Stone in the Sky (20 page)

“We'll set the time for attack for an hour after we decelerate from light skip,” Ednette said.

We all nodded and headed back to our tents and pods.

“Let's rest up,” I said. After a fraught day, I knew I would finally be able to fall asleep with my sister alive.

Tomorrow I was going into battle.

 

26

Our attack would begin in an hour.

The cargo bay was so quiet, as though everyone was saving their voice to be the loudest that it could be.

I passed out the last protein paks I had, and we ate in silence, preparing ourselves for what was to come.

“It's time,” I said.

Ednette, Bitty, and I banged on the steel cargo doors until they opened.

“What do you want, Human?” the guard asked.

I made the signal and the cacophony started. Every Human in the cargo bay began to talk, to scream, to sing, yell, yodel, and whoop at the top of their lungs.

In a split second the Hort guarding us went from powerful to powerless. They screeched and scuttled back, and as they did, we rushed forward and pinned them down. We took their knives and immediately our weapons tripled.

We cheered when we took the hallway, but soon, bells rang and lights strobed. One of the Horts must have sounded the alarm.

I did not care. We had to push forward.

“Take care of them,” Traynor said. I watched as the Wanderers dragged the Hort guards into the cargo bay. I heard the mournful thrum of music that came from the Hort vestigial wings and then high, piercing screams. I shuddered, but what happened to them was no longer my concern. Ednette, Bitty, Traynor, Siddiqui, and I took one hallway. Buzzle, Thomas, and Hanks went down the other.

I did not know the layout of the ship, so Ednette took point. She'd been on more spaceships than I had. She knew how to figure out the lay of the land.

Stolen knives at the ready, we pressed every button in the hallway until a door opened, giving us a way to move on.

Because the alarms had sounded, I was expecting to see the Hort ready to fight us at every turn. Instead, when we entered the hallway they were running wildly away, looking like they were trying to escape. From us? No. I didn't think so.

“Where are they going?” Ednette yelled.

“I don't know,” I said back. “Something is happening.”

Something else
was
happening. The alarm was not for us. It was signaling another danger. The Hort scuttled by, ignoring us. We were swimming upstream. The clicking sound of the Hort's panicked appendages on the metal of the floor was unsettling.

Then the ship quickly decelerated and came to a full stop. A strange noise followed, and then an explosion.

“What is that?” Bitty asked. She had a fear in her eyes that I could trace to the burn on her face. It was the fear of a ship tearing apart.

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “Keep going.”

I was pretending to be unafraid, but inside I was panicking. I had fought for my life in so many ways, but I had never been in battle.

“Let's go,” Ednette said. “Let's use this chaos to our advantage.”

“Where do we go?” Traynor shouted.

“Wherever they are running away from,” Siddiqui said.

“Why head toward danger?” I shouted.

“Because whatever is danger to them is to our advantage,” he said.

Ednette made three quick gestures for the team to follow. Whatever was happening to the ship, we were on the move.

We heard a scraping. Something was coming along outside the hull. The ship shuddered. Metal screeching on metal filled the hallway with an ever-deafening sound.

“The ship, it's coming apart,” Bitty yelled, eyes wild in full panic.

I tried not to scream.

“No. That's the sound of another ship fast docking,” Siddiqui said.

When we turned a corner, there was a flash of light and then smoke.

We weren't coming apart. Someone was invading the ship.

A smoke grenade had burst in front of us. My senses were disoriented, and I fell to the ground. I didn't know which way was up, and there was nothing to see except shadows. I wondered who was here with us and whether they were friend or foe. An arm grabbed me and pulled me up.

“Come on,” Bitty yelled.

As I ran I could see shadows as they stepped through the smoke. I tried to make out which species they were, but they all wore elaborate masks to cover the finer details of their faces and forms. In a way, the garish colors and strange masks they wore made them unified. A non-uniform uniform.

“Pirates!” Ednette screamed.

We raced down the smoky hallway hearing only the thudding feet of the Pirates behind us. They were closing in from all sides and then they burst into view.

I had my knife at the ready. I would fight them if I must. Even though they were attacking the Hort ship, I didn't know if they would attack us, too. We were surrounded by the fleeing Hort on one side and the attacking Pirates on the other.

I froze, and the moment seemed to hang in an eternity until one of them made a hand signal. Everything sped up again as the pirates ignored us and ran off to pursue the Hort.

“Go, go, go!” Ednette cried, jolting me back to the here and now.

Though we all took different hallways, we were at the top of the ship by this point, which led us to the same place. The bridge.

On the bridge, the Pirates were in an intense fight with the Hort who had remained behind. Even though we had arrived, they paid us no heed and continued to concentrate on the Hort.

“They're on our side,” I yelled.

“What do we do?” Traynor shouted back.

“Fight,” Bitty cried.

I moved forward, my knife flashing.

Bitty jumped in front of me and slashed a Hort's appendage off. The Hort screamed at a pitch that I couldn't hear, but I could feel. Dark liquid spilled to the floor, making it slippery. Bitty shoved the Hort to the ground and with a battle cry sunk her knife into its chest.

“Look out!” I cried as another Hort scuffled over to her. She pushed me back out of the way and then elbowed the Hort in the eye. I turned away as she looped her arm around its vestigial wing, pried it up, and stabbed where I knew the Hort heart was.

“Hide there,” Bitty said. “I can tell you're not a fighter.”

But she was. Bitty, Ednette, Traynor, and Siddiqui were fighting fiercely. As shell shocked as Hanks had seemed in the cargo bay, she was skirmishing as best she could on the other side of the bridge. She was holding her own but pinned down by two Hort, she could not avoid the sharp appendage that pierced through her back. She fell over, and from where I was crouched I could see her dead blue eyes staring up at nothing.

Buzzle and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. Bodies were everywhere. There was so much screaming; some of it from pain and some of it from fear. I screamed. I had shimmied down even farther by a panel to have some cover but though I was not in the middle of the action, my knife was covered in blood as I slashed at whatever came near me.

Watching Bitty was something else. She was quick. Pinned by two Hort, she ducked and weaved until she and one of the pirates led them to a corner. Then she slashed off the appendages of one of the Hort. While he screamed and scrambled away, dark liquid spraying everywhere, and was finished off by the pirate, she turned quickly and plunged her knife into the other Hort's eye.

Then she jumped on top of its body and kicked open its plating, digging her heel into its soft flesh. When we were young, I had never known her to be athletic, but here she fought with a ferocity that I could barely understand. If I had used my brains and charm to survive on the Yertina Feray, she had clearly had to learn to use her brawn to survive wandering.

Then it was done.

I always had assumed that there would be an eerie quiet in the aftermath of a battle, but it was noisy. People shouting orders to each other. Movement of bodies. The whirring of electronics. The scramble to get the falling ship under control.

The Pirates were finally in charge of the Hort ship. We were now in their hands.

I looked at them, this mix of species, covered in strange masks and colorful clothing, now stained by Hort blood. I think half of the fear they struck was from this mad look they wore. They had helped us, and I was still scared.

One of the Pirates, a biped, came on deck and looked at us Humans and did a sweep of the room. When it turned to me, it slowly removed its mask and showed its face.

Caleb.

“I got your message,” he said.

 

27

“You found me,” I said.

I could hardly believe Caleb was standing there in front of me.

“You were hard to miss,” he said. “You left a trail as large as the Milky Way.” I moved toward him, but his posse moved in closer as though they would slice me in two if I even hinted at touching Caleb.

“You can't touch me,” he said. “They'll kill you if you do. It's the Pirate way.”

I took a step back, and they backed down a bit.

Seeing the Pirates in action made me understand why Reza had been hesitant to give me Caleb's ship's name. Having just witnessed the battle with the Hort, I knew that meant he had done unspeakable things. I could hardly recognize him with his facial scruff, long blond hair, and hard blue eyes. He seemed a far cry from the gentle young man I'd known on the Yertina Feray.

He nodded toward the group of Humans on the ship with me.

“Friends?” he asked.

I nodded.

“So you are capable of making and keeping friends,” he said.

“I'm still your friend,” I said.

“I don't trust you to not try to kill me again,” he said. I couldn't tell if he was angry or making a joke. I could not find one thing I recognized in this cold, cruel-looking face.

“I didn't kill you,” I said.

“You might as well have,” he said. “At least, that's what I know now.”

“There were circumstances beyond my control.”

“How's Trevor?” he asked.

“He's here,” I said. “The Hort took him to the electronics bay.”

“That's good to know. I'll be taking him with me,” he said. “Then again, we'll take whatever we want.”

I swallowed back my sadness as he and the others looked around the bridge with greed in their eyes. I knew I couldn't argue to keep Trevor. Caleb was no longer the boy who sang tender songs in the arboretum and spoke of love for a girl that he hardly knew across a galaxy. He was different now. A Pirate.

“Of course,” I said. “He's yours.”

He exchanged hand signals and half the group of pirates went off into the ship. Caleb and three others stayed behind.

“What's happening?” I asked.

“I told them that I'd take the parley since you are Human,” he said.

Everyone left was staring at us.

“Do you know this man?” Ednette asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He's a friend.”

“I'm not your friend,” Caleb said. “I'm an intrigued acquaintance.”

“This is my sister, Bitty,” I said pointing to Bitty. I saw a look pass over Caleb's face.

“She's alive,” he said slowly. He was surprised, and I could tell that he cared about that.

“Yes, and I'd like to keep her that way,” I said.

He nodded and then rubbed his face. He looked exhausted.

“I've been trying to figure out what you were doing,” he said getting back to it. “Jumping from ship to ship. Your course made no sense.”

“I was forced to leave the Yertina Feray,” I said. “I didn't have anyone else to turn to. You were the only person I knew. I thought I could ask you for help.”

He laughed and shook his head.

“I didn't imagine that you'd joined a tribe. But when I noticed that you'd transferred to this ship, I knew that was bad news for you. Wanderers don't have a habit of ever hitching again if they board certain ships.”

“You know about what's been happening to the Wanderers? What Brother Blue is doing?”

“You and Brother Blue,” he said. “You are single-minded Tula. I have heard rumors about it, but it's not my concern.”

“Of course it's your concern!” I said. “They're Humans. He's killing them for nothing. For power.”

“I'm only interested in cargo that I can sell,” he said. “Or have use for.”

“Who are you?” I asked looking straight at him. After a moment I saw his eyes flick away defensively.

“I came for you, didn't I? I stepped in when there was trouble.”

“We were doing fine without your help,” I said.

He laughed. It came right up from his belly, and for a moment he looked happy. Like it had been a long time since he'd really laughed.

I hardened my eyes. Nothing about this situation was funny.

“We would have taken the ship eventually,” I said. He was making me angry. I had wanted to find my friend. I didn't need this stranger's help.

“And gone where?” he said. “Do you even know how to fly a spaceship?”

“No,” I said. “But he does.” I pointed to Siddiqui. Caleb took in his tattered Imperium uniform.

“Can you?” he asked him.

“Maybe,” Siddiqui said. “Probably. I had simulation training.”

“Fair enough,” Caleb said. “You can take care of yourself.”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “We would have figured it out.” But the truth was I had not thought much beyond taking over the Hort ship. I had figured that it would be a hijack, and we could persuade them to fly us somewhere safe. But the Hort were all gone, or dead. They'd been running to their escape pods. What did they care about abandoning some Humans?

I thought that once I found Caleb all of my problems would be solved. I had always known that he would be a leader, and here he was in his element. Commanding. Charming. Seemingly invincible. He was right next to me and yet a million miles away.