Trouble in the Stars Read online

  “I’m not hungry,” I add.

  The captain gives me an odd look. When she comes out of the galley, she puts a pile of protein bars next to my empty stew bowl.

  I sit on my hands so that I don’t reach for a protein bar. Everybody else goes back to their stew. Electra keeps watching me.

  Growl, growl, growl goes my stomach.

  * * *

  After dinner, the rest of the crew hurries out. Captain Astra wants Reetha to check on whether Peacemaker is pursuing us, because maybe Electra sent them a message before her Dart ship became disabled. Shkkka is sent to inspect the Dart and to continue working on the stealth-box, whatever that is, and Amby is supposed to set a course to make it harder for any other ships to follow us.

  On the captain’s orders, Telly puts the restraining cuff onto Electra. Then he goes out.

  Electra does the same thing I did after the captain put the cuff on me.

  She heads for the doorway that leads out of the mess-room.

  “Don’t try it,” I tell her, following.

  She ignores me and hits the panel to open the door.

  “You’ll get a terrible”—I start to say, and then she’s stepping through, and—“shock,” I finish as the restraining cuff crackles and she’s flung back into the mess-room.

  She’s lying on the floor in the middle of the room. I go and crouch next to her. She’s staring up at the ceiling without blinking. I pat her on the arm.

  She takes a gasping breath.

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “It’ll stop hurting in a few seconds.”

  She takes another breath, then starts struggling to sit up. I try to help, and she jerks away. “Leave me,” she hisses, “alone.”

  With a shrug, I go to sit with my back against the wall. Slowly, she manages to sit up, leaning against the couch.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “I am not,” she says stiffly, “speaking to you.”

  We sit in silence for a few minutes.

  Electra’s voice is low and angry. “But I’ll tell you one thing—”

  “I thought you weren’t speaking to me,” I interrupt.

  “Shut up,” she snaps. “The captain of this tin-can ship is going to be sorry about this.” She holds up her hand, showing the cuff around her wrist. Then she climbs shakily to her feet. “I am a StarLeague cadet and a Dart pilot. I was sent on a mission to locate and, if possible, recapture an escaped criminal.” She scowls down at me. “My mission hasn’t ended just because my Dart was damaged. If there’s something not right about this ship and its crew, I will find out.”

  16

  I should probably tell you more about the ship that we’re on.

  During one of our long, interesting midnight snack conversations, the captain told me that the ship is named Hindsight.

  “What does that mean?” I asked her.

  She gave half a laugh. “Hindsight means understanding something only after it’s happened, and not while it’s happening. It means knowing better next time.”

  I hope there is a next time, so I can know better about it.

  Anyway, I figure that if I’m not wearing the restraining cuff anymore, I can go anywhere on the Hindsight that I want to. Exploring, I find out that at one end of the ship are the living areas—the mess-room and tiny sleeping rooms for each of the crew—in the middle is the bridge, and then the pulse engines and the engineering section, and then the cargo area. Shkkka is there, working to fix Electra’s Dart ship. I don’t tell her that I’m the one who broke it.

  You’ve been on a ship before, right? You know that usually a spaceship is metal-colored and boring white plastic, inside and out. The Hindsight is not like that. The corridors are all painted in swirls of bright reds and blues and purples, same as the mess-room, and there are long leafy vines growing along the ceilings. The vines are Telly’s—he keeps them watered and healthy green. There are comfy pillows on every chair, and there’s always the faint, comforting hum of the ship’s engines in the background.

  Earlier, Electra called Hindsight a tin-can ship because from the outside it looks like a cylinder made of scuffed and dented metal.

  She’s wrong. This ship is not a tin can. It’s a bubble of warmth and color and life floating through the darkest, coldest, emptiest places in the galaxy. In this ship, somebody, if they weren’t careful, might start to feel like they were safe. Like they were at home.

  * * *

  For the next week, I do my best to seem quiet and helpful and human and nice and, above all, normal.

  I am the galley boy, so I use the screen to look up recipes, and then make special meals for each person in the crew. Reetha likes food that is crunchy and salty; Amby prefers things that are mashed up; and Telly, of course, eats only vegetables.

  The captain seems to live on bitter kaff and nothing else. She’s weary, and spends most of her time on the bridge, checking for blips. She is certain that Peacemaker is lurking out there, somewhere. The rest of the crew is snappish too.

  It’s like they’re all waiting for something terrible to happen.

  Electra and I spend a lot of time together—without talking. At night she sleeps on the couch, and I scrounge up a pillow and some blankets and sleep on the floor in the galley. The ship’s rats aren’t happy about this, but really, they shouldn’t be in the mess-room anyway.

  After a delicious breakfast, I’m busy cleaning—and finishing everybody’s eggs and tofu—when Electra jumps up from the couch and starts pacing around the mess-room. She does this a lot.

  “Is it time to get tired again?” I ask.

  It’s been days, and she hasn’t once talked to me, so I know she’s not going to answer. Instead she casts me a green-eyed glare and then drops to the floor and starts doing this thing where she uses her arms to push herself up and down. It always leaves her sweaty and panting, with her hair-tentacles loose and lashing around her head.

  In the galley, I put down the cleaning rag, then hop onto the counter, where I sit cross-legged, watching her.

  Finishing her weird arm-pushing thing, she flips over and starts sitting up and down again and again. Then, to my surprise, she pauses and actually talks to me. “Quit,” she pants, “staring at me.”

  “But what are you doing?” I ask. It’s weird, right? All this moving around that leaves her exhausted?

  Electra jumps to her feet and starts running in place. “Exercising,” she says, scowling. “Obviously.”

  “Can I try?” I ask, hopping off the counter.

  She stops, hands on hips, and catches her breath. Her hair-tentacles wave around and then settle onto her shoulders. “One hundred push-ups,” she says. She drops to the floor again. “You won’t be able to keep up.”

  Oh, a challenge! “Yes I will!” I answer, and fling myself onto the floor next to her, where I start exercising. And I do keep up. I have lots of extra energy, and I do push-ups with Electra, and then the thing she calls sit-ups, and then a bunch of different exercises that leave her lying flat on the floor, panting. Even her hair-tentacles are lying limp and pale over her shoulders.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” I say, feeling a little hungry.

  Electra climbs to her feet, then leans over with her hands on her knees, still panting. Straightening, she brushes her hair-tentacles away from her face, studying me. She frowns. “You’re not even tired,” she says slowly.

  And I have this feeling I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  17

  There’s an organism called a slug. It’s a little like my blob of goo form, except that it has its eyes at the end of eyestalks.

  Later, while I make dinner for everybody, I feel like Electra has eyestalks and is staring at me in a way that makes me feel prickly all over, even though she’s on the other side of the mess-room.

  I do my best to ignore her as everybody
, including me, gathers around the table and starts to eat. After dinner, I clean up, and the crew leaves the mess-room, and Electra is still watching me.

  To get away from her, I go into the galley and lie down on the floor. My stomach growls. Electra’s been watching me so carefully that I’m not getting enough to eat. Quietly, I sneak a couple of protein bars out of the cupboard.

  After a little while, she comes to stand in the doorway of the galley.

  Yet another weird thing about humanoids is that they like to begin every conversation by making it clear that neither person is dangerous. They do this by holding out a hand that does not have a weapon in it and shaking the other person’s hand, or by smiling, or by exchanging some sort of basically meaningless greeting.

  Electra doesn’t bother with this.

  “It’s obvious,” she says bluntly.

  I’m lying there with about thirty protein bar wrappers scattered around me. “What’s obvious?” I ask, and then I burp.

  She folds her arms and takes up a wide stance. “I don’t know how the crew of this tin-can ship doesn’t see it. They must be blind.”

  I sit up.

  “You,” she says, pointing at me, “are not human.”

  “Yes,” I say firmly, “I am.” I’m telling the truth, because at this moment I am human.

  “No,” Electra insists. “You are not. And I can prove it.” She reaches into a pocket of her black coverall and pulls out a sleek metal box about the size of her hand.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  She steps closer, and I scoot away until my back is pressed against a cupboard.

  “This,” Electra says, holding it up, “is an ID scanner. I brought it with me from the Dart. At birth, every person in the galaxy is given an identification chip that—”

  “I know about ID chips,” I interrupt. All the sentient beings in the galaxy have an ID chip that is impossible to remove or alter in any way. The ID chip is scanned every time they get on a ship, or go onto a station or a planet, or go through a doorway or a hatchway, or buy something, or do anything. That means the StarLeague always knows where everybody is.

  Except me.

  “Stand up,” Electra commands in a voice that sounds like she’s used to giving orders.

  Slowly, I get to my feet. My heart starts to pound—a human reaction.

  It means that I’m frightened. When Electra has proof that I have no ID chip, she’ll tell the captain. And then what will happen? I don’t know, but it won’t be good.

  Electra is wearing a grim and determined look.

  And I feel, stirring deep within me, another form that I could take.

  All of a sudden, I’m not scared anymore.

  Electra holds up the ID scanner. “It doesn’t hurt,” she says. “Just bend your head. The chip, if you have one, is in the back of your neck.”

  “No,” I tell her, and my voice sounds strange. That other shape stirs within me again, but I hold it back, staying in my human boy form. “I don’t think so.” Fast as lightning, my hand flashes out and knocks the ID scanner from Electra’s grip. It flies across the room, clattering to the floor and coming to rest in a corner.

  Electra steps back, swallowing, her eyes wide. She glances at the ID scanner, on the floor across the room, and starts to say something when the door to the mess-room slides open and Captain Astra strides in.

  Without hesitating, the captain comes to the counter at the galley. “Eggs,” she orders.

  I take a deep breath and edge away from Electra. “With—with neon cow powder?” I ask, and my voice shakes a little.

  The captain shrugs. “If you insist.”

  Turning to the counter, I start to make us eggs. Electra watches for a few moments, then crosses to the corner, where she picks up the ID scanner. Then she goes to sit on the couch.

  While we eat our snack, the captain is all loungey like her usual self, but she’s watching me carefully. I don’t ask any questions, or say anything at all.

  I am too busy thinking about that other shape, the one I felt stirring inside me, and wondering what it is and why I’ve never felt it before.

  Or maybe I do know what it is, and I have felt it before.

  I just can’t remember.

  18

  The next morning when I make breakfast for everybody, they’re all nervous and jangly and snappish, and Electra keeps staring at me. While we eat, the captain talks with Reetha, and I stay quiet and think about memory. When humans think back to before, they make a little story out of what happened, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not many species do that.

  I don’t like trying to think about my before. All I can remember is floating through space in my blob of goo form. But there had to be something before that. I think it was probably bad.

  When everybody finishes eating, the captain stands up and heads for the door.

  Before she gets there, Electra follows, grabbing her arm so she can’t leave.

  “What?” the captain snaps, and pulls her arm away.

  Electra leans closer and says something that makes the captain frown and glance at me.

  “Yeah, all right,” Captain Astra says. With a jerk of her chin, she calls Reetha to her.

  Reetha pulls out the key to the restraining cuff and takes it off Electra, and all three of them—the captain, Electra, and Reetha—leave the mess-room, heading toward the bridge.

  I know what Electra said to the captain.

  I want to talk to you about Trouble.

  I have to find out what Electra suspects, and what she knows.

  * * *

  In my rat form, I’m lurking in the ventilation tube, spying on the bridge.

  Reetha is at the communications area, and the captain is slouched in her chair with a cup of kaff in her hands, looking tired and a little bit sad.

  Electra is standing at attention, and I can’t see her face, only the top of her tentacly head. “Permission to report,” Electra says.

  The captain rolls her eyes and glances at Reetha, over in the communications chair. She does nothing but look blankly back. Then, I notice, Reetha looks up at the ventilation tube. I edge back, just in case I’m visible from the bridge.

  “Permission to report,” Electra repeats. Because I am getting very good at noticing emotions, I hear that a tinge of annoyance has crept into her voice.

  The captain takes a slurp of her kaff. “This isn’t a military ship,” she says dryly. “You don’t have to ask permission before speaking.”

  Electra gives a little huff of impatience. “Captain Astra, one of your crew is wanted by the StarLeague.”

  “Reeeeeally,” the captain drawls. “Which one?”

  “Trouble, the galley boy,” Electra says promptly. “An ID scan will prove it.”

  “My crew,” the captain says, “is not your business.”

  Electra’s shoulders hunch, a sign of frustration.

  “And anyway,” the captain adds, straightening, “we don’t have an ID scanner on this ship.”

  “I have one,” Electra says, and pulls the only slightly dented metal box out of her coverall pocket. “General Smag ordered me to pursue your ship because it departed from the station during a hunt for an escaped prisoner. During my mission here I have concluded that this fugitive is, in fact, aboard this ship. You will assist me in arresting it and delivering it to the StarLeague.”

  “Will I?” the captain asks. “It sounds like you’re trying to give me orders,” she goes on. “On what is, I remind you, my ship.” She’s starting to sound angry.

  “The prisoner is extremely dangerous,” Electra insists.

  “Trouble is not an escaped prisoner,” the captain snaps. “He’s a stowaway, true, but he is completely harmless.” She’s not relaxed anymore, she’s leaning forward in her chair, eyes blazing.

 
“And it is devious,” Electra responds.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard,” the captain growls. She gets to her feet, still glaring at Electra, who holds her ground.

  “You have to help me,” Electra says. “It won’t let me scan it for its ID chip, and it—”

  “Your repeated use of the word it,” the captain says, and there’s no drawl or humor at all in her voice, “is really starting to annoy me.”

  “It wouldn’t let me scan for its ID,” Electra goes on doggedly. “It tried to destroy the scanner. But it seems to like you, Captain Astra. It will let you do the scan.”

  The captain glances over at Reetha. “What do you think?”

  Reetha looks blankly back at her. Then she glances at the ventilation tube again.

  She knows I’m in here. Her chin lifts, and she points with a claw at the door.

  Yes, I get it, Reetha. But I can’t leave yet.

  Earlier the captain said my crew, but I know I’m not really part of her crew. I already know what she’s going to do.

  “I am a StarLeague cadet with orders from General Smag,” Electra reminds her. “You must comply with my demands.”

  The captain sighs and rubs the back of her neck. “All right,” she agrees. “We’ll get this over with. Reetha, you’re with me. We’ll go scan Trouble’s ID chip to prove that he’s not some kind of intergalactic criminal.”

  Yes, that’s what I thought she’d say.

  Before the captain gets to the bridge doorway, I’m skittering along the ventilation tube, heading back to the mess-room. When I get there, I scurry into the galley and shift into my human boy shape. I get to my feet, panting.

  They’re coming.

  Quickly, I pull on my clothes.

  The captain is coming, with Reetha, and with Electra. They’re going to scan for an ID chip. When she sees that I have no ID chip, the captain will know that I’m not just a stowaway.