LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

eat sushi,” Ash muttered.

      Lissa heard a commotion from above. She needed no Translator to tell her Captain Nask was protesting at the top of his lungs. The five children followed the Patrol Captain as he climbed the rungs of the ladder up to the deck.

      The assembled pirates were lashed to the foremast in various states of chagrin. Captain Nask had apparently been speaking separately to one of the officials, and as they watched he was dragged away from his crew.

      An officer of the Patrol extended a plank out from the rail in solemn formality.Two others on either side of him saluted. Captain Nask was shoved between them, cursing loudly all the while. He stood on the edge of the plank, his eyes fixed in a glare of rage and fear at the officer who tended the rail.

      “What’s happening?” Lissa asked Mr. Piff who had come to stand beside her.

      “Captain Nask has been found guilty of illegal enslavement, theft, mayhem and firing on a licensed law enforcement ship. The penalty is execution by ejection,” Mr. Piff said solemnly.

      “You’re going to execute him?” Lissa rounded on the shorter alien, horrified, “Just like that?”

      “The evidence is incontrovertible,” If she was not mistaken, the alien looked rather surprised, “Would you have us wait until he does it again?”

      Lissa stared numbly out across the deck toward the scene that was unfolding. He would have sold us. She reminded herself, Or made us into ground meat for some alien restaurant.

      Yet the sight was truly horrifying. Captain Nask fought savagely, throwing his weight against the smaller Patrolmen who shoved him onward. He was on the plank now, fighting to go back. One meerkat zapped him with a prong that sizzled at one end. He fell to the ground with a thud, only to rouse instantly and swipe out at the creature. Three others pressed him back, wielding prongs of their own. At last he was up against the airlock. An officer barked an order and the other Patrolmen fell back. Nask snarled at them all, but remained where he was. A sort of desperation lit his features so starkly that Lissa could hardly bear it.

      “Wait!” She cried, “Isn’t there some other way?”

      “We are bound to follow the laws of the galaxy we inhabit,” Mr. Piff said. His face was stern, but Lissa could see pain in his eyes, as though the necessity of punishing the pirate wounded him.

      Now Nask was within the airlock chamber. The officer pressed a button and the plank on which the pirate captain stood shot out until it extended beyond the transparent dome that held in the pressurized atmosphere of the ship. Lissa turned away. She saw Stephanie who had buried her face in Shika’s shoulder. The tribal girl was staring at the proceedings with wide eyes. Ash stood just beyond his sister, a tight grip on his spear and a vengeful gleam in his eyes. Lissa shuddered and averted her gaze.

      “Thus is the end of Captain Arol Nask,” Mr. Piff whispered softly.

      Lissa glanced at him. She wasn’t sure what emotion she felt exactly. The Captain had tried to sell her as an alien hors d’oeuvre, or whatever the space equivalent was. Yet, she had never seen anyone die before. Space Patrol seemed to execute justice with unnerving precision.

      “We have heard further word,” The Patrol Captain touched her shoulder as she turned, meaning to retreat below.

      “Your government appears to have not received any invitation to join the Galactic Trade Company. A message is being broadcast to the nearest Representative informing him of your new status and a visit should be forthcoming shortly.”

      Lissa Aboard

      Lissa paused at the hatchway before descending ‘tween decks. Stephanie clutching her elbow from just behind her. The alien space slaver was behind them, his ray pistol held firmly between his three rubbery fingers. He jabbed its butt into her spine to keep her moving along and Lissa stumbled, wavering for one treacherous moment above the cold metal ladder that led to the cargo hold below, until Stephanie’s tight grip on her arm steadied her. She clutched the railing and gaped at the yawning hole.

      “Get a move on,” the robot translated the captain’s growls and squeals. The bot had changed to a literal translation rather than the involved explanations he had started to give. She found it easier to understand this way, although the side comments had been useful information. Not useful enough to help me figure out what to do with this mad situation though. We’ve been kidnapped!

      “I don’t have a whole sun-turn!” The bot added for the Captain’s sake.

      Whatever that was, thought Lissa. He prodded her again.

      She peered down the long drop to where the ladder disappeared into darkness. She was pretending courage she didn’t feel, knowing from just one look into Stephanie’s face that the other girl was terrified. An alien stepped out of the gloom and peered up at them from below—it was a guard dressed in the same muted gray colors as Captain Nask, holding a second ray pistol which he waved airily in her direction while motioning for her to descend the ladder.

      Great, she thought ironically, another laser gun to point at me. Do I really seem so dangerous? I’m eleven!

      But apparently age was no guarantee of safety to these alien minds. They watched her climb below with small black eyes set deep in their green mottled skin. Captain Nask’s face had an oily gleam in the eerie artificial light of the cargo hold, and a stench of alien sweat oozed off of them into the air which her breath mask could not filter completely as she passed the guard and followed his gestures with his gun toward the far end of the hold.

      The translation robot had told her she was going down to the cargo bay. To her shock and revulsion, the ship’s cargo was not boxes of goods from various planets, nor was there a cache of strange weapons or alien technology. The corridor she stepped into was lined with the glass walls of cages—cages that held…humans.

      There was an African boy, wearing little at all but a scrap of cloth over his loins and white paint across his black cheeks, still clutching a spear in his sinewy hand. His black eyes bore into his captors with a deep hatred that made her shiver. Despite his passionate demeanor he looked little older than Lissa.

      “Oh, look!” Stephanie was pulled out of her shocked reverie. She pointed forward. In the next cage sat a Mongol boy with a haughty face. He was clothed in a thick coat of white fur and an embroidered red silk cap. The thick glass that separated them made Lissa feel she was in a museum staring at the habitats of wild animals. What had caught Stephanie’s eye and made her point was a beautiful golden eagle that sat on the boy’s wrist and mantled at them before settling down at a touch from his master.

      The boy was cross-legged on the ground, his face impassive. With his eyes averted, he studiously ignored them as though it were beneath him to grant importance to aliens, but his feathered companion was not above snapping out angrily in Nask’s direction. The Captain lumbered on, unperturbed by the hostility in the hallway.

      Nask paused before the next cage to tap the glass. Now his thick grey lips stretched wide in a grin. Lissa peered around him and saw that this cage was different—over five feet of water sat on the other side of the glass, the surface lapping slightly above her head. The water was murky and opaque—she saw nothing but seaweed waving slowly back and forth as she stared into its depths.

      “Why do you have a bunch of water?”

      “Stupid Earthling!” He made to cuff her ear but Lissa ducked away, narrowly missing his fist, “That’s not just water,” he gloated, “Look closer.”

      She strained her eyes to see through the blue-green ocean tank, and then…

      “An octopus?”

      She turned to face her alien captors, “You came all the way to Earth for a bunch of kids and a pet?”

      The alien Captain guffawed, “That’s no pet, little Earthling. That’s a highly advanced intelligent life form from one of the moons of Jupiter,” he nodded wisely toward

Скачать книгу