Stone in the Sky

by Cecil Castellucci

  “Mother, we’ll die here if we don’t do something,” Bitty said to Ednette.

  It was strange to me that she called Ednette Mother. But it reminded me that Bitty was only eleven when we’d left Earth. I was glad that she’d had Ednette to care for her. Just like I had Heckleck to care for me in his own way.

  Ednette did not react; she just kept stitching up the fabric that she was holding. Her face was still and stoic, as though she had years of practice at hiding what she really thought or knew.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Let’s do something.”

  “Tula can help us,” Bitty said. She was looking at me the way that she did when she was a little girl and thought that her older sister knew everything. I wondered if she might know more than me. She’d been on more space voyages than I had. She looked like she’d been in more fights than I had, too.

  “Do you have an idea?” Ednette asked.

  “I do. We’re going to take over the ship,” I said.

  “How do we do that?” Ednette asked.

  “Our enemies are Hort. I know Horts,” I said. “They cannot stand the sound of the Human voice.”

  “That must be why the Hort mostly never take Humans. It did surprise me when they accepted our passage,” Ednette said.

  “There was so much money to be made they could not refuse,” I said.

  Ednette’s face sobered.

  “The frequency of it reverberates with them in such an awful way that it causes them intense pain. The nanites that most species carry can alter our frequency in conversation, but it can not immediately balance hundreds of Human voices all at the same time. It would give us only minutes, but those minutes could mean life.”

  “How can I help?” Bitty added.

  It wasn’t much different then when she asked me when we were children what the game was. We’d march out into the dust, hoping for green fields, but finding only brown, dried foliage. In the distance there’d be the factories, and at night there’d be the stars. During the day, Bitty would rely on me to make up games and find the fun. I led, and she followed. In the past, it annoyed me when she’d asked me that question, but now I could kiss her.

  “Bitty, go get those Imperium officers and anyone else you can trust,” I said. “We’re going to need a team.”

  “I’ll get Traynor, Buzzle, and Thomas,” Bitty said, and Ednette nodded in agreement.

  “Who are they?” I asked as Bitty darted away.

  “They were the journey leaders of the other tribes before I was named for this leg. They know their people.”

  Bitty came back with them, and I noticed that one of the journey leaders, Traynor, was the grizzled man that had discovered my bracelet.

  “Why are they here?” Traynor asked, pointing to the two Imperium officers. “We should kill them and throw them out an airlock. They brought us here. They are responsible for our situation.”

  “They have a vested interest in getting out of here, and they have military skills that we don’t have,” I said.

  Traynor shook his head in disagreement, but he was alone in his opposition.

  “What are your names?” I asked. They were cautious, not knowing what new trick this might be.

  “Hanks,” the woman said, her blue eyes darting from face to face nervously.

  “Siddiqui.” He stood at attention as though he was ready to adapt to the situation.

  “Do you know how to win a fight?” I asked.

  “Who are we going to fight?” Hanks asked incredulously. “We’re locked in a cargo bay.”

  “We’re hijacking this ship,” I said.

  Hanks shook her head.

  “You can’t get a bunch of savages to fight an honorable spacefaring race,” Hanks said.

  Siddiqui put his hand up to silence Hanks.

  “I’m sure if I could talk to these Hort they’d see that there was a misunderstanding…” Siddiqui said.

  “There is no misunderstanding,” I said. “These Hort have been highly paid to take us to the colonies.”

  “But that’s a good thing,” Hanks said. “My great aunt is on Marxuach. She went there with the Children of Earth. We can get there and hitch a ride back to Bessen when the next transport comes.”

  “I know you’ve been told one thing,” I said. “But you have to stop believing that fiction. I’m going to tell you very clearly that there are no Human colonies, and if we don’t stop this ship from going there, we’ll be dead.”

  A wave of understanding finally came over them. Hanks’s shoulders slumped, and her eyes got a faraway look as she tried to reconcile reality with what she had believed for so long. Siddiqui straightened, his square jaw set as he made the leap in his mind.

  “Weapons,” Siddiqui said as he grasped the seriousness of the situation. “Gather whatever weapons or makeshift weapons you can find. We can make a better tactical plan once we know what we have.”

  “Don’t let everyone know,” Ednette said. “I don’t want to spread any more panic than we have to.”

  Ednette, Bitty, and the other Wanderers scattered to find what they could. They brought back trinkets and goods that people had hoarded. When we had our makeshift weapons laid out in front of us, it was sobering.

  We sifted through and each took knives, clubs, and tools to arm ourselves.

  “Could be death,” Traynor, the grizzled man, said.

  “It’s this or death,” I said. “You choose.”

  “I don’t like death,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Siddiqui concurred. Hanks gasped putting her hands to her mouth.

  “I just came out here to help colonize,” she said. “I’m on a peaceful mission.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “We die trying,” said Ednette. “No matter what the odds.” She was this voyage’s leader. They would do what she said. It was the rule of survival for the Wanderers. It was a relief to have Ednette’s full backing and support.

  “The ship is moving again,” Bitty said. We could all feel the ship speeding in its acceleration to a light skip.

  “I don’t know how far away we are from where we are going,” I said, trying to calculate from the many ship voyages I’d recently done what the best timing would be for the attack.

  “The guards that block us from the hallway. They are our first line out of here. If we can escape the cargo bay, and get to the hallway, then we have a chance at taking over the ship,” Siddiqui said.

  “What next?” Ednette asked.

  “You cannot seduce a Hort. You cannot sway them with sob stories. You cannot play on their sympathies. They are cold and they are cunning. They loved certain kinds of foods that we Humans would never eat and that we certainly don’t have. Our situation seems hopeless, but I once knew a Hort named Heckleck who I called a friend. He is dead now but he taught me everything that I know about how to stay alive.”

  “They don’t seem to have any weaknesses,” Traynor said.

  “Noise,” I said and then explained about the Hort and their aversion to the Human voice.

  “That’s too simple,” Traynor said.

  “It’s true. I learned about it in training. Human voice frequency troubles them. Makes them uncomfortable unless it’s modified by nanites,” Siddiqui said.

  “That’s why we’re in the bottom of the ship,” I said. “It’s going to take a long time for us to make our way up to the bridge.”

  “We’ll get there,” Ednette said.

  “If we make so much noise that it overwhelms them, it could at least give us a first push,” I said.

  “We can get everyone to do that,” Bitty said. “Even the weak.”

  “Let’s get the word out,” I said. “When the door opens, everyone needs to make noise—a lot of noise. But everyone else should stay back until we’ve cleared the hall.”

  “You want them to fight?” Siddiqui asked, looking back at the Wanderers. Some were so old that they could barely stand. Many were sick.

  “Yes,” Edn
ette said. “If we fail, they are dead anyway. Those who want to fight might as well fight.”

  “They can secure what we’ve taken as we push forward,” I said. “That gives them something to do.”

  I looked around and noticed that even Hanks was in. Our group was in agreement.

  “We’ll set the time for attack for an hour after we decelerate from light skip,” Ednette said.

  We all nodded and headed back to our tents and pods.

  “Let’s rest up,” I said. After a fraught day, I knew I would finally be able to fall asleep with my sister alive.

  Tomorrow I was going into battle.

  26

  Our attack would begin in an hour.

  The cargo bay was so quiet, as though everyone was saving their voice to be the loudest that it could be.

  I passed out the last protein paks I had, and we ate in silence, preparing ourselves for what was to come.

  “It’s time,” I said.

  Ednette, Bitty, and I banged on the steel cargo doors until they opened.

  “What do you want, Human?” the guard asked.

  I made the signal and the cacophony started. Every Human in the cargo bay began to talk, to scream, to sing, yell, yodel, and whoop at the top of their lungs.

  In a split second the Hort guarding us went from powerful to powerless. They screeched and scuttled back, and as they did, we rushed forward and pinned them down. We took their knives and immediately our weapons tripled.

  We cheered when we took the hallway, but soon, bells rang and lights strobed. One of the Horts must have sounded the alarm.

  I did not care. We had to push forward.

  “Take care of them,” Traynor said. I watched as the Wanderers dragged the Hort guards into the cargo bay. I heard the mournful thrum of music that came from the Hort vestigial wings and then high, piercing screams. I shuddered, but what happened to them was no longer my concern. Ednette, Bitty, Traynor, Siddiqui, and I took one hallway. Buzzle, Thomas, and Hanks went down the other.

  I did not know the layout of the ship, so Ednette took point. She’d been on more spaceships than I had. She knew how to figure out the lay of the land.

  Stolen knives at the ready, we pressed every button in the hallway until a door opened, giving us a way to move on.

  Because the alarms had sounded, I was expecting to see the Hort ready to fight us at every turn. Instead, when we entered the hallway they were running wildly away, looking like they were trying to escape. From us? No. I didn’t think so.

  “Where are they going?” Ednette yelled.

  “I don’t know,” I said back. “Something is happening.”

  Something else was happening. The alarm was not for us. It was signaling another danger. The Hort scuttled by, ignoring us. We were swimming upstream. The clicking sound of the Hort’s panicked appendages on the metal of the floor was unsettling.

  Then the ship quickly decelerated and came to a full stop. A strange noise followed, and then an explosion.

  “What is that?” Bitty asked. She had a fear in her eyes that I could trace to the burn on her face. It was the fear of a ship tearing apart.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Keep going.”

  I was pretending to be unafraid, but inside I was panicking. I had fought for my life in so many ways, but I had never been in battle.

  “Let’s go,” Ednette said. “Let’s use this chaos to our advantage.”

  “Where do we go?” Traynor shouted.

  “Wherever they are running away from,” Siddiqui said.

  “Why head toward danger?” I shouted.

  “Because whatever is danger to them is to our advantage,” he said.

  Ednette made three quick gestures for the team to follow. Whatever was happening to the ship, we were on the move.

  We heard a scraping. Something was coming along outside the hull. The ship shuddered. Metal screeching on metal filled the hallway with an ever-deafening sound.

  “The ship, it’s coming apart,” Bitty yelled, eyes wild in full panic.

  I tried not to scream.

  “No. That’s the sound of another ship fast docking,” Siddiqui said.

  When we turned a corner, there was a flash of light and then smoke.

  We weren’t coming apart. Someone was invading the ship.

  A smoke grenade had burst in front of us. My senses were disoriented, and I fell to the ground. I didn’t know which way was up, and there was nothing to see except shadows. I wondered who was here with us and whether they were friend or foe. An arm grabbed me and pulled me up.

  “Come on,” Bitty yelled.

  As I ran I could see shadows as they stepped through the smoke. I tried to make out which species they were, but they all wore elaborate masks to cover the finer details of their faces and forms. In a way, the garish colors and strange masks they wore made them unified. A non-uniform uniform.

  “Pirates!” Ednette screamed.

  We raced down the smoky hallway hearing only the thudding feet of the Pirates behind us. They were closing in from all sides and then they burst into view.

  I had my knife at the ready. I would fight them if I must. Even though they were attacking the Hort ship, I didn’t know if they would attack us, too. We were surrounded by the fleeing Hort on one side and the attacking Pirates on the other.

  I froze, and the moment seemed to hang in an eternity until one of them made a hand signal. Everything sped up again as the pirates ignored us and ran off to pursue the Hort.

  “Go, go, go!” Ednette cried, jolting me back to the here and now.

  Though we all took different hallways, we were at the top of the ship by this point, which led us to the same place. The bridge.

  On the bridge, the Pirates were in an intense fight with the Hort who had remained behind. Even though we had arrived, they paid us no heed and continued to concentrate on the Hort.

  “They’re on our side,” I yelled.

  “What do we do?” Traynor shouted back.

  “Fight,” Bitty cried.

  I moved forward, my knife flashing.

  Bitty jumped in front of me and slashed a Hort’s appendage off. The Hort screamed at a pitch that I couldn’t hear, but I could feel. Dark liquid spilled to the floor, making it slippery. Bitty shoved the Hort to the ground and with a battle cry sunk her knife into its chest.

  “Look out!” I cried as another Hort scuffled over to her. She pushed me back out of the way and then elbowed the Hort in the eye. I turned away as she looped her arm around its vestigial wing, pried it up, and stabbed where I knew the Hort heart was.

  “Hide there,” Bitty said. “I can tell you’re not a fighter.”

  But she was. Bitty, Ednette, Traynor, and Siddiqui were fighting fiercely. As shell shocked as Hanks had seemed in the cargo bay, she was skirmishing as best she could on the other side of the bridge. She was holding her own but pinned down by two Hort, she could not avoid the sharp appendage that pierced through her back. She fell over, and from where I was crouched I could see her dead blue eyes staring up at nothing.

  Buzzle and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. Bodies were everywhere. There was so much screaming; some of it from pain and some of it from fear. I screamed. I had shimmied down even farther by a panel to have some cover but though I was not in the middle of the action, my knife was covered in blood as I slashed at whatever came near me.

  Watching Bitty was something else. She was quick. Pinned by two Hort, she ducked and weaved until she and one of the pirates led them to a corner. Then she slashed off the appendages of one of the Hort. While he screamed and scrambled away, dark liquid spraying everywhere, and was finished off by the pirate, she turned quickly and plunged her knife into the other Hort’s eye.

  Then she jumped on top of its body and kicked open its plating, digging her heel into its soft flesh. When we were young, I had never known her to be athletic, but here she fought with a ferocity that I could barely understand. If I had used my brains and charm t
o survive on the Yertina Feray, she had clearly had to learn to use her brawn to survive wandering.

  Then it was done.

  I always had assumed that there would be an eerie quiet in the aftermath of a battle, but it was noisy. People shouting orders to each other. Movement of bodies. The whirring of electronics. The scramble to get the falling ship under control.

  The Pirates were finally in charge of the Hort ship. We were now in their hands.

  I looked at them, this mix of species, covered in strange masks and colorful clothing, now stained by Hort blood. I think half of the fear they struck was from this mad look they wore. They had helped us, and I was still scared.

  One of the Pirates, a biped, came on deck and looked at us Humans and did a sweep of the room. When it turned to me, it slowly removed its mask and showed its face.

  Caleb.

  “I got your message,” he said.

  27

  “You found me,” I said.

  I could hardly believe Caleb was standing there in front of me.

  “You were hard to miss,” he said. “You left a trail as large as the Milky Way.” I moved toward him, but his posse moved in closer as though they would slice me in two if I even hinted at touching Caleb.

  “You can’t touch me,” he said. “They’ll kill you if you do. It’s the Pirate way.”

  I took a step back, and they backed down a bit.

  Seeing the Pirates in action made me understand why Reza had been hesitant to give me Caleb’s ship’s name. Having just witnessed the battle with the Hort, I knew that meant he had done unspeakable things. I could hardly recognize him with his facial scruff, long blond hair, and hard blue eyes. He seemed a far cry from the gentle young man I’d known on the Yertina Feray.

  He nodded toward the group of Humans on the ship with me.

  “Friends?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “So you are capable of making and keeping friends,” he said.

  “I’m still your friend,” I said.

  “I don’t trust you to not try to kill me again,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or making a joke. I could not find one thing I recognized in this cold, cruel-looking face.

  “I didn’t kill you,” I said.