The Planet Thieves (3 page)

“They'd
kill
me, Tom.” Mason injected a little more desperation into his voice.

Tom said, “The Egypt has only two access ports, both heavily guard—”

“Tom.”

“Only if you call me Thomas. I keep asking you to do that.” His words were garbled by shouting cadets:
Look look! The claws are unfolding! No, pull up a different angle!
Mason's desire to see what was going on outside was now a physical itch.

“Fine,
Thomas
! Get me out of here!”

The link went dead. Mason wondered if Tom wasn't really coming, but it only took about thirty seconds for him to show up with Merrin Solace. Just the sight of her made his stomach unclench: Merrin was his only true friend, the only cadet onboard he really knew.

He'd known her since before Academy I. Mason had stowed away on a cruiser to join the academy a full year early; as a member of a military family, he'd been guaranteed a spot. Staying on Earth for regular schooling was not an option: Mason wanted to learn about space, to be a soldier like his sister. Susan had already graduated to Academy II, and Mason was sick of waiting for his turn. But his plan didn't work: the ESC sent him home, with a meaningless fine, since he didn't have any parents to pay. But Mason and Merrin promised to meet up next year, when they started Academy I for real. And they did. They'd been friends ever since.

Merrin was … different. Her long hair was dyed violet to match her eyes, and her skin was so pale sometimes Mason could see the veins underneath. Her blood looked as purple as her eyes and hair, if the light was right. Mason had asked her once if she was sick, if that's why her blood was a different color and her skin was so clear.

Her eyes had gotten all wide. Then her brow furrowed.
“No,”
she said. “Are you?” And that was the end of it.

Tom, on the other hand, looked more like Susan's brother than Mason did. He had dark hair and eyes, and always seemed to be studying whatever he was looking at. It made him look, in Mason's opinion, untrustworthy. Calculating, like his mother. Not a bad quality in an ESC soldier, really, so Mason couldn't blame him for it. But he'd never seen Tom smile, or at least one that wasn't a smirk.

Mason nodded at them. “Hi guys.” The backup lighting dimmed suddenly, then returned to normal. Somewhere in the ship, metal whined, reminding Mason of the whale song recordings he heard while studying Earth animals.

“So … you're in jail,” Merrin said. “I knew it was only a matter of time.”

“Surely that's not the most interesting thing happening right now,” Mason replied.

Tom ignored them, heading straight for the port in the wall, where he plugged in his personal dataslate.

“I expect the full story later,” Merrin said, shaking her head. But she looked amused. The ship was under attack, but Merrin Solace was amused.

Tom cleared his throat. “Let it be known I am only breaking ESC regulation because your life may be in danger.”

“Let it be known,” Mason echoed, legs tingling with the desire to move move move. He imagined the Tremist making it on board, so he could try out some of the hand-to-hand combat moves he learned in his fifth and sixth year. As soon as he thought it, he took it back: if Tremist made it onto the Egypt
,
it would mean they were losing.

The ship had been accelerating over the last minute, but now it was slowing, and Mason had to brace himself against the left wall. Tom started to fall but Merrin's hand darted out and grabbed Tom's sleeve, holding him in place.

“Thank you, Merrin,” he said. Not
Cadet Solace,
Mason noted.
When did they become friends?

“No problem.” She turned away to watch up and down the corridor.

Tom pressed a few symbols on the dataslate and the door to Mason's cell slid open. He stepped out and clapped Tom on the shoulder. Tom looked at Mason's hand like it was covered in barf.

“Thanks,” Mason said, removing his hand.

“You owe me.”

“I know it.”

They left the brig, and Mason breathed as a free cadet. Something smelled off with the recycled air. It tasted burnt.

“Let's get back to the others,” Merrin suggested. They rounded a corner and passed the opening to the crossbar, the long narrow section that connected the two halves of the Egypt.

“Cadets, hold up!” Commander Lockwood was jogging toward them. Mason froze as ordered, a reflex. So did the others.

“Now you've got both of us in trouble, Stark,” Merrin whispered from the corner of her mouth.

Lockwood was a thin, wiry man, mostly bald, with a ring of jet-black hair around his head. Mason thought he looked like an eagle, with a hooked nose that resembled a beak, and fierce eyes that saw everything. But despite his intense appearance, Commander Lockwood at least made eye contact when he passed cadets in a hallway, unlike some of the officers who didn't seem to know they existed.

Tom tensed up, shifting from foot to foot.

“Don't look guilty,” Mason whispered.

Lockwood stopped a few feet away and narrowed his eyes. “Where were you going? Stark, you're supposed to be in the brig.”

“We were—” Tom began.

Mason cut him off with, “I tricked them into helping me out. I didn't want to stay there.”

Lockwood sighed. “Yes, well, that's not important now. Come with me.”

He marched down the hallway toward the front of the ship, and the three cadets followed. A door opened to Mason's right, and three crewmen wearing battle vests and carrying rifles burst through the doorway and ran in the opposite direction, toward the crossbar and the bridge.

The rifles were a red flag. The soldiers planned to be shooting
inside
the Egypt
,
or were at least preparing to.

Tom opened his mouth to ask a question, even got so far as to making a
W
sound, but Lockwood barked, “Keep walking!”

“What can you tell us, Commander?” Mason said quickly, as they began to jog.

“Nothing at the moment,” Lockwood said. Mason noticed the top of his head was shiny with sweat, and it caught the red lights whenever they flashed. “I need you cadets to do something special for me, can you do that?”

“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison. Responding to an order was the easy part; it was the following through that Mason was still working on.

Lockwood didn't tell them about the
something special
right away. First they rode an elevator down two levels, then stepped onto a long, narrow moving walkway that sped them forward at twenty miles per hour. It took them all the way to the left front of the ship.

The segments of track slowed until they were able to easily step off next to the cadet quarters. The door opened automatically, and Lockwood basically shoved them inside. The cadets lived in an officer's room that had been converted just for them: all the luxury furniture had been replaced with stacks of bunk beds. Until the Egypt returned to Mars to drop them off at Academy I and II, it was home.

Since it was an officer's quarters, there was a floor-to-ceiling window at the front, giving an unobstructed view of space. Unobstructed except for the fifteen other cadets, ages seven to thirteen, who were crammed against the glass. They were all staring at something outside, and the window was tall enough to see what it was.

The Tremist ship was speeding toward them, bright and alive against the complete blackness of space.

Merrin inhaled softly, and Tom's dataslate slipped from his fingers. Mason could only stare. It was a Hawk, a ship he'd studied inside and out at Academy I. Big, open, swooping wings connected to a narrow main body, coming to a point at the front, sharp as a hawk's beak. The wings were twelve levels thick. The engines underneath even resembled curved talons tucked under the body. Right now they were bristling with purple energy, sending the Tremist ship into a circle above the Egypt. Like a bird circling her prey.

“Don't be afraid,” Lockwood said behind them, quietly. “The Egypt can take care of herself.”

“I'm not,” Mason said at once. A lie, but only half of one—he was also in awe. He'd seen vids of the Hawk, of course, but to see one alive, pulsing with energy, moving effortlessly, making the Egypt look as clumsy as a bathtub in a lake … that was something else. It was smaller than the Egypt
,
but the swooping wings and weapon clusters under those wings more than made up for it in menace.

Tom asked, “Commander? Why aren't we firing?”

Lockwood was about to say something—his lip twitched, and he made a noise in his throat—the start of a word—and Mason knew right away that whatever it was, it would be a lie.

Merrin gave Mason a look:
He's definitely about to lie.
Merrin was better than anyone at reading people, but Mason had slowly been learning from her over the years.

Instead of lying, Lockwood just shouted, “Cadets! Attention!”

The cadets spun around and scrambled to stand at attention in front of their bunks, forming two lines on either side, seven on the left and eight on the right. Mason, Merrin, and Tom joined them.

“At ease,” Lockwood said. The cadets relaxed but didn't move. “I don't want any of you to worry. Captain Renner believes the Tremist ship is trying to make contact. I wish I could say more, but you're to remain here until an officer comes to retrieve you. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Commander,” the cadets replied in unison. Mason had his fingers crossed, realizing Lockwood's “special” task was just to stay put. Next to him, Merrin tapped his thigh with her own crossed fingers. “Good. The cadet who disobeys this order will do time in the brig, and possibly be sent back a year in school.”

With that he left the room, manually shutting the door behind him.

They all heard the lock thunk down inside the door.

“Son of
Zeus,
” one cadet mumbled, a curse that could earn him five laps up and down the ship. Another cadet laughed, and a few seconds later they were all pressed against the window again, searching for the Hawk.

Though the Hawk was no longer visible from this angle, an eerie light filled the room, painting the cadets' faces a ghastly green.

It was growing brighter.

Mason knew what it was instantly: the weapon clusters under the wings were charging up. A few of the cadets who paid attention that day in class seemed to know it too—they were backing away, hands automatically reaching for things to hold on to.

“Brace—!” Mason began to yell. He barely had time to grab hold of a bunk before the Egypt made a terrible sound somewhere between a roar and a scream, and the floor dropped out from under them.

 

Chapter Three

The war came about, as Mason was taught, because two races were really bad at taking care of what they had.

What both races wanted was a planet: Nori-Blue. It was one of three known planets in the galaxy that humans could thrive on. Nori-Blue was covered in forests from pole to pole, with a single ocean smaller than the Atlantic back home. The temperature ranged from fifty to seventy degrees year round, because the planet's axis was the same tilt at all times. Some creatures lived on the surface, but none like humans, and certainly none like the Tremist. Which meant it was the perfect place for humans to go now that the population was over eighteen billion: Earth was simply running out of places to put people, even with the dozens of minor settlements in the galaxy.

Nori-Blue had rivers and lakes and edible plants that grew fruits more delicious than any on Earth. The air was nineteen percent oxygen, perfectly breathable. It was only slightly smaller than Earth, too, so the gravity was suitable. It was rumored that you could jump twice as high on Nori-Blue, but Mason did the calculations in his advanced math class, and it would only be around one and a half times.

Nori-Blue was perfect for a race that had outgrown its own planet.

Which is exactly what the Tremist had done, too.

Not much was known about them. First Contact with the Tremist happened in 2640, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago. An earlier version of the Hawk was seen circling an ESC installation in Neptune's high atmosphere—the first ever sighting of an alien spacecraft. The installation sent a radio message to the Hawk, just a simple ping, in the hopes of saying,
Hey! We see you! Want to chat?
The Hawk didn't want to chat: it sped away and disappeared.

Then came Second Contact four years later, when a trio of Hawks bombed Academy I on Mars. Thirty-eight cadets were exposed to the atmosphere and died.

Immediately the Tremist were designated hostile.

But one hundred years passed before they were seen again.

It wasn't until Nori-Blue, or Earth II as some called it, was discovered. The ESC built a massive cross gate in the low altitude of this new planet. People would step through a gate on Earth and onto a platform a mile above the ground on Nori-Blue. A city was being built on the surface, near the water. They called it Hope. It would run on energies that wouldn't adversely affect the planet and atmosphere. Humans were going to do it right this time.

In 2740, when the gate neared completion, the Tremist arrived in 286 separate ships. Hope was destroyed, literally. The gate was vaporized, along with any hope of a colony. The SS Norway received a call, and on the viewscreen the crew watched as a Tremist with shimmering plate armor and a mirrored mask for a face decreed that Nori-Blue belonged to them now.

Tell everyone,
the Tremist said.

The Norway crew sent out its final transmission to Earth, and then it was destroyed too.

After that, there was only war.

In the following decades, after countless skirmishes and attacks, just one Hawk was ever captured. The ESC bristled with excitement at the possibility of finally learning about their enemy's biology. But the Tremist aboard had all died in some kind of superheated explosion, which destroyed all their DNA, which destroyed any hope of finding out what they looked like under all that armor.