I raised the gun I’d grabbed, but couldn’t find a trigger to fire it. Instead, I bashed at them, hurling their bodies off me. They fought without direction, just flinging themselves at me. I kicked and spun, wielding the gun like a club. Spider was the last one standing, and I smashed the gun into its face full of eyes. Legs flailed and green goop splattered everywhere. In moments, all three of the Botanists lay motionless on the floor.
The ship’s momentum hitched again. My stomach lurched as we lost gravity for a longer second. The Botanists and I floated up a hand’s length from the floor before the thrusters kicked in again and the floor jumped up to meet us.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway. I spun around, gun raised like a baseball bat.
Shiro burst into view, heavy bag slung over his shoulder, gun aimed straight at me.
“It’s me!” I screamed. “Don’t shoot!”
He slid to halt and eyed the dead Botanists around me. “Wow. You look like a war zone. What happened?” His Siitsi uniform was wet, and slime dripped from his hair.
I looked down at my arms and legs, bleeding and burned under the tattered remains of my clothes. “I had a run-in with a pitcher and some acid. How did you get in here?”
A look of disgust made his nostrils flare. “Cut a hole in the side and squeezed right in. It was trying to heal itself all around me. Got stuck inside the wall and had to just keep cutting. Never smelled anything like that in my life.”
I grinned and lowered my gun. “The ship is dying. I poured the bug pheromone into the pitcher and they all went nuts, tore it apart.” That was it. Poured that pheromone on purpose. That’s what I did. Totally knew what was going to happen. I held out my arms with the shreds of my shirt clinging to my bloody skin. “Fell in. Got out. But the ship is in a bad way. We keep losing thrust. I killed it, and when it goes down completely, we’ll fall out of the sky.”
“Time to go, then.”
He turned to head back the way he came, but I didn’t move. “We have to get my brother. There are people here. I need to be with Shane when we crash.”
“Crash?” Shiro smiled. “Who’s crashing?”
He grabbed the smallest of the dead Botanists, throwing the floppy body over his shoulder. “Where are they?”
I ripped away the remains of my shirt and dropped it, leading the way down the halls until we reached the panel. It didn’t open to my touch, but Shiro slapped it with the dead Botanist’s hand, and the door hissed open.
Shane and the others rushed forward. He threw himself into my arms and I winced as he clung to my abraded skin.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I murmured. “I’m here now.”
He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “What happened to you?”
The rest of the captives crowded around us. “What’s happening? Why is the ship shaking like this?” They stared at Shiro. “Who is . . . ?”
Shiro shook his head. “No time. Gotta go.”
We rushed down the hall to where the rest of our people were held, and I stopped at the door. “Here! There are more in here!”
He used the Botanist’s hand, and eight more people joined our sad parade. They were full of questions, hanging in the doorway as if we were Botanists in disguise.
“What’s going on?”
“Where are we going?”
“Who’s that man?”
They barely had a chance to gape at the stranger. We didn’t pause to answer their questions, just motioned them to follow.
I made Shiro stop at some of the other doors, and we let some of the other alien livestock go. Some of the beasts were small enough to carry, and others we herded ahead of us. The ones that rushed the doors, snarling, we left behind, closing the hatchways as they lunged for us. Shiro finally dropped the dead Botanist and we rushed down the vibrating corridors.
“Where’s the shuttle? The Horizon shuttle?” Shiro’s voice cut through the rumbling all around us.
A giant lurch spilled all of us to the ground.
“Come on!” I struggled to my feet, pulling Shane up with me. “This way!”
The slick covering on the walls of the corridors started to wrinkle as we ran. The blue-green surface streaked with brown around the edges, our feet leaving squishy marks. The ship really was dying. Shriveling up like the dead plant it was.
Groups of Botanists fell to Shiro’s stun gun. I looked up to the ceiling, but no pores opened. No gas escaped. The ship had no defense. And in a very short time, it wouldn’t matter as it splattered all over the ice moon with us inside it.
We burst into the huge hangar. On the far side, our shuttle had listed to one side, the floor giving way under it.
“Everybody in!”
Our frightened people herded the animals onto the shuttle, beasts crashing over the rows of seats.
Shane held back from the ramp, last to get on. “I was so scared. I thought they had you.”
I crouched in front of him. “They couldn’t hold me. Not when I had a little brother to save.”
He scuttled into the ship, and I closed the hatch behind us. The smell inside the shuttle was worse than I remembered from our long days adrift. Terrified cries from humans and other creatures filled the hold.
The Botanist ship’s pulsing engines cut out. We lost gravity and everything inside and out of our shuttle floated free. People and alien animals rose up around the seats, screaming and bleating with terror.
“Everybody hold onto something!” I yelled.
I clawed my way forward, pulling myself hand over hand across the rows of seats until I reached the cockpit and hauled myself through the open doorway.
Shiro was strapped into the pilot’s chair, flipping the switches that made the shuttle roar to life. “What’s happening? Did we leave the atmosphere?” My voice was raw in my throat.
“Maybe,” Shiro said. “Or maybe we’re still in the moon’s gravity. If everything in here is falling at the same rate, that’s the same as no gravity at all. No way to know from inside.”
“Can you fly this thing?” I pushed myself off the ceiling to reach for the back of the copilot’s chair next to him, settling onto the seat and belting myself in.
“Why not?” He shrugged. “How hard can it be?”
He switched our shuttle on. Thunderous engine noise filled the hangar as the Botanist ship plunged into darkness around us. Our shuttle’s running lights illuminated the damp, browning walls trapping us inside.
“There’s no hangar door,” I realized. “It just opens to swallow what it wants. How are we going to get out?”
Shiro gripped a long handle, lowering the thrusters to a growling idle.
“Wait here. Keep everybody inside.”
He unstrapped himself from the seat, grabbed the bag that was floating free behind his chair, and shoved his way back to the main shuttle hatch. I followed him, bouncing off people and animals in the hold, and shut the hatch behind him to keep everyone from floating away. I managed to haul myself back to the cockpit in time to see him attaching the explosives he’d brought from the Siitsi ship along the wall in front of our shuttle. There were only four little silver blocks, and he checked a small remote before returning to the hatch and locking it. He pulled himself into his seat beside me and belted in.
“Might want to shut your eyes.” Shiro’s hands were white-knuckled on the remote.
The ship rocked with the strength of the blast.
I opened my eyes to see a small, smoking hole in front of our shuttle’s nose. Through it streamed bright, white sunlight.
Sunlight, not black sky and stars. We didn’t make it out to space. We’re in the atmosphere. We’re falling.
“What’s our altitude?”
A grim smile from Shiro. “We’ll find out.”
The shuttle leaped forward as he gunned the thrusters. It lurched toward the hole in the side of the ship, grinding its nose into the small hole, which already looked smaller than when the explosives opened it up seconds before. The brain of the Botanist ship was dead, but the side was still trying to close up around us, whatever cells in the walls that were still alive struggling to heal the hull as they’d been programmed to do.
“Punch it, Shiro!”
The hole peeled wider with the force of our thrusters grinding us through it. I could see out the windshield. Sky. And horrifyingly close below us, solid ice.
“Go! Go! Go!”
Thrusters screamed. With a great, sideways heave, our shuttle tore through the shuddering hull and soared free into the bright afternoon sunlight.
Jagged spears of ice thrust up right below us. “Too low! We’re too low!” I shouted.
Our little ship groaned as its belly sheared off the tops of the ice shards below us, scraping against the top of a frozen mountain. Shiro gunned it and we lurched into the sky. He pulled us around in a wide arc to see the enormous, shuddering white bean of the Botanist ship smash into the side of a giant glacier. It burst into a million pieces, sliding down the solid white cliffs.
A cheer erupted from the people pressed against the shuttle’s windows.
Shiro turned the shuttle away from the crash, and we descended through the clear blue sky toward a smooth lake of ice below.