The Incredible Space Raiders from Space! (14 page)

Jonah reached the air grate without incident and bent down to pull it off.

“Look,” Sally whispered.

He followed her gaze and saw an open door a little farther down the hall. The lights were on inside, and he saw a computer console and a table. They exchanged a look.

“Let's check it out,” Jonah said.

He really wanted to get into the air duct and hide, but he also wanted answers. This looked like a good place to start. He hurried over to the open door, Sally close behind. Taking a quick look inside, he nodded and went in.

“Check the computer,” he said.

The small room looked like a workstation. The shelves held a few old files and star maps, while a second desk and computer sat in the far corner.

“Needs a password,” Sally said. “It's not 111, either.”

Jonah wandered over to the other computer. He punched 111 into the home screen. Nothing. He was just turning back to Sally when he saw a brown folder on the desk. There was a label on the front with the typed words
PROJECT WEED.

Jonah frowned and picked up the folder. He opened it to the first page and found a small star map of the known galaxy. He didn't see any areas labeled “Dark Zone,” but there were some circled planets with numbers over them: one to eight. There were also scribbled notes on the page of travel-time estimates and little hand-drawn
stars labeled
possible sighting
. Jonah flipped to the next page. It contained a picture of a planet called PER-1. Descriptions of the planet's physical characteristics were listed below it.

“What did you find?” Sally asked.

“I have no idea,” Jonah said. “Have you ever heard of Project Weed?”

She shook her head. “Anything about the Space Raiders?”

“Not yet. Maybe—”

“Shh,” Sally said suddenly.

They fell silent, and she looked at Jonah, her eyes wide.

“Footsteps.”

Jonah looked around the room in a panic. The desk was the only place to hide.

“Here,” he mouthed, and then quickly climbed behind the desk.

The desk was placed diagonally in the corner of the room, leaving a big-enough gap for them to fit between the desk and the wall. Sally was there in an instant, hunkering down beside him. She was just in time.

Jonah heard someone walk inside, muttering to himself.

“Get the folder, Bogg. Hurry up, Bogg. I need it right now, Bogg. I don't care if you're not on duty, Bogg. You're always on duty, Bogg.”

The man was heading right for them. Jonah and Sally hunkered even lower.

“I need to see PER-7, Bogg,” the man continued. His voice was raspy and rough.

Jonah heard him snatch the Project Weed file off the desk. He exchanged a confused look with Sally as the man started for the door.

“Whatever you want, captain,” the man said. “I live to serve.”

He left the room and started down the hallway, still muttering about the captain.

“That was close,” Sally said.

“Too close,” Jonah agreed. “We better get to the air duct.”

She nodded, and they crept out from behind the desk and started for the door. Jonah was about to take a look into the hall when he heard voices. He quickly stepped against the wall, pulling Sally with him.

“Worst idea ever,” Sally whispered.

The voices grew louder.

“Should save the bars, if you ask me,” one man said. It sounded like Wrinkles.

“And starve 'em all?” another man asked. His voice was familiar too. It was the man who had taken Martin the Marvelous. “Be a nasty cleanup.”

“Nah,” Wrinkles said. “We throw 'em in the air lock and dispose. Easy. We do it with the garbage.”

The other man chuckled. “And Leppy, too?”

“Him most of all,” Wrinkles muttered. “Cost us two weeks.”

“You got somewhere to be?”

“Yeah,” Wrinkles said. “The bar. I'm taking a leave after this job. I'm sick of carrying these miserable kids across the galaxy. And now I have to feed the troublemakers on top of everything else. This is not what I signed up for. We should be back looting the transport ships like the old days.”

“Dangerous game,” the other man said.

“And a profitable one,” Wrinkles said.

They were past Jonah and Sally now, and their voices were growing a bit fainter. Then they came to a stop. Jonah heard a door slide open.

“Here you go, you miserable buggers,” Wrinkles said. “I must have forgotten a bar, so you can fight it out to see who goes hungry. I know my guess,” he sneered.

The door slid shut, and the two men walked past Jonah and Sally again, talking and laughing about some transport ship they'd once hijacked. Jonah waited until their voices had faded away, and then he glanced at Sally.

“Space pirates,” he murmured.

She nodded.

“Follow me,” Jonah said. There was something he had to see.

He took a quick look out the door and then hurried down the hallway.

“What about the air duct?” Sally whispered behind him.

“I need to do something first.”

He jogged down the hallway, looking from door to door. And then he saw it. One door had a square of solid glass built into it, and a well-lit room was visible inside. And there, scooping up the food bars, were the captured Space Raiders. Jonah didn't know how many had been taken overall, but there were a lot. He saw Martin and Samantha and nine others he didn't recognize, though two looked like the captured hall guards. He even saw one younger boy who looked a lot like Victoria. He'd found her brother too.

Jonah did notice that Alex wasn't in there. Jonah hoped he'd made it back to Sector Three.

There was a control panel next to the door. Sally tried 111 and shook her head.

“Didn't think so,” she said.

Jonah was about to tap on the glass to let them know he was there when he saw the grizzled, sallow-faced man with bright red hair sitting in the corner. He guessed it was Leppy, the imprisoned crew member. And he knew Leppy would gladly give him up to get back into favor with the captain.

Leppy was just glancing toward the door when Jonah stepped out of the way.

“Let's get to the grate,” he said quickly.

He and Sally jogged back to the air grate, pulled it off, and climbed inside. Not until it was firmly in place and they were tucked farther up the supply duct did Jonah finally relax a little.

He looked at Sally. “I need your help.”

J
ONAH AND SALLY DECIDED THE
first step to a successful rescue was information. They needed to find out more about the movements of the crew and the controls for the brig door panel, all without being detected by a group of bloodthirsty space pirates.

Jonah was starting to feel like a hero again. Just a really scared one.

They began by crawling through the entire air duct. Unfortunately, the section they were in ended before the brig itself; Sally guessed that the air in the brig was being fed in through a grate in the ceiling. They wouldn't be able to get in that way.

The air duct also ended before the thick double doors to the bridge, where the captain and his crew piloted the
Squirrel
across space. Jonah had hoped to spy on the bridge for a while and figure out exactly where they were going, but no luck there, either. However, the air duct did travel along the rest of the crew's quarters, with scattered grates staring out into the short hallway along the way, which Sally named Pirate Road.

Watching from those grates, Jonah and Sally managed to piece together a loose schedule for the crew. Over the course of three to four hours, Jonah saw five different pirates, including Red Eye, Wrinkles, Bogg, and the two pirates who had captured Martin—Sally had named them Weasel and Beardy. Sally told him she'd seen two others as well, including one she guessed was First Mate Grouter and a stout, foul-mouthed woman she called the Space Witch.

So that left them with seven pirates, Leppy, and Captain White Shark himself. Sally had never even seen him. She had just heard stories.

“Even the crew is afraid of him,” she whispered as they sat hunched beside an air grate, waiting for crew members to walk by. “If you ever run into him, run.”

“I just wish we could get onto the bridge,” Jonah said. “I want to know where we're going.”

Sally frowned. “We're going to the Dark Zone. Same as every other trip.”

“Then what's PER-7?” Jonah asked.

“Who knows,” she said. “A certain part of the Dark Zone, maybe? All I know is, Space Raiders go into the Dark Zone and they don't come back.” She paused. “I hope that's because the fight is still going on and you're all just reinforcements.”

Jonah glanced at her. “And not replacements.”

She nodded.

Jonah pictured himself being dropped onto some haunted alien planet with a bonker and a bunch of marching, uniformed kids at his side. A thick purple haze lay over the planet, sweeping over scorched red soil and barren cliffs that rose to the sky. They walked between the cliffs, the commander at the lead, and then a bellowing cry rang through the air and clawed green monsters with black eyes streamed down the cliffs toward them. Jonah lifted his bonker, preparing to fight, and said a silent good-bye to his family, knowing he would never leave that planet.

Jonah turned back to the grate. “I don't think I want to go to the Dark Zone.”

“I don't blame you,” Sally muttered.

It occurred to Jonah that the thought of hiding in an air duct spying on pirates and plotting to rescue a group of Space Raiders might have once been just as crazy as marching across a red planet with a bonker. He tried to remember what he was like before. A quiet, shy kid with no friends. A scared little boy who watched other kids venture into the woods because he was too afraid of the trees and even more afraid of what the other kids would say if he tried. That was just a few short weeks ago.

Space was changing him.

Maybe it was the musty air or the gray walls or the haunting, moaning engine. Maybe it was the constant threat of exile and the Shrieker and the crew. But Jonah
Hillcrest was suddenly a boy who rescued prisoners. And he kind of liked that Jonah.

Now he just had to figure out how to do it.

He heard a door slide open with a whoosh. It seemed most of the doors worked in the crew's quarters, unlike in the rest of the ship. Sally said they had power-supply issues to much of the
Squirrel
but that the crew had managed to maintain the power lines to their own section. She'd seen them fusing a line together once in the engine room before she'd quickly scurried back into the safety of the shadows.

They were watching the hallways from the air duct when heavy footsteps suddenly approached the grate. Jonah leaned back just a little, being sure not to get his face too close to the light. As in the lower levels, the grates were mostly obscured by tight metal panels, but you could get a glimpse from certain angles. And so he bent to take a look just as she walked by holding a small pile of food bars.

Space Witch.

“Stout” was definitely the word for her. Her legs were as thick as tree trunks, and her faded brown pants strained and pulled with every step. Jonah bent down a bit lower and saw that she wore a white tank top with a black jacket, revealing a bit of a belly and bulging arms that were almost as thick as her legs. Her hair was a greasy mess of brown strands pulled back into a very tight bun.
Her face was flushed red and scarred and pulled into a ferocious scowl.

Jonah was still watching her when she suddenly slowed her pace. Her dark eyes flicked around the hallway. She knew she was being watched.

Jonah quickly pulled back, propping himself against the wall of the air duct. He waited, listening to the slow, scraping footsteps in the hall as the Space Witch looked around. If she pulled open the grate, they were finished. The seconds ticked by.

Finally, the Space Witch continued down the hall, and Jonah slumped in relief.

“Was it her?” Sally asked.

Jonah nodded. “And she really lives up to the name. Let's get back to the main duct. I don't want to be here when she comes back.”

They crawled back into the main air duct and sat beside each other, bent awkwardly in the small space. It was time to come up with a plan.

“Have we learned anything?” Sally asked.

Jonah paused. “Well, we know how many there are. We think. A crew of nine, including the captain and Leppy. All with nasty-looking guns strapped to their hips.”

“Yes, that's an important point,” Sally said. She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “So we know who will be killing us if we get caught.”

“Right,” Jonah said.

“You sure you want to do this?”

He nodded. “We can't leave them in there. I owe Martin. And I told someone else I'd save her brother if I got the chance.”

“Was it a girl?” Sally asked.

“Maybe.”

She rolled her eyes. “Pretty?”

Jonah felt his cheeks flush. “I guess. I don't know. Didn't really think about it.”

“Boys,” she said, shaking her head. “You're all the same. One bat of the eyelashes and you'll take on a ship full of pirates.” She batted her long black eyelashes at him. “Just don't forget about the space princess. I'm so very helpless.”

“We should make a plan,” Jonah said, trying to change the subject.

She smiled a toothy grin. “Fair enough, Jonah the Now Blushing. Any ideas?”

Jonah ignored her. “Well, they don't seem to feed the prisoners on a regular schedule. Not that it would matter if they did, because we don't have any way of telling time. We also don't know the password for the brig door, which is definitely a problem.”

“This is great so far,” Sally said.

“So even if we wait until they've just been fed and everyone seems to be either asleep or at their stations, we still have absolutely no way of opening the door and rescuing them. Unless we figure out the password.”