Space Patrol!

by Sarah Nicole Nadler

  She strode in triumphantly waving the hardcopy sheets Anubis had handed her—a print out of the new client contract between Earth and the Galactic Trade Company.

  “I have it!” she crowed, waving the papers above her head. “I got the contract!”

  The president looked flustered. He glanced past her into the hallway, ran his palms down his sides as though to remove invisible wrinkles in his dress shirt, and then said without looking her in the eye, “Ah ... that’s excellent.” His voice was falsely cheerful. “Let’s see it, then.” He reached out to take the papers from her, but Lissa stepped back, looking around the room.

  “Where are Stephanie and Mr. Piff?”

  “They left,” Mr. Bilderbus said smoothly, his hand still outstretched to take the contract from her.

  “But why ...” she began, when her eyes fell to his feet and froze there. Three fat drops of green liquid saturated the rug, one of them slightly smeared as though something had been dragged through it while it was still wet. Lissa had seen that distinctive shade of green not long before.

  Her mind was so slow. It was like trying to run through a swimming pool; thoughts kept pushing against her even as she strained to move past the sudden hollow feeling in her stomach.

  As though from a great distance away, she heard the Earth president say, “Give me the contract, Melissa Phelps.” His voice was slippery and slid across her frozen consciousness. She stared at the thick green drops on the carpet. She had to move. Had to move. Her fingers were still gripping the contract as he tugged on it, trying to pry the papers out of her grasp.

  In the back of her mind, a desperate voice cried, Stephanie! Oh my god, Stephanie ... What did he do to them? Her thoughts caught up with her. The green liquid was the same color as the blood that she had seen on the wounded Space Patrolmen after their battle with Captain Nask. Something must have happened to Arthur Piff.

  Lissa’s mind unlocked as suddenly as it had halted. Like a computer after it has unfrozen, all the commands she had given it blurred to life at once. She snatched the contract away from Mr. Bilderbus, her eyebrows snapping together as she said coolly, “If you don’t know where they’ve gone, then I’m afraid I can’t give this to you.”

  The Earth president backed up a step, unnerved by the chilly tone in her voice. “I’m sure they’ll be back in a moment,” he said, sounding not at all sure.

  Lissa smiled, but the smile did not touch her eyes, which bored into him intently. “Then you won’t have long to wait,” she purred, tucking the contract under her arm and sauntering over to the window.

  Pretending to take in the view of Los Angeles, while keeping Bilderbus in her peripheral, she scanned the sky for any sign of the Forty-Five. No glimmer of golden sails or oak hull caught her eye, and her stomach sank lower. She had no way to signal them, no way to tell Shika and Ash to come to their rescue—even if she had known where Stephanie and Mr. Piff had been taken. She tried hard not to think about those telltale drops of blood. Vowing that if he was dead she would tear the OneWorld Tower down, cement brick by cement brick, she continued to gaze out as Bilderbus paced adjacent to her, clearly pondering what to do. He reminded her of an anxious hobo she had once seen, secretly terrified of everyone yet trying to bluster small children into coughing up their lunch money.

  A cloud floated near, its white puffs glimmering in the sunlight. Lissa watched it drift closer. Bilderbus paused in his stride, then continued, his steps taking him past her vision where she could not observe his movements without turning her head. Still she stared at the cloud as it hung thick and gleaming in the blue sky. She felt the hairs on her neck rise. A soft shuffled step sounded just behind her. The cloud loomed ever nearer. Lissa heard a sharp intake of breath, as though the Earth president were steeling himself to do something and she knew he had sneaked up on her. Still her gaze never left that puffy white cloud.

  There was a glint of sunlight on metal and that was the only warning she got. Lissa ducked down to the floor, making herself as small as she could. Glass flew all around and above her as something shattered the window and landed in a crouch beside her.

  When she stopped feeling the tinkling of glass shards bite her hands and hair, Lissa lifted her head. Ash knelt there, covered from head to toe in alien armor, which had protected him when he leaped from the deck of the Forty-Five through the glass window. The only visible piece of him was his black eyes, full of humor and triumph as he grinned at her through a slit in his helmet.

  Mr. Bilderbus was cowering under a desk nearby, sobbing loudly. Ash wasted no time on him. He grabbed Lissa and thrust a small device into her hand.

  “This will allow the MTrans to latch onto you,” he told her. He began pushing her toward the broken window, placing himself between her and the door where even now the thud of OWSF boots could be heard.

  A blast cut off anything else he had meant to say and the door to the office disappeared, replaced by a puff of smoke through which OWSF guards poured into the room. “Stand down!” one of them shouted.

  Ash, in his full-body armor, wasted no time replying. With a grunt, he shoved Lissa out the window into empty space.

  She screamed. And continued to scream. The wind rushed past her ears with a loud roar and drew tears from her eyes until she squeezed them shut. She flipped once and then dropped like a stone toward the ground fifty stories below. She barely had time to think about the device in her palm before a pop mixed with a fizzle and she found herself suddenly still ...

  No longer falling, she could feel the glorious warmth and comfort of her ship’s wooden deck below her face.

  She looked up, relief swamping her. A second later, Ash came flying out of the cloud in which the Forty-Five had cloaked herself, bullets cascading off his body armor. He landed calmly on deck a few feet away and called out to the bridge, “Rescue complete, Octi. Take us out of here!”

  “Aye, sir!” came the artificial voice of the Europan translator, and the Forty-Five banked as Shika trimmed the golden sails and they tacked around to a nor’ easterly course going positive on her z-axis. Steam poured out of pumps on either side of her hull, cloaking the ship in an artificial cloud as they took to the sky.

  “Stephanie ...” Lissa whispered, trembling as she attempted to push herself to her feet. “Relax, Captain,” Ash reassured her. “Mr. Piff has her aboard the 32nd Patrol ... Well, that was fun,” he added as he extended a hand to her. “I could get used to this outfit.”

  Once she was on her feet, she surveyed him as he twisted to admire the sleeve of his black metal armor. “Where did you get it?” Lissa asked, brushing herself off.

  “Octi accessed the shipboard computer and looked up its armaments,” Shika said. She and Shiro came to flank her on either side, the latter balancing Rasta on his forearm.

  “It’s built of nanotechnology,” Ash told her. “Tiny robots that link together to create an armor impervious to projectile or ray weapons.”

  “It looks fierce,” Shika said and smiled at her brother.

  “Speaking of fashionable outfits... How did Stephanie escape? Is Mr. Piff okay? I saw green blood.”

  “Is that how you knew something was wrong?” Shiro asked. “We got a call from Piff as soon as he and Stephanie were aboard the 32nd. He said Rocksquatter sold us out—tried to kidnap Stephanie and ended up wounding Piff.”

  Lissa clenched her fists, wishing she had the fat ugly man in front of her so she could wring his sorry neck. She would do so, at her earliest opportunity. But she had other things to worry about right now. “Where are we going?” she asked. It was Octi who answered. “I hacked the closest satellite to your OneWorld Tower and intercepted a cell-phone call from Rocksquatter. He was ordering for your mother to be taken into custody.”

  “What?! That elephant is not touching my mom!” She clenched her fists, her jaw so tight she could feel a headache coming on.

  “We’re on a course to intercept her now,” Octi replied, calm as always. “I estimate we will be at y
our home four minutes and twenty-two seconds ahead of the OWSF.”

  Lissa took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Octi was doing all the right things—they just had to get her mom out of there before the OWSF laid their filthy hands on her.

  She nodded to the octopus. “Okay, let me know when we’re close.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Octi gave a little half-bow.

  Lissa strode forward, realizing belatedly as she neared the prow that, at some point in the last few hours while she was planetside, one of the members of her crew had figured out how to get standard Earth atmosphere circulating the ship. None of them were wearing breathing apparatuses. She peered over the rail, chewing on her lower lip as they sailed across the skyline. Octi’s tentacles were a blur of movement as he manipulated the navigation computer. He had been forced to bypass the voice-activated helm, saying it was too slow for his tastes, and instead perched on top of the great wheel with a three-dimensional screen projected in front of him, which he tapped furiously upon with five tentacles, using the other three to support his weight. His great black eyes were fixed on the many alien symbols floating before him. He maneuvered the ship past skyscrapers and dodged air traffic and then, finally, downtown gave way to suburbia and Lissa began to recognize the landmarks below at last.

  “There!” Her house loomed closer, but even as they sank low to skim the roofs along her street, she saw two blocks over a pair of black vans speeding toward them. “Octi!” she cried.

  “I see them!”

  The world seemed to tilt as Octi sent the Forty-Five into a perilous dive toward the ground, abandoning their cloud cover and bringing her down to hover just above the lawn. “Mom!” Lissa shouted, both hands at her mouth. “Mom, come outside!”

  “Sensors show she is at the back of the house,” Octi said with urgency. “I could hop into the backyard...”

  “No, she’s probably in the kitchen—she won’t see us! Octi, can you make a phone call from here?”

  In an instant, a three-dimensional image of a dialpad appeared before her. Lissa’s fingers blurred as she speedily dialed her mom’s cell.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom! It’s me—Lissa. Come outside the front!”

  “Lissa!” There was a crash of breaking glass. “Oh my gawd, where are you?!”

  “Mom! There’s no time—quick, come outside!” Lissa’s eyes were glued to the black vans. The first one was turning the corner onto their street.

  “Lissa, are you alright?”

  “I’m fine, Mom! But you have to get outside right now!”

  “Melissa Phelps, do you have any idea how worried I’ve been about you?”

  Her mother’s tone turned dangerous as it always did when Lissa had made a serious mistake. Under normal circumstances, Lissa would have winced and begun a mental assessment of what excuses she could use to avoid being grounded, but with the first black van approaching and a dull ping against the hull telling her they had opened fire on the Forty- Five, with three teenagers-turned-spacers and an alien octopus at her back, these were no normal circumstances. Lissa took a deep breath.

  “Mom, I’m here; I’m fine—I’m outside on the front lawn. But I need you to get out here right NOW! There are OWSF guards coming toward our house, and they’re not here for teatime, I can guarantee it.”

  Lissa had never spoken to her mother like that in her life. Somehow her will and intention alone seemed to gain enough of her mom’s attention that Mrs. Izzie Phelps stopped building herself up to a full redheaded round of scolding. Less than half a minute later, she walked out the front door.

  There, hovering not three feet above the ground was an enormous Spanish galleon with twin turbines puffing steam on either side and her daughter poking her head down over the rail on the uppermost deck. Down the street, two black vans with “OWSF” stamped in white letters were approaching, guns already drawn and firing on the floating vessel. Mrs. Phelps might have been a middle-class Earthling, but she knew a thing or two. She dropped her cell phone and ran, pumps and all, toward her daughter’s outstretched hand.

  A pop mixed with a fizzle and Mrs. Phelps found herself standing on the deck of the ship. Lissa shouted a command at Octi, who obeyed post-haste, and the ship angled for the vast sky and left the OWSF behind.

  Lissa strode toward the ladder to the lower deck, calling over her shoulder, “I think a conference is in order, Mr. Ash. Assemble the crew.”

  “Aye, Captain.” He saluted, still in his suave black armor, before disappearing below deck to find Shiro.

  Shika fell into step behind Lissa, who gestured to Octi that he had the con before stepping into the semi-darkness of the captain’s quarters for the first time.

  As they waited for Shiro and Ash to appear, Lissa turned to her mother. Time to face the music, I guess.

  “What is going on?” Mrs. Phelps’s voice was quiet. The dim light in the captain’s cabin gave her an eerie glow, and Lissa felt small as she realized how worried her mom must have been. It had been nearly a day and a half since she had been kidnapped, but it felt like a lifetime—as though she had aged twenty-four years instead of twenty-four hours. Yesterday, she was a preppy schoolgirl, dreaming outside the window at the Swiss Alps and wondering what was for lunch in the cafeteria. Today, she was captain of a space galleon and responsible for the lives of every human on Earth. She felt old, and her eyes fell on her mom’s haggard face with a measure of empathy that would not have been possible mere hours ago.

  The Lissa of yesterday might have bickered at her mom or resented the question as an invasion of her teen privacy, but the ambassador and space captain just looked up at the older woman with eyes that felt heavy and said, “We’re on the run from a corrupt government unit who were given the task of taking you into custody.”

  Mrs. Phelps shook her head. Not in disbelief, Lissa realized, but in an attempt to reconcile the information.

  “Why?” she asked finally.

  “Because you were guilty of being related to me. They thought they could control me; use me for their own ends. When they figured out I wasn’t going to do what they wanted, they tried to use you to get to me—make me cooperate.”

  “Who are they?” Mrs. Phelps demanded, and Lissa winced. Her mom always hated it when she spoke in generalities.

  “Timothy Rocksquatter, the President of Earth, maybe even Anubis of the Galactic Trade Company,” Lissa rattled off, thinking.

  “The OneWorld Government?” But why ...? Are they the ones who kidnapped you?” She looked around, seeming to realize for the first time that they were on a floating ship and there were no kidnappers in sight.

  “No, that was earlier ... Here, sit down, Mom. Let me explain.”

  And as Shiro and Ash entered the cabin, Lissa drew up chairs to the ornate oak chart table by the window, and between them, she and her crew told the whole story.

  “What an amazing story,” Mrs. Phelps whispered. Her eyes glowed as she gazed at her daughter, and the pride shining there embarrassed and fidgeted Lissa, who turned away, aware of a warmth that filled her chest and spread across her cheeks. Her mom had never looked at her that way before. It was a heady feeling.

  “So now we need to meet up with this Piff and Stephanie?” Mrs. Phelps asked.

  “About that ...” Suddenly the thought occurred to Lissa. “Where are they exactly?” The blue sky around the Forty-Five was empty of other ships.

  “Um...” Ash hedged. He glanced at Shika for support. “Mr. Piff was pretty bad off.”

  Lissa jerked her head to look at him. “Is he okay?”

  “We don’t know,” Octi admitted. “They got him on the 32nd Patrolship and took off right away for Jupiter’s moon. There’s a major healing center there.”

  “How long will it take them to get there?” Panic erupted in Lissa at the thought of Mr. Piff, clinging to life as he traveled through space toward a distant planet.

  “All Space Patrol craft are equipped with a VOD drive,” Octi assured her. “
Travel there will have been instantaneous.”

  “They have instantaneous travel?” Ash repeated, awed.

  “What’s a VOD drive?” Lissa asked.

  “The Viewpoint-of-Dimension drive is an interstellar drive system that allows instantaneous location transfer. They say the engine is designed to move the universe, not the ship.” Octi shrugged his eight tentacles. “No one knows how it works really, except Space Patrol. It’s one of their greatest secrets, and the reason why they’ve been able to maintain discipline in the universe.”

  “Never knowing when they might appear or disappear, eh?” Ash commented. “Yeah, I guess that would help keep people in line!”

  “We don’t have a VOD thingy, do we?” Lissa asked hopefully.

  “Unfortunately not,” Octi apologized. “The Forty-Five is equipped with a modern steam engine and solar sails. She maxes out at four hundred lightyears per hour.”

  “Did he just say ‘steam engine?’” Ash asked. “How is that even possible?”

  “You are familiar with the anatomy of atoms—the basic unit of matter?” Ash nodded. “The Forty-Five’s engine operates by use of steam pressure turbines. A special condenser removes the space between billions of atoms of oxygen and hydrogen, allowing for the storage of sufficient H2O to fuel her travel anywhere in this galaxy.”

  “I am not understanding all this science talk,” Shika interrupted, looking miffed.

  “Nor am I,” Shiro added.

  Mrs. Phelps leaned forward in her seat. “Continue your lesson later please, Mr. Octi. If these Space Patrollers took Stephanie with them, we must get her back. How can we contact them? Her parents will be worried.”

  Lissa felt a pang of guilt. She hadn’t even thought of that.

  “Captain Lissa should use Lollipop to contact the comm officer on the 32nd Patrol.”

  The five humans stared at him, not comprehending.

  Octi turned and frowned at the translator bot. It jittered at him in Europan for a moment, and then the bot said, “Mr. Stubergott desires me to remind you that your Friss companion, Lollipop, has a telepathic mind. It is well within her capabilities to contact the communications officer on the 32nd Patrol craft and form a telepathic link for you to speak with your friend Stephanie and inquire after the health of Mr. Arthur Piff.”