by David Liss
I loved the program so much I went back and collected as many of the old Brave and the Bold comics as I could find, and when I read each issue, I went in with one question: Which one was brave and which one was bold? I spent more hours than I would like to admit trying to tease out the difference between the two terms, and what I decided was that guys like Superman and Martian Manhunter were brave. They put themselves in danger for the greater good. They were willing to take risks and make sacrifices because doing so was the moral choice. Guys like Green Lantern and the Flash were bold—they were reckless and daring, Sure, they wanted to do the right thing, but their willingness to expose themselves to harm smacked of daredevilry, like their powers filled them with the urge to take chances.
I always admired the brave heroes, and I wanted to be one of them, but I didn’t have what it took to be brave. Bravery required true courage. There was a nobility in bravery. As I prepared to drop down to that planet, I knew I was not being brave. I was being bold. I was reckless. I was taking other kids, the best friend I’d ever had, and a girl I cared about, into the most dangerous situation I could possible imagine, and somehow I had convinced myself I could do it.
• • •
Steve looked at his readout panel, which he’d configured to display solar flares. “Going to be soon, mate.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You feel good about this?”
I thought about it, and my answer surprised me. “I don’t know why, but I do.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said. “Because I’m scared out of my bleeding mind. Coming up in three, two, one. Now!” He throttled the ship forward, and we all lurched back, but the g-force inhibitors kicked in like they were supposed to. We hadn’t taxed them. Not yet.
The ship began to buck violently, and the engines whined. Despite being strapped in, I jerked violently in my seat. It was impossible not to feel like we were crashing, like we were doomed. Part of me wanted to panic, but part of me watched with calm dispassion, as though this were a movie, and a boring one. I began to wonder if the dread was somehow forced, like a memory of something that had once scared me as a little kid but meant nothing now.
Steve worked the panels in a state of near hypnosis. He flicked his tongue, as if the scents in the air could tell him something about the ship’s system. Maybe they could, for all I knew. Maybe it was a nervous habit.
“Listen up, sentients,” he said and the turbulence increased. “Tighten your sphincters.” Then we pivoted toward the atmosphere and throttled hard as we made entry. The shields kicked in, and the main screen showed the heat and fire building up toward our nose, generated by the incredible friction of reentry at top and stupid speeds. The g-force inhibitors were already maxing out, and I could feel pressure in my eyes and my sinuses. We were tossed violently. The engines screamed, and I heard the disconcerting sound of metal groaning under stress.
“Turn back,” I heard Nayana moan. “I can’t do this.”
I wanted to tell her she could, but the effort of speaking was too much. Instead I watched as Steve broke through the atmosphere and cut the engines and we became nothing more than a meteor hurtling with murderous force toward the surface of a strange world.
I thought my eyes would literally tear out of my head. I thought my spine would come out of my back. I thought I would wet my pants. None of that happened. We fell and fell and fell. Somehow I managed a glance back, and I saw that Charles, Mi Sun, and Nayana had passed out. They were all bleeding from their noses. I didn’t think I was. Tamret wasn’t. Steve made a weird coughing sound, like a failed attempt at speech, tried to raise his arm, and blacked out.
Tamret managed a nod at me, and I switched my console to helm while she switched hers to navigation. And we were still falling and there was nothing but pain and pressure and the feeling of being torn apart. I envied Steve his oblivion, and I longed for it, but I could not quit on my friends, and I could not ask Tamret to do what I would not. I stayed there. I made myself stay, and focus, and fly that plummeting death trap.
Then the console chimed, signaling that it was time to come out of the dive and save our lives, but I could not do it. I was too far gone. I couldn’t lift my arm or make my hands move or think about anything but the incredible pain and how, if we struck the surface, it would all end. I was giving up. I was going to let us all die.
Except I wasn’t. As if looking at someone else’s actions through my own eyes, I saw my hands working the controls. I didn’t recall making a decision, but I was already in mid-action. The engines were firing and I was trying to level out the ship.
A doubting voice in the back of my mind told me I had waited an instant too long, but somehow I knew that wasn’t true, because we were turning, hard and fast, and then we were no longer vertical. I was afraid I’d overcompensated, but we leveled out, and there we were, skimming along two hundred feet above a rough and rugged landscape of unfamiliar brush and rock and sand. Alien vistas tumbled past us in a blur of color. There were great purple and pink things, like trees with vines twisting out of thick stalks, waving in the breeze like giant seaweed. And there was grass, actual green grass, but a strange shade of dark green. Herds of quadrupeds ran from us, and things like monkeys that scattered from the vine trees. And above it all, zipping along at about seven hundred miles an hour, was me. Next to me was my unconscious pal, and next to him Tamret, who looked at me and said nothing, which was just fine because her approving gaze was exactly what I needed.
Steve opened his eyes. “You step in for me, mate?”
“Yep.”
“You think I’m a tosser for blacking out?”
“A little bit,” I said. “How do you feel?”
“Bloody awful. But surprisingly less bloody awful than you’d suppose. Maybe because I’m not actually dead.”
“Oh my God, that was the worst!” Nayana cried from the back. “Let’s never do that again!” The adrenaline was coursing through her. I knew it because it was coursing through me. We’d lived through something no human body should be able to survive. Now we were flying really, really fast, which seemed like a good reason to be concerned.
Steve was on top of it, though, and already working his console. He wiped at his bloody snout with the back of his hand and then proceeded to call up something on one of his screens. “Veer ten degrees to the east and then straight ahead for about twelve hundred miles.”
I watched as Steve made the course correction, and I felt someone’s furry hand touch my neck. “Nice flying,” Tamret whispered into my ear. “You can do anything. And you know what that means?”
“That you were right and I was wrong?”
“Correct.”
• • •
Steve put the ship down about ten miles outside the prison complex. There was a copse of low purple and pink vine trees, and while we weren’t terribly well hidden, I didn’t think anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for the ship was going to find it. It took half an hour for our nanites to repair our various broken blood vessels and muscle tears from thrashing against our restraints, and then I made sure everyone put on fresh clothes. A shower would have been nice, but the artifact carrier didn’t have such amenities, and clean clothes were our only hope of keeping our enemy from smelling us from a quarter mile away.
I’d chosen these clothes deliberately before leaving the station. I put on khaki pants, held up with suspenders over my maroon shirt, and over that my authentic Firefly “Browncoat” coat, which was, indeed, brown. To get through this, I needed to feel like a tough guy, and if cosplay made me believe I could be a hero, I wasn’t too proud to indulge. Everyone else went for the practical: jeans and long-sleeved shirts and durable shoes. Tamret wore olive-green pants, made out of some kind of flexible fabric, and a purple shirt, both clearly chosen to help her blend into the foliage.
So, with no reason to delay, I opened the shuttle doors and we
stepped out onto an alien planet. My first. I had been in spaceships and I had been on Confederation Central, which felt like an actual world, but it wasn’t. This was a planet, in a strange part of the galaxy. I had traveled to another world. The air had a crisp, slightly metallic scent, and it was cool and humid at the same time, with crazy purple and green and orange vegetation growing everywhere.
“This,” I noted with wonder, “is another planet.”
“We chose well in having you lead us, mate,” Steve said. “You don’t miss much.”
Charles followed me out of the shuttle, and he looked around, straining his neck. He began to spin, slowly, taking it all in. He crouched down and took a handful of the gravelly soil in his hand and let it stream through his fingers.
“He’s right,” Charles said dreamily. “This is another planet.”
“I get it,” Nayana said. “It’s a new and amazing experience and all that. Plant your flag and let’s move on.”
“Another planet,” Charles said. “I wonder if this ever gets old.”
“Somehow I doubt it,” I said.
Even without the wonder of being on a new world, three days on the cramped artifact carrier made walking through the jungle toward an enemy prison feel like a rare treat. After about six miles, we began to see signs of habitation. No people, but abandoned excavations where I supposed Former artifacts had either been removed or never discovered. We walked on.
Two hours later we saw our first outbuildings. There was no fence around the complex—why would there be on a planet from which there was no escape?
We heard the sound of digging, of picks on stone, and we walked through the trees until we found an active dig. There were probably fifty beings at work there, swinging axes, sifting through sand. I saw all kinds of creatures, many of whom I recognized from the station, but I did not see anyone who looked like Martian Manhunter. Around them I saw ten guards, Phands like Vusio-om, with their rectangular heads and space-orc underbites. They all looked lazy and bored, in crisp white uniforms that had a strangely British-colonial feel to them. They stood along the edge of the pit, expecting no trouble and not receiving any. This was still an insane plan, but the lack of Phandic discipline would prove helpful.
I kept looking for my father, scanning each face, each body, for that shade of green. I didn’t see him, but as I moved my eyes over the mass of people swinging, breaking, grunting, I came across a familiar face. I bit my lip to keep myself from crying out in surprise and happiness. There, toward the far end of the pit, swinging a pickax with skill and strength, was a large and bulky figure I had come to love.
I hit Charles on the arm and pointed.
“Oh,” he said.
Oh, indeed. She looked tired and wounded. There was a bandage wrapped around one of her arms. Her eyes, huge and far apart, were half closed, and her mouth at the end of her trunk was pursed in an expression I thought was distaste. She looked broken and unspeakably sad, but I felt a thrill of excitement. It was Captain Qwlessl. She was alive. Maybe the rest of her crew was also alive.
How? Had she somehow been away from her ship when it had been destroyed? Had the Phands altered the images of its destruction to make it look like an attack? Maybe the crew had evacuated and they had destroyed the ship themselves rather than face capture.
I would find out the details later. What mattered for now was that my friend, whom I had believed dead because of me, was still alive. That was good news for more than just the obvious reasons. It meant that getting off the planet had just become a little less impossible.
• • •
We waited until sundown, when the guards rounded up the prisoners and began to lead them indoors. It was my hope that the grounds would not be well guarded at night.
They went inside and we ate our rations and drank from our canteens. Then we waited some more, watching their movements as red points on the hologram of the prison grounds. Fourteen guards were inside the prison complex. The other thirty-three were inside the barracks, and more than half of those appeared to be sleeping. They evidently worked on fourteen-man rotational shifts, with a few extra Phands here and there. Inside the barracks there were three Phands in the front control room. The other eleven not sleeping were in a central room, probably a mess or rec room.
“Cameras here and here,” Steve said, pointing to the hologram. “But look at the angle. They’re pointed down, so we can assume they’ve never had an Ish-hi prisoner.”
I looked at Tamret. “Is there a constant data stream from the surface to the cruiser in orbit?”
She checked her data bracelet. “Doesn’t look like it.”
That meant no one on the orbiting cruiser would know what we were up to, which was good news. “This might work. Steve, you think you can get in via the roof and get the drop on them?”
“Not a problem, mate. Mi Sun, be ready near the main door, out of range of the cameras. If I need backup, that’s you.”
“Got it,” she said.
Steve scrambled through the brush to the far side of the building and scurried up the wall like, well, a lizard. I saw his hunched form skittering over the roof, then moving a panel and dropping down.
We waited and waited for what felt like forever but could not have been more than a minute. Then the front door swung open and I heard a loud hiss. I hoped it was the Ish-hi equivalent of a whistle. We moved.
Steve was inside the control room with three unconscious Phand guards. He held a metal cylinder in his hand and was fiddling with some controls on it.
“Nicely done,” I told him.
“That was the easy part,” he said quietly. “If we’re going to take out the other thirty Phands in here, we’re going to need to figure out these plasma wands.”
He pushed a few more buttons, and a narrow metal rod about three feet long emerged from the cylinder with a satisfying click. It was maybe a quarter inch in diameter, and hollow, with evenly spaced holes all over it. Steve pressed another button, and plasma began to flow upward. It sparked wildly for an instant and then settled into a tight little blue nimbus, evenly spaced around the rod, to make a glowing cylinder about two feet long.
“Oh, wow,” I said, unable to believe what I was looking at. You write something off as impossible, pure fantasy, and then suddenly it’s right before you, and it’s real. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Give me one of those right this instant!”
Steve picked up another wand and tossed it to me. “Okay, mate. Keep it calm. The big button on the bottom seems to activate the rod, and the one at the top turns on the plasma. You’re welcome to have a go, but I’m still figuring out the rest.”
I released the rod and then activated the plasma. I held the wand, looking at its bright blue glow, and I moved it through the air. It made a whooom whooom noise, just liked I’d hoped it would. “I can’t believe it. This is so amazing.”
“You’re being daft,” Steve said. “It’s only a plasma wand.”
“No it’s not,” I told him, as I whoomed back and forth. “It’s an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. This is a light saber.”
• • •
Once I stopped annoying my friends by waving my plasma wand around and striking Jedi poses, we got down to the business of figuring out how the weapons actually worked. We got comfortable with turning them off and on and adjusting the power settings, so it was time to actually use the darn things. We all agreed that Steve and Mi Sun would lead the way, hoping their speed and skills, and the power of surprise, would be enough to take out the eleven guards in the central room before they woke the nineteen guards in their bunks.
We found some rope and what appeared to be something like alien duct tape and left Nayana and Charles in charge of binding the guards. It was time to clear out the building.
I was no fighter—my limited time in the sparring room had proved that—but I was strangely confident i
n my skin, like a champion boxer when he enters the ring. Maybe it was the plasma wand, which gave me my chance to play Luke Skywalker for real. I kept telling myself that this was not a game, that we could die, that beings almost certainly would die if we were to succeed, and yet I felt so sure of myself, like taking down an alien prison was no big deal. My mind was alert, and my muscles twitched with coiled readiness. I decided it had to be the adrenaline, or maybe the excitement of knowing that at least some of the crew of the Dependable had survived.
Steve led the way through a corridor and down a flight of stairs, and then along another corridor toward a large room with an open door. He signaled for us to stop and waved Mi Sun forward. They activated their plasma wands and rushed in.
Tamret and I were right behind them, but we weren’t fast enough to see most of what they did in there. We heard the deep whoosh of the plasma wands and the Phands shouting and unconscious guards hitting the floor. As we reached the door, a Phand ran out, no doubt hoping to signal for help. I swiped at him with my wand, striking him across his midriff. He did not vanish into a pile of empty clothes. He did, however, jerk and spasm like a man who had been electrocuted, and then fell to the floor completely senseless.
When I stepped into the room, there were more unconscious Phands, looking stiff and vaguely silly in their white uniforms. We found enough cord and wire and tape to bind them, which was time-consuming, difficult, and generally less exciting than combat.
“Look at this,” Steve said. He’d been propping up one of the Phands to tie his hands behind his back, when he’d found something on his belt. It was a saber—a real one, the metal kind, like a slightly curved dueling blade. “What do you make of this?”
“A couple of the others have them,” Mi Sun said.
“The ambassador had one at my hearing,” I told them. “It must be ceremonial or something.”
“I want one for a souvenir.” Steve sounded strangely enthusiastic.
