Space Hostages Read online

  “I’m sorry, love,” croaked Dad without opening swollen eyelids. A minute later he was snoring.

  “Please consider Archangel Planetary for all your future health-care needs,” said the dove, and hovered out of the room.

  Tears stung in my eyes.

  I went back to my enormous room and sat there uselessly for a few minutes before calling Gran.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said when she’d finished exclaiming sympathetically over Dad. “Don’t worry about a thing. The insurance will cover everything, and I’m sure the airline will let you fly home early.”

  “But Gran!” I wailed.

  “I know you’re disappointed. But love, it’s for the best. You’ve had quite enough trouble for a girl your age. You don’t really want to be rushing off to the other end of the universe.”

  I said good-bye quietly. My tablet pinged with a message from Carl.

  Hey, is everything okay? Are you on the Space Elevator yet? We’ve got to leave soon. Heard your dad was sick. You’re still coming, though, right?

  It had only felt like a couple of minutes since I’d said good-bye to Gran, but the time on the tablet said 8:45.

  I clenched my fists, and I slipped back into Dad’s room, and looked at him, huddled in the blankets.

  “Dad,” I said. “I could always go by myself.”

  I waited. There was no reply.

  “I’ll be perfectly fine on my own. Dr. Muldoon will be there, and Lena—you know, Josephine’s sister—they’re very responsible.” I stopped, realizing I was not sure that was completely true; Dr. Muldoon was worryingly keen on human experimentation, and Lena had taught Josephine how to build flamethrowers when she was six. But they were grown-ups, and humans; that had to count for something. “And Mum said she could catch up, so maybe you could come with her. Or you could stay behind with Gran, because I know you don’t want to go. . . .”

  And I waited again.

  “But Dad, I really do.”

  “Mmf,” said Dad, and shifted a little on the pillows.

  He wasn’t properly awake. It wasn’t a yes.

  But it also wasn’t a no.

  He hadn’t ever said I couldn’t go by myself.

  I texted Carl back: I’M COMING.

  I did write Dad a note, on expensive hotel paper: Get well soon. See you when I get home, XXX Alice.

  Then I added ten more X’s and a couple of hearts to make up for what I was doing, and put it on the table beside the bed.

  Then I grabbed my suitcase and ran.

  3

  I wish I had one of those hover suitcases. They’re really expensive. But running nearly half a mile with a suitcase that only has wheels is hard, especially when you’re quite agitated and not perfectly sure where you’re going.

  I pounded through a memorial garden, across a car park, down a wide avenue of palms, my shoulders aching as the suitcase dragged behind me. I managed not to knock over a couple of women taking photos of the Space Elevator and a veteran with a missing arm in line for a burger at a food truck.

  I hurtled my way along the waterfront. The tether rose from a round concrete platform at the end of a long pier sticking out into the waves. The complex on land was so new it wasn’t finished yet; I lurched past lots of empty buildings and colorful billboards covered with pictures of the exciting space-themed coffeehouses and gift shops that were going to be there eventually.

  It was all a lot quieter than the airport had been. There was only one place you could get to from here. Although, on the other hand, it could take you absolutely anywhere.

  I rushed across all that empty space, and crashed into a counter and waved my passport at the lady behind it. “I’m Alice Dare,” I gasped. “You have to let me on the Space Elevator. I’m a Plu— I mean, I was an evacuee on Mars and stuff happened, I need to go the Morror planet; the Morrors are expecting me.”

  “I know who you are, sweetie,” said the lady, smiling. “But you’re by yourself?”

  “My parents can’t make it,” I said. “But Mum will be coming out later.”

  Now, when you’re thirteen, telling people they need to let you travel an enormous distance without your parents mostly isn’t going to work. But they were expecting me. And none of the others had their parents with them; Carl and Noel’s dad has nerve damage from the war and their mum was too busy running the movie theater they owned. And Josephine’s dad . . . well, I didn’t completely understand what was going on with Josephine’s dad, but he wasn’t coming.

  “You’ll have to hurry,” said the lady, in what seemed to me an unbearably leisurely way. “Your climber leaves in . . . two minutes.”

  Then a little autotrolley came scooting up to me and beeped encouragingly. I fell onto it, and it whisked me up to a pair of forbidding metal doors engraved with both the EDF crest and the Archangel Planetary logo. The doors slid open, and then I whirred down a long glass-covered tunnel over the waves of the bay.

  “The next climber for Orbit Station One departs in one minute,” said a disembodied voice, for no reason I could see except to stress me out.

  “Come on,” I moaned to the trolley, which was no smarter than a vacuum cleaner and doing the best it could anyway.

  “The next capsule for Orbit Station One . . .”

  “As if it could go somewhere else!” I complained.

  We emerged into an oval open space like a concrete arena. The noise of the waves and the wind outside rang around the heavy walls, and there was an acrid smell of engine oil and salt water. This close up, the tether was a bundle of separate flat strips like ash-gray hair ribbons, each terrifyingly thin and delicate, descending impossibly from the sky and looking far too fragile to support the huge double disc of the platform fastened to it, let alone the stack of drum-shaped cargo capsules being loaded aboard. There was a handful of crew members in yellow overalls inspecting things, and as the trolley carried me around to the far side of the elevator, one of them jumped down from a service ladder and signaled okay at someone above.

  “The elevator is ready for departure,” announced the disembodied voice, a little muted by the roar of the sea. And the elevator began to rise.

  “WAIT!” I screamed, tumbling off the trolley.

  And thank god, the person in the yellow overalls saw me. He raised his hand and the elevator stopped, two feet off the ground. And there was the passenger capsule, another drum-shaped container with a wide band of windows around the outside, and doors that slid open as I rushed forward. The autotrolley beeped in farewell as I heaved my suitcase inside and climbed in after it. I collapsed, breathless, on top of the suitcase.

  The doors snapped shut, and I was rising into the air. Before I got my breath back, the world below had dwindled away and ships in the bay shrank first into toys and then into grains of white rice. Looking down, I found myself clinging to the suitcase, as if that would help if I fell.

  I’d thought there would be other people there, but there weren’t. I suppose all the scientists and soldiers who needed to be up there already were, and there still weren’t many people who could afford space cruises just for fun. There were two rings of seats, one facing outward and one facing in, a tiny bathroom inside a sort of pillar in the middle, and a little shelf where there was complimentary tea and coffee.

  My tablet beeped. I pulled it out of my shoulder bag and tapped it warily, as if it might be red hot.

  “ALICE, GET DOWN FROM THERE!” Dad yelled.

  “I can’t!” I said, already watching the curve of the Earth come into view. “I’m sorry!”

  “Oh, you sound it,” said Dad bitterly.

  And of course I wasn’t really sorry, except about leaving him.

  “You are in a world of trouble,” Dad promised.

  “All right,” I agreed peaceably. Because whatever trouble I was in was over a month away and easily worth it. “Are you feeling any better?”

  But I lost the signal then, and since no one likes being yelled at by their dad, I was relie
ved. I turned off the tablet, and did a little celebratory dance in the middle of the blue sky.

  I rose for two hours. Everything was silent except the faint hum of the elevator and the moan of the wind. The clouds shrank into wisps below me. The blue of the sky thinned around me like a pretense I was seeing through, and there was the blackness behind it.

  And then, instead of endless space outside, there were walls against the windows, sealing the capsule in, and there were outer doors lining up with the capsule doors. The elevator stopped with a clunk and hiss as the pressure equalized, and the doors slid open. I trundled my suitcase out.

  I was standing on the edge of space. Every surface of the great curved chamber around me was transparent, even the floor. The sun blazed in the black sky.

  Under my feet I could see the whole circle of the Earth now. It shone back at me like a bright blue eye.

  Robots were unloading the elevator climber, but there were some people about too, directing their movements, coming and going from the ships outside. . . .

  The ships. There they were, bright against the black, some docked against access passages, some floating amid little crews of busy service robots like big fishes letting little ones nip parasites from their scales. A Flarehawk carrier. A large, ugly, mud-brown mining vessel. And looking small beside it, there was a beautiful ship, like a swan with folded wings, that could only be the Helen of Troy.

  “Hey!” called a woman in a technician’s uniform. “You’re one of those Mars kids, aren’t you? You need to hurry—the Helen’s about to leave.”

  I dragged my suitcase toward the beautiful white ship. There was no obvious security to stop me from running down the passageway to the airlock, but as I entered it, I felt a brief tingle on my skin and a computer voice said, “Welcome, Alice Dare,” so I think something scanned me in some way. The EDF have owned my biosignature since I went to Mars, which is a little creepy when I think about it. One final set of doors opened to let me through, and then I rushed onto the spaceship.

  I was in a pale, softly lit space, as anonymously pleasant as the lobby in the hotel I’d left on Earth. There was a water feature, and soothing glass sculptures, but there were no windows. The doors I’d come through had shut behind me.

  “Uh, hello,” I said. One of the problems of very modern technology is that you can’t always tell if it’s in things or not, and that’s how you find yourself talking to walls and potted plants and feeling like a moron when they don’t talk back. These didn’t.

  I felt a little bit disappointed. Someone might have come to meet me.

  The central set of doors obligingly let me through. Small lights blossomed under the floor to greet me as I walked. But my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the loss of the sunlight yet, and the passage seemed shadowy. I passed doors on either side, but none of them opened. I crept deeper into the ship, trundling my suitcase behind me, trying to ignore the feeling that I’d made a serious mistake and something bad was about to happen.

  Then there was a breath of cold on my neck. I jumped pretty high, I expect. I spun around, but no one was there. Yet I had the impression of movement, a shimmer on the edge of my vision. . . .

  “Thsaaa! Stop it!” I complained, and heard the soft wheezing of Morror laughter. The shimmer whisked around me again. “Sneaking up on people in your invisibility gown is rude.”

  There was a whisking sound and Thsaaa’s head appeared out of nowhere in front of me, colors rippling through their mane of glassy tendrils. “But it is traditional for us to wear amlaa-vel-esh when we travel,” they said.

  I considered this. “You’re lying. Look, you’re going red. And orange and blue.”

  “You wanted me to have fuuuuuun,” said Thsaaa, pulling the invisibility gown off completely and flexing their tentacles. “Besides, it was not really a lie. We always did travel in them, in the war.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Watching. Josephine has hacked into the security cameras, I believe. I could not surprise you so effectively with them here,” Thsaaa explained.

  “All right, hi everyone, very funny,” I said, waving in the general direction of the ceiling. “So, where am I supposed to go?”

  “Come with me,” said Thsaaa. Gallantly, they seized my suitcase in two tentacles and deposited it inside a lift.

  “Are your parents here, Thsaaa?” I asked, as we rose through the Helen of Troy.

  “No. It is the start of the summer skiing season,” said Thsaaa.

  There, I thought. Going off by myself wasn’t that big a deal.

  “Are you all right here?” I asked, reminded about Morrors’ climate needs. “You’re not getting too hot?”

  “It iiiis very hot,” conceded Thsaaa. “But I am all right. I must go to my cabin or put my amlaa-vel-esh back on before very long, though.”

  The doors opened. A girl was there, waiting for the lift. But it wasn’t Josephine or anyone I wanted to see.

  It was Christa Trommler.

  “Oh,” I said aloud, in undisguised horror.

  Christa looked just how she used to—well, not how she looked when she was co-leader of a deranged mob smashing anything that got in its way, but how she looked before that on the way out to Mars, i.e, crisp and expensively dressed in a blue-striped blazer and sunglasses poised on her short blond hair. Her expression was nearly as dismayed as I felt. “Alice,” she said with icy dignity, as though at some point in the past we’d had a disagreement on the proper way to lay out salad forks. She nodded, and tried to sweep grandly past me, but was rather stymied by the fact that I didn’t get out of the way.

  “Hi, Christa,” I said. “Last time I saw you, you were laughing while your boyfriend locked me in a smashed-up classroom,” I announced. “Were there any plans to let me out, or did you figure it was okay if I died in there?”

  Christa bridled. “That was all Leon. I went along with it because I was scared of him.”

  My mouth dropped a little open. “Yeah, right,” I said.

  “It is right, unlike that book,” said Christa. “You know, we could have sued you over that. We just didn’t want to give you the publicity.”

  “It’s all true and you know it, Christa!” somebody hissed.

  There was Josephine, with Carl and Noel beside her. Josephine had grown a surprising amount. She was as skinny as ever, but a little taller than me now, which I couldn’t help feeling vaguely disgruntled about.

  Josephine’s hair was different too. Instead of the usual wild halo of soft dark zigzags, it was scraped back into a tight bun. Her expression was lethal enough to make Christa cringe.

  I was fairly satisfied by this, so I let Christa into the lift.

  “It was all just a joke anyway,” said Christa. “Obviously we’d have let you out.”

  “Weren’t you saying you only went along with it because you were scared of Leon?” asked Josephine, whose hearing was eerily good. “If it was a joke, what were you so scared of?”

  Christa did not answer. “Everyone knows your dad wrote the whole book anyway,” she shot at me as the lift doors closed.

  “Someone might have warned me she was here!” I said.

  “She only got here this morning, on the last elevator before yours,” said Carl. “I know—it sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Why is she here?”

  “Hanging out with her dad, I guess,” said Carl.

  “What, Rasmus Trommler’s here too?”

  “Yeah, well. It’s his tech, his ship. He’s been the one ferrying Dr. Muldoon out to play around with Morrorworld this whole time.”

  “He did invent Häxeri,” said Josephine. “He’s a genius, no matter what his daughter’s like. And she won’t want to see us any more than we want to see her. And it’s a big ship. Anyway,” she finished, a bit awkwardly. “Hi.”

  She hugged me. I was a bit surprised, because normally she’ll hug me back if I start it, but she doesn’t usually start things off herself. And then all the rest of us hugged, and I felt
even more certain that the trouble I’d be in when I got home was worth it.

  “Come and look around,” said Carl. “The views are amazing.”

  “The labs are amazing,” Josephine added.

  “There are many empty rooms,” said Thsaaa, in faintly uneasy colors.

  “Well, it’ll be mostly used as a cruise ship now that Morrorworld’s finished,” said Carl.

  “I guess,” said Josephine dubiously. “But I wonder how many people are going to be able to afford this kind of thing.”

  The Helen of Troy was much more luxurious than anything I’d experienced in space before. When Josephine showed me into my cabin on the Helen, it was bigger than my room at home, smelled of jasmine, and had its own bathroom with a spa bath and a shower with power, steam, and sonic settings.

  Out in the main passenger lounge, there were pleasantly squishy seats around gently glowing tables set into oval wells in the softly carpeted floor. There was a low stage opposite the bar, which made me worry about whether this trip was likely to include much singing. And there was a pool table. The pool balls also glowed, which probably doesn’t help with pool particularly but did look pretty. Enormous windows took up most of the walls, wrapping us in sunlight and stars.

  Carl plunged into the nearest well of seating and started whacking the little icons on the tabletop to see what would happen. A menu on a virtual screen appeared in midair, and he began ordering burgers and banana hotcakes. Meanwhile, the glowing tables pulsed in different colors in a vaguely Paralashath-like way. I don’t know if this was intended to please Morror passengers, but if so it kind of backfired. Thsaaa went nauseated colors at the sight of them and muttered, “I cannot eat off furniture that appears to be humiliated.”

  Josephine slid into the seat beside Carl and did something to the table that made it stop glowing.

  “So, I guess . . . from what you said to Christa, you read the . . . book . . . thing, then,” I said to her, feeling suddenly shy and weird about it again. “I wasn’t sure if you had.”