Space Rocks! (12 page)

“W
hat's it saying?” whispered Becky.

“Quiet!” I snapped, startling her.

It wasn't every day that you got to meet the quasimythical progenitor of your entire race. I was standing in front of
the
Jalasu Jhuk, hero of our oldest stories, the greatest Xotonian to ever live. The situation demanded some respect.

“I am most sorry, Great Jalasu Jhuk of the Stars,” I said in formal Xotonian. “Please forgive my barbarous alien companions. They are but ignorant space hillbillies, unfit to touch the hem of your worst cloak.”

But Jalasu Jhuk continued to speak over me, staring out into the middle distance.

“By now, I am gone,” it said. “I left the entrance code to this chamber with a trusted few, with the instructions to open this door only if my plan failed. If you are here, listening to this message, then that likely means Gelo has been discovered and our enemies are coming for the Q-sik.

“If this is so, you must take it and flee to the Second Sanctum. The Q-sik is a weapon of unimaginable destruction, and not just for its intended target. Even at the lowest settings, the device can create a beam of energy powerful enough to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time. It is too dangerous to exist. Yet we cannot destroy it. Not yet, anyway.

“So you must do everything in your power to keep it from the Vorem and all others who would use it for conquest. Even those in the League. The fate of all beings in the universe—indeed, the fate of the very universe itself—hangs in the balance. You must not fail.”

Then Jalasu Jhuk saluted, flickered, and disappeared.

“Jalasu Jhuk!” I cried. “Where did you go, O Great Progenitor?” Frantically, I looked around. But Jalasu Jhuk was nowhere to be found.

“It was a hologram,” said Hollins.

My heart sank. Hollins was right. It had just been a three-dimensional projection from a tiny glass node on the wall. It was more lifelike than even the human hologram devices. Had Xotonians once been capable of creating such things?

“A hologram. Yes, of course,” I said quietly.

I had looked upon Jalasu Jhuk with my own eyes. And for that, I considered myself unaccountably lucky. It was proof positive that our Great Progenitor was real, not just some legend. The message had mentioned the Vorem too. I could hardly believe it. It seemed that all Hudka's old stories were actually true. My mind reeled at the possibility.

But a great sadness welled up inside me too. It was profound to be so close to such a hero and yet so far away. Separated by countless years, separated by the barrier between life and death.

Such a pity it had been only a recording and not the real thing. We Xotonians could have used the guidance of a leader like our Great Progenitor in these troubled times. Perhaps Jalasu Jhuk would have known how to resolve our conflict with the human miners with honor and justice, without resorting to the Q-sik.

A cold feeling crept over me. The Q-sik. Despite Jalasu Jhuk's warning, we had already used it. Would this bring destruction to us, as Jhuk's message suggested? I wished I could just ask it. But Jhuk was long gone. And no one returns once they've passed to the Nebula Beyond.

“So who was that?” asked Little Gus.

“Great Jalasu Jhuk of the Stars,” I said. “Someone very . . . very important to my people.”

“And what did it say?” asked Becky.

“It said that we were welcome to enter the chamber,” I lied. I hadn't mentioned the Q-sik to the humans yet, and I didn't intend to. It would likely mean answering a number of uncomfortable questions about the asteroid-quake that had stranded them here. Plus, the message from Jalasu Jhuk seemed to confirm that the ancient weapon should remain hidden from outsiders.

“The recording seemed to talk for an awfully long time just to say that,” said Nicki delicately.

I said nothing as I stepped through the threshold to the chamber beyond.

It seemed to be constructed entirely out of iridium. The beams of the human flashlights bounced endlessly, reflecting off the silvery surface of every wall.

“Holy . . . crap,” said Hollins, his eyes wide.

“There's more refined iridium in this one room than on the entire planet Earth,” said Nicki.

“We're rich!” screamed Little Gus, overcome with excitement. “I'm gonna buy an ostrich and a new rocket-bike and the Tunstall 28x Holodrive, when it comes out, and an island! And then I'm going to hold a mysterious martial arts tournament on the island!” In his mind, he had just secured lifelong financial independence.

“Chorkle,” said Nicki, looking around in awe. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

I didn't answer. In fact, I hadn't. But the strangeness of an iridium room paled in comparison to what was inside it. Indeed, what I was looking at shocked me nearly as much as my face-to-face meeting with Jalasu Jhuk.

There, in the center of the chamber, sat three things that shouldn't exist. They were, unmistakably, Xotonian starships!

I bounded forward to get a closer look.

The ships were beautiful: sleek ellipsoids of glass and tarnished green metal. Each was big enough to hold a handful of passengers and had a bulbous cockpit in the front and a swiveling blaster turret on top. These were serious ships; they looked like they could hold their own in a fight.

“So Xotonians do have starships, after all,” said Hollins.

“We're not supposed to, but I—I guess we do,” I said. “Or we did. It is said that long ago, our ancestors traveled the stars as easily as we walk between caverns today. But we all thought that was a myth.”

“How much cash do you want for one of these ships, Chorkle?” asked Little Gus, now reckoning himself a very wealthy man in iridium. “I'll give you a million bucks.”

“I'm not sure—”

“All right, a billion bucks!” said Little Gus. “You drive a hard bargain, my little alien friend.”

“Maybe the ships aren't Chorkle's to sell,” said Nicki.

“Can I at least rent one?” asked Little Gus. “I'd love to take one of these bad boys out for a spin. I'll be all, like,
vrooooooom
. ‘Enemy ships detected, Captain!' ‘Ready the lasers.' Pew! Pew, pew! Booooom!” He was now racing around, engaged in a fierce imaginary dogfight.

“I'd like to go on record as saying I don't think Little Gus should be operating any heavy machinery,” said Becky.

“It does pose an interesting question,” said Nicki, looking around. “Do you think they still work?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“This place sure wasn't destroyed like the rest of the city up there,” said Hollins. “Maybe the iridium kept the moisture and the mold out.”

“Their systems might still be good to go,” said Nicki.

“I bet you I could fly this thing,” said Becky, wiping a layer of dust off the glass shield of the cockpit to get a look inside. “It's got a yoke and a throttle. Pretty much the same controls as the flight simulators we trained with before coming to this dumb asteroid—er, no offense, Chorkle.”

“None taken,” I said.

“Probably pretty similar to flying a rocket-bike, even,” said Hollins, looking over her shoulder. “Except bigger and with more get-up-and-go.”

“Too bad you don't know how to fly a rocket-bike,” said Becky.

“Ha ha,” said Hollins.

“If I push 'er any harder, captain, the whole thing's gaen to blow!” cried Little Gus to himself in strangely accented human. He now seemed to be losing the space battle against himself.

“Even if you could get the ships working, how would they get out of here?” asked Hollins. “We're deep inside the asteroid.”

“I think I know,” said Nicki, shining her flashlight on the ceiling of the chamber. There, high above, were hinges attached to heavy machinery. “This whole place opens.” After she said it, it became clear what she meant: The ceiling was divided into two huge hinged sections that opened to the surface of Gelo. The biggest surface hatch ever. We were in a flight hangar large enough to hold many more ships than the three before us.

My mind was racing. The existence of these ships changed everything we knew about the Xotonian race. They meant that we were not just a pack of cave dwellers hiding on a little space rock called Gelo. We really had been the star-faring heroes that our legends promised!

But if Xotonians had made spaceships once, why did we no longer possess them? The ability to construct them—much less fly them—had been totally lost to us through the ages. Jalasu Jhuk said that the entrance code to the chamber had been kept a secret from most Xotonians of its own time. The location of this hangar, amid this ruined city, had apparently been forgotten. But why? Did Jalasu Jhuk itself have some reason for not wanting Xotonians to travel the stars?

“Let's see if we can open one up!” said Becky. “I want to sit in the cockpit for a minute. Just to get a feel for it.”

We inspected the surface of one of the starships. On the side we found what seemed to be the entrance hatch. It was defined by a deep groove in the shape of a sinuous rectangle. And sure enough, beside it was a keypad.

I punched in the same code again: 9-1-5-6-7-2-3-4. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I tried the keypads of the other two ships. I was out of luck. The code just didn't seem to work.

“Sorry,” I said, shrugging. A sigh ran through the humans.

“Stand back, everybody,” said Little Gus. “I got this.” Then he wedged his fingers into the groove of the hatch and pulled as hard as he could. The hatch didn't budge.

“Ow,” he said at last. And he walked away, flapping his hands in pain. It made sense that the seal, meant to stand up to the vacuum of space and the heat of atmospheric reentry, wasn't going to be broken by the strength of a tiny human boy.

“Hold on a sec,” said Nicki, and she pulled out the Tunstall 24x Holodrive. “That keypad is electronic. After so long, it's possible that the ship's batteries simply ran down. Maybe I could give it just enough juice to bring it back online. A little jump-start, if you will. Then the ship might turn itself back on.” She began to inspect the various technological inputs near the door. “I mean, I'm assuming they use computers to run. . . .”

“If we could bring one online,” said Hollins, “then maybe we could fly it back to our parents!”

He was right. We might have just solved the problem of getting the young humans back to their own kind. It was a big “if,” though.

“As long as I'm flying,” said Becky, still gazing into the cockpit. “I don't trust anyone who got less than a ninety-seven percent pilot skill rating.”

“Here we go!” said Nicki. She had found a small three-pronged hole in a panel by the door. “Anybody got, like, a pin?”

“Sis, please try not to shock yourself like you did with that ferroelectric capacitor you built for fifth-grade science fair,” said Becky, handing her sister a small metal hairpin.

“Mild electrocution? Ha,” Nicki was now muttering to herself. “I eat mild electrocution for breakfast.”

She carefully bent the metal pin to convert the holodrive's output cable from one prong to three.

“I'm curious, Becky,” said Hollins. “What did you make for fifth-grade science fair?”

“Volcano,” sighed Becky.

Nicki plugged in the cable and began typing code on the holodrive's virtual keyboard. She smiled.

“Good, I'm touching the ship's computer system. Luckily it's a solid-state drive. So first, we need to translate this ship's machine code into binary. This will take a few minutes,” Nicki muttered to no one in particular. “Next, we translate it back into a programming language I know. Not perfect, but it gets it into semi-usable form. The executables to activate each of the separate systems should look pretty similar to one another. So if I can just figure out what one of those is, then maybe I can give it a little juice from the holodrive's battery. . . .”

After several minutes of furiously typing in silence, Nicki suddenly yelled, “Okay, here goes nothing!”

Indeed, nothing went. We waited. Nicki crinkled her nose.

“It's all right, Nicki,” said Hollins, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Using a human computer to somehow interface with an ancient alien starship was never going to be—”

“Aha!” said Nicki, stopping deep in her code. “Syntax error. Forgot the semicolon at the end of line one hundred seventy-two. Let's try this again.”

She did. And miraculously, the ancient starship lit up.

“It works!” cried Little Gus. Becky clapped Nicki on the back.

“Wow, you're a genius, Nicki,” said Hollins.

“Yeah, you've got the glasses for a reason, sis!” said Becky.

“I wouldn't say it works quite yet,” said Nicki, beaming. “I just brought the very simplest system back online: lighting. But to me it looks like the other systems should be functional. All except one. Really weird. It's got encryption like I've never seen before. But it's isolated. Doesn't seem necessary to the normal functions of the ship. Anyway, if you give me a few more hours, I guarantee you I could get the whole thing up and running. All three of them, even!”