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

by S. E. Smith

  “The company hired my dad within a few months of the accident.” I added the date under my dad’s name. “They were a new start-up, but well funded.” I looked at Mazan over my shoulder. “I never heard their pitch.” I frowned. “Dad told me I could work for him for a while if I wanted to.” I bit my lip. “I thought it meant he needed me to be there to help him. I mean, I knew he was worried about me, but he was so devastated by mom’s death, he got kind of clingy.” In his absentminded way. I shook my head. “It all felt so normal. Even when my friends asked questions about why I wasn’t going to college after all, but even then it felt normal. Right.”

  “Was The Opposer there?”

  I shook my head. “She didn’t pop out of the woodwork for two years.” I wrote that date on the screen, more for something to do, than because it was relevant or helpful. My hand trembled a bit, skewing the words. I felt closer to knowing something, but the pushback in there was painful. Someone or some thing didn’t want me to remember. Was the someone me? Or her?

  “It was not long after that my dad had his first breakthrough.” How did she do it? How did she pick my brains? How did she make my dad believe he did it? “But they came very slowly.”

  “If she is The Opposer, then she knows the intergalactic laws for this star system. She had to be careful. The penalties are severe, not just for her and this planet, but for the Kruvox.”

  I swung around to face him. “But she wasn’t careful enough. What happened?”

  “I did not know this when I was pulled out, but they left monitoring in place.” I must have looked annoyed, because he added, “With what you knew, it was necessary.”

  And a good thing, I conceded. If they hadn’t, what would Iris have done? Could she have talked my dad into taking a ride to the stars? Maybe she already had. He was a geek, too. Would I have agreed to go with them? That was harder to answer. It was one thing to dream about it, something entirely different to just up and go—particularly when it was my dad’s honeymoon trip to the stars. Ugh. So she’d have had a plan that didn’t require my consent, or could force my consent without my knowledge. And before the end of my birthday, I’d have had an accident. I shivered but shook it off and focused on Iris.

  This plan had been a long time in the making. She’d had years to figure out what she wanted and how she was going to get it. And we had hours to figure how to stop her. Okay. At first, she’d have focused on surviving, figuring out how things worked. Dad and I weren’t on her menu then. She’d have had to find out about my mom in some way—

  The mental fist hit so hard, I gripped the edge of the table to stay on my feet. I had to push the words out past the block. “She was here.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “Here?”

  “That night. She—what she did—it’s the reason I can’t remember. I didn’t just lose a night. I lost everything related to you.” I waved my arms. “I lost this. She did that. Somehow she did that.” I licked my lips as a far off echo of “Run, Emma!” slipped through the cracks in my memory wall. “She…must have killed my mom. She would have killed me, too, but somehow she realized I could help her. So she took my memory instead.”

  And now my dad was about to marry that evil, murdering inheritance-stealing dragon lady.

  “My dad has already married one alien.”

  We’d been bouncing around ideas for what felt like hours. My screen was a mess, filled with notes, some crossed out. I don’t know why I didn’t erase them. But I didn’t. Since the wedding was first, we’d focused on that.

  “He’s not going to dump his boss without proof.” And what if she’d done something inside his head, too? He couldn’t be…complicit. Not my dad…could he?

  We didn’t have proof. Okay, we had this ship and the records on its databases but, if she’d messed with his head—or his loyalty was at all divided—that might open this ship up to her, too. And, I glanced at Mazan out of the corner of my eyes, attraction was a powerful force. Just looking at him made it hard to focus on not getting blown up. I didn’t know how badly my dad wanted to marry Iris. It made my stomach queasy to even think about that. But he was a guy. She was a gal. I hated her, but she’d kept herself up pretty well. She’d made sure I wasn’t around her a lot, but when she did swan by, heads turned, even young guy heads. She had “it” despite her dragonlady, fist-of-iron deal.

  “And he might actually, you know, like her.” No matter how grownup I’d suddenly become, I couldn’t use the word “hots” and “my dad” in the same sentence. Okay, I did it inside my head and it made my eyes twitch again.

  Mazan’s lips twitched. “You mean in the way we like each other?”

  I looked at him then and kind of lost the plot for a few minutes, because even when things are about to blow up and evil is about to triumph over good, love still makes the world go round. As first kisses went, this one was epic. The truth was, I’d pretended to have a crush on high school Ted so I wouldn’t accidentally slip and tell my friends I was in love with an alien. Like my father before me.

  If the shrink had only known how truly messed up I was…

  The longer we kissed—it was as if sensation, feeling returned to my world. And color. I was on a basically gray ship but it was an awesome gray. A vibrant gray. The best gray ever. My toes curled and possibly some other body parts. If the world ended now I’d be—if the world ended it would be my fault.

  I eased back and inch or two and smiled at him, then sighed. As delightful as the kissing was, we were steaming up his view screen. And we had a world to save.

  I had learned something, though. If my dad’s brains were this scrambled, an appeal to reason wasn’t going to work. Would we have to blow him up? That assumed I managed to survive his wedding night. Oh wow, wish my brain hadn't gone there.

  At least it cleared my head. I stared at our screen and for some reason, this time I began to see a pattern in the chaos.

  “You don’t need your plan to take out the company,” I muttered, rubbing both my temples. “She’s already got a plan in place.”

  “To blow it all up? But—”

  “Not blow it up, but she doesn’t want us to have that tech. It’s all for her. And you said she knows the risks of accelerating our tech. She’s not taking any chances.” There wasn’t as much pushback inside my head, because this was new knowledge, not old, or so I postulated. “Want to bet she also got the cloaking technology from me?”

  “It does not appear on the ship’s specifications,” Mazan pointed out, though thoughtfully rather than in a tone of denial.

  “The ship will appear to blow up, so there won’t be extra scrutiny from whoever does that. I’ll bet she’s even got some debris ready to scatter around. And what the team knows—it won’t be complete. It isn’t complete. The whole project is compartmentalized to cut down the risk of corporate espionage. We’ll have a launch. There’ll be a big boom and everyone will think it’s just another private industry failure.” There’d even be some reason all of us were on board. Or were killed by falling debris…

  Mazan nodded as comprehension broke over his face. “Of course. That is the best way for her to avoid an investigation into the launch. But the ship—”

  Which meant… “All we need to do is stop the wedding. And make sure the launch fails to happen.” Could we manage to modify the ship just enough to make it look like it wasn’t quite there yet? Remove the unearned tech and leave the ship? Though the thought of blowing up Iris…I sighed and let it go. We had to make sure Iris never left this planet.

  I explained my idea and he nodded again.

  “I can manage that part, but not until after the wedding. If we fail—“

  He didn’t have to spell it out.

  “At the wedding, though—she would recognize me as Draze. I can’t assist you very much other than to be there with my personal cloak.” He looked adorably worried.

  “We’ll have to make it work,” I said, rubbing a spot on my temple as the something inside me fought
this old knowledge question. “How did she get it out of my brain?”

  “It?” Mazan shook his head as puzzled took over his expression at the sudden shift in topic.

  It was so cute I almost lost the plot again. “The illegal knowledge? We know she must have got it from me, but how?” Had she implanted something in my head? In my dad’s head? This wedding was so far out of character—

  Suddenly all signs of daze left Mazan. His expression turned grim and older. “We need to run a scan of your brain.”

  The one thing you loved to hear the man you loved say.

  Five

  There are things you should never know about your parents. It makes it really hard to face them across the breakfast table. And it is especially hard when that breakfast is on your dad’s wedding day. The wedding I needed to stop so that Mazan didn’t have to blow up ten square miles of Texas. Or they didn’t give those galactic monitors an excuse to take out Earth.

  “So,” I stirred my cold cereal around in the bowl, “your big day. You nervous?” I know I was.

  He met my gaze for a couple of seconds, then nodded. “The wedding. Of course.”

  Had he forgotten for a moment it was his wedding day? Words wanted to flood out my mouth, words like, “Don’t do this,” and “Are you freaking crazy?” I managed to hold them back. My discomfort was not helped by the knowledge I had a Kruvox implant in my brain. The analysis of it had delivered complicated and inconclusive results. One thing Mazan was sure about, it was a patched together affair with a somewhat unstable power source. Yay.

  Mazan was reluctantly impressed by the jury-rigged device. And was unsure of the level of penetration Iris had achieved inside my head. If she could have seen through my eyes, she’d have already shown up at The Entireer. This made us cautiously optimistic she couldn’t completely read my thoughts. The implant seemed to “encourage” me to avoid certain thoughts by causing me pain and rewarded me for doing what it wanted with endorphins. Which explained a lot and creeped me out. Without removing and examining it, there was no way to know if it depressed my memories or if there was some kind of subliminal hypnotism, also messing with my head. And Mazan didn’t want to remove it until he found a way to stabilize the power source.

  I would like to say I was getting used to the killer headache, but I’m a terrible liar. With a headache.

  I know the smile I directed at my dad was over-bright because my face hurt. “I was thinking I’d pop out and buy a dress for the, um, ceremony tonight.”

  His eyes widened a bit and then he nodded slowly. “Perhaps Iris—”

  There must have been something in my expression that breached even his level of absent-minded. “I know this is happening very fast, Emma.”

  Sometimes you just have to rip that bandaid off, is what I wanted to say, but I managed not to. I looked away. “It’s…she’s my boss, so yeah, it feels a little weird.” I hesitated, then met his gaze. “I want you to be happy, dad.” And for neither of us to die, possibly horribly at the hands of the Opposer. “Are you…happy? Do you love her?” Amazing how much push back I got from those questions. Did I see a struggle in his eyes? Or just the discomfort of a dad who was about to remarry?

  He cleared his throat a couple more times. “There are…different kinds of…affection, Emma.”

  So that was a no, then.

  “I’m…surprised you’re doing it before the launch.” I opened my mouth but couldn’t say honeymoon without gagging.

  His gaze slid away from mine. Did that make him embarrassed or did he know he was planning to honeymoon in outer space? How could I know the answer to that question? He was my dad. I knew daughter things about him, not…guy things.

  “Iris was, well, she liked—” his words trailed off, as if he didn’t know why they were getting married today.

  I nodded. “Do you want me to drop you at work or are you taking today off?” He just looked surprised, so I pushed my chair back. “I’ll drop you off then.”

  “Iris will—I’ll see you at the chapel then.” A look of anxiety crossed his face. “You won’t be late?”

  I shook my head. “No, I won’t be late.”

  Six

  I reached up to adjust my dad’s bow tie, not able to meet his gaze. It was cool in the vestry, but that’s not what made me shiver.

  Mazan and I had a plan. Not a good one—since most of it hinged on me—but it was a plan. Okay, it was the outline of a plan. Hopefully it would achieve plan-ness before my dad said, “I do.”

  Peddrenth didn’t seem worried. Not that I expected him to be worried, but—the truth was, I didn’t know what I expected, other than a horrible death. Mazan was clearly not worried. They’d been over the ship and knew how to stop the launch, but I had to stop the wedding first. Otherwise the ten square miles were going to blow. For now, all they had to do at the wedding was to boost my morale.

  Up off the floor.

  I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and ran the plan over again inside my head. I had to engage in battle with the Opposer inside my head without tipping off the wedding guests that there were aliens among them. Iris had had eight years to learn how to dig around inside my head and I hadn’t even tried to get inside hers for fear of tipping her off. It had seemed easy on Mazan’s ship, gazing into Mazan’s eyes, and dreaming of a future with the alien who loved me.

  Now I faced the reality of playing happy daughter, slash, employee, while mentally gas-lighting the evil Opposer of the Draze. All the while hoping she didn’t get annoyed enough to blow up my brain with that implant. Which would actually be better than ending up on a dissection table at Area 51 if the word got out that I was half alien.

  I was excited about getting my own little Kobayashi Maru moment. Who didn’t want to be an un-sung hero of her own world? Or a dead—

  If I fail, Mazan…

  She does not wish to involve the galactic monitors either, Mazan reminded me. She will have to take care in how she responds to you.

  That was the lone bright spot. Mazan had figured out how to tap into my implant, and link it to Peddrenth’s, so that he could hear and talk to me, too. It was like getting mental hugs—hugs I badly needed.

  I repositioned my dad’s buttonhole, moved his tie a millimeter left, then back to where it had been, gave it a pat.

  “You look good.” I stepped back. In his sober black suit, with the white carnation, he could get married and buried—

  He grinned. “For an old dude?”

  I managed not to wince at hearing my dad say “dude.” He patted my hand.

  “You look lovely, Emma.”

  “Thanks, dad.” It all felt so natural, I figured Iris was sending me endorphins as a reward for being obedient.

  Our minister, the painfully named Reverend Wolverscamptonwood, who had presided over my mom’s funeral, poked his head in. “We’re ready for you, Dr. Standish.” His gaze flicked to mine, equal parts compassion and worry in there. “You look well, Emma.”

  I cranked up the edges of my mouth. “Thanks, Reverend Wolverscamptonwood. I am…well.” Getting his name out without a stumble gave me the confidence to gesture to my dad. “After you.”

  Dad hesitated a minute, then followed the Reverend out into the main part of the chapel, with me trotting obediently in their wake. Dad moved into the groom spot, then glanced around like he wasn’t sure why he was there. Neither of us liked the limelight, I reminded myself, even though I hoped it was a sign his brain had been messed with. There was a minor rustle from the guests—about fifteen coworkers who looked a bit lost—and then the soft murmur of voices faded away as the organ began pumping out the familiar march. Iris popped into the door at the back, inappropriately eager to get on with the wedding and the killing.

  Dad tugged at his tie as she beelined his direction, just a bit ahead of the tempo.

  I tensed, even as a heightened sense of calm flooded through me. A false calm for sure.

  Be strong, Emma. Peddrenth’s voice inside my head wa
s comforting.

  We will be victorious, Mazan added. He was in the upper gallery that overlooked the chapel, hidden by his personal cloak. I wished I was with him. I saw a flicker of reptile tail near the last pew, then a snout poked out from behind the wooden base. I looked away as Iris closed on us. What was Peddrenth doing? Wasn’t he supposed to be cloaked with Mazan?

  Iris reached my dad and gave him a coy smile as she grabbed his arm and almost yanked him around to face the minister.

  It was a good thing I hadn’t expected to enjoy my dad’s wedding.

  With a last, somewhat discordant, wheeze, the music stopped. In the silence between that and the minister clearing his throat, I felt the wrongness of what we planned to do. Though the chapel was small, it was a sacred space, with a majesty that wasn’t just about the religious fittings and soaring ceiling. Light shone through the stained glass windows, painting their patterns on stone and wood. I remembered feeling comforted by the sight of them at my mom’s funeral—

  When do you wish to begin?

  The sound of Peddrenth’s voice in my head jerked me out of the past. This was not the time to lose the plot. And surely this was a place where it was right to try to save my life, my dad’s, some Texas acreage, and, possibly all of Earth.

  The slow, solemn words of the wedding ceremony filtered softly into the serious silence. I glanced at my dad. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He glanced at me and his lips moved soundlessly. Was it my imagination that he mouthed the word, “Help?” Or did I just want to believe that?

  Let’s do this. I think the words were more for me than for them.

  As if on cue, I heard the minister say, “Should there be anyone who has just cause why this couple should not be united in marriage, they must speak now or forever hold their peace.”