For the Love of Gelo! (8 page)

As we galloped past, Eromu tossed something up to me. I caught it, then stared at Eromu. The guard captain offered a quick salute. It had given me its energy blaster.

I turned the weapon over in my thol'graz: tarnished green metal with an usk-leather grip, surprisingly heavy. One of only 256 on all of Gelo. I'd never held an energy blaster before. I wasn't sure I wanted to. I opened my pack to stow it away.

The frightening truth was that the blaster was far from the most dangerous weapon I carried. From inside my bag came the faint glow of the Q-sik.

W
e made the trip from Core-of-Rock to Flowing-Stone in record time. In our minds, each stray sound we heard as we raced through the Unclaimed Tunnels became the Xotonian city guards closing in on us. Once Sheln realized that we were gone, it would be easy enough to guess where we were headed. The other guards wouldn't be as sympathetic as Eromu.

By the time we arrived, the usk-lizards had been worked into a lather. As we leaped from the saddles and raced toward the hangar, Gus stopped.

“Hold on,” said Gus. “I'll be right behind you guys.”

“Dude, there's no time!” cried Hollins. “The guards could be here any minute!”

But Gus had already turned and dashed off into the philiddra forest, his flashlight twinkling in the mist.

“We should all agree to pee
before
we do this stuff,” said Nicki.

Down in the hangar, we powered up the
T'utzuxe,
the least damaged of the two remaining starfighters.

“No arguments, Becky,” said Hollins. “I'm flying.”

“One argument, Hollins,” said Becky. “I'm flying.”

“Ugh, fine!” said Hollins. “But only because you could use the practice.”

Becky snorted and took the cockpit. We ran through a quick battery of system tests: power, propulsion, artificial gravity, navigation, communications, weapons, sensors, and life support.

“Well, weapons are still on the fritz, but otherwise everything looks good to go,” said Nicki, “more or less.”

“What does ‘more or less' mean, sis?” asked Becky, adjusting the controls to her preference.

“Well, we've flown these ships in space and around Gelo,” said Nicki, “but they took a beating in the battle. Kyral's gravity and atmosphere might very well tear us to pieces when we try to land. Our life support could give out. Or the automated navigation systems could fail while we're trying to—”

“Okay, okay, Nicki. We get it,” said Hollins, cutting her off. “No time to worry now.”

“Hey, I'm just thinking out loud here,” she snapped. “I'm supposed to be ‘the smart one,' aren't I?”

Hollins grimaced and said nothing.

“Guys, help!” cried Little Gus from across the hangar.

We saw him struggling toward the ship. He was pulling a big, blue, unwilling shape behind him: Pizza the thyss-cat.

“Dude, what are you doing?” cried Hollins. “Pets aren't allowed in restaurants. What makes you think you can bring one on our interplanetary rescue mission?”

“Pizza wants to come,” said Little Gus. “He wants to help us!” All visual evidence contradicted his statement, however. In fact, I'd never seen the thyss-cat like this. The closer the beast got to our ship, the more Pizza whined and growled and resisted Little Gus.

“Let him go, Gus!” cried Hollins. “Seriously, we don't have time for this! I guarantee you that the city guards are on their way here right now.”

“Does . . . anybody,” wheezed Gus, pulling Pizza as hard as he could, “have . . . like . . . a steak or something?” Now, three meters from the
T'utzuxe
, Pizza wouldn't budge. The thyss-cat stood rigid, facing the ship and wailing pitifully.

“Eh, not everybody likes flying,” said Becky, shrugging.

“This wasn't part of the plan, Gus!” said Hollins. “If you don't come aboard right now, we're leaving you!”

“Oh no,” said Nicki.

Across the hangar, several Xotonians ran toward the ship, blasters at the ready. Indeed, they were city guards. They had caught up to us.

“Stop!” cried Ydevi. “You are not authorized to be here!”

“It's now or never,” said Becky, powering up the thrusters and opening the hangar bay doors. The atmosphere began to rush out of the chamber and into the void beyond.

At last, Little Gus gave up. He let go of Pizza and scampered aboard the
T'utzuxe.
For an instant, Pizza seemed totally confused that he'd been abandoned. It was almost as though the thyss-cat wanted to keep Gus from boarding the ship. Pizza gave one final yelp. Then—an instant before the automated hatch closed—he leaped inside after Gus.

“He likes cutting it close,” said Little Gus, rubbing Pizza's neck. “Adds drama.” But Pizza was more distressed than ever. The thyss-cat kept trying to position himself between Little Gus and the back of the ship, all the while making a low growl in his throat.

“What, is he sick? That thing better not throw up inside my ship,” said Becky as we lifted off the ground. Somehow she never seemed more at ease than in life-threatening situations. “Hey, Hollins, got any inspirational Teddy Roosevelt quotes for us?”

“Uh, ‘Believe you can and you're halfway there,'” said Hollins, his face pressed to the viewport. Beneath us, the guards had begun to fire their weapons.

“You learned that one from me,” said Nicki curtly.

A few green energy bolts whizzed past us as the
T'utzuxe
rose toward the open hangar doors. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but the shots seemed a tad halfhearted to me. Perhaps, like Eromu, the other guards knew we were trying to save their true Chief.

We blasted out into space. Little blue-gray Gelo shrank away behind us, along with the crippled battle cruiser. Green Kyral grew. Its lopsided planetary ring faded into a cloud of dust as we approached. We could see the fissures and icy canyons on Ithro, its moon.

“Turn the communicator on,” I said. “Listen for the
Phryxus II
's distress beacon.”

Becky did. And almost immediately, we heard the telltale chime ringing over the speakers.

“Kalac!” I cried. I hadn't imagined it! And the closer we got to Kyral, the clearer the sound became.

“Okay, I'm getting a read on it,” said Nicki, regarding a display projected from her holodrive, now connected to the
T'utzuxe
's navigation system. “Looks like it's coming from a land-bound point in the Northern Hemisphere. About eight thousand kilometers north-northeast of that big inland sea. You see the one I'm talking about? It's kind of shaped like a . . . dolphin wearing a sombrero?”

A brief discussion of the sea's true shape ensued—some felt it looked more like a banana playing football. Personally, I thought it resembled a zaeper with two rha'tills, but no one else knew what that was. As Kyral swelled to fill our view, the fuzzy green ball focused itself into distinct plains and mountains and forests and oceans. Kalac was down there somewhere. Hopefully, it was still alive.

With all our attention squarely focused on the new planet, none of us heard the hatch of the cargo hold scrape open. Only Pizza saw the stowaway creep silently from his hiding place. The thyss-cat snarled.

From behind me, there came a voice, somehow familiar. “Turn this ship around,” it said, speaking oddly accented Xotonian, “or I will kill you all.”

As one, we turned. Standing behind us was a dark figure. Though he spoke Xotonian. he was not one of my people. He was a Vorem. In one hand, he clutched what looked to be some sort of improvised energy weapon.

“I told you so,” said Little Gus under his breath.

The Vorem was a young male. He was stripped of his armor and wore a filthy, ill-fitting legionary's uniform. His stringy black hair hung down in his eyes.

“Fly me back to the Vorem battle cruiser
Secutor
immediately,” he commanded. I heard a desperate tinge in his voice. He looked wild, half-starved.

“We're not going to do that,” said Becky in Xotonian. “And if you hurt anyone, I'll crash this ship. You'll be a little purple stain on that big green planet, tough guy.”

The starfighter rattled as we entered Kyral's highest atmosphere.

“Do as I tell you to do, alien female!” the stowaway shrieked.

At that instant, Pizza flew at him. Somehow—quick as a thyss-cat himself—the Vorem dodged out of the way, and Pizza tumbled into the open cargo hold. He quickly slammed the hatch shut behind the beast.

As he turned back to face us, Hollins's fist caught him square in the face. The Vorem stumbled, and Hollins swung again. The second blow never landed, though. The Vorem blocked it with his arm and returned two hard kicks: one to Hollins's stomach, the second to his face. Hollins's head snapped back, and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.

“That's it! What did I tell you, guy?” cried Becky, standing from the pilot's chair, her fists balled. Now the starfighter was shaking and bucking wildly. We were tumbling in an uncontrolled spiral toward Kyral.

The Vorem hesitated. Perhaps he hadn't expected her to carry through on her threat to crash the ship. Suddenly there was a flash. An arc of blue light leaped from his little weapon to Becky. For an instant, she convulsed as though every muscle in her body had contracted at once. Then she too fell to the floor of the ship. The legionary had taken out our two best pilots.

Nicki stood but froze when the Vorem trained the weapon on her. Frantically, he pointed the weapon at each of us in turn: Nicki to Little Gus to me then back to Nicki. He was panting wildly. His plan, such as it was, was in as much of a downward spiral as our ship.

Outside, the blackness of space had become a deep blue. The shade grew lighter with every passing second, as the density of Kyral's atmosphere increased. Through the viewports, I saw flames as bits of debris burned off our hull. Inside, pieces of the ship were knocking themselves loose. Countless warning lights flashed. Our descent was far too rapid. The flight stick vibrated wildly. Somewhere Pizza roared in anguish.

“Take me back to my ship!” he bellowed again. But none of us dared move. “Turn around and—”

The Vorem gave a wordless cry as the shot from my blaster caught him in the arm. He fell back against the hull, and his strange little weapon clattered across the floor. Nicki grabbed it. Perhaps he hadn't considered that we too might be armed.

I held the energy blaster in my thol'graz, trained on him. I hoped he didn't realize that I was terrified to fire the weapon again. If I missed, the shot might damage some vital system—or worse, tear a hole in the hull and depressurize the starfighter.

Little Gus dove for the flight stick. Outside, I could make out the shape of individual rivers, rocks, and trees. But they were coming at us way too fast.

Gus pulled up as hard as he could. I could feel the
T'utzuxe
straining to obey. Straining but failing. Nicki was yelling something I couldn't understand.

“I can't hear you!” I cried.

But she had already folded her head toward her knees. I saw the Vorem slowly close his red eyes in resignation.

We crashed.

T
he ship hit Kyral. My face hit a sparking instrument panel. There was a continuous deafening roar that seemed like it would never end. I bounced off the floor. Or was it the ceiling? The shaking of the ship slowed and then stopped altogether. I tasted blood and heard the roar of fire. All around me the air was filled with thick black smoke. The warning lights had all gone out.

Now Little Gus and Nicki were dragging Hollins away. And Becky wasn't dead. She was moving, pulling herself up onto unsteady feet. I could hear Pizza mewling like a cub. I fumbled around until I found the latch of the cargo hold, and I released it. The thyss-cat burst out of the hold and scrambled past me through the haze. Instinct told it the way out. My own instincts felt dull and uncertain, so I tried to follow Pizza.

Beside me a valve exploded in flame, and I fell flat on my z'iuk. If I had been human, the flare would have surely caused me to lose all my head-fur. Crouching down low, I found that it was easier to breathe. So I crawled like a cave slug toward the exit.

My thol'graz brushed something. It was rubbery, pointed: a black boot. There was a leg inside it. It was the Vorem. He was pinned between the hull and a heavy support girder. His uniform was slick with amber-colored blood. He'd been killed in the crash.

Another ball of fire bloomed from a snarl of ruptured tubing. The whole ship was burning now. I'd worked with the starfighters enough to know that there were dozens of volatile compounds coursing through the ships' inner workings. When the fire reached them, the
T'utzuxe
would explode.

Over the flames I heard something: a quiet moan. I was wrong; the Vorem was alive! It would serve him right to die, I thought, since he brought this disaster upon us. I fumbled past him toward the exit.

I stopped. I couldn't do it. No matter how evil he was, I couldn't just leave him to burn.

I groped back through the smoke until I found the Vorem again. I wrapped all four of my thol'grazes around his leg and pulled with all my might. He didn't budge. I pulled again. He was stuck fast beneath the girder.

There was even more fire crawling up the inside of the hull. The smoke and the heat made it hard to think. Outside I could hear the human children screaming for me.

I clambered back toward the bulkhead and found Eromu's blaster lying in a sticky pool of coolant. I adjusted the weapon to its maximum power setting and pointed it at the girder that was pinning the Vorem down. Then I fired. A green bolt of energy leaped from the blaster and sheared a white-hot hole through the metal. But it wasn't enough. I aimed and fired again. Finally, the girder shuddered and fell into two pieces with a shower of sparks.

Summoning all my remaining strength, I somehow dragged the Vorem's limp body—he was as tall as Hollins, at least, if not as heavy—across the deck of the burning starfighter and out onto the surface of a new world.

I blinked in the bright sunshine and sucked in a gulp of air.

“What are you doing, Chorkle?” cried Little Gus in disbelief. “Why did you save him? Dude is super,
super
evil!”

“We all need to get away from the ship!” screamed Nicki. “Like, now!”

“Help me,” I rasped. Nicki and I hefted the Vorem up between us. Somehow we dragged him about thirty meters before we all collapsed onto the ground. Nearby I saw Becky standing stiffly. Hollins was sprawled on the ground, his eyes still closed.

I turned back just in time to hear a thunderous boom and see the starfighter go up in a twenty-meter-high cloud of flame. A few seconds later, we were showered with little bits of ash and smoking debris.

“Well, that sucks,” said Becky. She worked the stiffness from her arms.

It was only as I watched the
T'utzuxe
burn to the ground that I remembered the Q-sik. Where was it? I felt a surge of panic until I realized that it was still safely inside my pack, which—thank Great Jalasu Jhuk of the Stars—had somehow stayed on my i'ardas through the crash. I shuddered to think what would have happened if the Q-sik had been aboard that exploding starship. Jhuk had warned that any damage to the device might release the incredible energy it contained all at once, with devastating consequences.

Hollins was sitting up now, rubbing his face. One of his eyes was ringed with a dark purple bruise, courtesy of the Vorem's boot.

The Vorem was still unconscious, lying in the grass and breathing shallowly. In the bright sun, he looked frail and gaunt.

“So what do we do with him now, Chorkle?” asked Hollins, frowning. I had no answer for his question.

“I think I have an idea,” said Becky, taking the blaster from my thol'graz. She scowled and pointed it at the Vorem. I closed my eyes. After a long moment, I opened them again. She had lowered the weapon.

“Okay, fine. I'm not going to just shoot him while he's unconscious,” she said at last.

Nicki knelt beside him and began to check his vitals.

“Well, I think I feel a steady pulse,” she said. “Are they, uh, supposed to have pulses? Or is that a bad thing?” I shrugged. None of us knew any more about Vorem anatomy than she did. She started to dress his wounds—a big gash across his chest and the blaster burn on his arm. She was operating under the assumption that human first aid was better than nothing.

“Man, you've sure got a soft spot for aliens, don't you, Chorkle?” said Hollins.

“I couldn't just leave him there to die,” I said. “I shot him once already. Doesn't that count for something?”

Little Gus prodded the Vorem with his toe. “So I get why we can't just vaporize the creep now, without due process or whatever,” said Gus, “but couldn't we just slap some bandages on him and leave before he wakes up?”

“Nope,” said Hollins. “He's way too dangerous to be left alone.”

“Well, he sure laid you out,” laughed Becky.

“Yeah. And he lit you up like Times Square with his little zapper thingie,” said Hollins as he searched the Vorem for more weapons.

“That must be where all the missing tools from the hangar went,” said Nicki. “He was using them to build this.” She turned the strange little device over in her hand.

“He was probably stealing food too,” said Hollins.

“Hey! My phui-chips!” cried Becky, suddenly remembering. “Okay, I changed my mind. Let's kill him.”

“What do you think this is?” asked Hollins as he pulled a small circular token out of the legionary's pocket. It bore General Ridian's crest on it—three black suns—and looked to be made of gold.

“Hey, I, uh, think that's mine,” said Little Gus. “Can you believe he stole Becky's chips and my, uh, special gold medallion that's probably worth thousands of dollars?”

Hollins shook his head. “We're not murderers, and we're not thieves either, Gus,” said Hollins, shoving the token back into the legionary's pocket. “Guy can keep his oversized commemorative coin or whatever it is.”

Just then, the Vorem startled us all by crying out in his sleep. “I . . . failed you. . . . ,” he murmured. “Sorry I'm weak . . . Sorry . . . General. . . .” And once more he was silent. The humans and I looked at one another, speechless.

Little Gus was the first to break the silence. “Ahem. Some of you may have missed it, since we were crashing at the time, but I just want to take this opportunity to offer another resounding I-told-you-so. This is the dude I saw running around Core-of-Rock in the fire! Maybe now you'll believe me when I tell you important stuff. . . .”

I lost the thread of what Little Gus was saying as I noticed something curious about the Vorem. A little object was attached to his belt. Not a weapon. It looked like a featureless black screen a few centimeters in diameter. I knelt and examined it, then tried for the better part of a minute to activate it. No matter what I did, though, it wouldn't turn on. At last, I figured it had been damaged in the crash, so I gave up.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Hollins was saying to Gus, “just spit it out. What other important information do we need to know?”

“Like I told you guys before, Pizza can say ‘hamburger'!” cried Little Gus.

“Wait, where is Pizza?” asked Nicki.

The thyss-cat was nowhere to be seen. We decided to survey our surroundings and search for Pizza. Hollins stayed behind with the blaster trained on our new prisoner and a grim expression on his face.

For the first time, I really took in the landscape. Somehow, this world was even greener than it appeared from space. In one direction, a sunny plain extended for thirty kilometers, toward a colossal mountain range just a shade purpler than Kyral's lavender sky.

In the other direction, there stretched a dark forest of woody treelike plants. They had deep blue trunks and pale green leaves of oddly geometric shapes—pentagons and hexagons and sharply pointed stars. High above us, three black specks wheeled in between the clouds: birds (or the local equivalent).

Little Gus sniffed the fresh Kyral air (thankfully it was breathable; in my experience, breathing is one of the most important things). “Weird as this place is,” he said, “it somehow kind of looks like Earth. . . . I mean, it would if there were more parking lots and stuff.”

“The moons are kind of a giveaway,” said Nicki, pointing to the sky. I could just make out two faint circular outlines.

“Wait. Kyral only has one moon!” I said, suddenly terrified that I'd misidentified this planet completely.

Nicki smiled. “Chorkle, the little one is Gelo,” she said. I looked up again. She was right. It is an odd feeling to realize that your home is just someone else's moon.

We found Pizza crouching in the tall grass nearby, yellow eyes peering off into the forest. The thyss-cat seemed to perceive something out there that the rest of us couldn't. This time, of course, we heeded his concern.

Gus hung back with Pizza, while Nicki, Becky, and I ventured farther into the forest to take a look. Many trees were huge, a hundred meters tall with trunks as wide as a Core-of-Rock street. Their thick canopy nearly blocked out the sky. Only scattered patches of sunlight managed to find their way to the forest floor. My eyes, used to the subterranean environment of Gelo's tunnels, found the dimness more agreeable. The occasional rustle of foliage or snap of a twig told us there were more than just plants here. We were surrounded by life. Once, I saw a little lizardlike creature flit among the branches on a pair of leathery wings.

“I'm sorry,” said Nicki, “I know that we're supposed to be looking for danger right now, and I'm actively resisting the urge to be nerdy, but . . . I really just have to do this!” And she dashed over to a small—and to my eyes utterly unremarkable—shrub and snipped off a blue branch. “Don't tell Hollins,” she said, and she placed the branch into a plastic bag and scribbled something on the label. Nicki had collected her first sample.

“Great,” sighed Becky. “And so it begins.” When Nicki had arrived on Gelo, she'd acquired roughly two tons of similar bags filled with every type of fungus our asteroid could offer.

“Look! Just look at this,” said Nicki, holding up the bag. “Look at how regular the branch structure is. It's almost crystalline! So cool.”

“I'll take your word for it,” said Becky. “But, sis, we really should concentrate on figuring out our location.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Every minute we wait is a minute Kalac and the others are in danger.”

“Well, I have a map of the planet on my holodrive, courtesy of the ship's sensors,” said Nicki patting her pack. “The problem is figuring out where exactly on the map we are. Do you see any landmarks?”

We looked around. The forest spread out ahead of us as far as the eye could see.

“Do blue trees count?” I asked.

Nicki didn't answer. She was already distracted, taking a cutting from another Kyral plant. This time her target was a hairy teal vine that wound its way up the trunk of a massive tree.

“Oh, come on, Nicki,” said Becky. “That's probably space poison ivy.”

Just then I saw something sparkle in a distant pool of sunlight. I blinked and nudged Becky.

“Wow,” said Nicki, still distracted by her vine, “it does actually seem to be giving me a rash. Utterly fascinating—”

“Hush,” I hissed.

We all crept toward the glint. In the quiet, our footfalls suddenly sounded far too loud. Each crunch echoed off the surrounding tree trunks.

Ten meters away, we realized that we were looking at a piece of rusty metal. It sat atop a pile of vines and foliage in a small clearing. On its surface was a symbol painted in orange: a triangle with three dots over it. Intelligent life! It had to be the Aeaki.

On the ground in front of the scrap of metal, we saw something else. It was a strip of what appeared to be leather. In the center of it sat a pile of electric yellow berries, each of them a perfect little decahedron. While the metal could have been any age, these berries looked ripe and couldn't have been more than a few days old. Someone had been here recently.