Pets in Space: Cats, Dogs, and Other Worldly Creatures

by S. E. Smith

  “I don’t remember.” It was the truth. I didn’t remember. I’d just connected some really obvious dots.

  “Just that night. You said you do not remember that night,” he protested.

  I shook my head and he stopped talking, his head tipping to one side. I knew that pose, that look. He was…seeking to understand.

  “You can call me just Emma, you know,” I murmured, as little bits and pieces, small Mazan moments drifted in and out of view. “We know each other.”

  “Of course, just Emma—”

  “I mean, we knew each other before that night,” I interrupted, pushing back at the pain and resistance building inside my head. “We met…when…” my gaze shifted to Peddrenth. “…when I got you.”

  “Yes.” Mazan nodded, his expression lightened some, but also puzzled. “Peddrenth is a Draze Dragon, genetically engineered to look exactly like a species native to your world, your bearded dragon. He is your Companion.” The way he said it the word had a capital C.

  I looked at my dragon. My Companion? Who had accidentally left me behind? I opened my mouth to ask or accuse, but the look in his eyes stopped the words. He looked like I felt. Betrayed.

  “You know this—”

  “But I didn’t, I don’t, I mean, that’s part of what I forgot.” I looked at him, fighting to keep my breathing even again. “Why would I forget you? This?” And remember Peddrenth? But not the part about Peddrenth being a Companion, and now it was coming back to me in bits and bites how he’d always been able to talk to me like the best invisible talking friend a young girl ever had. “What happened that night? Why did you take Peddrenth and leave—” …me behind, is what I wanted to ask. We were young, but we meant something to each other. I didn’t know a lot of things, but I felt this to my toes. All the way through my heart. I touched my chest. It felt like I could see the cracks in it. He left me. For eight long, miserable years. I hadn’t known it, but I’d known it.

  “You told me to leave, just Emma.”

  “Emma,” I corrected, absently. Like the crack in his ship as the ramp lowered, a breach appeared in the wall inside my head. And it was a wall. I’d thought it was an ocean covered in fog, but it was a wall. High and solid, scary to approach and painful to touch, to try to breech. “Why would I tell you to leave?”

  “Someone came. A car. We could see the headlights on the road. There was a risk The Entireer might be seen. It was protocol. You told me I must not risk discovery. I cloaked the ship and launched.”

  Regret was in his eyes, in the tone of his voice. There had been a cost to him, too.

  “But…they told me I was in the car with her.” It was like trying to fit together pieces from two different puzzles. If the car we’d seen was my mom’s, the pieces might fit—but if she’d picked me up where the path met the road, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t have been going fast enough to hit that tree with lethal force, even with a nudge from another car. I didn’t remember another car. And that meant…I don’t know what it meant. I looked at Mazan. I needed to move, to get ahead of the flight instinct trying to send me back out into the forest, back to hiding from the past. I backed away from the wall, just a little. Maybe if I focused on something else… “Let’s walk while you tell me what it is that I’m leaking.”

  Three

  It took three circuits of the inner corridor for Mazan to explain, and one more for me to process it. He spoke the truth. I knew it in my heart, but my brain, well, there was that ugly wall of resistance. What lurked behind the wall shouldn’t be life threatening, but it felt like I would die if I remembered. Took the fun out of walking around in an alien spaceship—which you’ve already done, I reminded myself. Focus. It was a strange feeling, having the old and new kicking around there.

  As we did one more circuit, the ship got more and more familiar. This corridor circled the central core where the FTL drive was housed. Everything else required was located in the outer dish, except the bridge which was up top and the cargo hold in the lower belly of the ship.

  Mazan stopped at the galley. “Do you require something to drink, Emma?” He stumbled a bit over the single name, which was interesting. Had he been calling me “my friend, Emma” for all those years? All those years. It had been years if I met him when I got Peddrenth. But why—The Entireer had been my…school. I came here to learn, but no one had told me it was because I was half alien. I thought I’d been picked because I was special. Pause to be grateful I was no longer quite that needy and clueless. Chagrined, possibly, but not needy and clueless.

  “Thanks.” I didn’t really want something to drink, but the circuits were making me a bit dizzy. Or the memories swirling in my head were doing it. I followed him into galley. It was more functional than cool, but still cute in a Tiny House kind of way. Peddrenth hadn’t joined us. He’d gone to hydroponics, I thought absently, and then was surprised by the thought. He had a friend or friends there…

  All of the sudden I found it hard to look at Mazan and had to resist the urge to curl my hair around my finger or do some other flirty thing. This was a Serious Thing, not a boy-girl moment. I stole a look at him when he handed me a cup of water, his alien scent drifting close enough to tease my senses, comparing this Mazan to the bits of memory still forming inside my head. He hadn’t changed as much as I had, I decided. This ship hadn’t just been my school. Mazan had been my teacher, then my friend, and then my more-than-friend—at least for me. He shifted from one foot to the other and tugged at the neck of his space suit. Not as indifferent as he appeared? I hid a totally inappropriate-to-circumstances smile. Apparently I could face the dangerous deep and still go shallow. Great.

  I wrapped my hands around the cup and propped a hip against a counter, took a sip and said, “So I’m half alien, my mom is some kind of war hero that you thought was dead until she hacked a NASA satellite and sent you a message.” The words emerged from my mouth a lot calmer than they felt inside my head. In there they were all in caps and accompanied by lots of “oh, my hecks!”

  “But by the time you answered her message, she’d married my dad.” I had to pause here to try process the fact that my dad had married an alien. “…and she had me. So instead of going home, she asked you all to educate me so that I could choose where I wanted to live when I got old enough. You’ve been coming every year—” I broke off the frown. “Except for the last eight years? What happened?”

  “Your mother would send a safe signal, my—Emma. We did not receive this signal.”

  “Okay.” That made sense, but… “…there was no signal this year.” Since my mom was gone. “Why did you come back now?”

  Once again he shifted from one foot to the other, but this was different shifting. The guilty conscience kind.

  It took me a minute, which was kind of embarrassing, but I got there finally. “The leak.” I went back out into the main corridor and looked around. TFTL’s ship wasn’t the same, but there were signs of my leaking. Their ship was like a distant echo of this one. I looked at Mazan. “But…that’s my dad’s research. I’m just his assistant.”

  He shook his head. “It is not possible for your father to know the things he knows, to do the things he’s done.”

  “My mom—”

  He shook his head again. “He did not know.”

  “He didn’t know he’d married an alien?” My voice rose a bit on the end.

  Mazan half smiled. “He knew. He did not know about this.” He gestured around him. “And the Deliverer would never have given him our technology. It would not have been safe to give it to him.”

  “Why not safe?”

  He looked at me through those ridiculous lashes. “There are…those who closely monitor the development of technology in backwater star systems. It is illegal to accelerate technological advancement. There are severe penalties.”

  I let the “backwater star systems” slide past. It was not relevant to the moment. Even if it stung a little. Instead I considered my dad. Would he have been able t
o resist the temptation to use what he’d learned? Or even have remembered he wasn’t supposed to use it? Probably not, I had to concede. “But I did know?”

  He nodded. “It was part of your education.”

  “You gave advanced technology to a teenager.”

  “You understood the boundaries and each level of knowledge came after you proved you could keep it to yourself—”

  “—until I got knocked on the head and forgot.” My head hurt like I’d whacked it again. I rubbed my temple. “But if I didn’t remember, then how did I leak it?”

  Mazan looked troubled. “Perhaps it was a subconscious thing. You did not realize you were helping.”

  It was possible, I supposed. What—the stab of pain felt like a needle in my eye. What the heck? When it subsided some, I tried again. What did I know— oh yeah, that question was like some kind of mental trigger. I backed off and relaxed, letting my mind drift and something emerged from the fog.

  “The Kruvox,” I said. “That’s who my mom fought, right?”

  Mazan looked pleased. “Yes. They are evil.”

  “Did they have technology or something to manipulate memory—” I yelped when this pain hit, like a punch inside my head.

  “What is wrong, Emma?”

  I gritted the word out past the pushback. “Kruvox?”

  “There were rumors of such things, but—” He frowned. “But the Kruvox are not here. Your mother destroyed their fleet.”

  My mom, the driver of carpools and bake sales, had destroyed a fleet. A Kruvox fleet.

  “By taking out their leader, you said?”

  “The Opposer, yes.”

  I glanced around. My mom had done that and set this up. She’d always known—I thought it was my special secret, one shared only with Peddrenth. Wow, shone a whole new light on my teen years. But not on the big, black hole inside my head. Not yet. If she could do what she did, then her daughter could face the past and get over herself. I gritted out. “How did she do it?”

  “She was not just a great warrior, Emma,” he looked at me with glistening eyes, “she was a great scientist as well. She used her knowledge to create an explosion—”

  “—that didn’t destroy her ship,” I felt compelled to point out. It was the crash here on Earth that did that. I felt a little miffed at his hero worship. Of my mom. My mom the hero of the Draze.

  “We learned later that the explosion created a chain reaction that opened a wormhole. It pulled both ships in. Her ship was damaged. The Opposer’s ship did not survive transit.”

  My brain gave a kick, sharp and painful, like a memory trying to kick through that wall. “You sure he didn’t make it?”

  “He?” Mazan looked surprised. “The Opposer was also female.”

  There is no way I can explain the chill that went through me. The pushback inside my head was almost more than I could stand. There was both pain and the sensation of an iron hand closed around my throat, trying to choke off my words. I reached up a hand but there was nothing there.

  “Do you have a picture, an image of this Opposer?” I croaked.

  Mazan looked surprised, but went to the wall and touched something. A computer-looking thing swung out and he tapped. Then tapped some more. The screen filled with bits of color that slowly resolved themselves into a face.

  Huge cracks appeared in the wall, but I didn’t need to see the other side of the wall to know.

  Tomorrow evening, my dad was going to marry the evil Kruvox Opposer.

  At least now I knew why I didn’t like her.

  Mazan now looked as shell-shocked as I felt. “We must warn him.”

  “He won’t believe me.” I blew out a sigh, one hand gripping the armrest of the pilot’s position. It was everything I’d ever hoped for in an alien ship’s bridge. And I couldn’t enjoy it. All the flashy lights, the cool looking switches, the shiny were no help at all in solving the problem of Iris. No wonder my prospective evil step-mom didn’t want me to move out. And knowing my dad, he hadn’t told her that would never happen, that I would never live in the same house with that woman. He wouldn’t know how much keeping me around mattered to her. How could he know I was her ticket to ride home? Which I would be if we couldn’t figure out how to stop her.

  “You are his daughter. Of course he will believe you.”

  I bit back a sigh. How could he understand? I wanted to pat his hand, say, “There, there,” and kiss him on the mouth—I yanked my gaze away. Focus, Emma.

  “I had to see a shrink, a doctor, about my memory loss. The shrink told him I was mentally fragile.” I hadn’t been meant to hear that. It stung then, still did, I admitted grudgingly. I’d known I wasn’t hysterical or fragile. I’d known something was wrong, but I wasn’t old enough back then to fight their belief. All I could do was try to prove I wasn’t fragile. It hadn’t worked. Dad hadn’t noticed because of his whole absentminded professor deal. And he didn’t know my mom, his alien wife had done the equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru. She’d saved her people and Iris was using me to get back there, maybe to even undo what my mom had done. If she escaped on a ship I helped build, however unconsciously… “We have to stop her. I have to stop her.”

  He took my hand again and this time his smile was different. More personal. More grownup to grownup. I hoped it wasn’t hopeful thinking, but whatever. If I was going to take on evil, I needed hope.

  “So, the wedding is tomorrow and the launch is the day after.” Only my scientist dad would think that was romantic. And logical. “Somehow we have to stop the wedding and, what, sabotage the launch?”

  Mazan suddenly avoided looking at me.

  “What?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I have already taken care of the launch.”

  I arched my brows.

  “I was ordered to stop the launch.”

  “Show me.” I gave the order, but was surprised when he did. It’s not like I was in charge.

  He swiveled his chair to face the control console and moved things. Tapped things. Like before, it started as little bits that gradually formed into something I understood. It was not unlike the language Peddrenth had used on my computer. I was about to ask what it meant, when I realized that I knew.

  “Mazan, this won’t just stop the launch. It will leave a ten-mile crater in Texas! You’ll take out the whole facility and then some!”

  I stared at him as his gaze slowly returned to meet mine.

  “That’s the plan?” I shoved my hands through my hair. “You’re going to blow up my dad.” My eyes got wider. “You were going to blow up me.”

  He didn’t look away this time. It was the look of a man who knew exactly what he’d done. Or had planned to do. The stern line of his lips and jaw, the steady seriousness in his gaze, well, it was kind of sexy. Despite this, or because of it, I glared at him, but I had to concede, “You didn’t know I hadn’t betrayed you.”

  I still felt hurt. He should have known. Even if there was no way he could have known. I looked at him, my eyes wide and dry, my heart, well, my heart wasn’t happy. “You were my friend.”

  His lips twisted a bit wryly, as if I’d hurt him. “Yes, I was, I am your friend. But you…you are my love, Emma.”

  I felt my eyes widen.

  “And still I would have done it.”

  He’d just used the l-word. It kind of helped. I felt older. I tipped my head and asked, my tone different. “Why?”

  “It was you and your ten miles of Texas, or your whole world.”

  That sobered me really fast. “Okay.” Those monitor aliens, I guessed. I looked away, then back at him. “You love me? Do you know what that means here?”

  He took my hands again. I’m not sure how a guy with his core temperature managed to warm me up, but he did. He didn’t pull me closer or kiss me, which was a bummer. But since I was all grown up, or getting there fast, I sucked it up.

  “I know what it means. I will be there with you.”

  “With me?”

  “W
hen the ten miles goes away.”

  I didn’t jerk my hands away, but I did give his a shake. “We’re not blowing up.” Not now that I knew he loved me. “We’re going to figure this out.” I adjusted my grip so I could squeeze his hands. “And then…”

  “Then?” His lips twitched.

  “Then we’ll figure this out. Us, I mean.” Just because my brain was an on-steroids video game with most of my memory offline didn’t mean we couldn’t.

  It just meant it would be a little challenging.

  Four

  “So if Iris thinks she’s got a ticket off this planet using my leaking, why is she marrying my dad?”

  Now we were in a little version of a boardroom. There was even a board, well, a screen for me to write on with this nifty pen looking thing. Sadly, it was still blank. I faced that board, because looking at Mazan, not to mention hearing the clock inside my head ticking down to us blowing up, made it hard to focus.

  “You have not reached your maturity age as yet.”

  I swung around. “I blew past that five years minus two days ago.” I’d thought it was cool my dad’s company had scheduled the launch on my birthday. Now…well, I still thought it was kind of cool.

  “On Draze the age of maturity is equivalent to twenty-six of your Earth years.”

  “So?” I shrugged.

  “Draze is a matriarchal society.”

  “Really?” I needed to think about that. But not now. “Why does that matter?” Because it clearly did.

  “As long as you are under age, as your father’s wife, she would be the head of your family.”

  “For one day,” I pointed out, though I will admit I started to feel uneasy.

  “If she marries your dad and you died before you reached your maturity, she would control your inheritance.”

  “I…don’t have an inheritance.” He gave me a look, but didn’t speak. I lifted my hands. “I do not want to know.”

  I turned back to the blank screen, my disordered thoughts spinning in un-pretty patterns. Okay, we had suspicions, but what did we know? I wrote “Dad” in the air, and then “Iris.” With a mini flourish, both names appeared on the screen.