Starbounders Read online

  Zachary turned back to his mom and dad. He had so much to say, but what he settled on was, “Oh, I almost forgot. Make sure Danielle stays out of my room.”

  And with that, Zachary walked up to one of the pathways, its slick surface resembling the touch screen of a smartphone. He paused. Though he would only be taking one small step forward, he knew it would be the start of his own daring voyage into the unknown.

  «TWO»

  “Welcome, Zachary Night,” a pleasant female voice said as his foot hit the surface. “Let me guide you to your sleeping quarters.”

  A neon-green line appeared on the pathway, stretching all the way toward one of the honeycomb structures at the far west end of the hill. Following the green line, Zachary set off on the cross-campus trek. He looked out at the nearby lake and watched as several small boats with oversized translucent sails zipped across it even though there wasn’t the slightest bit of wind to propel them.

  Zachary was still trying to figure out how the boats were moving—could it have been the sunlight?—when he spotted a four-legged, two-armed creature moving toward him on the pathway from the other direction. It stood over six feet tall and was wearing a white rubber suit that clung to its leathery tan skin. Definitely not human, it had a face that looked like an anteater’s. Two glass canisters filled with orange vapor were strapped to its neck, with clear tubes extended out from them and looping into the corners of the alien’s mouth like bent straws. With each breath, it sucked in orange smoke from the canisters and let it out through the tubes.

  “Good afternoon, young Starbounder. I am Instructor Yiddagog.” The creature’s voice entered Zachary’s brain as clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud. But they hadn’t been. Zachary was tongue-tied. He’d never seen a living alien before, let alone one that could send messages directly into his mind. “It’s customary to respond to a greeting. Even if that greeting is delivered telepathically.”

  “H-Hello,” Zachary said, stuttering out the two syllables.

  “Hello, indeed,” the alien said (or thought?). It continued on, its clawed toes pulling it forward and wisps of orange smoke trailing behind. The vapors got up Zachary’s nose and acted like pepper. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there sneezing before the pleasant female voice from the black sidewalk called out to him.

  “Please resume normal foot speed. The Lightwing Boys’ SQ is just fifty-two yards away. Your presence is required there.”

  Close up, the honeycomb buildings were almost blinding to look at, with the sun reflecting off every angle of their mirrored exteriors. Zachary didn’t stop until the pathway led him right up to the six-sided door of his sleeping quarters. He reached out to knock, but before his knuckles made contact, it opened automatically. Zachary passed through. His hairs began to stand on end as though he’d rubbed his socks on the carpet in his living room and then touched a metal door handle. An electric field? What for? Zachary wondered.

  Inside, the sleeping quarters looked like the interior of a spaceship—at least the ones Zachary had seen in video games and movies—with silver trim and gray padded floors and ceilings. The beds—pods shaped like eggshells halved lengthwise—were built into the walls and stacked three high. Most of them were already taken, with sheets and pillows thrown on messily. More than a dozen boys Zachary’s age were unpacking their duffels and trunks, removing socks, tees, and an assortment of unusual outerverse devices, from strange-looking tweezers with balls on the ends instead of points to pitch-black life jackets with small booster rockets strapped around the torso.

  A red-haired boy with a sunburn was starting to put on one of the vests and must have accidentally activated it. He got pulled off his feet as the vest launched from his fingers and zipped across the room. The flying jacket bounced off a sleeping pod and crashed into a lanky kid’s trunk, sending his belongings spilling out.

  “Watch it, Chuck,” the boy said. “There’s a reason you’re not supposed to wear those inside.”

  “My bad,” Chuck said, his face getting even redder.

  Another Lightwing boy standing nearby removed what appeared to be a retainer from his mouth, only it was embedded with sparkling diodes.

  “Hey, Apollo, hear anything interesting?” one of his bunkmates called from across the SQ.

  Hear? thought Zachary.

  “All six hundred bands are covering the Clipsian attack on the Tranquil Galaxies,” Apollo said. “I’d like to see those charcs take on the IPDL instead of starbombing unarmed planets.”

  “We don’t use that kind of language around here,” a voice bellowed from behind.

  Apollo scoffed and continued unpacking.

  The voice belonged to an Asian man, who looked to be in his midtwenties. He wore a T-shirt with an infinity logo on it.

  “How would you like it if an off-planet called you a red-blood?” he asked.

  “It takes more than that to hurt my feelings,” Apollo said, removing a warp-glove box from his bag.

  The man reached a hand out toward Zachary.

  “I’m Kwan, one of your resident advisors.”

  “Zachary,” he said, shaking Kwan’s hand.

  “I know. You look just like your brother. And if you’re half as good a pilot as him, you’ll be commanding an entire fleet of pitchforks before you’re old enough to drive a car. Of course, you’ve got a mighty big glove to fill. Jacob was one of the youngest Starbounders ever to be recruited into the Elite Corps. Last I heard he was hunting Molking raiders in the Platurex Dominion.”

  “Just like Dad and Granddad before him, striking fear into the scum of the galaxy,” Zachary said.

  “That’s Derek, your other resident advisor,” Kwan said, gesturing to a smaller, out-of-shape guy with his nose buried in a tablet. “You have questions about spaceflight, combat, or campus regulations, you come to me. You have questions about girls, you go to Derek.” Zachary looked over at Derek, then back to Kwan, surprised. “I’m just messing with you. You come to me about girls, too.”

  “Definitely not my area of expertise,” Derek said, without looking up.

  “You better find a bunk,” Kwan said. “Unfortunately for you, it was first come, first served.”

  All that remained available were clearly the least appealing places to sleep in the SQ—a few top beds in the back corner over by the bathroom. Zachary spotted his duffel bag sitting alone in the center of the room, retrieved it, and headed for the unoccupied sleeping pods. He passed by a kid with braces surrounded by a group of trainees. The kid was showing off a pair of metal wrist cuffs connected by a chain of pure electricity.

  “They’re called shockles,” the kid said. “My dad was the warden of an asteroid prison. He never went to work without ’em.”

  Zachary reached the corner, slid his duffel bag into a storage space marked top, and began unpacking. He pushed aside his clothes and the mahogany box storing his grandfather’s warp glove, then pulled out a pillow and sheets before climbing a ladder to the topmost pod just below the ceiling.

  In a neighboring upper bunk, another trainee was making his bed. His appearance took Zachary by surprise. As human as the boy seemed, it was obvious that he wasn’t: his skin and bald head were pale and veiny like a bloodshot eyeball, and his arms were a little longer and more rubbery than they should have been. The boy noticed Zachary staring at him.

  “I’m Ryic,” he said, laying a blanket covered in bristles over the mattress. “Ryic 1,174,831 to be exact. But you don’t use birth numbers on your planet, do you? You can just call me Ryic.”

  “Zachary.”

  “I’m one of the twelve outerverse exchanges,” Ryic said. “My home planet doesn’t have a Starbounder training academy.”

  “So you’re, like . . . an alien?” Zachary asked.

  “I could say the same thing about you.”

  Ryic had a point. Zachary reached out to shake his hand, but Ryic didn’t even have to lean forward: his arm extended itself like Silly Putty out of his pod and a
cross to Zachary. Ryic’s skin felt like the outer peel of an orange, soft but slightly bumpy to the touch. His grip was surprisingly strong for someone so malleable.

  “Where I come from, on Klenarog, gravity is significantly stronger, so in the course of the evolution of our species, our bodies became increasingly flexible to prevent our bones from breaking. The weaker gravity on Earth makes us even more elastic than usual.”

  As Ryic’s arm retracted back to his pod, he said, “You’re leaking.” Zachary was confused. He looked down to see if he had spilled water on himself. “No, from your head.”

  Zachary put the back of his hand to his brow and found a few beads of perspiration there. He wiped them away.

  “That’s just sweat,” he said. “Humans get it when they’re hot or exercising.”

  “How strange,” Ryic said.

  “Is that what you’re going to sleep on?” Zachary asked, eyeing the quill-covered blanket.

  “Oh, yes. I like my sheets prickly. And my pillows firm.”

  Ryic stretched an arm down to his duffel bag on the ground and removed a cinder block. He brought it up to the top pod and dropped it at the head of the bed with a loud thunk.

  “Usually I prefer something harder, but this was all that would fit with my stuff.”

  Ryic reached back down, and this time, he pulled out a bag of what looked like green, sugarcoated candies.

  Just as Ryic was about to take one of the treats, a black hole materialized inches away from the bag. A crimson-colored warp glove emerged from the hole and stole the bag. Zachary and Ryic looked down from their sleeping pods to see Apollo pulling Ryic’s bag of candies out from another hole on the other side of the SQ. A millisecond later the black rupture in space disappeared.

  “Hope you don’t mind sharing,” Apollo said with a cocky grin. Some of his bunkmates laughed as Apollo tossed a handful of the candies into his mouth.

  “Interesting,” Ryic said. “Most humans don’t have a taste for Flobian roach brain.”

  Apollo immediately spit out the alien snack, wiping the green from his tongue. Suddenly, the laughter in the sleeping quarters turned on him.

  “Attention all Lightwings,” the soothing sidewalk voice said, only this time it came from the walls. “Report to the Ulam for your gravity test.”

  “All right, everyone, you heard Cerebella,” Kwan said. “She doesn’t ask twice.”

  Zachary and Ryic climbed down from their pods and joined the rest of their bunkmates as everybody headed for the door. When Zachary stepped over the threshold, he again felt the electric tingle.

  “Keeps away mosquitoes,” Derek said as he passed by.

  It might have been a fine deterrent for bugs, Zachary thought, but it hardly seemed worth the goose bumps every time he walked in or out of the SQ.

  Outside, the black sidewalk beneath Zachary’s feet lit up with bright silver arrows pointing to the Ulam. Upon reaching the building by the parking lot, Zachary and the others walked up the semicircle of steps that led around the reflecting pool and mercury-filled fountain. They entered a large foyer walled in by smoked glass; the room’s dark tint made Zachary feel like he was wearing sunglasses.

  On one of the walls were hi-res satellite projections of the other Indigo bases from around the galaxy. There were dozens of them, some in daylight, others in darkness. Several were inhabited by human-looking Starbounders-in-training, but the majority appeared to be populated by creatures most definitely not of Earth.

  When Zachary glanced up to the ceiling, he noticed that one of the glass panels that made up the top of the foyer displayed what looked like a traditional newscast, except that the anchor was not human but some kind of robot. The sound wasn’t on, but images flashed by of alien farmers coping with floods, the launching of large space pods from bodies of water, and trident-shaped fighter ships with indigo stripes flying in formation.

  On the far wall was a row of pedestals, each with a sculpture of a planet resting atop it. A plaque reading OUTERVERSE MEMORIAL hung above them. Inscribed on the pillars were brief histories of the planets and the date and circumstance of each one’s destruction.

  “We can’t save them all,” said Derek regretfully as he walked past.

  Right at the center of the space was a three-dimensional holographic map of the entire building. Zachary stopped before it and, upon closer inspection, he could see just how big the Ulam was: this glass foyer was only the tip of the iceberg; most of the building’s rooms and tunnels were below ground and not visible.

  “I had no idea Indigo 8 was so big,” Zachary said to Kwan, who had come up beside him. Derek and the rest of the Lightwings were already heading out of the foyer.

  “Training future Starbounders is only a small part of what we do here,” Kwan replied. “It’s also a central defense base for the IPDL, so there’s a strategic command center; a detention facility for off-planet criminals; and, fifty stories below us, a fleet of pitchforks and battle-axes ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.”

  “Wait, did you say the spaceships were underground?” asked Zachary.

  “The spacecraft don’t launch like traditional rockets into the sky,” Kwan answered. “Instead, they slip through a fold in space that sends them to the dark side of Jupiter. That way they go undetected by Earth’s telescopes. Hubble, Magellan, Gemini—none of them have any idea we exist. So government officials, scientists, and everyday people don’t either.”

  Zachary had spent his life surrounded by those everyday people. His neighbors, his friends. Even his science teacher. All living in their small town of Kingston, never realizing that space travel to other galaxies was not only possible but happening all the time. And soon it would be Zachary’s turn to make that trip.

  “Come on,” Kwan said. “We should catch up with the others.”

  Before Zachary took off, his eyes were drawn back to the holographic map of the Ulam. There on level three he spotted the Frederick Night Dimensional Strategy Center. He’d heard his family speak with pride about the center, but seeing his great-great-grandfather’s name on the map just added to the pressure he already felt to excel at Indigo 8.

  Zachary hurried ahead, imagining that one day part of the Ulam might bear his name, too. He caught up with Kwan, and found the rest of the group in a long hallway with massive glass terrariums built into the walls. Each recreated a different alien ecosystem and had vegetation and life-forms that were clearly not native to Earth. Zachary walked up beside Ryic, who had stopped to stare at a swamp of red plants and vines. Swimming circles in the murky puddle of water was a trio of creatures that resembled dreadlocked orange fish.

  “Reminds me of my first pet,” Ryic said.

  “I had goldfish, too,” Zachary said.

  Just then, one of the three creatures exploded, sending pea-sized eggs all over the terrarium.

  “Of course, none of my goldfish ever did that,” Zachary said.

  “Mine did,” Ryic said. “There’ll be lots more soon.”

  Ahead of them, at another terrarium, an overexcited trainee was slapping his palm to get the attention of whatever was inside. Zachary walked over to see a sluglike organism hidden among a patch of frost-encrusted flowers. The silvery-gray slug did an excellent job blending in with the icicle-covered thorny shrubs that filled the wintery habitat.

  “Hey, hands off the glass,” Derek said. “You like it when people shake your bed when you’re trying to sleep?”

  He had barely gotten the words out before the slug flung itself against the window at the boy’s hand. The trainee jumped back as the creature bared a row of gnashing teeth and tried in vain to eat its way through the glass.

  “Give that window a kiss,” Derek said. “It just saved your right hand from a vreek.”

  The boy tucked his fingers into his pockets and shuffled away.

  They kept moving until they reached a translucent tunnel that connected the Ulam to the ten-story-tall zero-gravity cube. The group entered a small holding roo
m where around fifteen Lightwing girls were already waiting. Zachary’s attention was drawn to two trainers who were gliding downward inside the cube, somersaulting through a series of rings and platforms that floated in midair.

  The two trainers’ boots landed squarely on the floor, and Zachary got a good look at them. The young man had inch-long black hair and a beard of equal length. He wore a skintight silver bodysuit and what looked like moon boots with some kind of rough Velcro tread on the bottom. The young woman was dressed in a matching outfit.

  The male trainer pressed his thumb against a panel, and a glass door slid open, allowing him to pass through an antechamber before entering the holding room.

  “I’m Loren.” He gave an exaggerated bow. “Yes, I know, it sounds like a girl’s name. My parents were convinced they were having a daughter, but they got me instead.” The Lightwing boys and girls laughed. “We’re going to split you into groups of four and see how you fare in the Qube. Suit up and find a pair of friction boots that fit you. Monica and I will be evaluating your skill level for training placement.”

  Zachary and the other boys and girls walked over to the far side of the tank, where rubber padded suits were hanging on hooks, and boots of all sizes sat in cubbies. He grabbed an outfit that looked about his height; it was long-sleeved with full-length pants. He then reached for a pair of size-seven boots, but it was as if they’d been glued down. He gave them a tug to pull the bottoms free from the cubby shelf. He tugged and tugged again, but the boots wouldn’t give. Finally, he gave them a twist, and they released immediately.

  And Zachary wasn’t the only one struggling with the boots. Ryic was as well. When he finally dislodged a pair from the cubby, Ryic went stumbling back into a girl standing behind him. They both fell in a heap.

  “First day on your new feet?” the girl asked.

  Ryic looked at her curiously. “No, these are the same feet I have always had.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to put on a pair of Armstrongs before?” the girl asked Ryic.