There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (9 page)

When they opened their eyes, the ship was on fire! Or was it? Beamer looked out the view port. Filling the screen was the face of a planet — a planet on fire! A moon-sized, crater-pitted asteroid had just collided with the planet, shattering its hard outer shell — causing the fiery molten core to erupt into space like splattering catsup.

Their ship, meanwhile, was whirling through space like a corkscrew roller coaster.

“Captain MacIntyre! Gravitational controls!” a voice commanded.

The part of the Captain that was still Beamer turned to see Scilla looking very grown-up and very much in command.

“We've got gravity from the planet and the asteroid hitting us at the same time!” Ghoulie shouted from a smoking, sparking control panel. “Engines and shields are off-line, Admiral Bruzelski!”

Admiral? How did she get to be “Admiral”?
part of Beamer's mind asked
.

Globs of red molten lava were being flung their way like massive paint balls. “We are about to be spattered by some very hot spaghetti!” yelled Beamer. “. . . with meatballs!” he then added, seeing monstrous, jagged fragments from both the planet and the asteroid tumbling toward them like a sidewise avalanche.

“Get those engines fired up now, Captain!” cried the Admiral. “Commander Ives, direct reverse tractor beam at those lava flares!”

Beamer rushed toward the trap door, dived through the floor, and started ripping out circuit boards.

Suddenly the ship rocked violently, like they'd been smacked with a giant flyswatter. “Hull's still intact!” Ghoulie assured them. “But we won't be able to handle many more impacts like that.”

Beamer jammed a new electronic panel into a slot and the ship suddenly surged into darkness. He fell backward into another panel which sparked and sizzled like he was sausage in a frying pan. “Yeow!” he yelped as he leaped back to the main deck.

“Talk about the nick of time!” yelled Scilla. “Good job, MacIntyre. Ives, we're jumping blind! Put us back into normal space before we jump into the middle of a sun!”

The engines cut off and they were again in normal space. Then Beamer noticed that fire still filled one of the view screens. “Hey! Didn't we go anywhere?”

“What's the matter with navigation?” asked the Admiral.

“We've moved,” said Ghoulie. “We did — about three hundred million kilometers!”

“Then where are we, and why do I feel like I'm being barbequed?” demanded Scilla, wiping sweat from her face.

Beamer decreased magnification on the view port. Something that looked like a humongous, thick, fiery rope stretched across the sky. At either end of the rope were two stars — one large and red, the other smaller and white.

“Ach! The noise!” cried Beamer, holding his ears.

“It's a massive energy stream!” Ghoulie shouted. “The suns in this binary system are so close together they're stealing energy from each other.”

The sound of static on their sensors was deafening. Beamer ran to an instrument panel and flipped the speakers off. He glanced over at the dark view port on the other side of the ship. “There goes the planet!” he yelled, seeing the tiny, distant flare of the exploding planet.

A much brighter flash suddenly streaked past them, then another. The ship quaked each time, like they had suddenly dropped a few floors in an elevator. Beamer readjusted the view port displaying the two suns and then instinctively ducked as a blinding fireball skimmed across the screen. “Hey, haven't you guys ever heard of water balloons?” he yelled at the two suns, which seemed to be hurling energy plumes at each other.

“Get us out of here, Commander! Now!” ordered Scilla.

Again the screens streaked into darkness. A few moments later the ship once more emerged into normal space. Or was it? The black velvet sky ahead of the ship was ablaze with stars — millions of them — rolled into a bright, raggedy ball.

“We're right next door to a globular star cluster,” announced Ghoulie. They suddenly felt the ship shudder. “Now what?” groaned Ghoulie as he checked his sensors. “Shock waves, lots of them on all sides!”

Another glance at the view ports made their situation clear. They were in the middle of a fleet of space ships.

“It's a whole armada!” Ghoulie gasped. Checking his sensor screens again, he continued, “They're using pre-hyperspace technology — traveling at sub-light speeds. We can easily outrun them.”

“I'm just glad they don't seem to be trigger happy. Hail them!” ordered Scilla.

“I am,” answered Ghoulie. “All I'm getting is a recording and — surprise, surprise — they don't speak our language.”

One corner of Ghoulie's mind made a note to paint a universal translator into the ship before their next trip.

“See if you can hack into their computer systems,” ordered Scilla.

Moments later the view screen displayed a series of pictures like you'd see from surveillance cameras. Their gasp nearly sucked the air out of the ship. Rows and rows of what looked like transparent cigars, set on end, lined ten decks of a very large ship.

“Magnify!” ordered Scilla.

Beamer adjusted the view screens. Encased within those fat cylinders were bodies.

“It's a ghost ship!” exclaimed Beamer.

“Yeah, as in bug ghosts,” gulped Ghoulie.

The bodies, which seemed to be swimming in a cloudy yellowish mist, had large insect eyes, armored torsos and — exactly how many they couldn't see — definitely more than two legs.

“Oops,” corrected Ghoulie. “Guess what? They're alive.”

“D'ya mean they're asleep?” stammered Beamer.

“Yep, they're all nighty-night in suspended animation,” added Ghoulie.

“So that's why they're not shooting at us,” said Scilla.

“I've calculated their origin,” said Ghoulie as his hands skipped over the instruments. “They're from the exploding planet. Left several months ago, I'd guess.”

“Refugees, eh. Heading where?” asked Scilla.

“Toward the globular cluster,” answered Ghoulie. “At their present speed it'll take them years to get there. We'll probably be ghosts before they find a suitable planet.”

“Somebody's in for a major alien invasion if they choose one with indigenous, intelligent life forms,” muttered Scilla.

“At least they won't be looking for an earth-type planet,” said Ghoulie. “The yellowish mist in those canisters isn't oxygen/ nitrogen.”

“Priscilla! Priscilla!” a woman's voice called. “Are you all right, honey?”

Scilla blinked and winced, once again a girl in jeans and ponytail. “I'm fine, Grandma,” she said, leaning out the window. “What's the matter?”

“Didn't you feel the quake?” Grandma held a hand over her chest, breathing heavily. “It nearly shook my china to the floor. Come on down, now. I don't want you up a tree if there's an aftershock.”

“Okay, I'll be right down,” Scilla called to her.

“Earthquakes? Here?” Beamer asked.

Ghoulie laughed. “I thought you wanted reminders of home.”

“Yeah, I had everything in California,” Beamer said wistfully. “Friends, sports, secret bases all over the place, and no — read my lips — no Jared. Here, I'm an alien, just like those bug-faced guys in the fleet are gonna be.”

“I've been here all my life and I'm still an alien,” shrugged Ghoulie. He turned to Scilla and said, “You're just lucky you're a girl.”

“Hey, it isn't so easy being a girl either, especially if you hate skirts and hair straighteners,” she retorted. “You don't have to have muscles to be a bully, you know. Girls have other ways to bully.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't realize,” Ghoulie said with a sheepish look.

“So I guess we're all aliens, huh,” shrugged Beamer.

“With our very own hostile indigenous life forms,” Ghoulie grumbled.

“What's in-didge-nous?” Scilla asked, her head popping back into sight.

Beamer and Ghoulie gave each other a knowing look, then looked back at Scilla and said, at the same time, “Jared!”

*   *   *   *   *

Defeating their hostile indigenous life form wouldn't be easy. In fact, Beamer figured that finding Jared's Achilles' heel was going to be something on the order of finding a snowflake in the Sahara. Here was a pimple-faced muscle-machine who had manipulating adults down to a science, and who also happened to be the principal's pet. The prospects didn't look good.

Then, out of nowhere, the Star-Fighters got a break.

14
Achilles' Heel

It didn't seem like much of a break at first. Jared and the other eighth graders were doing math problems at a blackboard when the teacher stepped out to answer a call. Jared, meanwhile, turned the place into a casino, and by the time the teacher got back, he had fleeced a schmuck who didn't know how to play 3-D tic-tac-toe and had a week's worth of the kid's milk money.

It didn't figure to be a major setback for Jared — not with
his
connections. Everybody expected the principal to just waggle a friendly finger, make him give back the money, and send her regards to his mother. In fact, that's what actually happened.

The break came from the fact that Jared had to wait for the principal. All he had with him was his notebook. So, he sat alone in a corner and waited . . . and waited . . .

He eventually started fidgeting. One particular fidget allowed him to see a pencil under the bench. He picked it up and, after a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, started to doodle.

*   *   *   *   *

Jared left the principal's office just in time for the final bell. Kids were scurrying up and down the hallway like mice in a cheese factory.

Beamer and Ghoulie entered the hall in time to see a worried-looking Jared dash into the restroom.
What was this? Jared without the smirk? Jared . . . afraid?

Barely half a minute later, Jared came out of the restroom, still looking worried and glancing around.
Something is missing. He'd had something when he went into the bathroom that he didn't have now. What was it?
Then it struck Beamer.
He'd ditched his notebook. Why?

Beamer and Ghoulie quickly pretended to be in a heated discussion. “Come on, Ghoulie,” Beamer insisted, “
Nestle
makes the best chocolate.”

“Hey, forget it,” Ghoulie shot back. “
Hershey
. . . man . . . that's the ticket.” (Well, what would you expect from seventh graders, the stock-market report?)

Jared quickly assumed his cool, macho look and swaggered off down the hall.

“Let's check it out!” Beamer said, and streaked into the bathroom like it was a candy store.

“What do you suppose he was up to?” Ghoulie asked as he peered into the corners of the starkly institutional bathroom. Then he dug into a trash can.

“I don't know,” Beamer said, searching through another can, “but he was in a big hurry to get rid of that notebook. I got a good feeling about it.” Beamer pulled several crumpled sheets of paper from the trash can.

“Find anything?” Ghoulie asked, walking over to him.

“Just a bunch of drawings — butterflies, birds, flowers, trees, and stuff.”

“Hey, they're not bad,” Ghoulie said. “Not bad at all. Who do you suppose drew them?”

“How should I know?” Beamer responded, reaching deeper into the trash can. He pulled out a notebook. “Here's some more,” he said as he leafed through half-torn-out pages.

Ghoulie took the notebook and turned it over. “Cowabunga!” he said in a hushed voice, staring at the back cover.

“Skullcross!” Beamer exclaimed, looking at a picture of a skull and crisscrossing dollar signs drawn in masterful strokes. “These are Jared's?” he gasped.

“We got him!” Ghoulie said, his eyes as bright as searchlights. He stuffed the drawings into the notebook and bolted out the door.

“Drawings? He wanted to hide drawings?” Beamer asked in confusion as he hurried up behind Ghoulie. “Why?”

“This is Jared we're dealing with,” Ghoulie said, cruising down the hallway wearing a first-class grin. “Bullies don't draw cute little pictures.”

“But they're good!” Beamer said with a troubled look.

“Maybe!” Ghoulie said through clenched teeth. “But to Jared they're an Achilles' heel.”

“Ghoulie, are you sure . . . ?” Beamer murmured.

“Sure about what?” he returned as he shot out the rear entrance. He stopped to scan the playground. “Come on,” Ghoulie said as he ran out across the playground.

“Hey, y'all!” called Scilla, who was running after them. “Whatch y'all up to?”