The Incredible Space Raiders from Space! (24 page)

The Space Raiders immediately started talking among themselves.

“Silence!” Lieutenant Potts called.

The crowd quieted again.

“How long have you lived on this ship?” Jonah asked.

She paused. “My whole life. I've never been off of it.”

Jonah nodded. That explained her pale skin.

“Why are we all here?” Jonah asked.

Jonah saw tears start to dribble down the commander's face.

“You're here because of Project Weed,” she murmured. “You're the seventh batch we've taken. We've already dropped off six other groups.” Her voice faltered. “I didn't want him to do it. But we needed the money. They were shutting down the
Squirrel
.”

Jonah saw the confused looks on everyone's faces. He knew it would get worse. Things were starting to click into place for him. And it wasn't good.

“What is Project Weed?”

She hesitated. “It's a top-secret commission project. Earth is too polluted. The ozone layer is collapsing.” She was trembling. “They couldn't send the entire population to the other planets in our solar system. They couldn't put billions of people in domes. They needed new planets. Earth replacements.”

She met Jonah's eyes.

“But the commission needed to know if humans could survive on the planets before they sent waves of people there. They don't know the planets well enough. If there are diseases. Weather patterns. Creatures.” She paused again. “Intelligent life.”

The Space Raiders were really whispering now. They looked scared.

“People weren't going to just volunteer,” she said. “And so they decided to solve two problems at once.” She
looked behind Jonah. “There were too many orphans.”

This caused the loudest stir yet. Jonah suspected many Space Raiders were starting to guess at the truth. But they believed the commander's story too much. They weren't there yet.

“They decided to send orphans to colonize the worlds. Two hundred at a time. One hundred boys. One hundred girls. They used young kids, and only two hundred, because they wanted to be able to take the worlds back if they wanted them. My dad told me if new settlers get comfortable, they stop taking orders. They fight for their homes. Kids wouldn't do that. They'd just be happy the adults had finally arrived. If they survived the first few years.” Her voice cracked. “The
Squirrel
was going to be decommissioned. It was an old passenger ship. But Elling came to my dad and offered him the contract. He said our ship was perfect: No one would notice it was gone.”

She looked out into space.

“My dad needed the money. He took on the contract and hired this filthy crew—pirates and mercenaries that he found in the old run-down dives by the spaceport. People who didn't mind abducting orphans and dropping them off across the galaxy. People that could keep them in line. And now we've been doing this for almost three years.”

Jonah glanced behind him. He saw Willona watching
with shaking hands. Alex looking betrayed. Jemma looking scared. He wanted to stop asking questions. He wanted them to keep believing. But he couldn't.

They deserved to know.

“Did you make up the Incredible Space Raiders?” Jonah asked quietly.

The commander put her hands to her eyes, the tears streaming through her slender fingers. “Yes.”

It finally hit home. He heard the gasps. The whimpers. The frightened voices.

“Why?”

The commander turned and looked right at Sally Malik. “The crew told the first batch what was happening. Where they were going. Sally was one of them. It was terrible. Kids cried and wept and begged to go home. They got angry and tried to take over the ship. One was killed. The rest were locked up until we got to PER-1. I remember the crying as they loaded them onto the shuttle,” she whispered. “But one of them escaped. We'd become best friends, so I let her out of her cell. She hid on the ship, and she's been here ever since.”

“The Shrieker,” Jonah murmured, looking at Sally.

She flushed and looked away.

“Yes,” the commander said softly. “I get to see her sometimes, but not much. Not while Space Raiders are on the ship. Sometimes I slip away, though, and Sally and I just sit in Home Sweet Home. When the Space Raiders
are gone, we spend most of our time together. But we're never happy. We know where the others are going.”

The commander shook her head.

“I begged my dad to stop the trips. But he wouldn't. So I made up a story. I wanted the kids to feel special. Like they'd been chosen for something important. They needed rules and uniforms and weapons. These big passenger ships always have boxes and boxes of emergency clothes, in case there's a disease outbreak. They sanitize everyone, burn their clothes, and give them these jumpers. The
Squirrel
never had an incident, so they were all still there. I also had bonkers. Those are just replacement parts for the core. They burn up all the time, so they keep thousands of extras. Sally agreed to make the noises and run around so no one would leave the sectors and go to the Unknown Zone. She knew what it was like to know the truth. And so she helped me cover it up.”

“Why make up the story about the EETs?” Jonah asked. “Why not just say we were being sent to try to populate a new planet?”

“It was easier to keep an army in order,” the commander said. “An army that had an enemy.”

“Why were they chosen?” Jonah asked. “There are lots of orphans.”

The commander paused and then looked at her feet. “They only chose orphans who ran away or caused
trouble. Or ones nobody was adopting. The ones who stayed behind.”

Jonah heard Willona sniffling. He saw tears in Jemma's eyes, and Martin's quivering lips. He knew it wasn't fear. Or even betrayal. It was that they all thought they'd been chosen to save the universe. That they all had a mission. It was like Jemma has said. They were tired of being pitied.

They wanted to be special. And the commander had taken that away.

The commander started shaking with silent tears. “I've already lied to five groups,” she whispered. “I watched them get on the shuttles with their bonkers and head down to those planets. My father played along with it and ordered the crew to do the same. He didn't want any more trouble. And it worked. They saluted me as they left.”

Her voice finally cracked, and she started to cry. Jonah met eyes with Sally Malik, who gave him a sad smile, as if to confirm the story. The tribunal was over. Everywhere Jonah looked, he saw scared children in old brown uniforms. The uniforms were too big. The badges were hastily made and stitched on. Their shoes, if they had them, were worn and dirty. Their hair was unkempt and greasy. Their eyes haunted.

They were orphans again. It had all come back. The pain they'd all faced. The loss they'd felt.

All they had wanted was a family. A purpose. And
now they were just crying kids in adult clothes.

But it was different for Jonah. He'd spent so much time being isolated and called a spy and wondering if he was here by mistake that he'd never quite believed he was a real Space Raider. Not like the others. But looking around, he finally understood what this was all about.

Jonah stepped forward. “I thought Space Raiders don't cry.”

Everyone looked up at him. They looked angry. Like he was rubbing it in.

“There's no such thing as Space Raiders,” Martin said quietly, standing at the front of the crowd. He looked like a little boy again.

“There
was
no such thing as Space Raiders,” Jonah corrected. “There is now.”

Martin frowned.

“We were all specially chosen,” Jonah said. “Picked from the entire solar system. We have uniforms. Bonkers. Rules.”

The commander was watching him now.

“What we didn't have was a ship,” Jonah continued, gesturing around the Bridge. “We do now. We didn't have a mission. We do now.”

“What mission?” Willona asked.

He turned to her. “To save the other Space Raiders, of course. To bring them all home.”

“To Earth?” Alex said.

Jonah laughed. “Where are the Incredible Space Raiders from?”

“Space,” the commander murmured, still watching Jonah.

He put his hands out. “Welcome home.”

He saw the others look around. He saw the word “home” on their lips.

“Now,” he continued, “who here is a Space Raider?”

There was a long moment of silence.

Then Martin stepped forward and saluted. “Martin the Marvelous, reporting for duty.”

“Willona the Awesome,” Willona said, saluting, “reporting for duty.”

Like a tide, the rest of the Space Raiders shouted their names. Soon they were just shouting. Then they were high-fiving and laughing and jumping around. They were acting like kids. Willona wrapped Jonah in a fierce hug, burying her head into his shoulder. She pulled back and met his eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

He just nodded.

“Hold up!” Lieutenant Gordon said, stepping into the middle of the room. “There's one more thing we have to do. We need to name a new commander.”

Lieutenant Potts swelled his chest. “Well, it should fall to the next in charge—”

“We'll have a vote,” Lieutenant Gordon said curtly.
He turned and looked at Jonah. “I know who has my vote. If you want Jonah the Now Incredible, raise your hand.”

There was no need for a second vote. Hands shot up everywhere. Erna the Strong raised hers instantly. So did Lyana the Forgotten. The only ones in the entire room who didn't were Ben the Brilliant and Lieutenant Potts, who looked around sourly. Even the commander raised her hand.

Lieutenant Gordon nodded. “Then I name Jonah the commander of the Incredible Space Raiders from Space, and the captain of the
Fantastic Flying Squirrel
!”

The cheer resounded through the bridge and down the hall. Countless hands reached out and shook Jonah's shoulders and patted his back and ruffled his hair. Victoria wrapped him in a tight hug and gave him a quick kiss, and they cheered even louder. It probably wasn't appropriate, but it was also one of the happiest moments of Jonah's life.

But as they cheered and shouted for Captain Jonah, he knew he had to tell them. He had to tell them that he was the wrong Jonah Hillcrest. That there was only one place he wanted to take the
Fantastic Flying Squirrel
.

Home.

J
ONAH SAT ALONE IN HIS
old bedroom in Sector Three, curled up on his bed and staring out the window. His journal was laid out on his lap.

When the celebrations had died down, Jonah had given out his first orders. The commander had been put in her bedroom in the crew's quarters and was guarded constantly by Erna the Strong. Jonah had mixed feelings about her. She had clearly been trying to save the orphans from further pain, but she'd also been assisting her father in taking them peacefully to the PER planets. Jonah was also afraid she might try to release her father from the brig, even though she swore she wouldn't. For now, locking her up was the best option. The other Space Raiders didn't have mixed feelings. They had been betrayed, and so they despised her.

His second order had been to name some new positions. He had named Alex as the new pilot of the
Squirrel
, Ria as the navigator, Martin as the new lead engineer, and Willona as the communications specialist. She had started crying when he'd given her the job. That was definitely
another one of the happiest moments of Jonah's life.

His first officer was Lieutenant Gordon, while his other officers were Samantha, Lieutenant Potts, and Lieutenant Ebo. He figured they could help him assign other jobs to Space Raiders from the other sectors. Erna the Strong was, of course, the head of security, and Jemma was officially named ship tailor, at her request. The rest of the Space Raiders were assigned to security, bridge duty, engineering, maintenance, or food.

But first and foremost, they were all Space Raiders.

He also invited Sally to officially join the Space Raiders, and she accepted gladly, though she did inform Jonah that she refused to ever call him captain, sir, or commander. Jonah named her the official ship adviser. But after the commotion had settled, he pulled her aside. There was one more thing that didn't add up.

“Why did you go along with it?” Jonah asked her quietly.

Sally looked away. “Like she said: I was there. When Captain White Shark told everyone where we were going and why we were chosen, they panicked. It was awful. I remember everyone screaming and crying. When they tried to leave the sectors, the pirates beat them and shot them and locked them up. I had another friend here: Niraj.”

Jonah frowned. That was the boy who had lived in his room.

“He tried again and again to get home. To take over the bridge or steal a shuttle or even to join the crew. He had younger sisters. He wanted to get back to them.”

“What happened?”

For the first time since Jonah had met her, Sally's brown eyes started to water.

“They shot him,” she whispered. “Right in front of us. After that, I realized there was no point fighting the crew. They were too strong. So when Sara let me out, I decided to just hide. I wanted to keep the new Space Raiders safe, so I came up with the idea of the Shrieker. We wanted to keep Space Raiders out of the halls. Sara came up with most of the rest, but I did help. I cried for days every time they took them down to those planets. I felt like I helped the captain. But I didn't know what to do.”

She looked at Jonah.

“Until you came along and showed me we didn't have to be afraid.” She turned away again. “I understand if you don't want me on your crew. I helped her lie.”

Jonah paused. “I know why you did it. And you just saved our lives. You're a Space Raider now, Sally Malik. I'll have Jemma make you a uniform.”