Space Hostages (14 page)

And then they started asking about Morrors and, particularly, what makes them disappear.

“I'm just a spawn,” I said. “I'm only nine. Nine-year-old spawn are total idiots.”

And they said, “But you are capable of speech. Human spawn mature improperly quickly. You must have acquired some information along with language.”

“Well, Morrors
can
disappear,” I said. “I know that. Everyone knows that. But I don't know how they do it, because I'm just spawn. No one tells spawn anything.”

And you know what, they clearly found talking
to me so unpleasant that they actually believed me. And then they went and I was by myself again.

Then there's this voice right by my ear going: “
Noooooooel
, I am here.”

I don't sound like that.

Oh, sorry.

You made a very peculiar noise, certainly.

I couldn't see that shimmer in the air Alice talks about, but I could feel the cold of your invisibility gown. You didn't take it off.

You said,
“Nooooeel, be quick, come closer!”
And then you threw the invisibility gown over my head.

I had folded my
amlaa-vel-esh
very small, under my kilt. I had had no opportunity to put it on when the Kuraaa-Kalaaa seized me, and could not tell anyone I had it. In my cell, I was made unconscious before I could use it. But when at last I awakened, I had my chance. I was not sure if I was being watched, but I hoped I was, and I retreated into a corner and
threw on the
amlaa-vel-esh
so it would appear as if I had ceased to be in the room at all. If they had invisibility technology at a standard matching ours, of course, my plan would fail, but they had confessed that in the matter of terraforming they were behind humans, so I was hopeful.

It was a greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-ehhh-eeeeeaaaat relief to be inside the
amlaa-vel-esh.
This ship is so hot and moist. Even when I was wrapped in a light cooling gown, it had been scarcely bearable. The air in the cell had been cooled a little for Morror needs—survivable, but not comfortable. I spread my limbs within the
amlaa-vel-esh
and tried to soak in its cool.

I had not loooong to wait. In due course the Kuraaa-Kalaaa did come, and opened the door to investigate how their prisoner had vanished.

While the door stood open, I gathered the
amlaa-vel-esh
as tight around me as I could and slipped through it. Here, it was an advantage that they are soooooooo much larger than we are. Outside the cell, I ventured down the red passageway. The Kuraaa-Kalaaa were, of course, not using their translator boxes to speak among themselves and they neither change color like Morrors nor move their faces, so their intentions were not easy to
understand—however, they do gesture somewhat like humans.

Th
saaa
, they are
nothing like
humans. They are like lobsters and
parrots
. I wouldn't say that about
your
species.

Very well, I apologize.

However, they
do
express agitation in a manner like humans, with waving of the arms. They were alarmed by my disappearance and anxious to learn where I had gone. Some of them came and went and spoke into their devices. But two—the shiny black one and the one painted with clouds—approached Noel's cell; I knew because I had seen them place him inside the room when we were brought to the prison.

So when they entered Noel's cell, I followed them.

I've never been under an invisibility gown before. You can see through it from the inside, but everything looks—I don't know how to put it—almost
more
bright and detailed than normal, but sort of
as if it's floating and not real. And maybe slightly purple?

No.

And of course I could also see you —

Not “you.” You are not talking to me. You are talking to the historians of the future.

All right, fine.

I could see Th
saaa
—at least, their tentacles, wrapped around my shoulders, flickering all light green and pink, but we were squashed so close together I couldn't see their face. It was also
very
uncomfortable under there, because the gown was really really cold on my face and Th
saaa
was burning hot against my back.

It didn't
feel
like we were invisible. It felt like we were having a weird hug in a freezing-cold bag in the middle of the room, for no reason.

“We must wait,” Th
saaa
said.

It felt like we were sitting there for ages, all hot and cold and tangled up. The fountainy thing kept
trickling away, and I wished I'd used it earlier. Obviously it was too late now.

Then the Krakkiluks did come back, and discovered I'd disappeared too. And yeah, to be fair, they did wave their arms around a bit.

“Crunch, clak, crunch!” went the one with the clouds.

“Crackle, splat, clop!” went the one in shiny black. I mean, not really, it just sounded a bit like that. I guess I'm being kinda rude. But they did
kidnap
us, so.

The door was still open. We shuffled and tripped toward it and nearly fell over each other inside the gown, and it felt like we were the most obvious thing on a ship full of people covered in spikes and diamonds, but the Krakkiluks didn't see us even as we waddled right past their legs and out into the corridor.

And for a moment I was all, like, “Yay, we've escaped!” and then I was, like, “Oh, no, we haven't.” Because we were still on that prison corridor, and still on an alien ship in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't even get out of the corridor because it was filled with Krakkiluks and the door was shut.

Then, I guess giving up on finding us, one of the soldiers laid a claw on a panel beside the door, which slid open, and all the Krakkiluks started filing out.

And we went after them.

As the last Krakkiluk skittered through, the door slid down and there was, like, not even a foot of space left when Th
saaa
hurled themself through, dragging me in a tangle of tentacles and the door shut and there we were on the floor on the other side, almost under the feet of the departing Krakkiluks.

We were in . . . well, a wider corridor. But this one had some windows on it, at least. I could see the golden planet. I wanted to go and look at it, like I'd maybe be able to see Carl and Alice and Josephine down there, somehow okay.

“Well,” I said. “Here we are. Now what are we going to do?”

“We must try to seize the
Helen
and escape,” said Th
saaa
.

S
o, we had no duct tape, though arguably that was not as bad as the fact that we had no first-aid kit, and definitely not as bad as the fact we had no spaceship. The Goldfish had said we were about three miles from land, and we were absolutely in no condition to swim that far.

What we
did
have, once we managed to break the visor of Carl's helmet into shards, was a kind of knife.

“We need to cut this leaf away from the stem,” I said. “Then we'll have a raft.”

Although by “we,” I really meant “Josephine.”

“I don't think it's my
turn
to go back in the water,” Josephine said.

“You signed up for all the underwater jobs when you got gills,” said Carl.

“I didn't sign up for wriggling pink things
,
” complained Josephine. But she slid into the water with her ceramic-shard knife and ducked under the leaf. Carl and I lay back to soak up the possibly carcinogenic sunshine and felt the leaf bobbing as she worked.

The sky above me was pale jade, the water deep emerald. The sun was light blue. I lay on the leaf, wondering if I might have broken a bone or two in my foot when I hit the sea. Apart from the whisper of the waves and the occasional splash of the wriggly pink things, it was utterly silent. It was kind of peaceful. In fact, it was
very
peaceful, except for how we had to keep an eye out in case any enormous sea monsters showed up to eat us or, alternatively, in case someone whooshed along in a boat or a spaceship in order to rescue us.

Neither of those things happened.

At last Josephine pulled herself back onto the leaf. “There,” she gasped, and she coughed a little, then leaned over and, rather disgustingly, ejected all the water she'd just breathed from her gills. I managed to limit myself to yelping quietly and adding a paragraph to the Outraged Letter about Dr. Muldoon's
behavior I was writing in my head.

“My
hair
,” Josephine moaned, plucking a few strands of wet goo from it. She gave up, pulled her hair out of the soaked and mangled braids, and tied it back with a torn-off length of lining from the collar of her space suit.

I found this oddly encouraging. She looked like a revolutionary or a pirate queen—or, that is to say, like my friend.

“There,” she said. “A raft.”

Carl and I cheered raggedly.

“Let's go, kids!” chirruped the Goldfish. I don't think there was any way we were up to making a sail or oars, even if there was a way to do it from the materials available. In the end we had to just hold on to the Goldfish's cable while the Goldfish towed us toward land.

“At least we got stuck on a warm planet this time,” said Carl drowsily, spread-eagled and dripping in the sunlight.

“And there's oxygen!” said Josephine.

I kept quiet. There was something worrying me about that, but there wasn't anything we could do about it—or if there was, at the very least we'd have to get out of the sea first, so there wasn't any point worrying anyone else. In any case, I might be wrong.

We weren't the only living creatures out on that floating leafscape. There were the buzzing blue things, and little gold creatures about two feet long that went hopping from leaf to leaf on three pairs of flippers to nibble with sharp green beaks at the puffballs, while others lay basking in heaps in the sun, their slick fur or feathers (or maybe something between) drying to a soft amber fuzz. They didn't seem at all afraid of us.

“Maybe we can eat them,” Carl said.

I wished he hadn't, because I hadn't noticed being hungry before that. I'd been thinking how cute the golden creatures were, but now they did look temptingly edible.

“Probably poisonous,” said Josephine.

The land rose slowly onto the horizon. The puffball plants grew thicker and thicker in the water, until the Goldfish couldn't tow us any farther. So we had to leave our leaf raft behind and make our way from lily pad to lily pad on foot for the last half mile.

The gravity was a little lower than on Earth, I thought, but not as low as on Mars. I wished it had been; we'd have been on dry land in a few effortless leaps. As it was, we were panting and sweating by the time we stepped off the last leaf pad onto the shore.

At once, I felt somehow ten times as exposed as
I had on our peaceful little leaf on the water. We had no way of knowing who, if anyone, lived on this land, but we were
trespassing
. We were uninvited, and almost helpless, and maybe we were going to get in terrible trouble.

For the moment, though, no one came charging over the hill, either to kill us or to ask to see our identity papers.

“So, those lobster guys,” said Carl. “This is their planet, right?”

“They talked about an Expanse, but I think they meant an empire,” said Josephine. “They'd claimed Aushalawa-Mo
raaa
. They've got lots of planets.”

But if it wasn't
the
Krakkiluk planet, that still meant it was probably
a
Krakkiluk planet.

“It's better than asphyxiating in space!” exclaimed Josephine, as if she'd been accused of something.

“No one's saying it's not, Jo,” Carl said.

“Earth'll find us,” said Josephine. “Or Aushalawa-Mo
raaa
; the Morrors have more experience with hyperspace. If it's possible to send a transmission through, it
must
be possible to pinpoint where it's coming from. They'll be working on that now. And Lena . . . We just have to stay alive.”

I thought again about the thing that was worrying me about the air, and I didn't say anything.

We trudged up the beach. The sand and pebbles were just ordinary like you might get on Earth, and the beach rose like any other up to a shallow scarp. But a thick carpet of red-and-orange egg-shaped blobs was growing on the scarp, and that wasn't Earthlike at all. We climbed up onto it, and the blobs squished a bit underfoot, like rubber, but didn't burst. Farther back from the water, some of them had little holes at the top, and some of them opened out into funnels like tiny vases. And ahead there were much bigger funnels, of deep red and bright gold, as tall as trees.

We flopped down in the shade of one of those funnels and lay there in a heap for a while.

Our space suits were far too hot by now. Josephine was the first person who could summon the energy to move; she began hacking the sleeves of her suit off with the ceramic shard from the helmet and cut her neckline a bit lower. She passed me the blade when she was done, and I did the same and then passed it on to Carl.

“Oh, dear,” I said, looking at the array of scorches and bruises we'd just revealed.

“Duct tape,” said Josephine mournfully.

“I'm so thirsty,” said Carl.

“The seawater isn't salt,” I said. “But I don't
think we should go ahead and drink it,” I added, thinking of how nasty it tasted and also how much yellow stuff the wriggly pink things were spraying into it.

“We have to filter and boil it,” said Josephine.

Carl and I groaned, because that was plainly going to be a real pain in the neck.

“Okay, helmet as cooking pot—that part's obvious,” said Carl.

We used his helmet, seeing as we'd already smashed the ceramic visor out of it. We stripped out the lining and the microcircuitry as best we could and filled it with water.

Then we looked for firewood, which was difficult because none of the plants we found seemed to produce anything as basic as a
stick
. But some of the funnel things were dead and dried out and broke into flakes when you poked them.

Which left the matter of how to actually set them on fire.

“If I had my warning and defense unit . . . ,” mused the Goldfish darkly.

“Well, you
don't
,” said Carl, irritated.

“It's okay,” said Josephine. “We can use the sun.”

We made a little hearth of stones on the beach and piled the dried-out flakes inside. Josephine
angled one of the helmets that was still intact until a bright speck of focused sunlight appeared on the kindling.

I didn't think this would work. But the next second, there was a flash and a huge plume of fire burst out of nowhere, and if we hadn't been on the beach, I think we'd have started an ecosystem-wrecking inferno right there. As it was, the only really flammable stuff about was
us
, so we screamed and fell over and threw ourselves into the waves.

“Eyebrows?” Carl was saying urgently. “Have I still got eyebrows?”

We established that no, no one had quite as much hair as they used to. We grieved for its loss, and we went back to look at the blackened wreckage.

“Right,” said Josephine. “So, there's a
lot
of oxygen on this planet.”

“At least that's better than the other way around,” said Carl.

“Actually,” I said, and stopped. The others looked at me.

“What?” said Carl.

“Too much oxygen is . . . kind of . . . bad,” I said reluctantly.

There was another pause.

“How bad?” said Josephine, her voice flat.

I twisted my hands together. In other circumstances, getting the chance to tell Josephine something scientific that she didn't know might have been kind of fun, but in this case, I wished she'd looked up “
oxygen toxicity”
the last time she'd happened to be bored. But she wasn't the one who wanted to be a doctor.

“Well . . . it's just that sometimes, when people have hypothermia and frostbite, you can treat them with high levels of oxygen,” I began. “But you have to be careful, and give them breaks with normal air, because things can happen. Though it depends on how high the oxygen levels
are
, and the air pressure . . .”

“How
bad
?” repeated Josephine.

Somewhat ironically in the circumstances, I took a deep breath. “Disorientation . . . breathing difficulties leading to pneumonia . . .”

“Spasmodic vomiting, drowsiness,” chimed in the Goldfish helpfully.

“Neurological damage affecting vision and balance, and with prolonged exposure, eventually . . .”

“
Death.
God, we get it! Eventually death!” exploded Josephine. She sat down on the ground and stared straight ahead. “How soon?” she asked quietly.

“Oh, I think we should be fine! For at least . . .
four days?” I said as positively as I could.

“Gosh, Alice, you've been studying hard,” said the Goldfish after another pause, and scattered a spray of holographic golden sparkles over me.

“Well, I try,” I said dolefully.

“Okay, so we've got to get off this planet,” said Carl.

Josephine nodded jerkily, not looking at either of us. “We've got to find help,” she said in a small voice.

The Goldfish led us up into the depths of the vase forest.

We'd limped along the shoreline until we'd come to the slow, nameless river, uncrossably huge and electric green under the crimson forest. On the far bank, the funnels spread as far as the eye could see, with a complete lack of encouraging things like houses or multistory car parks to disturb their peace.

“There
must
be settlements on the river,” Josephine said as we floated along. “Civilizations always build close to water.”

“What if we landed on a deserted island?” said Carl.

“Oh, shut up!” I moaned. “And anyway, it's a continent—I could see that much when we were falling.”

Carl nodded, but he didn't have to point out that that might take care of the “island” but didn't address the “deserted” part of the issue.

At least we weren't thirsty anymore. There were tiny pools of freshwater in the funnels—at first we only dared to lick drops from our fingertips, and it tasted a little odd, kind of rubbery, but not obviously lethal. So we plucked teacup-sized funnels—warily, in case this caused the plant to come to vengeful life and attack us. It didn't, so we drank, first in cautious little sips with pauses to see if anyone died, and then with desperate abandon.

“I think maybe these are just one underground plant,” Josephine said, looking a little bit more like her old self. “Or maybe more than one, but I think all the funnels are sucking water and sunlight down to one big root system. . . .” She trailed off. “This planet belongs to a culture with spaceships,” she announced abruptly. “It
has
to be unlikely that there's no way off it.”

“I know,” I said. “We'll find the spaceships. There was a satellite, at least. I saw it, up there.”

Carl was trying to angle away the dubious expression he was making so Josephine wouldn't see it, but she did anyway, or maybe she sensed it.

“Yes, the spaceships may belong to the same
species of people that threw us out of a spaceship in the first place,” she said with exaggerated patience. “But we have only met a handful of Krakkiluks. It would be illogical to assume we know what all of them are like.”

“Yes. Illogical,” agreed Carl, this time trying to go for no expression at all.

“And there might be
other
people. If the Krakkiluks aren't using this planet to live on, and they aren't using it to grow Takwuk, maybe they're using it for
labor
. In which case the locals are our natural allies! The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”

But so far there was no visible sign anyone else was using it for anything, unless you counted the flippery gold creatures basking on the floating leaves. They were having a great time.

The forest was not silent. The funnels sang in the wind like a choir of ghosts, and the creatures nestling in their ledges or gliding on double wings across the river chittered and warbled and hooted. On the banks the funnels spread wide and low, casting crimson shade over the water. The landscape changed as we floated on. Hills heaped high on either flank of the river—and then gray arches emerged from the ground amid the spreading funnels.