“All right,” said Zero, and tied the apron around his waist. “Let’s get started.” He turned on the flashlight, wedging it into a corner of the bulkhead, and then laid out the paint cans in front of his brothers’ stasis pods. He used the magnetic clamps to keep the cans from floating around, and carefully opened them. He half expected the paint to float up and out of the cans, but it didn’t; he guessed that made sense, because there was nothing trying to pull it up, just like there was no gravity trying to pull it down. He dipped his brush in the black, and lifted it back out. A ball of black paint hovered around the bristles of the brush, not dripping down or soaking in or anything. He nodded, and looked at Park’s stasis pod.
“I still think you look like an action figure,” he said. “You just need a little something extra.” He used the black paint to draw a mustache on the plastic shell of the stasis pod, right over Park’s face. It looked perfect! He added a pointy beard, and an eye patch, and then a few dots for warts. He let go of the black paintbrush, letting it hang in the air, and dipped another brush in the red. “A good action figure needs a name,” he said. “How about … Bonehead Boy!” He wrote, “Bonehead Boy!” in large, red letters across the top of Park’s stasis pod, right above his head, and then added a few extra exclamation points just for fun. He let that brush float next to the black one and grabbed two more; he dipped one in blue and one in orange, and used them to paint a bright costume onto the shell of the stasis pod. He stepped back to admire his work. If he stood just in the right place, his older brother looked like the worst superhero ever.
“Perfect,” said Zero, and got to work on Yen. If Park got an eyepatch, Yen needed something really special. A black eye! But he couldn’t just paint it in black—a real black eye was purple or green, or sometimes both, and he had green paint but he didn’t have purple. He used his red brush to make a blob of red paint in the air, and then dipped his blue one into the middle of it and swished it around. He could mix paint right in the middle of the air! Doing things without gravity was the best. The blob turned purple, and he slapped it onto Yen’s stasis pad to give him a big picture of a bulging black eye. He used the black to paint on crooked teeth and a worm crawling out of his ear, but the worm didn’t work very well. He used the yellow paint to draw on another super suit, and then mixed some brown and painted it in big, nasty lines right on Yen’s legs. “You’re Captain Poopy Pants!” he shouted, and used the red paint to write the name on the top of the stasis pod. Just as he was trying to decide if he should paint a tiger or something to eat Yen’s head, he heard a sound. Not just heard it, he felt it: the air echoed with a distant thud, and the whole ship seemed to vibrate for just a second.
Zero looked up. “Sancho?”
“It appears that a ship has docked with us,” said Sancho.
“People?” asked Zero, and let go of his paintbrushes. They turned silently in the air. He kicked off the nearest stasis pod and floated to the end of the aisle, looking out into the hall. “Maybe it’s Jim coming back!”
“I did not see them coming on our sensors,” said Sancho. His voice had the same uncertain tone to it that he’d had when he’d discovered Jim was missing. “That is curious.”
Zero stopped, his excitement frozen in a moment of fear. “You … didn’t see any ships throwing asteroids at us, either,” he said.
“It appears there may be a fault in my sensor package,” said Sancho. “I will have to run a diagnostic.”
“Do you think it’s—”
“Done,” said Sancho. “I have found a section of new code in my sensor program, causing me to overlook the specific transponder code of this ship.”
“You’ve been hacked?”
“It would appear so. This is not a good sign.”
“No, it’s not,” said Zero, and looked back out into the hallway. He crept up toward the open center column, moving from handhold to handhold, and listened. There was nothing. He spoke in a tiny whisper. “Sancho, can you hear anything?”
“They have docked with airlock B on Ring 240,” said Sancho, matching Zero’s quiet volume. “They have not yet opened the door, but they are trying to bypass the security locks.”
Zero thought he heard the sound of a door hissing open, but he couldn’t be sure if it was real or just in his imagination. 240 was sixty Rings away.
“Stay out of sight,” said Sancho. “Something is very wrong.”