Other people noticed the black spot in the sky. Murmuring broke out all through the shuttle, and the people on the side that was attached to the Delta left their portholes, which showed nothing but Delta’s metal hull. They pulled themselves over to peer out the windows on our side.
“Something’s there. Something’s coming!”
It felt stupid to hope after we had all given up. But as the black hole got closer, it reflected the few lights that still shone out from our shuttle.
It wasn’t a hole.
It was a ship.
Huge, black, and smooth, it came into focus like a shiny, dark bean in the sky, reflecting off the few lights that still shone from the dead Horizon.
“Rescue! Someone’s coming for us!”
Nobody even asked who it was. The giant black bean wasn’t the Alpha or the Beta. It wasn’t anything a human had ever seen before.
Aliens. It was a spaceship made by aliens. And it was coming right at us.
It lumbered right past our windows, close enough that we got a good look at its side. No windows. No steel plates. Just a smooth, unbroken hull of reflective darkness.
“Who is it? What do they want?” The murmuring grew into shouts. “Do they know we’re in here? Flash the lights!”
Nobody paused to wonder if the aliens would be friendly. We were starving. Doomed. No matter who they were, being found was surely better than dying one by one in the filthy shuttle.
The giant ship cruised past as Doc hurried up to the cockpit to flash the cabin lights on and off. It was a waste of our precious little power, but no one complained.
The ship didn’t slow down.
“Where is it? What’s it doing?” Shane pressed his face against the thick glass.
The bean disappeared from our view. Doc Walsh yelled back from the cockpit. “I think it’s turning. It looks like . . .” He paused for a moment. “It looks like it’s attaching itself to the front of our ship.”
“Our shuttle?” I asked. I hadn’t felt a thing if the giant bean had made contact.
“No, the Delta. It’s kind of . . . sucked on to the aft cylinder.”
Our shuttle rattled then, and we all gripped onto whatever was closest. Someone was floating right above my head, hanging upside down, trying to get her face in next to Shane’s at the window. When the shuttle vibrated, she kneed me in the face.
“Hey, watch out.” I glared up at Marie, the nurse from sick bay. “Oh, sorry.”
She didn’t even answer. Everyone was looking around in shock.
This was it. Aliens. Real aliens, here to rescue us.
“I can’t believe it,” Marie said from above me. “We’re saved. We’re really saved. How lucky can we get?”
She was grinning, and I looked around the dark shuttle. Everyone had crazy smiles pasted on their faces. Rescued. We’re rescued.
“What if they don’t come get us?” Shane gave voice to the doubts I was feeling.
What if they don’t? I unbuckled my seat belt and pushed away from the seat, heading for the crowd trying to cram into the cockpit. What if they do?
Noises echoed from the other side of the hatch that connected us to the mother ship.
“Everybody shut up!” I yelled, stopping my forward motion and pressing my ear up against the cold metal. “They’re on the other side!”
Icy fear shot through me. If they opened the hatch from their side, we’d all die. The Delta’s life support was gone. Everything in the back third of the ship would have been sucked out the hole by now. The aliens must have space suits to survive with no atmosphere.
Or they don’t need space suits. Or oxygen. Or any of the things we need to live.
“Hey, don’t open the hatch!” I yelled into the steel hull. Genius. They’re sure to speak English.
They didn’t open the hatch.
Right in front of my eyes, a tiny spark lit up. I jerked my head back as the spark grew into a fiery glow no larger than my finger.
“They’re making a hole in the hatch!” I whipped my head around. “Get me something to plug it so we don’t lose air!”
A man behind me ripped his shirt off and stuffed it into my hand. I held it close to the bright circle on the hatch, ready to stuff it in as soon as the hole opened.
The bright glow died, and when I could bear to look straight at it again, there was no open hole. Instead, a dark green tube poked straight into our shuttle. It looked like a long finger with no joints, just a waving tube of green.
Like a plant. A vine.
It pushed itself into the shuttle just past my face and I shoved myself back, bouncing off whoever had pressed in behind me. No one spoke. We watched in wonder as the little tendril waved around for a few long seconds.
It retreated, and I reached out with the shirt to plug the hole it was going to leave behind. But it left no hole. When the questing green “finger” disappeared, it was instantly replaced by a thick green plug, neatly filling the tiny hole.
I heaved a sigh.
“They know we’re in here. They know we need air to breathe.” I hoped my words were true. But what had that odd green finger been attached to? Who were “they”?
The sounds on the other side of the hatch faded off into the distance.
Marie grabbed my arm from behind. “Are they leaving? They can’t leave us!” She pounded on the hatch, yelling, “Come back! Come get us! Don’t leave us here!” Everyone else joined her, beating on the side of our shuttle that abutted the Delta’s dead hull. If the green-finger aliens were coming back, there was no way we would hear them.
“Everybody be quiet!” Doc’s voice thundered from the cockpit. “The ship is coming back!”
The huge black bean appeared in the outside windows. The smooth, shiny hull made it almost impossible to focus on, but the dark hole in the stars got bigger and bigger.
Shane grabbed my hand and whispered, “They’re going to squish us.”
And it looked like he was right. The ship got closer and closer until it was pressed right up against our window. If the thick glass hadn’t been there, I could have reached out and touched it. What would it feel like? Soft? Slippery? Cold?
The blackness outside the window was complete.
“Why is it just sitting on top of us?” I wondered aloud.
Another voice from the other side of the ship was laced with panic. “It’s all around us! It’s between us and the Delta!”
I pushed back to the Delta side of the shuttle. The blackness oozed around those windows, filling in the gaps between us and our mother ship. I whipped my head around in time to see a faint yellow light opening up on the other side.
“It’s all around the ship. It’s absorbed us inside it! It’s swallowing our whole ship!”
There was nothing to see in the yellow light on the far side—just a pale glow. My eyes still couldn’t judge distance, but I thought there might be . . . a wall? Was our whole shuttle inside some kind of chamber in the black bean ship?
Gravity snapped on. All of us who had been floating around above the shuttle’s seats crashed to the floor. My chin bounced off the armrest, and someone landed right on top of me. The cabin filled with groans and whimpers.
I staggered to my feet and looked from side to side. On the Delta side, the bright light fired out the windows nearest the closed hatch that attached us to the Delta. It spread all around until I had to avert my eyes.
What’s happening?
With a crashing jolt, the fire disappeared. The yellow glow wrapped around all sides of our shuttle.
Doc’s voice from the cockpit was full of wonder.
“They’ve cut us away from the Delta without breaching our hull. We’re inside their ship. Our whole shuttle is inside their ship.”
The yellow glow dimmed. Walls. There were definitely walls out there. Doc was right. Our shuttle was sitting on the floor of some kind of huge hangar. The distant walls were bare and green, or maybe blue reflecting the yellow light that had no apparent source. Through the tiny window by my brother’s face, I could see the edge of something made of dark metal. It was angular and large, but I couldn’t see the whole thing.
Our hatch was locked with a thick metal wheel. It gave a great screech and slowly began to turn.
I grabbed Shane’s arm. “Stay close to me. Whatever happens, stay with me.”
They’re opening the hatch. I watched, mesmerized, as the gray wheel spun. What if there’s no air in their ship? What if there’s no pressure?
The hatch swung open.