by Dan Wells
“I’m not going to eat this,” said Jim. “It’s contaminated.”
Zero scowled. He was so close!
“Suit yourself,” said Mama, “but stay in that ship. I don’t want that kid to start snooping around.”
“I’m throwing this away,” said Jim, and Mama turned away from her food in a rage, pushing herself toward the door.
“Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean nobody else will!”
Now Spider was the only one looking at the burritos.
“It’s contaminated!” shouted Jim. “It’s not safe.”
“I’m done here,” said Spider. “You two argue all you want—I’m going back to the control room.” She pushed past Mama, and suddenly no one was looking at the food. It was right there, in front of Zero, unattended but out of reach. He looked at the straw in his hand; it would easily fit through the slats in the vent. Maybe he could throw it? Or—
The answer was so simple he almost laughed. With the sauce in the straw it was basically a blow dart. He slid one end through the vent, aimed it carefully, took a big breath, then put his mouth on the clean end of the straw and blew. A tiny blob of tomato sauce flew out, crossed the room, and splatted on the wall behind the burrito.
He missed!
He took another straw, aimed carefully, and blew. He hit the chair.
He had one tomato straw left. Mama couldn’t keep yelling at Jim for too much longer. He poked the straw through the vent, aimed, and blew.
The bacteria-ridden tomato sauce sailed across the room in a perfect, straight line, and splashed onto one of the burritos. But whose? Mama turned around, and Zero pulled the straw back through the vent and out of view.
Mama floated back to the burritos, grabbed the contaminated one, and took a bite. She frowned as she ate the tiny blob of tomato sauce. “This salsa’s really bland.”
Zero silently punched the air in triumph.
Chapter Twenty-Three
CAUGHT
ZERO WAS OUT of the spoiled food, and he’d only gotten one person. Should he go back for more? Could he come up with another plan? Mama was obviously the boss, so stranding her in a bathroom was pretty good, but Jim and Spider and Nyx were all still on the loose, and they were more likely to catch him than she was anyway. Mama was mostly just coordinating things from a central location, through the communicators, and she could still do that even if the location was a bathroom.
He considered, just for a second, trying to reboot Sancho right now, but decided not to risk it. Spider would just turn him off again, and this time, she might do it in a way that Zero couldn’t fix. Better to keep going and hope he could get rid of the pirates. He needed more sauce. Getting them sick might take a while, but it was still his best plan.
He slipped out through the hatch and headed aft, going slow and watching out for Jim. When he finally made it back to the cargo bay he crept inside, closed the door, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Boo,” said a voice, and Zero yelped in fright. He looked around wildly, pushing himself toward the door, but Nyx was right there, blocking it with her body. Zero backed up, yelping again, and then braced himself to attack. If he could take her out now, while she was alone, he could—
“Nope,” said Nyx, and raised her stun gun, pointing it straight at his chest. “You just stay right there, and we can have a little talk.” Now that he got a closer look at her, he decided he was right about her age—twelve, maybe even thirteen. She had bright pink hair that billowed around her like a jellyfish, and a devious smirk that showed she meant business.
“Don’t kill me,” said Zero.
“It’s just a stun gun, you big baby, it can’t kill you.”
“But Kratt will,” he said. “Or Mama.”
“How do you know our names? Ohhhh.” She nodded her head, as if everything made sense. “You’re wearing headphones. Do you have one of our communicators?”
Zero clenched his jaw, wondering how he could possibly get out of this.
“I guess that explains how you’ve been able to hide from us,” said Nyx. “Jim keeps calling out his location like some kind of military genius, and you’re just listening in and laughing your head off.”
Zero didn’t know what to say. “Well I haven’t been . . . laughing, really.”
“Give it to me,” said Nyx.
Zero didn’t move.
“Come on,” said Nyx, waving the stun gun. “Give me the communicator—and the headphones.” Zero grimaced and pulled it out of his pocket, tossing both the device and the headphones toward her. They drifted lazily through the air, and she caught them with her free hand. She looked at them in surprise. “No way,” she said, examining them. “This is one of ours, isn’t it? These are Spider’s headphones.” She looked at Zero and raised her eyebrow. “You went into our ship—you looted our ship.” She smiled. “Not bad.”
“It seemed fair,” said Zero, finding his courage again. “You’re trying to steal mine.”
“Oh, so it’s your ship?” asked Nyx. “Well pardon me, Governor Tamira Hatendi of the Kaguya Colony Pathfinder mission. I didn’t recognize you without your United Earth uniform.” She stared at him for a moment, thinking. Then she asked another question. “What’d you do to Big Mama?”
“What?”
“You said Kratt and Mama would kill you,” said Nyx. “Kratt, obviously, I know why he’d kill you, but why Big Mama? What’d you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
She cocked her head to the side, considering him. “What’s your name?”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m going to ask you your name,” said Nyx, “over and over again, until you tell me.”
“I’m . . . Zero,” said Zero.
“There’s no way that’s your real name.”
“Is Nyx your real name?”
“Okay then,” said Nyx, smiling again but keeping the stun gun trained on his chest. “Nicknames it is. Are you really alone?”
Zero shook his head. “There’s a whole team of United Earth commandos hiding in one of the cargo bays.”
“They’re super bad at their jobs,” said Nyx.
“Fine, I’m alone,” admitted Zero. “But you gotta admit, I’m doing a pretty good job for one lone kid.”
“You are doing a fantastic job,” Nyx agreed. “You chained Kratt to the outside of a spaceship! Honestly, that deserves an award.”
“So let me go.”
“No backsies,” said Nyx. “I got you fair and square.”
“How’d you know I was coming here?” asked Zero. “Jim said I wasn’t in this bay.”
“He said the spaces here were too small to move through,” said Nyx. “Which, of course, made me wonder how big they really were, because Jim is not a small guy. I came down here, realized I could fit through these little gaps in the crates pretty easy, and then I found your open food crate and I knew for sure.”
“It was open when I found it,” said Zero.
“Aliens?” asked Nyx.
“Probably.”
“Your aliens really like tomato sauce,” said Nyx. “You’ve got two open cans of it back there.”
“Did you eat any?”
She frowned. “Did I eat any of the random open cans of tomato sauce I found floating in a cargo hold?”
“You don’t have to be rude about it.”
“But I choose to be.” Nyx looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “So, now what do I do with you?”
Zero smiled. “Let me go?”
“You’d make a terrible pirate,” said Nyx.
“Tell that to Kratt.”
Nyx nodded. “See, Kratt is the problem: if I take you back to the family, Kratt will, as you said, kill you. And I don’t want you to die—you’re on the other team, but you’re still pretty cool. And there’s nobody cool on Tacita.”
“Are you really from Tacita?” asked Zero. “Like an honest- to-goodness hidden planet on the edge of the solar system?”
“You better believe it,” said Nyx.
“What’s it like?”
Nyx paused, as if the question surprised her, then shrugged again. “Awful. It’s cold and it’s dark. We’re so far away from the sun that it just looks like another star. Like we have no sun at all. The atmosphere keeps us from literally freezing, but we can’t breathe it, so we live in old ships and in holes in the ground.”
“That sucks.”
“It really does.”
“How’d you get there?” Zero asked.
“Me? I was born there. Everyone else found it by accident in a failed mining expedition about fifteen years ago. A couple thousand people. It took them five years to get the ships repaired. And in the meanwhile, they did what they do best and started mining. Turns out, there’s enough molybdenum out there to supply the whole solar system for a thousand years.”
“What’s molybdenum?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea.”
Zero stared, and then laughed. And after a moment, Nyx laughed with him. Small chuckles giving way to loud guffaws. Both of them laughing and laughing until they could barely breathe. “Oh man! You don’t have the faintest idea, and neither do I.”
“It’s some kind of metal, I think. And they’re ready to burn down the whole friggin’ system for it. And I have zero clue what it is or what it’s for or anything. Adults are the worst.”
Zero thought about his parents. “Some adults are okay.”
“None of the ones I know. I mean, you’ve seen my mother. You want to guess where my father is?”
“You mean Jim?”
“He’s my step-grandfather, actually. He joined us about six years ago when we started selling molybdenum back to the inner planets. Most of the Tacita miners are content being secret traders, but Big Mama wants more. She found out that Jim was the Pathfinder pilot and hatched this whole scheme to use him as an inside man.”
“So, who’s your dad, then?”
Nyx settled into her story, visibly pleased to have someone new she could talk to. “It doesn’t matter who, just where—and that’s dead. He was killed in the first Tacita mutiny. See, Big Mama didn’t used to be in charge, so she tried to take over and used her own sons as muscle. Got my daddy killed a month or two before I was even born. And if she ever feels sorry about it, she’s pretty good at hiding it. Throws it in Spider’s face sometimes. Or in Kratt’s—making it out like it’s their fault. She’s the one that ran the whole thing, though.”
“So your mom is Spider?”
“Not that you can tell by watching her. She treats me like garbage, and just lets Big Mama raise me. And I guess my father would have been about the same. All I know about him is that he fell in love with Spider, and anyone who’d do that is crazy. So I figure I’m better off not knowing him.”
“Wow,” said Zero. “I’m sorry.” It was starting to make sense to him why Nyx was so eager to talk. She didn’t have anyone in her family—maybe her whole life—that she could trust or feel comfortable with.
“And the worst part is . . .” Nyx paused, like she was listening to something. She waited, then gave Zero a wary glance. “See? Case in point.”
“What happened?”
“Oh—I forgot you lost your communicator,” said Nyx, and tapped her ears, revealing wireless headphones. “Big Mama just told me to come back where it’s safe, and my darling mother said I could fend for myself, and good riddance if I couldn’t.”
“That sucks,” said Zero, thinking of his own mother. He looked back up. “Though to be fair, you’re the only one who caught me, right? So you can fend for yourself.”
“Well, that’s not really the part that bothers me, is it?”
“Can I ask you a question?” asked Zero.
“I might not answer,” said Nyx, “but you can ask me anything you want.”
“Are you really going to enslave us all? Like, all twenty thousand people?”
Nyx looked away, like she felt embarrassed, or even guilty. “That’s . . . not what this is.”
“I heard Mama say it,” said Zero. “You’re going to make us work in a mine.”
“Well, I didn’t know that when we started.”
“But you know it now. Are you just going to let them?”
“Maybe that’s none of your business.” She raised the stun gun again. “I don’t have to explain this stuff to you.”
“Sorry,” said Zero again. Apparently he’d struck a nerve. “I just . . . I like having someone to talk to.”
Nyx stared at him for a while before answering. “Yeah,” she said at last.
He stared back, waiting for her to stun him or call for Jim, or any number of other scenarios—all bad for him. But she didn’t do anything. Finally he dared to speak. “So . . .” She didn’t shoot him, so he tried again. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” She twisted her face into a couple of weird expressions, trying to think. “Will you stop attacking us?”
“So you can enslave me?”
“I can make sure you’re okay,” she said.
“Do you mean ‘living an exciting new life on a bright new planet’ okay, or just ‘slightly better off than the rest of the slaves in a deep space mine’ okay?”
Nyx threw up her hands. “Well, what do you want me to do? Betray my family?”
“Your family is evil.”
She shoved the gun closer to his face. “Say that again.”
“I mean—” He stopped, searching for something to say. “Come with us. To Kaguya.”
“There’s not enough stasis pods,” said Nyx. “I looked.”
“If you looked, it’s because you want to come,” said Zero. “Tacita’s terrible—you said so yourself. Kaguya’s awesome. There’s got to be something we could—” She stopped him before he could continue, holding up one hand while she put her other to her ear. She listened for a moment, then pointed the stun gun at him again.
“What did you do to Big Mama?”
“Nothing,” said Zero, “I told you.”
“Did you poison her?” asked Nyx. “She says she feels like she’s dying—vomiting, diarrhea.” Nyx looked genuinely worried. “She’s the only one who’s nice to me.”
“She’ll be fine,” said Zero, starting to feel bad and trying to reassure her. “I just made her a little sick, but she’ll get better, and—” He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because Nyx shot him with the stun gun: the nose of the weapon blew open, and two metal darts flew out, trailing wires behind them. They hit him, and the electrical current surged through his body, and he blacked out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
PAPER, ROCK, AND SCISSORS
ZERO WOKE UP in the dark, floating in the cargo bay. His head hurt, and his chest ached where the stun gun darts had hit him. But he was alive, and he was healthy.
And he was alone.
There was no sign of Nyx, or of where she might have gone. Zero assumed she’d gone back to find Big Mama, which meant she was probably going to tell the others where he was. But why had she just left him? Why not take him with her? It’s not like it was hard to carry someone around in zero gravity—she could just shove him along in front of her, all the way up the central column of the ship. She didn’t want him to screw up their plans, but she didn’t want him to die, either. Maybe her solution was just to . . . leave him?
There was no way he was going to give up. With Mama sick and Kratt still outside, they were down to just three pirates, and one of them was a little girl, and she’d already used her stun gun. Those things only had one shot each. He opened the door and checked the nearest computer panel, showing him the countdown. It was almost time to cross the Kuiper Cliff. He’d been unconscious for hours. He didn’t have much time, but he still had some, and he was going to use it. All or nothing. Do or die.
He didn’t like that last thought, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.
He opened the door and jumped into the hall, and started clim
bing through the tubes toward the Drago on Ring 240. He didn’t have a plan, but he didn’t have time to make one, either. All he had was desperation. He prayed that it would be enough.
About halfway up, a voice echoed through the tube. “There you are.” It was Spider. Zero spun around, trying to see where she was, but he couldn’t find her. He kept moving, and her voice moved with him—instead of behind him, it was in front of him now, like she’d teleported. How?
“Don’t stop now,” said Spider. “Keep coming! Or going, if that’s what you want to do. You think we can’t find you? I control the ship now, you little space rat. I can find you anywhere.”
Zero realized that Spider was talking through the speakers, just like Sancho had done! Which meant she’d gained even deeper access to the Pathfinder computer. That’s how she knew where he was.
“The locator chip!” Zero whispered.
“What was that?” asked Spider. “You’ll have to speak up, little space rat. You’re so insignificant I can barely hear you.” Sancho had been able to tell where Zero was by using a chip sewed into the fabric of his coverall. He unzipped it now and tore it off, leaving himself floating in the air wearing just a pair of shorts. The suit tumbled away, along with the flashlight he’d stashed inside of it. He grabbed the light, ready to use it as a club if nothing else.
“You think you can hide from me by taking off the coverall?” asked Spider. Her voice seemed to come from everywhere. “I have the whole thermal system too, dude. And you’re the only other heat source on the entire ship, so: you’re kind of obvious.”
Zero launched himself up through the tube, leaping from Ring to Ring, trying to go as fast as he could—until bam! A hand reached out and grabbed him.
