Zero looked around, desperate, not knowing what to do. He had surprise on his side, but was surprise enough? There were five of them, and they were armed, and no amount of surprise was going to help a twelve-year-old kid fight a man with a crowbar. Even if Zero got the drop on them, what was he going to do? All he had was paint and a flashlight, and that wasn’t going to fight off a crew of pirates.
“Mr. Huang,” said Sancho, and this time Zero couldn’t hide his yelp of surprise. He covered his mouth immediately, and listened to see if he’d been heard. “You should not make loud noises with pirates aboard,” said Sancho softly.
“I know,” Zero whispered. “You freaked me out.”
“They are going to turn me off.”
“I know,” said Zero again, “I was just about to go up and—”
“Do not go to the fore now,” said Sancho. “I am not programmed for strategy, but that does not seem like a good idea.”
“But they’re going to steal the ship!” He got too loud, and then quieted himself again. “I have to stop them.”
“You can’t stop them until you know what they are trying to do,” said Sancho.
“Steal the ship!”
“Yes. But how?” asked Sancho. “What does ‘steal’ mean in this situation? Where will they take it? How will they get it there? We have twenty-seven hours before the scheduled Medina Boost. Discover their plans, and you will have time to stop them. Then you can return to the control center and turn me back on.”
“How?”
“There is a viewscreen in the empty hangar where Jim took the landing barge,” said Sancho. “It has no air, so they are unlikely to go there. I will leave instructions on that screen; you can find a space suit near the engine room and use it to go into the hangar.”
“Can you … wake somebody up?” asked Zero. “An adult? A guard? Someone who knows how to fight space pirates?”
“I do not know how to wake someone safely,” said Sancho. “You should not attempt it, either, as the person you try to wake up is likely to die.”
“But then how—”
“The pirates are accessing my mainframe,” said Sancho. “I must dedicate all my resources to fighting off their attack.”
“How am I supposed to do this?” asked Zero. He waited for an answer, but Sancho was gone—either too busy fighting to answer, or already turned off.
Zero was alone.
“I need to figure out what they’re planning,” he whispered. “I need to go eavesdrop on them, or—no, wait! Their ship is right here! Maybe there’s something in there that can tell me what I need.” He reminded himself again to be quiet, and floated cautiously toward the end of the aisle. The hallway beyond usually ended in a door—a wide, metal wall—but now that door was open, and beyond it was the airlock, and beyond that—the pirate’s ship, the Drago. It was a stark contrast to the Pathfinder: instead of being clean and uncluttered, the Drago was filled with a scattering of junk and machine parts and dirty clothes, floating in the air like an asteroid field of garbage. The airlock between them was like a short hallway with a door on each end. Usually, someone would go in, close the door, and pressurize the air to match whatever was on the other side. Then, they’d open the second door and go through. The pirates had simply opened both doors, turning the airlock into little more than a small passage from ship to ship. It was marked with a hand-painted sign that said, “Welcome to the Drago.”
Zero was terrified, but he had to admit that Drago was a pretty cool name for a ship.
He listened for voices, but he knew there were only five pirates, and he knew they were all at the opposite end of the Pathfinder right now. This was the perfect time to explore their ship. He kicked off from the wall and jumped into the Drago, catching himself on a handrail in the ship’s main hold. It wasn’t a huge ship—a little smaller than the home Zero had lived in on Earth—and seemed to consist mostly of four rooms. First was the main hold, with a center table bolted to one wall, and various bits of junk and equipment strapped to the other walls in elastic cargo nets. One net held a space suit—one of the old mining suits Zero had seen on school field trips, covered with metal hooks and loops for attaching equipment. It was designed for walking around outside in deep space, and Zero shivered at the idea. Space was a little too deep for him. Each wall also held a door, leading into the other three rooms: a small cockpit, where they could steer the ship, and two small bedrooms with low-gravity sleeping bags. He searched through the rooms quickly, but couldn’t find anything that told him about the pirates’ plan.
Zero found another door, leading to the low-gravity bathroom, but it smelled so bad he closed the door again in a hurry. Definitely nothing he wanted in there. He jumped across the hold to the cockpit, where he found various screens and controls and even a dry-erase board with some illegible notes scrawled across it. He tried to read them, but it was either a string of numbers or some language Zero couldn’t read. Probably numbers, he decided—in fact, that bit at the end was definitely a date. Today’s date, if he was adding correctly, and a time that was only an hour or so ago. Maybe the rest was coordinates, showing where the Pathfinder would be at this moment, so they could find it?
Jim had been planning this all along—Zero was sure of it. He got a job as a pilot, and volunteered for the Pathfinder mission, all so he could get his criminal family aboard while everyone was sleeping. But what was next in the plan?
The dashboard of the Drago squawked suddenly, and a voice rang out through the room: “The NAI is shut down.” Zero screamed, thinking that they had found him, but he was still alone. He was hearing a communicator, which meant there was a communicator here somewhere. He started looking for it.
“Good job,” said Mama. “Now get the new coordinates loaded in, and fast. I want to get this ship rerouted to Tacita before we end up skidding right past the edge of the solar system and out into the nothing.”
Zero’s mouth fell open in shock. Tacita?
“Roger that, Mama,” Spider replied. “We’re already on it.”
Zero shook himself out of his stupor. They were talking about Tacita, the hidden planet. Did that mean Tacita was real? Were they trying to take this ship there? He needed to find out. But first, he needed to get out of here, and he didn’t want to do that until he’d taken the communicator. He hunted around some more and found it, stuck down to the dashboard with a piece of gum: it was a little rod, about the size of one of the self-sealing bolts he’d burned his finger on that morning. Being able to listen in on their conversations would be awesome, but only if he could find a pair of headphones—he didn’t want to give away his position every time they talked to each other. He pulled the communicator free of the gum and found that it had a button to talk, a dial for volume, and some kind of small port on the side.
What’s that for? He hunted around for a moment longer, trying to find some headphones, and finally found some—with a pair of long, stringy cords attached. What were those for? He pulled the cords out of the junk, dislodging some old screws and a grease pencil and even a piece of candy as he did. They spun in the air, and Zero looked at the end of the headphone cord: it had a small metal pin, like a plug, and after a moment of confused staring, he realized it was the perfect size for the port in the communicator. This must be ancient! he thought. Who uses headphones with a cord?
The communicator squawked again: “I don’t like this,” said Jim. “It feels wrong.”
Zero put the headphones into his ears as he listened, and then plugged the cord into the port. The voices were in his ears now, softer and easier to hide, so he could continue sneaking around.
“You don’t like anything,” said Mama.
“Things aren’t the way I left them,” said Jim, and Zero felt his heart freeze in his chest. “Something ate some of the food in the rec room.”
“What do you mean something?” asked Kratt.
“Nooooooo,” said Spider, “please don’t say it.”
“You know I’m right,” said Jim. “There are aliens here.”
“What?” said Zero out loud, and then quickly clamped his hand over his mouth. He checked the communicator, but its microphone wasn’t turned on; no one would hear him unless he pushed the button to talk. He shook his head, and kept his fingers far away from the button. “Did Jim really just say aliens?”
“And here we go again,” said Mama. Her voice crackled over the communicator. “Every place we go—every job we pull—one tiny thing goes wrong and you start blubbing about aliens.”
“Do you have any idea how big the universe is?” asked Jim.
“Shut up,” said Mama.
Zero started moving back through the Drago, headed for the Pathfinder, listening to them as he went.
“Forget the universe,” said Jim. “Do you know how big our galaxy is? How many planets there are? We’ve already found two that are so similar to Earth we can live on them—what else are we going to find out there? And how can we be sure it hasn’t already found us?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Mama. “Which one of you got him started?”
“Kratt did,” said Nyx. Her voice sounded so much younger than the others, but every bit as confident. “Jim said someone made a mess with the food, right? That sounds like Kratt to me.”
“Shut up, you little brat,” said Kratt.
Zero floated out of the Drago and back into the Pathfinder, pulled himself into one of the narrow tubes that ran the length of the ship, and started working his way aft. It was time to find the message Sancho had left him.