Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon (11 page)

“Hey!” He nudged her with his elbow. “You okay?”

She looked at him with a frantic expression, her mouth hanging open. They locked eyes for a moment, and then she closed hers and pressed her forehead against her hand, grimacing. Chase realized that this was the first time she'd really gone out on her own. While he'd spent a week tearing around the galaxy trying to find his identity, she'd spent the entire time sedated in the hands of the Fleet.

“It's going to be okay!” he shouted, putting an arm around her skinny shoulders.

“You sure about that?” came Parker's voice from beside him.

Chase looked up and saw that the shuttle was racing over the surface of a planet, ripping through clouds as it screamed down toward what looked like a mountain range. This, presumably, was Storros. “Analora?” he asked with an unmistakable and embarrassing squeak of fear in his voice. She didn't answer, and as they neared the surface of the planet, Chase stared in frozen terror, watching what could only be their certain impending death.

When they got close enough that he could see individual trees and rocks, the capsule started to tilt again, swinging into a long arc that brought them parallel to the ground. The thrusters roared, and the capsule began to slow. Colors flashed by below, browns and reds and yellows, too quickly to tell what anything was. The capsule sank lower and lower toward the surface.

They hit hard and fast, but at the moment of impact, there was a flash of white, and suddenly the inside of the capsule was filled with protective foam that held them all perfectly in place—all except for Chase. In his panic, he couldn't stop his body's automatic reflex to phase, and the foam was not only around but inside him, packing the loose space between each of his phasing molecules. He was one with the foam, and it burned like fire.

“Parker,” he tried to say as the capsule skidded and slowed, but only a panicky garbled sound came out. He couldn't let Analora see him like this.

The shuttle rolled to a stop, and not a moment too soon the door shot off, allowing Chase to swiftly grab the edges of the doorframe and pull himself free of the foam. He tumbled to the ground and started jumping and rubbing his skin, trying to make the tingling pain stop. Behind the shuttle was a long, deep gash in the earth, the broken limbs of trees swinging in their wake. They'd landed in some sort of forest full of short, uniformly spaced trees with gigantic yellow leaves, and a musty sweetness filled the air.

Lilli crawled out of the capsule, wide-eyed and silent with shock. Parker came next, digging himself free. “Holy suns of Taras, we're alive,” he muttered, looking up at the bits of sky that peeked between the leaves.

Chase went back to the capsule to help Analora out. By the time he reached her, the foam was already starting to disintegrate. She smiled up at him, brushing a chunk of it from her sleeve, and took his hand to help pull herself out of the capsule. “Well,” she said, blinking. “That was fun.”

Lilli had sat down on a smooth brown rock. Her face was even paler than usual, and her dark eyes were locked on a point on the ground, deep in concentration. Parker and Analora were already talking and laughing, as though hurtling down to the middle of nowhere on a strange planet were no different than taking a jettaxi to a different part of a city. If Chase was feeling a little stunned, Lilli was probably in complete shock.

Chase crouched down at her side. “Are you okay?

“Just give me a minute,” she said in a stiff voice.

Analora had plucked one of the yellow leaves from a tree. It was big enough to cover her entire face when she held it up. “I wonder what kind of trees these are,” she said, folding the leaf carefully and sticking it in one of her pockets.

Parker took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling air and grinned. “We're on Storros!”

“Great, but we're not exactly in a city,” said Chase. “How far are we from Lumos?”

“No idea,” Parker said with a shrug. “Let's find a high point and see what's around us.”

Shaking her head, Analora pulled a device from her jacket and flipped it open. After a moment, she pointed. “Lumos is that way.”

Parker gave her an admiring smirk. “Of course, the great explorer Miss Bishallany would remember to bring a locator. What else have you got in there?”

“A distress beacon, a couple phoswhites, a tube of steamgel, a utility knife, and a sandwich.”

“A sandwich? Don't you eat scrappies?”

Analora gave a theatrical shudder. “Never. You know what those are made of, right?” Chatting like this, they walked off in the direction Analora had pointed, and Chase looked after them with a knot in his stomach. They were already making up their own inside jokes, and here he was stuck looking after his sister.

“Can you walk?” he asked Lilli.

She stared at him for a moment before answering in her solemn little voice. “Yes.” She made no move to rise.

He stood and held out his hand. “Come on.” When she still didn't take it, he sighed impatiently. “You can't just sit here all day.”

Lilli scowled at him. “I'm just orienting myself, calm down. That jump pod…”

She was obviously still shaken. “I've never done anything like that before either,” Chase told her. “I thought I was going to throw up on myself.”

She tipped her choppy blond head back and looked up at the sky. “How are we going to get back?”

“Didn't that problem occur to you before you agreed to come along?” Chase paused, making an effort to filter the irritation back out of his voice. “They'll probably come looking for us before we have to hunt for a way back.”

“They're hosting the peace talks today. Is anyone even going to miss us?”

“Dr. Bishallany will. Now get up, please.” He held his hand out again.

She allowed him to pull her off the stone, letting go of his hand immediately after, and plodded along behind him. Ahead of them, he could hear Parker's and Analora's voices. They had gone ahead, but the trees grew extremely dense and Chase couldn't see where they were.

“Parker! Hey, Park! Slow down!” Chase hurried through the brush, irritated that the two of them had just wandered ahead together without waiting. Glancing back to make sure Lilli was still behind him, he pushed onward, shouting Parker's name again.

A high-pitched scream echoed through the trees.

“Analora!” Chase took off running through the forest, following the sound of her voice. He burst into a small clearing, where she and Parker stood huddled on top of a rock. Sitting on the ground before them was a small creature covered in shaggy violet-gray fur. Chase couldn't see its face, but it had hunched shoulders and long, stringy arms.

“Go! Get away!” Parker shouted at the creature, kicking at it. The creature snatched his foot with both arms, and Parker nearly fell backward off the rock, grabbing Analora's shoulder for balance.

Without thinking, Chase raced forward and yanked the furry animal back by the scruff. The first thought that crossed his mind when he touched it was that underneath the violet fluff, its body felt as hard as armor. The second thought, when it turned to face him, was less of a thought and more an incoherent blare of terror. Instead of the monkey head he half-expected, the creature had a withered, wrinkly face, with oily black eyes and a puckered hole for a mouth. It hissed when it saw him, a pair of rubbery black lips pulling back from a mouthful of needle-thin teeth.

He'd successfully diverted the creature's attention away from Parker and Analora—now it pivoted around, reaching for him with long arms that ended in a cluster of flat, wriggly feelers. He tried to bat the arms away, but in his fear he phased right through them. A sane voice in the back of his head tried to tell him that this thing couldn't hurt him, but he couldn't stop his adrenaline from spiking, making it impossible for him to stop phasing long enough to push the creature away.

He turned to run, and in one corner of his eye saw his sister trying to scale the bendy limbs of a tree. At least a dozen more of the same creatures were emerging from the woods, pulling themselves on their long arms. He felt a tingling sensation at his ankles and realized the first creature was trying—and failing—to grab him by the legs. He glanced back to see if Analora was seeing this, but she had somehow gotten hold of a dead tree branch and was swinging it at the approaching creatures.

A rough plan was forming in his head to lure the creatures away and let everyone else escape, when a soaring screech exploded behind him. Suddenly the entire clearing was filled with fat sparks of light that drifted lazily through the air. Squinting and batting them away, Chase realized that the sparks were only light, not fire, and that they were making the creatures back off. He ran to the tree to help Lilli down, but she was staring past him, eyes wide and frantic. He turned around to see what she was looking at.

At the edge of the clearing, a yellow single-rider hovercart hung above the ground. Its driver stood over the seat, holding a long rifle-like object that must have been the source of the spark explosion. A gauzy mask covered most of the person's face, but by the long torso and stumpy legs it was obvious that this was not an Earthan.

The Storrian pushed back the gauze mask, revealing a coral-colored head sporting only a few fine wisps of hair, with tiny black eyes, a soft, flat nose, and drooping turtle-like mouth. He said something in a rounded, soupy language. A millisecond later, Chase's translink kicked in, and in his right ear he heard, “What are you doing on my property? How did you get here?”

“We … crash-landed,” said Parker, still standing atop the rock.

Two rows of short stalks oozed out of the Storrian's forehead, right above his eyes, and arched in a way that made him look confused. He shook his head and gestured for them to come forward. “Earthans?” He mumbled something that the translink interpreted as “Gerp, gerp gerp.”

“What?”

“Get in. I'll take you back to the hive with me,” came his translated voice.

Parker looked back at Chase, eyebrows raised. Going with an alien stranger to his hive—his
hive
—didn't seem like the smartest plan, but letting him leave them in the forest full of little sharp-teethed monsters sounded worse. And this Storrian seemed, well, if not friendly, then at least not unfriendly. Chase nodded, first at Parker, and then at the stranger.

The alien hooked the light-rifle back onto the side of his hovercart and drove the vehicle farther into the clearing, where Chase saw that he was pulling a sort of hovertrailer behind. He hopped down and walked to the back, moving things around in the trailer, then waved the children over.

Chase took a step forward, but Lilli grabbed his arm and pulled him back. Her face was frightened and confused. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

Chase shook his head. “It's fine. He's just taking us back to his, um…” Suddenly he realized why she looked so confused—Lilli hadn't received a translink. “Don't worry. He's going to help us.” He looked back at Analora. “He's a Storrian, right?”

Analora nodded. “Yup. Oh hey, I forgot—I brought extras.” As they were heading toward the hovercart trailer, she handed something to Lilli. “Put this in your ear.”

The Storrian stood beside the trailer as they all climbed in, a good foot taller than any of them, with broad shoulders and that impossibly long torso. Chase and Parker squeezed in among the cylindrical containers sticky with a black substance. “Sorry about the mess,” said the Storrian. “I was collecting havarnox sap.”

“Oh, great,” muttered Analora.

He climbed back on his hovercraft, and soon they were soaring through the trees. Parker tipped his head back and looked up at the leaf-dappled sky. “Well, this isn't turning out so bad.”

“Other than almost getting eaten by those monsters,” said Chase.

Parker shrugged. “'Almost' doesn't count.” He rubbed his finger along some of the black sap on the container before him and sniffed it. “Smells good. I wonder if—”

He lowered his sap-covered finger to his mouth, when Analora snatched his hand away from his face. “
Don't put that in your mouth
.” Her eyes were huge. “Don't
ever
put a raw foreign substance in your mouth until you
know
it's not poisonous.”

Parker blanched a little. “Why? Is this—?”

She pulled her scarf from around her neck and used it to vigorously wipe the sap from Parker's finger. “Storrians process havarnox sap into a syrup. If you had some of the syrup, you'd get an upset stomach. When you distill the syrup more, you get a drink called Noxosot that's really popular with certain types of humanoids. But the sap itself is really toxic for Earthans. You'd be dead in five minutes.”

Looking disturbed, Parker rubbed his finger. “Good lords. I'm glad you were here.”

“I still can't believe you almost ate that.
Never
eat before you know. It's one of the first lessons my mom taught me.”

“Yeah, well, my childhood didn't include a lot of interplanetary travel.” Parker's eyes flickered to Chase—was that embarrassment on his face? After getting over his shock of Parker's low-key near-death experience, Chase found himself surprised and even a little pleased that there was something Parker didn't know. Not that he could say he wouldn't have tried the same thing himself.

“When we get to this guy's hive we can figure out where we are,” said Chase. “And the fastest way to get to Lumos.”

“If we can get him to understand us,” said Parker, looking out at the trees as they whipped past. “What are the odds a Storrian tree farmer has a Fleet-quality translink at home?”

“Did you say you have some extras?” Chase asked Analora.

She shook her head. “It won't work. Storrians don't have ear canals like we do.”