ARC: Under Nameless Stars (2 page)

A grinding noise came from outside the hull as the ferry docked. She turned to watch the floating sandhog, but it continued its fitful slumber. There was the groan of a hatch opening, a whoosh of inrushing air, then the rattle of a machine approaching, followed by scraping sounds. Then the crate heaved into motion and, a few seconds later, she, Katie, Liam and the hog all dropped to the floor of the crate, pulled down in the grip of artificial gravity.

She’d done it. She was aboard the
Helen of Troy
. Now, all she had to do was track down a single three-foot-tall Skirni among the starship’s thousand or so other passengers, follow the alien to find her father, free her father from his captors and get away again, all while first avoiding discovery and being sent back to Mars. Right.

With the sandhog’s slow, raspy breathing the only sound, she and Liam sat silently on the floor of the crate and waited several minutes in case anyone should come. Finally, Liam stood and cautiously peered out through one of the holes in the crate wall.

“Looks empty,” he said quietly.

“Katie hungry,” the rikkaset signed at Zenn, big eyes blinking. Then she went to Zenn’s field kit backpack where it lay on the floor and began pulling at the cover flap with her deft little paws. “Friend-Zenn have treats? Treats for Katie in bag?”

“No. Sorry. Treats later,” Zenn signed. “Wait a little.”

Katie huffed at her, sat down and wrapped her long, striped tail around her body.

Zenn went to where Liam stood and looked out to survey the scene. They were in a vast, dimly lit cargo hold, with containers of all sizes and shapes piled to the ceiling as far as she could see. The sandhog rumbled and twitched in his sleep; the movement made the entire crate rock back and forth.

“Hey, I’ve got a wacky idea,” Liam said, regarding the hog. “How about we get outta here before Tiny rolls over and mashes us?”

Zenn eyed the hatch on the crate’s ceiling.

“OK,” she said. “But we’ll need to keep him asleep until we’re both through the hatch.”

“So, what’s the problem? You leave your knockout ray pointed at him and we climb out.”

“I can’t just leave him under permanent sedation,” she said curtly. “It could kill him.”

“Oh, can’t have that. I guess.”

And besides, she thought but didn’t bother to say, it’s my equipment and I’m responsible for its proper use and maintenance.
Otha had drilled this fact into her on countless occasions during her classes back at the cloister. Back on Mars. Back with all the people and animals and places she loved and was already starting to miss. At least she had the backpack, the one Otha had given her to use as a field kit. The Skirni had grabbed the pack off the desk in her room. Immobilized by whatever weapon he’d used on her, she’d seen him sweep a stack of her computer mem-shards into the pack, just before he’d thrown her over his shoulder and made his escape. When she’d retrieved the pack in the warehouse, the shards were the only things missing, as far as she could tell. But why take the shards? More to the point, why take
her
?

“So,” Liam said, “how do we get outta here in one piece?”

Zenn thought for a few seconds, then crouched by the backpack and searched in it. She found what she was looking for and stood again, a length of hemp-braid rope in her hands.

“What?” Liam said. “You’re gonna lasso him?”

She didn’t answer but stooped to secure one end of the rope around the seda-field unit. She then knotted the other end around her wrist, then signed for Katie to get into the pack and, once she was settled, hoisted the pack up, slipping one strap over her arm.

She nodded at the hatch in the ceiling. “Give me a boost up.”

“Oh, sure. I’ll just hang out down here with the giant killer-hog.”

“He’s not a… Just lift me up, will you?”

Liam gave her a look, then laced his fingers together. She put one foot into his hands and he easily lifted her up until she could reach the latch of the feeding hatch. She opened it, grabbed the lip of the opening and, with a final push from Liam, was up and out. On the roof of the crate, she quickly slipped off her pack, lay down flat and reached in for Liam.

He was trying to jump high enough to grab her hand when the seda-field dish emitted a loud crackle, spat another burst of sparks and puffed out a large cloud of white smoke – followed by silence.

“The dish – it’s dead,” she whispered. “Liam, get out. Grab my hand.”

“I’m trying.”

Beneath her, Zenn felt the crate shift as the hog started to regain consciousness and move.

“Hurry!”

With his next jump, Liam’s hands took hers. He was too heavy to lift off the floor, but by pulling with all her strength as he jumped, he reached high enough to grab the edge of the hatch opening with one hand. Zenn stood, repositioned her grip, and began to pull on his arm with both hands. But as she struggled to lift him up through the hatch, the sandhog gave a savage bellow, followed by the sight of a huge digging claw swiping across her field of vision, hooking Liam’s body, breaking her grip and throwing the boy out of sight. She heard him hit somewhere on the far side of the cage. She dropped to the opening again, leaned down into it, but couldn’t see him.

“Liam!”

A loud thud of metal hitting flesh came from the dark, then Liam’s face was beneath her, his hands reaching up.

“Now would be good,” he gasped.

Zenn extended her arms as far as she could and he took her hands again.

Pulling with all her strength, she was able to help him regain a grip on the edge of the hatchway.

The creature’s furious roar just underneath him prompted Liam to fling himself up in a frantic effort to get away. He’d just cleared the edge of the hatch and rolled away onto the roof of the crate when the hog threw himself upward, the impact shaking the container beneath them.

“It’s OK,” Liam said, breathing hard as he got to his feet. “He came at me and I nailed him with the knock-out dish. Kinda pissed him off, I think.”

“Sounds that way.”

Zenn quickly began to reel in the rope connected to the dish, but, a moment later, she was jerked violently to her knees, the rope cutting into the flesh of her wrist.

“I’m caught,” she said. “The hog – tangled in the line.”

Another tug from the sandhog and she was sliding across the roof of the crate, toward the open hatch.

“He’s pulling me in!”

TWO

She felt Liam’s hands around her ankles, felt him straining, lifting both her legs into the air as he leaned back. Zenn clawed at the knotted rope with her free hand, but it was no use. A powerful jerk from the animal and they were both hauled forward. Another tug, and Zenn was over the opening, the snorting, growling hog beneath her in the dark, his acrid scent sharp in her nostrils. Then she was tugged backwards, just a bit. She saw Liam had braced his feet against the raised metal lip that framed the hatchway.

“I can’t hold him, Scarlett,” Liam said. “What do I do?”

“My backpack. Can you reach it?”

He let go with one of his hands, grunting with exertion.

“Too far. Can’t get to it,” he said. “Unless I let go of you.”

The hog pulled on the rope. She and Liam held out against the force. Barely.

“You have to get the maze-caut cutter,” she told him. “When I say so, go get it. Ready?”

“Scarlett, I don’t–”

“Liam. Ready?”

“OK, OK.”

One more pull from the hog, the rope peeling flesh from her wrist, then a bit of slack.

“Go!”

As soon as Liam loosed his grip, Zenn’s legs fell. She spun around, jammed both feet against the far side of the hatch opening and braced herself.

“Scarlett?” Liam shouted, panicky. “The cutter thing – looks like a…?”

“Like a… It’s like…” What did a maser cauterizer look like to someone who’d never seen one? “A cylinder… a tube… A flashlight. Like a flashlight.”

“This?”

She twisted enough to see him holding up a large-gauge dermal infuser.

“No! It’s metal! With… a pointy tip. And buttons.”

The hog’s next jerk on the line snapped her forward at the waist, the force strong enough to bang her head down hard on her knee. The hog’s next pull would be too much for her. Then Liam’s arm was around her waist.

“Scarlett,” he breathed through clenched teeth, his face close to hers. He held the maze-caut in his other hand. “Where’s the on-switch?”

Zenn snatched the cutter out of Liam’s hand, pressed the power pad, and saw the blue-white maser tip crackle to life. The hog tugged again, and her trapped hand, with the rope that held it, was pulled out of sight into the hatch.

“Liam, I can’t see to cut. Pull up hard. Now!”

The towner boy’s arms were strong around her. He heaved backward with all his might, crushing the air from her lungs. But the effort brought her arm up far enough to see the rope. The sandhog gave one more powerful jerk, the line went painfully taut, and she swung the cutter blindly.

With the sudden release of tension that followed, she and Liam flew backward from the hatch, rolled awkwardly and came to rest several feet away, lying next to each other, exhausted, Zenn’s wrist burning.

A chattering, scolding noise came from nearby.

She raised herself up to see Katie, perched on the backpack. The rikkaset was sitting upright on her haunches, vocalizing in high-pitched squeaks and signing a stream of words that equated roughly to “Friend-Zenn being silly. Katie doesn’t like. Stop now.”

Zenn got to her feet, massaging her shoulder, which felt as if it was nearly dislocated by the hog’s final pull on the line. She scanned the surroundings. The ship’s storage hold stretched on for hundreds of feet, the stacked containers arranged with narrow walkways between them. There was no one in sight.

She moved cautiously back to the hatch. The animal raised itself up to snarl at her, then dropped its bulk onto the seda-field dish, crushing it flat, before retreating out of sight to a dark corner of the crate. Liam joined her and together they hefted the hatch lid shut.

“Well, Tiny seems fine. But I think your knock-out ray is toast.”

Zenn just nodded and started to work the knotted rope off her wrist.

“Bad hog-thing! Stinks,” Katie signed.

Zenn had to agree.

“Yes,” she signed, then spoke aloud for Liam’s benefit. “Sandhogs have a strong odor.”

“You got that right,” Liam said. “I’ve come across road-kill that smelled better.” He sniffed at his own shirtsleeve. “Ugh. Now I reek as bad as he does.”

“It’ll wear off,” Zenn told him.

“Not soon enough. I mean, why bother with these damn things, anyway? I know: they turn useless sand dunes into soil for crops. I’m not totally dense. But there are chemicals for that. Those are cheaper. And won’t kill you.”

“Sandhogs don’t kill people, Liam.”

“Oh?” He gave her a hard look.

“Your dad? That was an accident, you know that.”

Intending to steal a valuable generator and sell it to pay off his gambling debts, Liam’s father had mistakenly crept into the wrong shed on Gil Bodine’s farm one dark night. It was his last mistake.

“Yeah. I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like the things. Or their stink.”

While her uncle Otha was fond of saying hogs weren’t worth the trouble, the truth was that resource-strapped colonists on Mars needed all the crop-growing soil they could make. In fact, Zenn had been assisting her uncle when he went to treat this particularly troublesome sandhog boar out on Gil Bodine’s farm. It had burrowed out of its enclosure the night before. After it suddenly reappeared and almost attacked Otha, Gil said he was through with sandhogs, that he was going to send the creature back to its owner on Sigmund’s Parch. That piece of information had come in handy. Hiding in the Pavonis warehouse, she’d heard her abductor talking to someone about her kidnapped father, saying that the Skirni was going to take her up to the
Helen
. After that, it was just a matter of hiding in the hog’s cage-crate and waiting till it was loaded on the orbital ferry. So far, so good.

“C’mon.” Liam sat down on the edge of the crate. “Let’s make ourselves scarce before someone comes. I think I see an exit over there.” He pushed himself off to land on the floor.

Zenn went to where Katie sat.

“What this place?” Katie signed at her.

“A ship. A big spaceship.”

“Don’t know word: space-ship.”

Zenn thought for a second.

“A big, floating house. In the sky. Many people in it.”

“Why Friend-Zenn comes here? Why brings Katie up in sky?”

Good question, Zenn thought, wondering at the impossible events of the past weeks, trying to bend them into some sort of logical order. They resisted being bent. And she’d hardly had time to catch her breath, let alone think things through, since the moment she was kidnapped.

That word again. Who could possibly have any reason to kidnap her? She opened the backpack and rearranged the meds and supplies inside to make more room for Katie.

But maybe that’s how quickly a person’s life can turn upside down, she thought. One minute, you’re minding your own business, living in the cloister where you’ve always lived, where your whole world is a small corner of a pressurized canyon in the Valles Marineris on Mars, where your only problems are too much homework, passing the next test or treating the next patient in the cloister’s menagerie of animals.

Well, she allowed, her life also presented a few other problems to consider. Like Liam Tucker. Like her foolish abandonment of her time-tested routine of keeping other people out of her life, or at least holding them at a safe distance. Or, the uniquely unsettling problem of Liam’s embrace and the kiss that she should’ve seen coming but blind-sided her completely. Or, a few hours after that, finding yourself slung over the shoulder of a stocky, pug-faced little alien and taken from your dorm room in nothing but your old, worn-out pajamas.

Pajamas
.

“I need to find some real clothes,” she said. She made sure Katie was securely settled, hoisted the pack onto her back and tightened the straps around both shoulders. Then she sat down as Liam had done, and he reached up to help her down off the crate.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Orange clashes with red hair?”

“I kind of stand out in this,” she said, indicating the coveralls. “I’ll need to blend in if I’m going to follow that Skirni without him seeing.”

“Right,” Liam said, looking down the nearest row of crates, boxes and shipping containers. “Let’s see what we can find.” He went to the nearest container that had an unlocked door latch and pulled it open. It was full of large plastic sacks labeled “Gen-Soybeans. For Export Only”.

After trying four more containers filled with either bulk food products or crated machinery, they finally found one stacked with passengers’ trunks and suitcases. Zenn flipped up the lid of a case, feeling a twinge of guilt. It was full of men’s clothing. She opened another and held up a silky green evening gown.

“Pay dirt,” Liam said, looking on.

“Not exactly low-profile. And way too big.”

They continued down the row, opening more crates.

“So, Scarlett. This whole thing with you and the Skirni, back on Mars. He went to a lot of trouble. To find out about you. To sneak into the cloister. To kidnap you. Why would he do that?”

“From what we overheard the Skirni say, it’s because of something called a nexus. And thanks to you,
Liam
…
he didn’t have much trouble at all finding out about me. And apparently, whatever it is, it’s important enough to kidnap me and my dad.”

She felt her irritation with Liam rising again, then became angry with herself once more, for confiding too much in the towner boy, for opening up to him about what had been happening between her and the clinic’s animals.

She brushed by him to the next unlocked container. The first trunk she opened held girls’ clothing, roughly her size. She dug deeper. At the bottom of the trunk, she found a full-body jumpsuit, made of some dark synthetic material that felt almost weightless. She held it up to measure against herself; it was a little big, but close enough.

“Stylish,” Liam said, attempting humor. “It’s you, Scarlett.”

“At least it’s close to the right size. And all the pockets could be useful,” she said. “It’ll do. But still I need shoes.”

She bent back into the trunk but found nothing. They went to the next container.

After two more suitcases, she turned up a pair of pair of heavy leather, lace-up boots and a long blue-and-black silk scarf.

“A scarf? Really?” Liam said, smirking.

“To cover my hair and face,” she told him. “Low-profile, remember? Now…” She gave him a significant look. “Do you mind?”

“What?” he said. She held up the jumpsuit. “Oh, right. I’ll just… go check for a way outta here,” he said, and walked off.

When he’d gone, she pulled off the coveralls, then the pajamas. The jumpsuit fit well enough and was, frankly, so new and fashionably current, Zenn felt uncomfortable wearing it. She was lacing up the boots when Liam returned.

“Very nice,” he told her. “In fact, probably the best-dressed I’ve ever seen you.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said. But he was right – everything she’d ever worn back at the cloister was either homespun or secondhand. Still, he didn’t have to rub it in.

“C’mon,” he said. “That door leads into a corridor. I opened it a crack. There are lots of passengers going past. We should be able to slip into the crowd.”

“And then?”

“Then… then we try and spot your Skirni and follow him and… Nine Hells, Scarlett,” he swore. “I don’t know. We’ll make it up as we go.”

Resigned to the fact that this was also about as far as her own planning had proceeded, Zenn followed him to the nearest wall of the cargo hold. She watched as he opened the door a few inches and peered out. Over his shoulder, Zenn could see passengers flowing by in either direction, most of them chattering excitedly.

“C’mon.” But no sooner had he stepped out into the corridor than a high-pitched voice spoke from close behind Zenn.

“Excuse me! You there, young human.” Zenn froze, her heart leaping. “If you don’t mind my asking, what is your business here?”