A Pet For Lord Darin Read online

  “Hey, are you okay?” said Naomi.

  I nodded and said nothing, staring blankly out the window. My face felt numb.

  “Are you sure? You don’t look so hot.”

  I don’t feel so hot. I felt claustrophobic and nauseas and scared, but even if I’d wanted to tell her that, I couldn’t seem to open my mouth.

  Naomi looked at me for a moment longer and turned back to her window. She pressed her face against it, fogging the glass with her breath. “What do you think it’s like? Living on a space station?”

  I couldn’t get myself to say it aloud, but nobody lived on that space station. It was a self-sustaining data-sucking instrument unto itself, with meager living quarters for the rare occasions when someone had to go up in person to fix something, or to take the chips from the little silver ships by hand while someone else fixed the transport bay or whatever else they might use to bring them inside. I couldn’t imagine it was fun, though. The spaces were small and the windows were few. No one was ever going to be living in it full time, so it was more economically expedient to forget the windows altogether.

  Naomi was looking at it with the wide, wistful eyes of a child, maybe imagining herself living in its small confines with one of her imaginary alien paramours.

  Just another few hours, I thought. We would touch down at the facilities, look around a bit, ooh and ahh at all the miracles of science Galix was responsible for, and we’d turn tail and go back home. Back to Earth, back to atmosphere. Back to books and cats and flowers and dirt. Just another few hours.

  Sound doesn’t travel in space – there’s no atmosphere to carry the waves – but we felt the whole ship rise and fall, as though jostled by a wave.

  “What was that?” said Katy.

  “Turbulence?” said Naomi.

  “Turbulence is caused by rough air and changing temperatures,” said Jonathan. “There’s no air, and there’s definitely no changing temperature.”

  “Okay,” said Katy. “Then what the hell?”

  We were all quiet for a minute. We looked at each other, quietly wondering.

  “Maybe somebody else came out of hyperspace,” Katy said.

  “Not so soon after us,” I said. There could only be one ship in hyperspace at a time. We only had two places to jump back and forth between, and it was better to form a line and deal with delays than to have two ships traveling at warp speed come out at the same time and place and smash into each other like vengeful comets. So if it was another ship exiting hyperspace, they were doing it in spite of safety regulations the whole planet shared.

  The pilot came over the intercom. “Ladies and gentleman, good afternoon and welcome to Triton.”

  He gave us a brief rundown of the weather on the ground – which was likely a joke in itself. You have to have an atmosphere to have adverse weather – but none of us were listening. We were looking out the windows like kids do when a plane shakes, looking for something on the wings, maybe expecting to see a giant pterodactyl or a parachuter jumping up and down on it like it was a trampoline. It was a dumb, juvenile thing to do. You never saw anything on Earth, so why should we see anything up here? But we looked anyway.

  And saw a ship.

  Enormous was hardly a worthy word for this thing. It emerged from the blackness in a hail of sparks and light, subspace slowly stitching itself closed behind it, and as it passed before us it blotted out the moon below. The vessel was a world unto itself, a drifting tube with a pyramid nose and half a million windows, small squares glowing blue from within.

  “What…what is that?” said Naomi.

  None of us answered. We stared and stared and stared.

  Then it moved. The front of the ship opened like the mouth of some ancient sea creature, and a long metal arm extended out of it – four twitching fingers on a five-jointed pole, reaching for us. Stretching like a child trying to brush skin with the stars.

  “Um,” I said. No one else had anything more profound to say, so I said it again. “Um.”

  “Professor?’ said Naomi, her voice small.

  “Don’t move,” said Professor Cravits. Not that any of us were planning to.

  The shuttle had enough gas for takeoff and landing. Either the pilot didn’t see it, or we didn’t have the fuel to burn making an escape. The grabber closed around us, steely fingers pressing against our hull hard enough to make the vessel groan. The outer shell crumpled with a metallic scream and a sound like thunder.

  The lights in the cabin stuttered and went out. Someone whimpered. I couldn’t tell if it was me.

  “That’s not human,” said Jonathan. He wrapped his fingers around the back of his chair and squeezed until his knuckles turned white.

  Do you think they’re cute? I thought inanely. We all must have been thinking it, but none of us had the fortitude to say it out loud. I doubted Naomi would have appreciated it anyways.

  We could see the moon as the ship dragged us inside. The hatch closed over us, shutting out the impenetrable dark of the cosmos, and with it, the only meager light we had. Everyone held their breath.

  “What are they going to do to us?” said Naomi.

  “Where are they taking us?” said Jonathan.

  “What’s happening?” said Katy.

  As though we knew.

  There was a hiss like spurting steam, and on the far side of the shuttle we saw burning red lines, spitting embers onto the hard, grey carpet – someone blasting their way in with a welder’s torch or a laser blade.

  We stared at it. No one moved. No one breathed. I wrapped my hands around the armrests, fingers pressing against the rough plastic.

  The red line made its circuit, and the carved glowing circle fell inwards with a clang that made everyone gasp. The room beyond was dark as pitch, but we could all hear something moving within it, muttering, whispering, clicking like insects.

  I had time to think, So much for going home.

  Then there was a soft whirr, like the crackle of a stun gun, and my mind went blank.

  ***

  The first thing that struck me when I woke up was that I could breathe.

  Anything that happened from here forward would be a miracle and a shock, but it was reasonable to assume that we’d been kidnapped by aliens. Definitely crazy, but reasonable. Nobody earthside had access to a ship that big, not Galix or NASA or anybody. And a ship that size would have to be assembled in space, launching it one piece at a time, and that kind of airspace violation – and that massive of a construction site with nothing to hide behind – would have been painfully obvious to some twelve-year-old nerd in Wisconsin with a shitty telescope, let alone to NASA. Every superpower on the planet was covetous of their interstellar property rights; no one would have gotten away with it. No one would have been stupid enough to try.

  So, aliens. Sure. Fine.

  But the part that was weird was that I could breathe on their ship at all. I was in a cage – an animal kennel with a black plastic bottom and latticed metal bars, which was definitely a bad sign – stacked over and under and beside other cages full of shifting, whimpering silhouettes. The room we were in was dark, lit only by glowing white lines running along the bottom of every wall, but in the gloom I could see ventilation shafts and small cracks in the irising door. The room wasn’t sealed as far as I could tell, so it wasn’t a closed environment full of oxygen just for us, unless the room outside this one was part of the closed system too. But there was oxygen, so either we and our captors had remarkably similar respiratory systems, or they knew that we didn’t and that we needed this specific gas to function.

  The first meant taking us could be a flight of fancy, an impulse. The second, a room full of oxygen the aliens didn’t need, meant this was premeditated. They’d prepared a space just for this.

  I didn’t want to think about what either of those scenarios meant for us.

  I sat up in the cage, stiff as a board. All my joints popped at once, some of them hard enough to hurt. I had about three inches of
clearance above my head when I sat up straight. My head ached like the dickens and I was having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open. My throat stung, my tongue was dry, and the room itself was freezing.

  I laid my hands against the bars, wrapping my fingers around them, realizing too late they might be electrified – but nothing happened. I pushed out a shaky breath and looked around.

  “Is…anyone else awake?” I said. I was answered with vague moans and a soft whimper from somewhere farther off to my right. “Guys? Katy? Jonathan?” Panic rose like bile in the back of my throat.

  “Here,” said Jonathan, grunting. “I’m here.”

  Oh thank God. “Are you okay?”

  “Never better.”

  “You sound terrible,” I said. My own voice was grating against my ears, but Jonathan sounded like he’d swallowed a cactus.

  “Really? Cause I feel great.” He coughed and there was a rattle as he moved around in his cage. “Where the hell are we?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “…Were we…kidnapped by aliens?” he said after a pause. “Or did I dream that part?”

  “No,” I said. “Definitely kidnapped by aliens. Nobody on Earth could have built a ship that big without falling on somebody’s radar. We would have heard about it.”

  Jonathan groaned. “Well, shit.”

  “No kidding.”

  He laughed bitterly, and there was a soft clang as he sat back against the wall of his cage. “Naomi will get a kick out of this.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you remember anything after the….stunner? or whatever that was?”

  “Not a damn thing. Jesus, it’s cold in here.”

  “Yeah.” My skin was pimpled with goosebumps and I was starting to shiver. It occurred to me we were probably lucky to still have our clothes on.

  “What do we do?” he said.

  “No idea,” I said. “Wait, I guess?”

  “For what?”

  I swallowed. For a long time, neither of us said anything. The ship creaked and hummed around us. Somewhere far off, something began to roar, engines, maybe. The thought made me sick to my stomach. We were flying away, likely abandoning the solar system altogether.

  “Nothing good,” I said eventually.

  “Are we in cages, Brittany? Is that what’s happening?”

  “Looks like,” I said.

  He sucked in a breath. “That’s bad. Like. Really bad.”

  “You don’t say,” I muttered.

  “Are we, like…cattle? Or something?”

  The thought made my stomach turn. I swallowed a steel ball of anxiety and said, “Let’s not think about that right now. Nothing we can do, anyways.”

  “Don’t think about it,” said Jonathan, and he scoffed. “Is it just me, or is that the kind of thing people say right before the shit hits the fan?”

  “It’s just you,” I said.

  “Do you think they’re gonna eat us?”

  “Christ, Jonathan, what did I just say?”

  “It’s a valid question,” he said. “We don’t know what they eat. We don’t know what they are, we don’t know what they want.”

  “We know they’re sentient,” I said. “They built a fucking space ship so they’re not just hungry animals.”

  “Humans are just hungry animals,” Jonathan said gravely. “We built space ships, too.”

  Fair point, though it was hardly a cheery one. “We need to be optimistic.”

  “So we don’t go insane?” It was only half a joke. I could hear the slight tremulations in his voice under his usual coat of sarcasm. Now was hardly the time to tell him to be serious. Staring the situation in the face was going to do about as much good as staring at the floor, plus or minus a dose of unmitigated terror. I tried to smile, even though he couldn’t see me.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Maybe they’ll let us starve to death in here.”

  I almost laughed. Not quite, but almost. “Jesus Christ, Jonathan, you’re not helping!”

  I swear I could feel him shrug. “Who said I was trying to?” His voice was a little steadier now. His effort to sound blasé was commendable. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was totally fine.

  “Whatever.” I groaned, dragging both hands down my face and tenting them over my nose. “Do you still have your clothes on?”

  The question didn’t seem to surprise him. “Yeah. Do you?”

  “I do.” Which, if they thought we were animals – or if they actually intended to eat us – is weird. Unless these aliens weren’t humanoid at all and just assumed our clothes were a part of our bodies, like the carapace of a beetle. They could have evolved from something completely different, birds or insects or lizards, and beyond that, even if they were humanoid, who’s to say they shared the human opinion of nudity? Maybe they didn’t wear clothes at all. Maybe they were just big, naked animals with a pension for interstellar kidnapping.

  “So maybe…” Jonathan trailed off, grumbling.

  “What?” I said.

  Jonathan made a dull hmm sound in the back of his throat, thinking hard enough to make his proverbial gears go up in smoke. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they think we’re animals, but if they wanted us for food we’d be dead or naked, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Maybe. It wasn’t totally out of the question to believe we were being transported alive to some star-bound slaughterhouse, but it wouldn’t do us any favors to say that out loud. “Right. We would be.”

  “So…but then what do they want?” His frustration showed for a fraction of a second before he bit it back. “We were in a space ship so we’re not totally stupid…do you think we’re prisoners of war or something?”

  “What war?” I said. An invisible war on Earth was one thing, but a military or even Cold War style conflict in space was another. It wasn’t impossible, but it was the kind of thing we’d likely have known about and definitely been openly taxed for. A space war would have been the perfect way to garner funding for more ships and stations. Nothing more patriotic than an astronaut with a gun.

  “Maybe they want to study us,” I said. A cache of seventeen adolescents and four adults was a reasonable, if not ideal, population sample. If they split us open and took a peak at our organs, or tested our blood, they’d find rudimentary variations significant enough to start – or continue – cataloging what it meant to be anatomically human.

  “Ugh. That means needles,” Jonathan, only half feigning his disgust. “I hate needles.”

  It could also mean dying, which I would bet he’d hate more, but again – not worth saying out loud. I wondered if Jonathan was having equally pessimistic thoughts and was just keeping them to himself.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said. It sounded stupid even to me.

  Jonathan didn’t laugh so much as cackle. “Fine.” He didn’t elaborate on what he thought was so funny about that, but I could do some guessing. We didn’t, for the moment, have any reason to fear anything specific – for all we knew, this was all a big misunderstanding, as unlikely as that was – but to think that we’d just be fine, as though we’d just get up and walk out of here to the tune of a muttered alien apology was more than a little ridiculous.

  “Fine,” he said again, and laughed a little louder. The sound trailed off with an almost whimsical sigh. When he spoke next, his voice was almost serene. “Do you think we’re gonna die here?”

  I almost said yes without thinking. I bit down on the word before it could leave my mouth and swallowed. The silence was answer enough for Jonathan.

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. “I mean, maybe not, but like, this doesn’t look good.”

  I came close to laughter. “That it does not.” Far as I could figure, best case scenario we were on our way to some alien zoo. I wondered what the extra-terrestrial version of kibble would taste like. Probably not great.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “Even if figuring it out just means we accept our fates and kill eve
rybody.”

  “Sounds good to me. I could do with a massacre. Sounds cathartic.” He paused. “Hmm. Where do you think they keep their weapons?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but if they’re smart they won’t store them loaded. Assuming they have something that even remotely resembles a Terran gun.”

  “Terran.” Jonathan exhaled through his nose, a stuttering noise that might have been a laugh. “We’re probably not even in our solar system anymore, Britt.”

  Jesus, that wasn’t fun to think about either. Not that any of the thoughts we were having just then were fun.

  “Probably not,” I said. I imagined us drifting through the blackness of space to parts unknown, to a planet with a different sun, different constellations. A different planet was one thing, but a whole different sky was another. The prospect of being even an inch beyond the reach of Sol manifested as a yawning expanse of fear in the pit of my stomach. I swallowed and shuddered, all my organs turning to air under my skin.

  “What do you think their planet’s like?” said Jonathan.

  The question caught me off guard. It was almost optimistic, coming from a scientist. A resurgence of pure, wholesome curiosity. I smiled to myself. “Maybe once we see them, we can guess.” What they had evolved to look like would tell us a lot about the terrain and climates of their homeworld, or part of it, at least. Human space ships usually had a diverse cast of people, representing half a dozen different biomes, but maybe these aliens were more segregated. Maybe the crew of this vessel were all from the mountains, or a cold coastal city.

  Maybe they don’t even have cities, which was stupid. Rocket science takes a concentrated, concerted effort on the part of hundreds of scientists and millions of dutiful taxpayers. A more primitive tribal system wouldn’t have cut it, and certainly not any variation of the roaming pack. No, they’d have to be creatures of community, space ships are hardly solo enterprises. Unless one of these tribes or packs was just absurdly more enterprising than the rest.

  “You know what I don’t get?” said Jonathan.

  “What?”