Space Rocks!

by Tom O'Donnell

  I had looked upon Jalasu Jhuk with my own eyes. And for that, I considered myself unaccountably lucky. It was proof positive that our Great Progenitor was real, not just some legend. The message had mentioned the Vorem too. I could hardly believe it. It seemed that all Hudka’s old stories were actually true. My mind reeled at the possibility.

  But a great sadness welled up inside me too. It was profound to be so close to such a hero and yet so far away. Separated by countless years, separated by the barrier between life and death.

  Such a pity it had been only a recording and not the real thing. We Xotonians could have used the guidance of a leader like our Great Progenitor in these troubled times. Perhaps Jalasu Jhuk would have known how to resolve our conflict with the human miners with honor and justice, without resorting to the Q-sik.

  A cold feeling crept over me. The Q-sik. Despite Jalasu Jhuk’s warning, we had already used it. Would this bring destruction to us, as Jhuk’s message suggested? I wished I could just ask it. But Jhuk was long gone. And no one returns once they’ve passed to the Nebula Beyond.

  “So who was that?” asked Little Gus.

  “Great Jalasu Jhuk of the Stars,” I said. “Someone very . . . very important to my people.”

  “And what did it say?” asked Becky.

  “It said that we were welcome to enter the chamber,” I lied. I hadn’t mentioned the Q-sik to the humans yet, and I didn’t intend to. It would likely mean answering a number of uncomfortable questions about the asteroid-quake that had stranded them here. Plus, the message from Jalasu Jhuk seemed to confirm that the ancient weapon should remain hidden from outsiders.

  “The recording seemed to talk for an awfully long time just to say that,” said Nicki delicately.

  I said nothing as I stepped through the threshold to the chamber beyond.

  It seemed to be constructed entirely out of iridium. The beams of the human flashlights bounced endlessly, reflecting off the silvery surface of every wall.

  “Holy . . . crap,” said Hollins, his eyes wide.

  “There’s more refined iridium in this one room than on the entire planet Earth,” said Nicki.

  “We’re rich!” screamed Little Gus, overcome with excitement. “I’m gonna buy an ostrich and a new rocket-bike and the Tunstall 28x Holodrive, when it comes out, and an island! And then I’m going to hold a mysterious martial arts tournament on the island!” In his mind, he had just secured lifelong financial independence.

  “Chorkle,” said Nicki, looking around in awe. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  I didn’t answer. In fact, I hadn’t. But the strangeness of an iridium room paled in comparison to what was inside it. Indeed, what I was looking at shocked me nearly as much as my face-to-face meeting with Jalasu Jhuk.

  There, in the center of the chamber, sat three things that shouldn’t exist. They were, unmistakably, Xotonian starships!

  I bounded forward to get a closer look.

  The ships were beautiful: sleek ellipsoids of glass and tarnished green metal. Each was big enough to hold a handful of passengers and had a bulbous cockpit in the front and a swiveling blaster turret on top. These were serious ships; they looked like they could hold their own in a fight.

  “So Xotonians do have starships, after all,” said Hollins.

  “We’re not supposed to, but I—I guess we do,” I said. “Or we did. It is said that long ago, our ancestors traveled the stars as easily as we walk between caverns today. But we all thought that was a myth.”

  “How much cash do you want for one of these ships, Chorkle?” asked Little Gus, now reckoning himself a very wealthy man in iridium. “I’ll give you a million bucks.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “All right, a billion bucks!” said Little Gus. “You drive a hard bargain, my little alien friend.”

  “Maybe the ships aren’t Chorkle’s to sell,” said Nicki.

  “Can I at least rent one?” asked Little Gus. “I’d love to take one of these bad boys out for a spin. I’ll be all, like, vrooooooom. ‘Enemy ships detected, Captain!’ ‘Ready the lasers.’ Pew! Pew, pew! Booooom!” He was now racing around, engaged in a fierce imaginary dogfight.

  “I’d like to go on record as saying I don’t think Little Gus should be operating any heavy machinery,” said Becky.

  “It does pose an interesting question,” said Nicki, looking around. “Do you think they still work?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “This place sure wasn’t destroyed like the rest of the city up there,” said Hollins. “Maybe the iridium kept the moisture and the mold out.”

  “Their systems might still be good to go,” said Nicki.

  “I bet you I could fly this thing,” said Becky, wiping a layer of dust off the glass shield of the cockpit to get a look inside. “It’s got a yoke and a throttle. Pretty much the same controls as the flight simulators we trained with before coming to this dumb asteroid—er, no offense, Chorkle.”

  “None taken,” I said.

  “Probably pretty similar to flying a rocket-bike, even,” said Hollins, looking over her shoulder. “Except bigger and with more get-up-and-go.”

  “Too bad you don’t know how to fly a rocket-bike,” said Becky.

  “Ha ha,” said Hollins.

  “If I push ’er any harder, captain, the whole thing’s gaen to blow!” cried Little Gus to himself in strangely accented human. He now seemed to be losing the space battle against himself.

  “Even if you could get the ships working, how would they get out of here?” asked Hollins. “We’re deep inside the asteroid.”

  “I think I know,” said Nicki, shining her flashlight on the ceiling of the chamber. There, high above, were hinges attached to heavy machinery. “This whole place opens.” After she said it, it became clear what she meant: The ceiling was divided into two huge hinged sections that opened to the surface of Gelo. The biggest surface hatch ever. We were in a flight hangar large enough to hold many more ships than the three before us.

  My mind was racing. The existence of these ships changed everything we knew about the Xotonian race. They meant that we were not just a pack of cave dwellers hiding on a little space rock called Gelo. We really had been the star-faring heroes that our legends promised!

  But if Xotonians had made spaceships once, why did we no longer possess them? The ability to construct them—much less fly them—had been totally lost to us through the ages. Jalasu Jhuk said that the entrance code to the chamber had been kept a secret from most Xotonians of its own time. The location of this hangar, amid this ruined city, had apparently been forgotten. But why? Did Jalasu Jhuk itself have some reason for not wanting Xotonians to travel the stars?

  “Let’s see if we can open one up!” said Becky. “I want to sit in the cockpit for a minute. Just to get a feel for it.”

  We inspected the surface of one of the starships. On the side we found what seemed to be the entrance hatch. It was defined by a deep groove in the shape of a sinuous rectangle. And sure enough, beside it was a keypad.

  I punched in the same code again: 9-1-5-6-7-2-3-4. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I tried the keypads of the other two ships. I was out of luck. The code just didn’t seem to work.

  “Sorry,” I said, shrugging. A sigh ran through the humans.

  “Stand back, everybody,” said Little Gus. “I got this.” Then he wedged his fingers into the groove of the hatch and pulled as hard as he could. The hatch didn’t budge.

  “Ow,” he said at last. And he walked away, flapping his hands in pain. It made sense that the seal, meant to stand up to the vacuum of space and the heat of atmospheric reentry, wasn’t going to be broken by the strength of a tiny human boy.

  “Hold on a sec,” said Nicki, and she pulled out the Tunstall 24x Holodrive. “That keypad is electronic. After so lo
ng, it’s possible that the ship’s batteries simply ran down. Maybe I could give it just enough juice to bring it back online. A little jump-start, if you will. Then the ship might turn itself back on.” She began to inspect the various technological inputs near the door. “I mean, I’m assuming they use computers to run. . . .”

  “If we could bring one online,” said Hollins, “then maybe we could fly it back to our parents!”

  He was right. We might have just solved the problem of getting the young humans back to their own kind. It was a big “if,” though.

  “As long as I’m flying,” said Becky, still gazing into the cockpit. “I don’t trust anyone who got less than a ninety-seven percent pilot skill rating.”

  “Here we go!” said Nicki. She had found a small three-pronged hole in a panel by the door. “Anybody got, like, a pin?”

  “Sis, please try not to shock yourself like you did with that ferroelectric capacitor you built for fifth-grade science fair,” said Becky, handing her sister a small metal hairpin.

  “Mild electrocution? Ha,” Nicki was now muttering to herself. “I eat mild electrocution for breakfast.”

  She carefully bent the metal pin to convert the holodrive’s output cable from one prong to three.

  “I’m curious, Becky,” said Hollins. “What did you make for fifth-grade science fair?”

  “Volcano,” sighed Becky.

  Nicki plugged in the cable and began typing code on the holodrive’s virtual keyboard. She smiled.

  “Good, I’m touching the ship’s computer system. Luckily it’s a solid-state drive. So first, we need to translate this ship’s machine code into binary. This will take a few minutes,” Nicki muttered to no one in particular. “Next, we translate it back into a programming language I know. Not perfect, but it gets it into semi-usable form. The executables to activate each of the separate systems should look pretty similar to one another. So if I can just figure out what one of those is, then maybe I can give it a little juice from the holodrive’s battery. . . .”

  After several minutes of furiously typing in silence, Nicki suddenly yelled, “Okay, here goes nothing!”

  Indeed, nothing went. We waited. Nicki crinkled her nose.

  “It’s all right, Nicki,” said Hollins, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Using a human computer to somehow interface with an ancient alien starship was never going to be—”

  “Aha!” said Nicki, stopping deep in her code. “Syntax error. Forgot the semicolon at the end of line one hundred seventy-two. Let’s try this again.”

  She did. And miraculously, the ancient starship lit up.

  “It works!” cried Little Gus. Becky clapped Nicki on the back.

  “Wow, you’re a genius, Nicki,” said Hollins.

  “Yeah, you’ve got the glasses for a reason, sis!” said Becky.

  “I wouldn’t say it works quite yet,” said Nicki, beaming. “I just brought the very simplest system back online: lighting. But to me it looks like the other systems should be functional. All except one. Really weird. It’s got encryption like I’ve never seen before. But it’s isolated. Doesn’t seem necessary to the normal functions of the ship. Anyway, if you give me a few more hours, I guarantee you I could get the whole thing up and running. All three of them, even!”

  “Great!” said Hollins, rubbing his injured leg. “After we get some food and sleep back at camp, we can come back first thing in the morning!”

  “What? But I’m only eight, maybe nine percent done here!” cried Nicki. It ran contrary to her nature to walk away from an unsolved problem right in the middle of it. She wanted to stay and work on the starships. Little Gus wanted to stay too. He was nervous about leaving the iridium hangar unattended so that anyone could just steal it.

  In the end, they relented and agreed to return after we’d eaten and rested. Together, we headed back up the winding staircase toward camp. It had been an eventful day; we were all tired and hungry.

  At last, we climbed out the entrance onto the rocky shore beside the stream.

  “Say, Chorkle,” asked Little Gus above the roar of the waterfall. “How come you went all camo again?”

  I looked down at my skin. It had again changed to the exact same shade as the rocks around us, an autonomic response to the threat of a nearby predator.

  “Oh no,” I said, my is’pog sinking. “Another thyss-cat!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The group froze. Something inside me, some ancient tingle on the edge of awareness, had once again detected the presence of an ancestral predator. This reflex had turned my skin a dappled gray.

  “Another thyss-cat?” groaned Becky. “Seriously? Two in one day? That’s excessive.”

  “Maybe it’s just a giant spider,” I said hopefully as I scanned the rocks around us.

  “And that’s better . . . how?” asked Nicki.

  “Everybody stick together,” said Hollins, folding knife now in hand. “Don’t get separated.” He knew better than anyone just how dangerous a thyss-cat could be.

  I swiveled all my eyes, scanning the spaces between the rocks for signs of the beast.

  “There!” I cried, pointing about fifty meters down the shore. I saw a patch of blue fur hunkered down between two boulders. The humans strained their eyes, but, as usual, they couldn’t see that far.

  Just then, we all heard a fearsome—meow?

  “Huh. This one . . . doesn’t sound quite as big,” said Hollins.

  We followed the sounds of mewling. Among the rocks we found a tiny thyss-cat. It was just a cub, only a few weeks old. Even I, the natural prey species of this animal, had to admit it was adorable. A little blue fur-ball with a pink tongue and huge yellow eyes. Its high-pitched distress squeaks pushed its lovability beyond all reason.

  “Want hug,” said Little Gus, reaching his arms out toward the cub. Apparently its cuteness level had garbled his human language skills.

  “The big one was probably its mother,” said Nicki, shaking her head. “Now she’s . . .”

  “We should—we should probably leave it here,” said Hollins. But I could tell that even he wasn’t immune to the little thyss-cub’s charms.

  “If we leave it, it will starve,” I said. Immediately, Little Gus bent down to offer the cub a bit of dehydrated chicken cacciatore that he’d been keeping in his pocket. It sniffed at the strange reddish hunk. And then it sneezed.

  “Awwww,” we all said in unison. All except Becky, that is. Her judgment remained unclouded.

  “Oh no,” said Becky. “You all saw what happens when these things get bigger, right? Unstoppable killing machine. Remember? Nearly ate Hollins? This animal isn’t nice.”

  “C’mon,” said Little Gus. “If we hadn’t—if I hadn’t done what I did, its mom would still be alive right now.” He was right. Although, I’d almost been killed and eaten by its mother, so I had a bit of trouble empathizing.

  “I don’t know,” said Hollins. “Look at its little feet. They’re like baby mittens.”

  “Six baby mittens,” said Nicki softly as she bent down to rub the cub’s left middle paw with her fingers. It squeaked.

  “You’ve all lost your minds,” cried Becky. “That’s it! I’m assuming command here. Executive order: No alien kill-beasts as pets!”

  “Please,” said Little Gus. “It will be my responsibility. I’ll clean up after it.”

  “What? Dude, we’re not even talking about that! Look, when our parents come back for us, there’s no way they’re letting you bring that thing with you,” said Becky. “You can’t even take a pineapple through customs at the airport. You think you’re going to get a space puma back to Earth?”

  “Reeeeeowr,” said the baby thyss-cat, suddenly and adorably.

  “Did you hear that?!” cried Little Gus. “It just said ‘Little Gus’! Everyone heard that, right?” Everyone nodded except
Becky.

  “Hopeless!” cried Becky, and she stalked off toward the rope, still dangling by the waterfall.

  “Becky stopped arguing,” said Little Gus.

  “Never happened before,” said Nicki. “I guess that means you won?”

  “So I can keep it!” he cried.

  “For now,” said Hollins.

  “My new best friend!” said Little Gus, and he reached down to pick up the cub. “Sorry, Chorkle, you just got bumped to the number-two slot. You should have been cuter.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, shrugging. I was secure enough to admit that the thyss-cub was significantly cuter than me.

  “So what should I call the little monster?” he asked, stroking the cub’s fuzzy chin.

  “Manitou,” said Hollins.

  “Eigenket,” said Nicki.

  “Our Future Murderer,” shouted Becky back toward us. She was already halfway up the rope.

  “‘Zhyddmor’ means ‘hunter’ in Xotonian,” I offered.

  Little Gus nodded thoughtfully at all our suggestions. “Hmmm. I think I’m gonna name it . . . Pizza!” he said.

  “Pizza?” asked Nicki, crinkling her nose. “Why?”

  “Because. I. Love. Pizza!” he cried, and he lifted the thyss-cat cub above his head in triumph. Now and forever, the beast would be known as “Pizza.”

  “This is way better than an ostrich,” said Little Gus, cuddling Pizza close to his chest as he walked back toward the dangling rope.

  Nicki turned to Hollins. “You know, Becky’s probably right. It probably isn’t safe to let him keep it,” she said quietly.

  “I know,” said Hollins. “But I think he needs this. Gus has had a rough couple of days. We all have.”

  Nicki nodded, and Hollins turned and limped toward the rope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “And then the guy from the phone company was like, ‘I’m sorry, miss . . .’” said Becky, pausing dramatically. “‘But we traced that phone call . . . and it’s coming from inside your own house!’” Becky leaned back. The light of the campfire danced on her face, turning her eyes into wells of deep shadow.