by Maggie Allen
Milo clung with both hands to her arm in a breathless moment of terror as one of the pirates, a wild and mean-looking one, investigated the sound. He bent down, eyeing the area suspiciously and grabbing the pipe. He set it back on the pile of weapons.
The pirates continued devouring their ill-gotten feast. Cordelia peered from the slits of the vent cover. Her dad stared past the pirates, between the stacks of crates; he looked right at her and winked.
Cordelia gasped. “Try again. Be careful.”
Milo nodded, and his cyborg hand once again inched out the vent and up the side of the crate.
“I see most of the jackets you’re wearing have the Zancor logo on them. Are you from the Astraea mining colony?” Cordelia’s dad called out to the pirates. Even with their backs to her and Milo, she could see them fidget uncomfortably.
“What do you care?” one pirate shouted back.
“It’s just that we’re bringing the food and supplies to you. All this is meant to supply your colony for the next four years. It seems that –”
“It seems that it’s none of your business,” the ragged pirate with the scraggly beard, the one who had searched the gardens, chimed in. Of all of them, he seemed to be the man in charge, the pirate captain.
“I’m not trying to pry . . . just want to understand.” Her dad’s voice was sugary sweet. Far more than these pirates deserved, she thought. But the distraction was good. Milo had successfully retrieved the pipe and was now bringing down a small pistol.
“Is there some problem with the colony? We’re not within communication range, so we haven’t had any updates in quite some time,” Cordelia’s dad asked.
The pirates looked at each other, all with guilty expressions, like they’d just been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. The pirate captain spat at the ground. “All is not well, sir, and hasn’t been for quite some time. Miners are mistreated. Conditions have . . . shall we say – deteriorated.”
“I see,” said Cordelia’s dad.
Milo’s tongue wagged like a fast-spinning merry-go-round while he fixed his concentration on the last weapon, a long-barreled gun. It was trickiest of all. Cordelia was grateful her dad kept talking.
“I’m sorry for your troubles. Surely we can come to some sort of agreement. You all look hungry – I get how desperate you must be feeling, out here in empty space, so far from your families.”
Milo inched the gun down the side of the crate, holding it carefully above the floor. Cordelia looked each of the pirates up and down. They were so focused on her dad that they weren’t watching their weapons disappear into the duct. Cordelia reached out and snatched the gun from Milo’s grip. His hand crawled back in.
“I can’t agree,” the pirate captain said.
“Come on.” Milo tugged on her arm.
She wanted to hear her dad out. If anyone could convince them to give up their pirating ways, it was him.
Each carrying half of the weapons, the two children crawled towards airlock number two, far away from the tethered pirate ship and the cargo bays.
“It’s clear,” Cordelia said and poked the hinged vent cover outward. She climbed out, still cradling half the weapons in her arm. Milo poked his head out, looking both ways down the hall before crawling out.
They both knew they weren’t supposed to jettison stuff into space. Cluttered it up unnecessarily, Gran always said, but this was a special circumstance. Besides, this part of space was already cluttered up with those torn-apart ships. By the look of things, they were in the middle of the graveyard, far too close to the scarred, endlessly floating hulks.
Cordelia and Milo tossed the weapons into the airlock.
“Maybe we should just keep the one?” Milo protested. “I could shoot the pirates.”
“No,” Cordelia said decisively. There was as much chance they or their family would get hurt if he tried that.
She closed the airlock door and hit the button. Moments later the weapons soundlessly rocketed into space, joining the graveyard of the forgotten war.
“Now to catch us some pirates,” Cordelia said.
In a rush of whispered words, they’d come up with the plan. Cordelia knew that catching the pirates wouldn’t be as easy as stealing their weapons had been. They decided to lure the pirates into one of the empty cargo bays and lock them inside. It was the luring that troubled her. She knew from the dropped pipe that the men would come running at a sound, but what if they didn’t follow? What if she and Milo got caught instead?
She hoped Cousin Liza, the head cook, would forgive her for any dents to her pots, but the noise had to be loud enough to attract the pirates’ attention. With a last deep breath, she threw the stack of pots to the floor and made herself wait so the pirates could see her.
“My gun – our weapons!” a pirate cried.
Two angry-looking pirates tore out of the cargo bay and gave chase. Cordelia led them down the hall and turned the corner. Their legs were longer, and they were gaining, but she was a step ahead. She grinned. The plan was working. She half-turned around to see them racing after her, and as she turned forward again, she pelted hard into the pirate captain.
Where had he come from?
He grabbed her. “Got ya!” he said triumphantly.
Cordelia kicked and wriggled, but his hands gripped tighter and tighter.
“Well, well, well,” one of the other pirates said. “Looks like we got a rat.”
“Let me go!” Cordelia shouted.
The pirate captain laughed. “Not on your life. What’d you do with our weapons?” The pirate lifted her off the ground.
Cordelia kicked her legs. “I won’t tell you.”
“Then I’m afraid something bad is going to happen to your family. I don’t need a gun to hurt them, you see.”
Cordelia gulped. She could see it in his eyes. He would hurt them, all of them. “Over there.” She pointed down the hall. “Cargo bay four.”
The pirate dragged her down the hall with the other two pirates following close behind. Cargo bay four was filled with empty crates.
The pirate captain held her tight. “Where are they?”
“Over there.” Cordelia pointed to the far corner stacked tall with crates.
The two pirates glanced doubtfully at Cordelia, but with a nod from the pirate captain, they made for the corner. They tossed crate after crate aside, smashing them against the floor.
“They’re not here,” the pirate called.
“Where –”
The door to the bay whooshed closed. The pirate jerked around at the sound, loosening but not releasing his grip on Cordelia. Cordelia kicked his shin as hard as she could, just like she did when playing soccer with Milo in cargo bay six.
The pirate grunted and let go. Cordelia darted away squeezing between two stacks of crates to the vent access. She threw up the hinged cover and wriggled inside. She heard the crates being shoved aside as the pirates clawed their way to her. One grabbed her foot; she kicked up hard, smacking him in the face. He recoiled, letting go of her foot. She scrambled away as fast as she could, hoping none of them were skinny enough to fit in after her.
Cordelia crawled through the duct and stopped just outside the opening in the hall, listening for sounds of trouble. It was quiet.
A hand reached for the vent cover. Cordelia scooted back before she realized it was Milo’s. The silvery hand slipped under the vent and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“You okay?” Milo whispered.
Cordelia crawled out of the vent. “Yeah. You sure it’s locked well?”
Milo grinned and nodded. Cordelia checked the door lock, just in case. The pirates inside talked in low voices. One started pounding on the door.
“That’s three. Just three more to go,” Cordelia said.
An alarm blared at the same moment that blue warning lights began to whirl.
Cordelia and Milo gaped at each other.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“No
thing good. You hide, okay?” She ran in the direction of the bridge, hoping the sound didn’t bring the other pirates out.
Cordelia reached the bridge and slid into the captain’s chair. The view-screen in front of her and every other on the bridge displayed the same scene – the Hope of Astraea hurtling towards a massive piece of a wrecked battleship at the edge of the graveyard. When the pirate ship had tethered itself to the Hope, it’d thrown her dangerously off course. The battleship would hit and damage the Hope’s miles-wide solar sail that caught the sun’s radiation and pushed them through space.
The warning alarm was clear. There wasn’t time for the ship to change course. The defensive laser array that normally blasted away pieces of space debris, ice, asteroids and meteors wouldn’t fire automatically on a ship. The computer didn’t know that this ship had long ago been abandoned. It needed a human to give the command.
Cordelia tapped at the screen, giving the command to fire on the battleship and blast it to smithereens. Within seconds, the central laser cannon sent bursts of brilliant purple beams towards the ship. The ship seemed to absorb the beams, but soon it began to glow from the inside before it exploded in a million fiery pieces.
The laser array lit up again, targeting one piece of wreckage after another, blowing them into tiny bits that would inflict minimal damage to the sail. Cordelia couldn’t help but hold her breath as the Hope sailed into the debris-filled space where the battleship had once been.
Sensors beeped as pieces of the battleship rained through the bottom center of the sail and engulfed the Hope of Astraea, sounding like sand hitting windows. Uncle Joe and his fixer-bots would have to spacewalk several times to fix the sail, but it would’ve been a thousand times worse if they’d plowed through the battleship, risking not only the sail but the whole of the Hope.
Cordelia let out a deep breath in relief. She brought up the navigation screen. The pirate ship had pulled the Hope of Astraea a fraction off course. It was enough, though, that if they continued on their present course for much longer, they would miss the drop point entirely, leaving the miners to hunt empty space for their food and supplies.
She’d watched her Dad make course corrections hundreds of times before. She tapped the command, altering course to match the computer-suggested path.
A hand gripped her shoulder.
The pirates. How could she have forgotten about the pirates? Cordelia whipped around.
Her dad beamed down at her.
“Dad!” Cordelia jumped up and threw her arms around his neck.
He hugged her for a long time. “You okay?”
“Yes, but what about the pirates?”
Her dad chuckled. “Well, I’d hardly call them pirates . . . more like starving runaway miners. The last three surrendered. They lost their nerve when the alarm went off and their buddies never returned.”
“Your dad’s being modest,” Captain Alex plopped down into her chair. “He’d nearly talked them into surrendering before the alarm.”
“We almost had ‘em,” Cordelia said.
“We really did,” Milo called from the edge of the bridge.
The captain waved him forward. “That was quite the handiwork, Milo,” she said.
Cordelia couldn’t help but giggle.
Milo grinned. “Thanks, Mom . . . I mean, Captain.” He saluted her with his cyborg hand.
She saluted back and turned to Cordelia. “You saved us. And by the look of things, you got us back on course.”
“Just keeping my . . . the Hope of Astraea safe, Aunt . . . Captain Alex. It’s my duty.”
“Not just yet. I’m not quite ready to retire.”
Cordelia blushed.
“But thank you for keeping her and us safe. And I’m sure there’s a whole colony of miners who will be grateful when they hear of your heroics.”
“Why don’t you and Milo go talk to Gran?” Cordelia’s Dad suggested. “She said something about needing to pick more strawberries for a celebration.”
“Beat you there,” Milo said.
“Oh no, you won’t!” Cordelia lighted past Milo, racing for the gardens and Gran.
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The Aliens and Me © 2015 Nancy Kress
Red Dust and Dancing Horses © 2012 Beth Cato
Cool Things That Happen On Venus © 2015 Cori Cunningham
The Worms Won’t Feed Themselves, You Know © 2015 Deborah Walker
Laddie Come Home © 2015 Curtis C. Chen
Blood Test © 2015 Elliotte Rusty Harold
Lunar Camp © 2014 Maggie Allen
Clockwork Dancer © 2015 Brad Hafford
When Hope Dies © 2015 Pam L. Wallace
Child of Luna © 2015 Ralan Conley
Warboots © 2015 Eric Del Carlo
The Rum Cake Runner © 2013 Jessi Cole Jackson
Leafheart © 2015 Anne E. Johnson
The Beach © 2015 Mike Barretta
Walk, Run, Fly © 2015 Amy Griswold
Luckless Tin Elephant © 2015 Angeline Woon
The Sugimori Sisters and the Time Machine Conflict © 2015 Brigid Collins
Alien Gifts © 2015 Sherry D. Ramsey
View from Above © 2015 Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
Cap’n Harry and the Pirates © 2015 Austin Hackney
Where You Want To Be © 2015 Jeannie Warner
The Hope of Astraea © 2015 Wendy Lambert
Permissions
The Rum Cake Runner was previously published at Crossed Genres Magazine and podcasted at Cast of Wonders. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Lunar Camp was previously published in Athena’s Daughters. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Red Dust and Dancing Horses was previously published in Stupefying Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.
