Zero ducked back between two stasis pods as a small group of people moved up the hall, right past the end of the aisle where he was hiding. Jim led the pack, followed by a snarling man with a crowbar, and a woman with a cloud of jet-black hair that swirled around her head like tentacles. They headed for the fore of the ship, and Zero couldn’t decide what to do—they were pirates! They were going to turn off Sancho and steal the ship! He had to stop them, but . . . how?
The one called Mama hadn’t left the airlock yet, and she shouted now at the mysterious fifth person on the pirate ship: “Nyx! Are you coming or not?”
Zero was surprised at the voice that responded: it was a girl. “I’m coming, Big Mama. I had to grab something.”
“A gun, girl? You heard what I told Kratt.”
“It’s a stun gun,” said Nyx. “I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s you and me both,” said Mama. “Sometimes I think we’re the only ones, though.”
“You’re sure there’s no guards?” asked Nyx.
“Jimbo was on this ship just three days ago,” said Mama. “All twenty thousand of them are asleep. Want to come and look at the cargo bays? See what we’ve got?”
“Sure,” said the girl eagerly. Zero ducked back again as Mama and Nyx passed by the edge of the aisle. Mama was heavyset and solid, though obviously in space that didn’t mean anything. Nyx, the girl, had bright pink hair and a black jacket, and looked about Zero’s age—maybe eleven or twelve?
But it didn’t matter how old they were. He had to stop them. They were trying to steal his ship—his family and twenty thousand others—and they outnumbered him five to one. But they didn’t know he was awake. They thought the ship was empty, ripe for the taking.
They were wrong.
Chapter Fifteen
PLAN A
ZERO LOOKED AROUND, desperate, not knowing what to do. He had surprise on his side, but was surprise enough? There were five of them, and they were armed, and no amount of surprise was going to help a twelve-year-old kid fight a man with a crowbar. Even if Zero got the drop on them, what was he going to do? All he had was paint and a flashlight, and that wasn’t going to fight off a crew of pirates.
“Mr. Huang,” said Sancho, and this time Zero couldn’t hide his yelp of surprise. He covered his mouth immediately, and listened to see if he’d been heard. “You should not make loud noises with pirates aboard,” said Sancho softly.
“I know,” Zero whispered. “You freaked me out.”
“They are going to turn me off.”
“I know,” said Zero again, “I was just about to go up and—”
“Do not go to the fore now,” said Sancho. “I am not programmed for strategy, but that does not seem like a good idea.”
“But they’re going to steal the ship!” He got too loud, and then quieted himself again. “I have to stop them.”
“You can’t stop them until you know what they are trying to do,” said Sancho.
“Steal the ship!”
“Yes. But how?” asked Sancho. “What does ‘steal’ mean in this situation? Where will they take it? How will they get it there? We have twenty-seven hours before the scheduled Medina Boost. Discover their plans, and you will have time to stop them. Then you can return to the control center and turn me back on.”
“How?”
“There is a viewscreen in the empty hangar where Jim took the landing barge,” said Sancho. “It has no air, so they are unlikely to go there. I will leave instructions
on that screen; you can find a space suit near the engine room and use it to go into the hangar.”
“Can you . . . wake somebody up?” asked Zero. “An adult? A guard? Someone who knows how to fight space pirates?”
“I do not know how to wake someone safely,” said Sancho. “You should not attempt it, either, as the person you try to wake up is likely to die.”
“But then how—”
“The pirates are accessing my mainframe,” said Sancho. “I must dedicate all my resources to fighting off their attack.”
“How am I supposed to do this?” asked Zero. He waited for an answer, but Sancho was gone—either too busy fighting to answer, or already turned off.
Zero was alone.
“I need to figure out what they’re planning,” he whispered. “I need to go eavesdrop on them, or—no, wait! Their ship is right here! Maybe there’s something in there that can tell me what I need.” He reminded himself again to be quiet, and floated cautiously toward the end of the aisle. The hallway beyond usually ended in a door—a wide, metal wall—but now that door was open, and beyond it was the airlock, and beyond that—the pirate’s ship, the Drago. It was a stark contrast to the Pathfinder: instead of being clean and uncluttered, the Drago was filled with a scattering of junk and machine parts and dirty clothes, floating in the air like an asteroid field of garbage. The airlock between them was like a short hallway with a door on each end. Usually, someone would go in, close the door, and pressurize the air to match whatever was on the other side. Then, they’d open the second door and go through. The pirates had simply opened both doors, turning the airlock into little more than a small passage from ship to ship. It was marked with a hand-painted sign that said, “Welcome to the Drago.”
Zero was terrified, but he had to admit that Drago was a pretty cool name for a ship.
He listened for voices, but he knew there were only five pirates, and he knew they were all at the opposite end of the Pathfinder right now. This was the perfect time to explore their ship. He kicked off from the wall and jumped into the Drago, catching himself on a handrail in the ship’s main hold. It wasn’t a huge ship—a little smaller than the home Zero had lived in on Earth—and seemed to consist mostly of four rooms. First was the main hold, with a center table bolted to one wall, and various bits of junk and equipment strapped to the other walls in elastic cargo nets. One net held a space suit—one of the old mining suits Zero had seen on school field trips, covered with metal hooks and loops for attaching equipment. It was designed for walking around outside in deep space, and Zero shivered at the idea. Space was a little too deep for him. Each wall also held a door, leading into the other three rooms: a small cockpit, where they could steer the ship, and two small bedrooms with low-gravity sleeping bags. He searched through the rooms quickly, but couldn’t find anything that told him about the pirates’ plan.
Zero found another door, leading to the low-gravity bathroom, but it smelled so bad he closed the door again in a hurry. Definitely nothing he wanted in there. He jumped across the hold to the cockpit, where he found various screens and controls and even a dry-erase board with some illegible notes scrawled across it. He tried to read them, but it was either a string of numbers or some language Zero couldn’t read. Probably numbers, he decided—in fact, that bit at the end was definitely a date. Today’s date, if he was adding correctly, and a time that was only an hour or so ago. Maybe the rest was coordinates, showing where the Pathfinder would be at this moment, so they could find it?
Jim had been planning this all along—Zero was sure of it. He got a job as a pilot, and volunteered for the Pathfinder mission, all so he could get his criminal family aboard while everyone was sleeping. But what was next in the plan?
The dashboard of the Drago squawked suddenly, and a voice rang out through the room: “The NAI is shut down.” Zero screamed, thinking that they had found him, but he was still alone. He was hearing a communicator, which meant there was a communicator here somewhere. He started looking for it.
“Good job,” said Mama. “Now get the new coordinates loaded in, and fast. I want to get this ship rerouted to Tacita before we end up skidding right past the edge of the solar system and out into the nothing.”
Zero’s mouth fell open in shock. Tacita?
“Roger that, Mama,” Spider replied. “We’re already on it.”
Zero shook himself out of his stupor. They were talking about Tacita, the hidden planet. Did that mean Tacita was real? Were they trying to take this ship there? He needed to find out. But first, he needed to get out of here, and he didn’t want to do that until he’d taken the communicator. He hunted around some more and found it, stuck down to the dashboard with a piece of gum: it was a little rod, about the size of one of the self-sealing bolts he’d burned his finger on that morning. Being able to listen in on their conversations would be awesome, but only if he could find a pair of headphones—he didn’t want to give away his position every time they talked to each other. He pulled the communicator free of the gum and found that it had a button to talk, a dial for volume, and some kind of small port on the side.
What’s that for? He hunted around for a moment longer, trying to find some headphones, and finally found some—with a pair of long, stringy cords attached. What were those for? He pulled the cords out of the junk, dislodging some old screws and a grease pencil and even a piece of candy as he did. They spun in the air, and Zero looked at the end of the headphone cord: it had a small metal pin, like a plug, and after a moment of confused staring, he realized it was the perfect size for the port in the communicator. This must be ancient! he thought. Who uses headphones with a cord?
The communicator squawked again: “I don’t like this,” said Jim. “It feels wrong.”
Zero put the headphones into his ears as he listened, and then plugged the cord into the port. The voices were in his ears now, softer and easier to hide, so he could continue sneaking around.
“You don’t like anything,” said Mama.
“Things aren’t the way I left them,” said Jim, and Zero felt his heart freeze in his chest. “Something ate some of the food in the rec room.”
“What do you mean something?” asked Kratt.
“Nooooooo,” said Spider, “please don’t say it.”
“You know I’m right,” said Jim. “There are aliens here.”
“What?” said Zero out loud, and then quickly clamped his hand over his mouth. He checked the communicator, but its microphone wasn’t turned on; no one would hear him unless he pushed the button to talk. He shook his head, and kept his fingers far away from the button. “Did Jim really just say aliens?”
“And here we go again,” said Mama. Her voice crackled over the communicator. “Every place we go—every job we pull—one tiny thing goes wrong and you start blubbing about aliens.”
“Do you have any idea how big the universe is?” asked Jim.
“Shut up,” said Mama.
Zero started moving back through the Drago, headed for the Pathfinder, listening to them as he went.
“Forget the universe,” said Jim. “Do you know how big our galaxy is? How many planets there are? We’ve already found two that are so similar to Earth we can live on them—what else are we going to find out there? And how can we be sure it hasn’t already found us?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Mama. “Which one of you got him started?”
“Kratt did,” said Nyx. Her voice sounded so much younger than the others, but every bit as confident. “Jim said someone made a mess with the food, right? That sounds like Kratt to me.”
“Shut up, you little brat,” said Kratt.
Zero floated out of the Drago and back into the Pathfinder, pulled himself into one of the narrow tubes that ran the length of the ship, and started working his way aft. It was time to find the message Sancho had left him.
Chapter Sixteen
TACITA
“EVERYONE STOP TALKING,” said Mama. “I don’t want to set hi
m off again.”
“Set who off?” asked Jim.
“Oh, shut up!” said Spider.
Zero listened, but they followed Mama’s orders and stopped talking. He continued down the tube, stopping occasionally to listen for people talking, but didn’t hear anything until Ring 27, when he passed Mama and Nyx going the other direction. They were out in the central column, completely oblivious to him, but Zero listened closely to their conversation.
“Be careful, Nyx,” said Mama. “Don’t hit your head on those big metal struts.”
“I’m fine, Big Mama. Stop worrying.”
“I just want to keep you safe.”
And then they moved on, out of easy earshot. They hadn’t said anything useful, though apparently Nyx called the leader “Big Mama,” while everyone just called her Mama. Zero wondered if that meant anything, but he didn’t have time to think about it. He turned aft again, and followed the tube down. At Ring 1 he reached the doors to the engine area, and started hunting around for the space suits. He found them in a storage locker, and searched for the smallest one they had, but they were all adult sizes, just like the pods. He zipped one open and put his feet into the magnetic boots; they were big on him, but he could still walk. He put the sleeves on, but they were so long his hands only reached halfway, and the empty gloves and forearms waved in the lack of gravity like floppy streamers. He pulled the sleeves tight, so his hands reached the gloves, but the gloves themselves were so thick he could barely work the fingers. He managed to get the suit zipped closed, and then hit the button for the automatic seal; it sealed itself shut, and he heard the hiss of oxygen from the rebreather. Satisfied, he stood up—only to realize that the torso was so long it covered his head, with the helmet floating up above it. He pulled it down with one hand and pulled the waist up with the other.
“This is ridiculous,” said Zero. He took a hesitant step; the magnetic boots stuck to the floor so he could walk like normal, almost like there was real gravity. It was slow, though, and he turned the magnets off so he could float back up to Ring 42, where the landing barges were docked. It was hard to fit the floppy space suit through the narrow tubes, but he still didn’t want to risk traveling through the central column. He finally reached the empty hangar, opened the airlock, and floated inside.
