13

“Tell us!” Becka screams. “Or else!”

This interrogation isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. The guard woke up a few minutes ago, right after we removed his helmet. And he was not super pleased to see us.

I look around at all the posters on Principal Lochner’s wall—“Settle it with a smile!” “Your moon is where the heart is.” “There’s no ‘I’ in Outer Space!”—and wonder whether they might be spoiling the mood.

“You don’t frighten me, you puny umjerrylochner,” the guard growls, his long Elvidian hair whipping around as he tries to free himself. Good thing Ari used all that tape.

“Do your worst,” he says, his red eyes getting redder.

The problem is that this is kind of our worst. We’re not really going to hurt the guy. But Becka’s vague threats don’t seem to be doing the trick. If she could just challenge him to a one-on-one dodgeball game, he’d be begging for mercy right now. Of course, thanks to me, we don’t have any more dodgeballs, so that option’s off the table.

We only need one more thing from him: To find out what stands in the way of us getting off this planet. Gun turrets? Military ships? Some other planetary defense system? There’s gotta be something. There’s no way we’re in the clear yet. Even if we can figure out how to get the ship off the ground, we need to know how to get it to safety. But if this guard knows anything that could help us, he’s keeping it to himself.

“But we’re not just any umjerrylochners,” Becka informs him. “We’re criminals. We’ve done terrible things.”

“You’re in jail for an unpaid parking ticket,” he says back.

“Oh sure, sure.” Becka nods. “But that’s just the latest thing. We’ve been in and out of jails all over the galaxy. You heard of the Great Asteroid Robbery out in the Tofu System?”

“No.”

“Well you should have. That was us. Kidnapping of the troll governor from Planet Barbie? Us. Nuclear Stink Bomb in the Grapefruit Nebula? Us. That was not an easy one to pull off, by the way. Barely made it out of there alive. But you can bet we got away with Blackbeard’s treasure.”

Even though she’s the best liar in the galaxy, the guard doesn’t seem convinced.

“Enough!” he shouts. “Release me at once. The Minister does not take kindly to those who disrespect her soldiers.”

Becka rolls her eyes. “Please. The Minister couldn’t hit a Snorg with a Blorg if her life depended on it.”

Ari chuckles—Becka is now literally talking gibberish—but the guard doesn’t seem to find it funny. Those eyes have gone so dark and deep red, they’re almost black.

“Did . . . you . . . insult . . . her?”

He’s so shocked and angry that he can barely get the words out. He starts thrashing around on the chair so furiously that I’m scared he’ll rip the tape clean off his arms. “Minister! Minister! Forgive me!” he screams over and over again, trying to bow down in the chair as far as the duct tape will let him.

Told you they were obsessed.

“Nice work,” I say. “You broke him.”

“How is this my fault?” Becka asks, as the guard sways back and forth, threatening to pull the chair out of its socket in the floor. “How was I supposed to know he was, like, in love with the Minister?”

The guard immediately stops moving. “Yes. I do love the Minister. I do.”

“Of course you do, buddy,” I tell him soothingly. “Of course you do.”

This calms him down a little.

“Now,” Becka continues, “you might love the Minister, but she can’t help you now. Tell us how to get off this planet, tell us if there’s anything dangerous out there, and we’ll let you go. Simple as that.”

“Never,” he spits.

I sigh. We’re not getting anywhere and the clock is ticking. He might even be stalling on purpose, waiting for his fellow guards to come find him.

“Guys,” I say. “Maybe we should just go. Take our chances. We’re sitting ducks down here.”

Ari nods, but Becka—looking into the alien’s face—doesn’t seem so sure.

“Yes,” says the guard with a sinister grin. Like gum, another thing that’s universal: the smile of someone who means you harm. “Don’t sit on ducks. Take your chances. Why not?”

I turn to Ari and I think he’s changed his mind about leaving. His eyes bulge and his mouth opens wide.

“We’ll figure it out,” I try to reassure him, but he’s looking past me. And now he smiles this big, stupid smile, which I immediately recognize. Because I’ve seen it pretty recently.

“Oh come on,” I say, as Ari bends down underneath Principal Lochner’s desk and picks up his hamster.

“Doctor Shrew!” exclaims Becka, who’s almost as excited as Ari. “He’s okay!”

“Of course he’s okay,” Ari says. “He’s a doctor.”

“Can we please focus?” I’ve just noticed that the tape closest to the guard’s long fingernails is shredded and loose. He’s still tied down, but who knows how long we can keep him that way.

“Oh yeah.” Ari nods. “You’re right, you’re right.”

He turns around to face the guard, holding the doctor (tightly this time) in both hands.

Suddenly—again—the guard’s mood changes.

“Arg!” he yells. “What manner of beast is that?”

“A hamster!” Ari answers happily. He can talk about Doctor Shrew for hours. Did you know that the human genome is 87 percent hamster? Cause I do. After a four-hour-long conversation with Ari.

In a low voice, like he’s genuinely afraid, the guard says, “Please—don’t let it near me.”

Ari looks down into his hands. “Doctor Shrew? He’s harml—”

“Ful!” I finish. “He’s extremely harmful. He can tear through solid steel with his teeth! Burn through it with his laser eyes!”

“Already?” says the guard. “Even before it reaches its full size?”

“This is—” Ari starts to say.

“Only a baby!” I cut him off. “You should see the adult hamsters we have onboard. They’re even more ferocious.”

Ari and Becka are staring at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

But I’m staring at the alien—leaning back in Principal Lochner’s chair as far as it goes, trying to get away from the tiny animal in Ari’s hands.

Doctor Shrew might just save us all.

***

Ari and I are in the computer lab, hovering over a microphone and one of the smaller cameras that the A/V club sometimes uses for motion capture. The technical details weren’t too complex to figure out. Not with Ari around and with the ship being (mostly) cooperative. The hard part was strapping Doctor Shrew down to the table underneath the camera in a way that satisfied Ari that we weren’t “committing animal cruelty.”

Becka is over in the cafeteria keeping watch over our prisoner. Against my better judgment, Ari made her another stun gun, and she used it to keep the guard in check while we transferred him from the principal’s chair to a rolling desk chair we’d stolen from the nearest classroom. After Ari blew through a fresh roll of duct tape to strap him in, Becka wheeled him off.

Now, I’m watching the cafeteria on one of the screens, and Becka and I are communicating via two small earpiece headsets we also found in the computer lab. She’s already duct-taped his chair to one of the lunch tables so that he can’t easily wheel himself toward an exit, and she’s talked me through rerouting this room’s camera feed to one of the cafeteria’s walls. Now we’re just waiting on Ari. “But I don’t know how long this guy’s going to behave,” she says in my ear.

“Almost there,” I tell her, as Ari repositions Doctor Shrew for the tenth time. “Come on, Ari. We need to get started.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, as he flips a switch and turns on the feed. The wall across from Becka and the guard flickers to life, displaying a fifteen-foot-tall animal, with golden-brown fur and pitch-black eyes staring out from a semi-3D display.

“Nooo!” the guard yells, trying to kick his legs backward to swerve away from the screen. But he’s bound to the table and can’t get very far. “Begone, foul monster!”

“I think he looks even cuter on the big screen,” Becka whispers.

“Let’s hope you’re wrong,” I say back. “Do your thing, Ari.”

He gulps, grabs the mic with both hands, and starts speaking in a low, rumbly, epic voice.

“I am Doctor Shrew!” he bellows, deep and angry. “Why have you disturbed me?”

“Oh, magnificent doctor,” the guard cries, “I am so sorry. I was brought here. Against my will. These children, they—”

“Nonsense!” Ari shouts. Becka turned the volume in the cafeteria up so loud that the room shakes with every word. “These children are my servants! They do my bidding. For I am Doctor Shrew! Demon space hamster of . . . er . . . space!”

The actual, little, Doctor Shrew is wiggling his legs around in tiny makeshift shackles, sniffing around at the carrot I’m dangling in front of him, just out of reach. But he’s looking straight enough into the lens of the camera that the hologram in front of the guard peers right at him.

“O great one,” the poor guard begs, “please be merciful.”

“You displease me!” Ari yells, really getting into a groove. “I am the Rat King! Rodent God of Destruction! Shrew, Lord of—”

I elbow him in the side. “Don’t overdo it.”

“Sorry,” he says away from the mic.

“It’s cool,” I tell him. “Keep going.”

He nods and refocuses. “You have imprisoned my followers on this planet! You must let all of the umjerrylochners go!”

“But I cannot!” the guard says. “I do not have the authority to give such an order, and the Minister would never allow it. I would be punished together with those I set free!”

We figured that one was a long shot. But we had to try. Ari knows to aim lower.

“Fine,” Ari says back. “Then at least tell me exactly what awaits this ship if it were to take off. How can we escape this planet?”

The guard hesitates for a second and Ari growls into the mic like a tiger.

“Defy me at your peril,” he warns. “I will eat you and everyone on this planet!”

“Please! No! The Minister will be angry!”

“I am angry. You have five seconds,” Ari insists. “Five!”

“Please, I can’t!”

“Four!”

“You don’t understand!”

“Three! Two!”

“Okay! If you let me go—without eating me—I’ll tell you how to safely get off Elvid IV.”

“Tell me how to safely get off Elvid IV and then I’ll let you go without eating you.”

The guard slumps down. He seems genuinely scared. If he weren’t one of the people keeping us prisoner, maybe I’d even feel bad for him.

“Fine,” he says. “It’s just a simple code. Broadcast it before you enter low orbit and you should make it past the defenses without incident.”

He rattles off a string of numbers.

“Ship?” I ask out loud. “You—”

“YEAH, YEAH. WAY AHEAD OF YOU. IT’S ALREADY PRIMED TO BROADCAST.”

“That was amazing,” Becka whispers in my ear. “Tell Ari that he’s awesome.”

I look over at Ari, who’s doing a weird victory jig to celebrate his success.

“I think he knows,” I whisper back to Becka. But I give Ari a thumbs-up anyway.

“Oh,” the guard adds, “and make sure you’re out of range of the light speed jammer around the planet. If you use any such engine before passing beyond the enclosure, well, there won’t be anything left of your ship when you reach the other side.”

Ari freezes mid-jig. “I see,” he says into the mic. “Tell me more.”