Trouble in the Stars Page 5

  The bridge contains a navigation area, where Amby sits surrounded by scrolling numbers and glowing charts, Reetha’s communications and sensors area, Telly’s area with a cargo computer, and in the center sits the captain’s chair, which is shabby and looks comfortable and has stuffing leaking out of it in two places. Next to the captain’s chair is a small control panel with a white plastic remote sitting on it and also an abandoned cup of kaff that has mold growing in it. There’s a screen mounted on the wall that shows deepest, darkest space, distant stars, and a small, deadly-looking silver arrow that must be the Dart ship.

  Captain Astra leans forward in her chair. “No sign of Peacemaker?” she asks.

  “No,” Reetha answers.

  “It must be around here somewhere,” the captain mutters. “All right. Let’s hear what this rat-bit Dart pilot has to say.”

  In response, Reetha pushes a button on the communication panel.

  “To repeat, this is StarLeague Dart ship number 242556982 demanding inspection of cargo ship 90087132. Per StarLeague laws you must come to a complete halt and prepare to be boarded.”

  The voice is metallic and flat, like a machine talking.

  “Telly,” the captain snaps. “Get to engineering and see if Shkkka has the stealth-box ready yet.”

  Telly jumps to his feet. “Stall them as long as you can,” he says, and rushes out.

  “Now put me through to the Dart pilot,” the captain orders, and Reetha pushes another button.

  Before she speaks to the other ship, the captain takes a deep breath. Then she leans back in her chair. “Greetings, Dart ship,” she says in a slow drawl. “What was that ID number again?”

  The metallic voice answers immediately: “StarLeague Dart ship number 242556982.”

  “Didn’t you say 242556983 the first time?” the captain asks slowly.

  “242556982,” the metallic voice responds.

  “Nine eight two?” the captain repeats. She sounds calm, but her leg is jiggling up and down—and that means she’s nervous.

  “242556982.”

  I might be imagining it, but the Dart pilot’s mechanical voice is starting to sound annoyed.

  “A-a-a-and,” the captain says, drawing the word out, “you want to do what now?”

  As an answer, a bolt of brilliant light flashes across the view screen and the entire ship shudders, while red lights blink frantically on the control panels. Captain Astra leaps to her feet and rips out a curse word.

  “That was a warning shot,” the Dart pilot’s metal voice says. “Come to a halt immediately, or the next shot will be aimed at your engineering section.”

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Amby whispers from the navigator chair. “We’re doomed.”

  “Calm down,” the captain mutters, still staring at the screen. “We’re not doomed. Yet. Reetha, find out where Peacemaker is. Now!”

  Up in the ventilation tube, my rat-whiskers twitch.

  I’ve been thinking.

  I’m not the reason for this Dart ship following us. I’m pretty sure it’s not me that Peacemaker is hunting.

  What I am is the only shapeshifter in the galaxy. I know that I can’t tell anybody about that, not even this ship’s crew. In a way, I’ve been lying to them all along.

  I know what this means for me. I was alone before, and I’ll probably be alone again, just like Captain Astra says.

  But now, in this moment, the ship is in trouble.

  And I can help.

  13

  As fast as my little rat-feet will go, I scamper through the ventilation tube and then out into a corridor until I reach an airlock; getting inside it, I shift into my blob of goo form. The airlock alarm is going off, but I ignore it. Once the inner hatch door is closed, I use a pseudopod to push the button that opens the outer hatch.

  Immediately I’m sucked out into space. For a second I float. Space is the same as it always is: airless, deeply cold, empty. The only light comes from distant stars, which are definitely not singing.

  From outside, Captain Astra’s ship looks like a scuffed and dented cylinder. Ahead, the Dart ship is a much smaller sleek metal sliver.

  I need to hurry, because when I’m in my goo form, I can’t remember things for very long, and I do not want to forget the captain or the ship or its crew.

  It turns out that my blob of goo form can move pretty fast when it needs to. I zip through the cold vacuum of space to the Dart ship. I don’t think Captain Astra will be able to see me from her ship—I’m small in this shape, and my goo is mostly invisible. It takes me only a moment to sense a way into the Dart ship—through its weapons port, hah!—and I ooze in.

  It is cramped and dark inside the Dart. The pilot is in a different part of the ship; I need to find a sensitive area where I can do some damage. I worm my way deeper in. Even for my goo it’s a tight squeeze. And then, ahead, I sense a pulsing, vibrating area—the ship’s engine. When I reach it, there’s a metal grate blocking my way. To get past it, I extend a pseudopod through the grate. Like a long gooey finger, it probes the machinery that keeps this ship alive. My pseudopod pulls a wire, and an alarm goes off. More alarms shriek as I pull a few more wires just to be sure, and push some moving parts out of alignment, and then I creep away from the engine area and out the weapons port into space.

  I don’t waste any time floating around. Quickly, I zip back over to Captain Astra’s ship. After getting inside, I shift into my rat form—I’m starting to get hungry with all of this shifting—and scurry all the way back to my perch in the ventilation tube at the bridge to see what’s happening.

  The captain, Reetha, Telly, and Amby are standing in the middle of the room, staring at the view screen. It shows the Dart ship adrift and broken, thanks to me. It’s venting puffs of air that turn into a glittering spray of ice crystals as they hit the deep cold of space.

  Hah. I wonder what the Dart pilot will do about that!

  * * *

  As you know, space is really big.

  In comparison, people like you and like me are extremely tiny, and there aren’t that many of us—not compared to the hugeness that is space.

  What this means is that when a ship is in danger, every ship in the area must try to help it.

  This isn’t even a StarLeague rule. It’s a people rule. When other people are in danger in space, you have to try to save them.

  So there’s a long silence as the crew watches the dying Dart on the screen.

  “Come on,” Captain Astra whispers, as if she’s waiting for something.

  More silence. More air vents from the Dart.

  “Anything?” the captain asks.

  “No,” Reetha answers, after checking the communications panel.

  As I’m watching from up in the ventilation tube, my whiskers twitch. I hope I didn’t do too much damage to the Dart ship. I hope the pilot is all right.

  And then, at last, there is a message from the Dart in the pilot’s mechanical voice.

  “Cargo ship 90087132, this is Dart ship pilot 2425 . . .”

  The transmission is interrupted by static.

  “2425 . . .” the pilot says again, and then there’s a sound like gasping for breath. “Ship pilot 242556982 calling for . . . for assistance.”

  “Finally,” Captain Astra says. “Telly, get to the cargo area and prepare to take the Dart on board.”

  “We’ll have to dump some cargo pods to fit it in,” he warns.

  “I know,” she responds, still staring at the disabled Dart ship. “Do it anyway. Hurry.”

  “Right-o,” Telly says with a twitch of his ears, and he races from the bridge.

  The captain says something else to Reetha, and I realize that I’d better get back to the mess-room. As fast as I can, I scamper through the ventilation tubes until I pop out into the galley. To get the restraining cuff back
onto my wrist, I have to shift into my blob of goo shape and put a pseudopod into the cuff, and then shift into my human shape. Then I find my clothes in the pile where I left them, and put those on.

  As I’m getting to my feet behind the counter, Reetha and the captain rush in through one door—and at the same moment Telly comes in through the other door, the one that leads to the cargo area. He’s carrying something.

  It’s a body.

  14

  “Here,” Captain Astra pants, and Telly and Reetha sling the Dart pilot’s body onto the couch. The body is wearing a space suit—sleek and black, with tubes trailing from it and a StarLeague patch on one arm. Covering the head is a helmet made out of what looks like black glass.

  “Get it off,” the captain orders. Telly fumbles with a latch where the helmet meets the suit, and then the captain pushes him aside. “Here, I’ll do it,” she says impatiently, and with a twist and a pull, the helmet comes off.

  They all stand there looking down at the body.

  I go over and go on tiptoe to peer over the captain’s shoulder.

  Huh.

  “It’s a kid,” I say.

  The girl lying there on the couch has her eyes closed. Her skin is palest green, with darker green dots sprinkled over her nose and cheeks. Instead of hair she has long tentacles that flow from the top of her head down to her shoulders. The tentacles are a beautiful dark blue at her scalp shading to lighter blue at their tips.

  One of the tentacles twitches.

  “Is she alive?” I ask.

  “Apparently,” the captain says.

  I push past her and kneel next to the couch. “Hey, other kid,” I say, and I reach out and touch her arm.

  “She’s not a kid, Trouble,” the captain corrects. “She’s a Dart pilot.”

  Then the girl’s eyes pop open. They are bright green. And they are angry. “Do. Not. Touch. Me,” she growls. She starts to climb off the couch, and I scramble away, and then her head tentacles lose all their color and she tips over and falls onto the floor.

  Then Amby hurries into the mess-room carrying a box—a medical kit—and pushes me aside, and they and the captain lift the girl onto the couch again and she lies there like a dead bug while Amby looks her over to see what’s wrong with her. Telly rushes off to be sure the Dart ship is safe in the cargo hold.

  “Will she be all right?” I ask Captain Astra.

  “Probably.” She doesn’t sound happy about it.

  “She’s not an enemy, is she?” I ask.

  The captain shakes her head. “No.” She shrugs. “Well, not exactly. We’d rather not have StarLeague military personnel on this ship, that’s for sure.”

  As far as I know, I’m not the escaped prisoner being hunted by General Smag and his Peacemaker and his Darts, but I am a shapeshifter stowaway and I don’t have an ID chip, and I’d rather not have this StarLeague pilot on the ship either.

  But still. She is a kid. Just like me.

  * * *

  The captain tells me to quit standing around and to make myself useful, so I go into the galley to fix lunch for everybody.

  After all of the shifting I’ve done today, I’m ravenously hungry.

  Over by the couch, Amby has the girl awake and sitting up. Her head tentacles have turned blue again; maybe that means she’s feeling better. The captain is standing guard with her arms crossed, frowning and asking questions that the girl is refusing to answer.

  I’m opening stew packets and dumping them into bowls when Reetha comes up to the counter. I get out a packet of the extremely salty snacks that lizardians like. After putting them into a bowl, I hold it out to her.

  She’s examining me with her unblinking golden eyes. Then she leans across, takes the bowl, sets it on the counter, and grabs my hand.

  “What?” I ask, trying to pull away.

  Her claw grips me more tightly. With her other claw, she taps the restraining cuff. “Wrong. Hand.”

  Oops. When I shifted from a rat to my goo form and then back into my human shape, I got the cuff on the wrong wrist. Trust Reetha to notice something like that. The captain will too, once she’s not distracted by the girl. Just my luck, to be surrounded by highly observant people.

  Lizardians are much more difficult to read than humans are, so I’m not sure what Reetha is thinking or what emotion she is feeling. She doesn’t say anything—not surprising—but she doesn’t let go of my hand, either.

  Ummmm. “I’m just going to,” I say slowly, “go into the bathroom. If that’s all right with you.” I need to shift the cuff onto the right hand.

  Reetha grunts, and then, with her free claw, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a metal strip—a key—and inserts it into a slot in the cuff. It drops off my wrist and onto the counter.

  Reetha lets me go. “Airlock,” she says. “Alarm.”

  What?

  She points at me with a claw. “You. Broke. Dart.”

  Ohhhhh. Reetha handles communications and sensors. When I left this ship to deal with the Dart, she noticed that the airlock alarm went off and the outer hatch opened. Maybe her sensors detected me out there in space in my blob form.

  You know what this means?

  Reetha knows that I am a shapeshifter.

  She stares at me, and I stare back at her.

  What’s she going to do?

  She reaches for the bowl of salt-snacks and pops one into her mouth. Crunching on it, she continues to stare at me. “Dog?” she asks at last.

  “Yes,” I admit. I was the dog when I came onto the ship.

  She nods, like she’s suspected it all along.

  Then Captain Astra comes up behind her. “Good,” she says, seeing the cuff on the counter. “Go keep an eye on the Dart pilot,” she tells Reetha. “I want a word with Trouble.”

  I go shivery and cold, ready for Reetha to tell the captain everything.

  But she doesn’t.

  Without saying anything, Reetha leaves, and the captain pushes me deeper into the galley. “Listen,” she whispers. “This Dart pilot was sent out from Peacemaker to hunt down that escaped prisoner. They probably sent out twenty or thirty Darts on the same mission. The pilot won’t tell us anything, but we don’t have Peacemaker anywhere on our scans—it’s not anywhere nearby—so we’re going to be good StarLeague citizens and drop her off at the next station. In the meantime, we won’t tell her that you’re a stowaway. As far as she’s concerned, you’re just a regular member of this crew. For the next two weeks, until we get to the next station, just be normal.”

  “I can do that,” I say.

  She huffs out a laugh and tousles my hair. “Just don’t give anybody any trouble, Trouble.”

  15

  I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as normal. I mean, you are weird, aren’t you? Yes, you are, and it’s not because you have eyestalks or purple scales or webbed fingers or you’re a lizardian or a humanoid or whatever.

  Every person is themself, and that makes us all different and weird to each other.

  Except for me. I’m a little weirder than everybody else.

  * * *

  In the galley, I make stew for most of us, and lettuce without roots for Telly.

  Over on the other side of the mess-room, the girl has stripped down to a black coverall with a StarLeague patch on the front. Her head-tentacles have turned deep blue again, and she’s tied them back from her face. In height, she is somewhere between me and the captain, and at a guess she is about the same age that I seem to be, in my human shape. She is thin, but she looks strong. She moves like she’s had training. She’s probably deadly. And devious.

  “Let’s eat,” the captain says, and everybody, including the girl, gathers around the table.

  Stew, delicious stew. Cubes of protein and cubes of plant matter swimming in a salty brown sauce. Mmmmmmm.

/>   While the girl eats, she watches the rest of us. And we watch her.

  I notice that she chews every bite exactly ten times before swallowing. She sits with her spine straight, not touching the back of her chair.

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  She sets down her spoon, and it is lined up precisely next to her bowl. “StarLeague pilot 242556982.”

  “That’s not a name,” I point out. “It’s a number.”

  She doesn’t say anything. One of her blue hair-tentacles escapes from the tie and waves free.

  “My name is Trouble,” I tell her, and take a bite of stew. “With a T.”

  The girl reaches up and tucks the free tentacle behind her ear. After another long moment she says, “My name is Electra.” Then she looks sharply at me. “Who are you, exactly?”

  “He’s nobody,” the captain puts in from the end of the table.

  “I doubt that you are nobody,” Electra says to me.

  I blink. “I’m definitely nobody,” I tell her.

  “He cooks and keeps the galley clean,” Captain Astra says. “He won’t give you any trouble.”

  And I would smile at that, because I know she said trouble for me, like a shared secret, except that Electra is still watching me.

  Finishing my stew, I lick my bowl and put it on the table. I gaze longingly at everybody else’s dinners.

  Unfortunately, because of all the shapeshifting I’ve done today, I’m extremely hungry. But all I have to do is eat eight bowls of stew in front of Electra for her to realize that I’m not normal.

  “More stew?” the captain asks me, getting up and walking into the galley.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  The entire crew stops eating and stares at me.

  My stomach growls, loudly.