A Daring Rescue by Space Pirates

by Rob Favre

  Renay bit into a pink-orange fruit that I didn’t recognize. “But she said she would help? And soon?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what she said. But who knows what ‘soon’ means to someone who’s going to live another ten thousand years.”

  She sighed and rested her head on my shoulder. It was comfortable, close, the warmth of her skin against mine. “I hope we get there soon. I feel we have been away for a lifetime.”

  “I hope we get there soon, too. I’m tired of wearing a skirt.”

  She laughed. Deep in the jungle, Preston roared again.

  Quick, impatient knocks rattled the door of my hut. “Monkey, come. Juliana wishes to meet with you.” Xerxes’s voice was irritated, but no more than usual. I didn’t sense any special urgency today.

  “Alright, alright, I’m up.” I blinked and rubbed my eyes. I felt like I needed to find something, but I looked around the room and saw only the straw-covered floor and bamboo walls. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat out there?”

  Xerxes sighed in exasperation. “Any time you are not sleeping, you are eating. How are you not bored by your own existence?”

  I stepped outside where Xerxes was waiting with a light box. Renay was already inside. She smiled and waved a little. I smiled too.

  Our box torpedoed through the water above a coral reef, leaving a trail of bubbles behind. Xerxes wasn’t letting it go. “I don’t understand wanting to waste a third of your already limited time being unconscious. Why do you do that?”

  “We just get sleepy, Xerxes. Sometimes it feels good to rest. If we don’t sleep, we get cranky.”

  Xerxes snorted. “Well, I don’t ever sleep, and you do not see me getting cranky.”

  Renay and I both stifled a laugh.

  We erupted through the surface of the water, passed over what looked like a kilometer-wide mushroom colored in brilliant reds and yellows. It was the second landmark between us and our daily meeting with Juliana. Next would be crystal asteroids, then purple waterfall, then alien desert with red moon, and finally graveyard during a thunderstorm. I sort of wanted to stop and look around that last one, but so far there hadn’t been time. It took about five minutes to get through all of them. We stopped instantly, as we always did, and stepped out into Juliana’s small, simple office.

  She smiled at us gloriously. “The Old One and the Young One. The heroes of the story. Hello again.”

  “Hello, Juliana.” I didn’t feel like wasting any time with pleasantries this morning, and if I let her start talking we’d get off into all sorts of boring tangents about art and time and stuff. “So, are we going to Crunchberry 3?”

  “Of course. I have spent the last few hours working out the details. I will show you the final plan.”

  She flicked her fingertips and a star field appeared in the center of the room. The stars were made of the same glowing stuff that formed the boxes and the couches and the trays. I reached out and touched a star. Each one was a tiny, solid point, floating in Juliana’s office.

  She beamed with pride and generosity. “I also had this specially made so you would be able to see, since you cannot see the data as a person could.” She gestured again. “We are here.” One of the stars changed color from yellow to blue. The words “Awesome Flavor” appeared in blue right above it. “Here is the plan.” A solid red line extended from the blue star to a different star, turned a corner to a third, and zigzagged to a fourth, turning each one blue as the line touched it. When it came to rest on a fifth star, the star turned purple and the words “Crunchberry” appeared above it.

  Juliana nodded with satisfaction. “So, as I said, everything is in place. We have so very much to see. And we are already under way.”

  I looked at the red line, crisscrossing the galaxy before finally resting at Crunchberry. “And this is the fastest way to get there?”

  “It is not the fastest in a literal sense, no. But there is so much to be gained by taking the extra stops on the way.”

  “Such as what, exactly?”

  She pointed to the first dot on the mapped route. “Here on Exxon Mobil 7, there is a unique variety of banana that blooms only once every five centuries. Our stop will coincide with the harvest.” Juliana’s perfect teeth glinted behind her perfect smile. “What a blessing that you will have the chance to taste one. And here on Toyota-Kawasaki 2, there is a festival that is simply…”

  I cut her off. “Bananas? We’re taking an extra stop for some bananas?”

  “Tom, you must understand, these are not the plain bananas you remember from Earth. They are…”

  “How long is this all going to take? How much faster would it be if we went straight there?”

  “Perhaps a few weeks. Perhaps a bit more.”

  “A few weeks for us. How much longer for them?” I pointed at the purple dot.

  Juliana shrugged. “Some years, I suppose, depending on how fast we travel.”

  “We can’t wait that long! Everyone will be dead by the time we get there!”

  Juliana kept smiling, but with sorrow in her eyes. “It is possible. But Tom, you must maintain some perspective here. Whether we take them from the planet or we don’t, their lives will burn bright and wink out in a moment anyway, like cinders rising from a fire. It is not in my power to give them more than a few short years in any case. There is but one thing I can do for them that will last forever, and that is to tell their story.”

  I was too stunned to say anything. Was she really saying we may or may not arrive in time to save an entire colony of people because we had to make a stop for some bananas? I felt numb. I tried to think of something to say that could possibly make her understand the enormity of what she was proposing.

  It turned out that I didn’t have to.

  “That is the most selfish, evil, and terrible plan I have ever heard,” Renay hissed, which pretty much summed up what I was thinking. “We are going straight to the colony. There is no other plan. Change the course, and do it right now.”

  For the first time, Juliana’s smile faded. “I weighed many factors in arriving at this plan, and it is not subject to your approval. I am already doing you an incalculable service. You are in no position to ask me to sacrifice more than I already am.”

  She motioned with her hand and the light box appeared. This time it wasn’t behind us; it was around us.

  “There is nothing more to discuss. Go and pass the time in whatever way seems best to you. I will alert you when we arrive at Exxon Mobil. We will not speak again until then, unless you wish to apologize to me.”

  Cemetery, desert, asteroids, waterfall, reef. We were back in the jungle in front of our huts.

  Renay started crying. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just held her. She cried for a few minutes, then sniffed and wiped her eyes.

  “Alright, Old One,” she said with steel in her voice. “Her plan is not going to work. We must create our own.”

  She found her sister down at the end of the passage, waiting by the hatch, which was not a surprise. Her sister was spending a lot of time down there.

  She sat down, at what she hoped was a friendly distance. “You like it up here.”

  “Yes, the air smells less like urine and sweat.”

  The air smelled just as bad here as it did anywhere else, but she said nothing. She looked up at the hatch.

  “Do you think he is going to come through there?”

  Her sister nodded. “If I believe it with all my might, will that make it true?”

  “Anything is possible. Perhaps I will try as well. You miss him still?”

  Her sister nodded.

  “I hope you are right. I hope he comes through soon. And I hope he brings patars with him.”

  Her sister laughed, a short sharp sound that bounced around in the passage. They sat together for a while, silent, watching the hatch, and hoping.

  Chapter 22

  When I was a kid, probably eight years old, my parents took me to Disneyland. It was
the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. I mean, they had Space Mountain. At the time, I figured that was as close as I would ever come to going into space. But the thing I remember most about Disneyland was wishing that I could have the whole place to myself. I wouldn’t have to waste an hour waiting in line for a 30 second ride. I could go on anything I wanted, as many times as I wanted, over and over until I wanted to go ride something else. Instead of going on ten rides in a day, I could probably go on a hundred.

  If I could go back and talk to eight-year-old me, I could tell that kid a thing or two. It turns out, going into space is a lot more complicated than Space Mountain made it seem. Also, having an entire amusement park to yourself isn’t as great as you think.

  I stepped off the purple roller coaster. The coasters didn’t have names, but there was a purple one, a red one, and a green one. The purple was the shortest and didn’t have any upside-down stuff, so I figured we would start with that one. But Renay was not going to get on any of them, no matter how convincingly I begged, so I rode by myself. It’s surprisingly lonely to be the only one riding a whole train on a roller coaster. It turns out part of the fun is being surrounded by other people, knowing that you’re all in it together, that when you scream, a whole train full of people is going to scream right along with you. When I screamed on the purple roller coaster, my voice echoed alone in the cavernous cabin that held the amusement park, and there was only one other person who could hear it. I hoped I didn’t sound too ridiculous.

  “You sound ridiculous on that thing,” Renay said as the train came to stop. She looked up at the snaky purple steel of the track, twisting over our heads. “People really ride on these for fun?”

  “Yeah, come on, give it a try.” I lowered my voice. “We have to make this look convincing.”

  She didn’t even answer, just stared me down. I didn’t ask again. I wiped the tears from my eyes and tried to put some of my wind-blasted hair back into place.

  It had been two days now since we’d seen Juliana, or Xerxes, or Hyacinth. We’d learned that we could ask the ship to take us to a destination and a light box would appear and whisk us away. But we couldn’t go just anywhere. And in the places we were allowed to go, we never saw anyone but ourselves. I think Juliana didn’t want to deal with us. Anyway, so far, we’d visited the beach and the mountain. We went to the cemetery but Renay got creeped out when I told her what a cemetery was for, even though I was sure there weren’t any actual people buried there. Pretty sure, anyway. We headed for the amusement park after that, and even though an empty amusement park is creepy in its own way, at least it was “sunny,” and there were rides and a midway that smelled like popcorn and fried dough.

  And we were here for another reason, though we had to pretend we were just bored and looking for something fun to do to pass the time.

  Renay and I had been trying to figure out what we were going to do about our little timing problem – we were going to arrive at New Newton long after everyone there was already dead. We had done a lot of thinking and come up with a lot of terrible ideas. We probably could have made Xerxes cry by destroying some of his exclusive designer outfits, but we decided that probably wouldn’t be enough to bend Juliana to our demands. Now we finally had the outline of a plan, but we couldn’t make it work without some help.

  “Do you think we can ask now?” Renay whispered to me as the roller coaster train clacked away. We weren’t really sure if anyone was listening to us, so we tried to keep our voices down, just in case.

  “Not yet. It should look like we’re just saying hi to him on the way to something else.”

  She nodded. We strolled down the midway, trying to look leisurely, past the game where you have to shoot a basketball into a too-small hoop, and the one where you have to knock down a bottle with a baseball. I shot the basketball, and it went in – nothing but net. A giant pink teddy bear hovered down, held by a glowing hand. I felt like pretty hot stuff until I made another, and another, and another. I covered my eyes, and made it. I turned around and shot backwards, and made it. Turns out, the game was programmed so the ball went in no matter what. If you think carnival games are no fun when they’re rigged so you always lose, just try playing one that’s rigged so you always win. We ended up with half a dozen giant teddy bears. I picked up a pale blue one and handed it to Renay. She looked confused.

  “What is this for?”

  “I don’t know… it’s soft and cute, I guess? You can hug it and stuff.”

  She laughed. “It is no Preston, but I suppose it is rather cute.”

  A loud, mechanical tune started to play from the merry-go-round behind us. “I think it’s time,” I said. Renay nodded. We crossed the midway and approached the hot dog stand.

  “Hello, Mustard,” Renay said, trying to sound friendly. “We haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?”

  “Hello, Renay.” His voice was flat and hollow. His tentacles hung limp on the ground. He kept staring at the hot dogs. “Have you heard of the awesome flavor of Grillo Brand Hot Dog Sausages?”

  Renay patted him on the bun. “Tell me about it, Mustard.”

  “They have flavor. I suppose it’s awesome. Or not. Anyway, that’s what I’m programmed to say, dude. But I dunno. I’ve never tasted one. I’ve never tasted anything.”

  I tried. “Mustard, have you done your dance for anyone lately? I’d like to see it.”

  “You don’t wanna see my dance, dude.” He just stared at the slowly turning hot dogs. The merry go round started up again, playing a happy tune in the empty silence. “I know these hog dogs are delicious. Just like I knew what we would find when we arrived at Planet Awesome Flavor. There were going to be Moltencheese volcanos, and ice cream asteroids, so many amazing things. But none of it was real. It was only what I was programmed to think. And if that wasn’t real, what else will I find out was just a lie I was programmed to believe? Do people not really like Buffalo Wasabi Ranch Meat Crunchies? Are hot dogs not really everyone’s favorite food? Do people not really like my dance?”

  He paused. I was about to answer, but Renay held up her hand. Mustard wasn’t finished.

  “Do people not really like me?”

  Tears welled in Renay’s eyes. She wrapped her arms around Mustard’s bun and gave him a big hug. “Mustard, of course we like you. We came back for you, remember?”

  His tentacles slithered hopefully. “You did. That was not something you were programmed to do? Or something I’m programmed to think you did? You really came back for me?”

  I patted his bun in what I hoped was an affectionate manner. “Really, Mustard.”

  “And my dance? And Buffalo Wasabi Ranch Meat Crunchies?”

  “We… really like you, Mustard.”

  His tentacles coiled around Renay and me. “If I have my friends, I do not need Moltencheese volcanos.” He wriggled a free tentacle into the glass case and pulled out a hot dog, placed it in a bun, and handed it to me. “Hot dogs are everyone’s favorite food, dude!”

  I took the hot dog, looked at Renay. She nodded. It was time to ask.

  “Mustard, how do you feel about the people who programmed you to think all that stuff?”

  “I feel hurt, Tom. I feel angry. I feel like they don’t care about me as a real living hot dog. They were just going to discard me, like an empty wrapper.”

  “What if there was something you could do to get back at them?”

  “Like what?”

  I stepped closer, whispering just in case anyone was listening. “Remember the force fields that carried us from the planet up here to the yacht? I had an idea about those.”

  Renay and I laid out our plan. Mustard listened. When we were done, he started dancing, but something had changed.

  “Mustard, your dance seems different. What happened?” Renay asked.

  “This is a new dance,” Mustard replied. “This is the dance of vengeance.”

  Our light box flashed to a stop in the volcano’s onyx core. Julia
na was waiting for us, her pale skin orange from the glow of lava below the floor. Hyacinth towered over her from behind. Xerxes was lacing up his shiny black boots.

  The box ceased.

  Juliana regarded us with a cool glance. “We are in orbit around Exxon Mobil 7. I know we had a disagreement at our last meeting, but it has been several weeks, and I hope you have had time to think over your position. I still offer you a chance to go with me to sample the rare delight of the Exxon Century Banana. Is there anything you wish to say to me?”

  Renay and I glanced at each other. She nodded to me. I cleared my throat.

  “Yes,” I said. “We would like to say that… that we’re really sorry. You’ve been nothing but generous to us, saving us and giving us a ride and all. And offering to feed us fancy bananas. So, if you don’t mind, we’d love to go with you to try them. And again – we’re sorry for how we acted before.”

  The ice in Juliana’s eyes melted, and they became kind again, twinkling and sky blue. “I am glad to hear it. I do not think you will regret your decision. Did you know you will be the first aboriginal to try one? Come, our landing craft is prepared.” She started to make her way toward one of the long corridors.

  “Actually, Juliana, I had an idea.” I was nervous. I hoped my voice didn’t sound squeaky. “I was just thinking, what if we took our old ship, Renay’s and mine, the one we found back on Crunchberry, and went down to the planet in that? You could see what it was like.”

  “And smell what it was like,” Renay added.

  “We could tell you how we lived, what we ate. It’s a big part of our story. Sharing it with you… it could kind of be our small way of starting to repay you for all you’ve done for us.”