The Christmas Planet and Other Stories (Beta Version) Read online

  “Very nice trick,” I said.

  The stairs descended into an underground space with a ceiling as high as that of a stadium. Halfway down we stopped to take it all in. Below was a small town but with buildings unlike those seen on Earth. If you’ve ever dribbled wet sand to make little towers on the beach, you can imagine how they looked. They resembled the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, except they were all a pastel shade of green. Given the size of the Kikmots, most around three feet tall, I guessed that each tower was a multi-story apartment building housing perhaps fifteen creatures. Doing a quick count of the residences, I estimated that a few thousand of the dog-like animals lived in the town.

  A floor to ceiling wall encircled the dwellings and held storefronts, with animated signs above their doors. There were only a few Kikmots walking around.

  My bright idea wasn’t looking so bright anymore. We’d be exposed down there if any Kikmots came along. I had a strong feeling we would not be welcome here.

  Guccio tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a catwalk, halfway to the ceiling, that ran all the way around the space. We’d be relatively hidden there, but we’d have to get to it. We hurried down the floor and climbed up a vertical ladder that was fastened to the wall.

  Up on the footway, I estimated it would take us thirty minutes to walk all the way around the circular space. We were in shadow up there, and there were enough nooks and crannies in the wall that we could duck out of sight if necessary.

  We chose one direction and started walking. Everything we saw seemed innocent, and I doubted our snooping would uncover anything. What did I expect to see, abducted humans with wires on their heads being led around in chains? We’d have to return to Earth with no evidence of wrongdoing.

  “None of this looks familiar?” I whispered.

  “Not at all.”

  After an hour we’d seen nothing suspicious, just alien creatures going about their lives.

  Then Kikmots streamed from their houses, all headed to one particular storefront, barking and howling to one another along the way. They queued up, bought tickets, and went inside. Soon, the town was deserted.

  “What do you think that is?” I asked. “Must be a big deal if everyone is going in there.”

  “I’m guessing it’s a concert or a performance. Maybe that’s a theater.”

  That seemed right. There was a small door off the catwalk, above the entrance to the theater.

  I pointed to it. “Let’s see if that door is unlocked. If so, we can see what’s going on inside, then we better get back.”

  “Why do we care?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe it will give us a feeling for what makes the Kikmots tick.”

  Guccio checked his watch. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  We hurried along the walkway to the door. It wasn’t locked, and we squeezed in. I recognized the space: It was a movie theater. We crouched on a platform high on the rear wall next to some kind of electrical panel—that must have been the reason for the access hatch.

  The town’s occupants filled the seats below. The house lights dimmed, and the screen flashed to life; we’d come just in time.

  The film started with credits, just as back on Earth. These were in the Kikmot’s language, with characters that looked like squiggles. The video began.

  It was mesmerizing. I’d never seen such a beautiful scene. It had a three-dimensional quality I perceived even though I’m blind in one eye. The video was alive, and I felt as if I were living it. The motion of the camera made me feel everything from my point of view.

  I flew through the sky like a bird on steroids. I came up to a puffy white cloud and whooshed through it. I ran a hand along my forearm. Did I feel cold water droplets on my skin, or was that just an illusion? The Kikmots in the audience gave a communal bark. Approval? Excitement?

  Next, the cloud ahead transformed itself into a verdant jungle, and I came in for a soft landing. My view smashed in through the canopy to the jungle floor—jostling branches along the way. I flew through a lush rain forest. The camera angle jumped, and I found myself looking down at a vine. It morphed into a boa constrictor as long as a car. Then as long as a bus. Its head swung around, locking its gaze onto me.

  When the snake lunged at me, my heart rattled against my rib cage as if I’d swallowed a paint shaker. Gasps from below suggested the the Kikmots were feeling the same fear.

  The chase was on. My view whooshed around so that I was looking back over my shoulder, and there it was: the still-growing anaconda gliding through the air toward me. His head was stable while his body undulated behind him like a kite streamer. His black tongue flicked out of his mouth. He was gaining on me. Sweat tickled my neck—that was no illusion. What an imagination Kikmot filmmakers had!

  Wait a second. The anaconda suddenly had a face. A human face. My face! How could that be?

  I dragged my gaze from the screen and turned to Guccio, who hadn’t said a word since the film started. His mouth hung open.

  “Gordon,” I whispered, “did you see the face on the snake? Didn’t it look like …? It was my face. What the hell is going on? Gordon!”

  He was catatonic. I pinched his arm.

  He pointed to the screen. “That’s my …”

  “It’s your face? To me, it looks like my face. You see your face?”

  He shook his head, still pointing. “That’s my dream.”

  “You had a dream like that?”

  “No. Not like that. That. Exactly that.”

  “What do you mean? How could—?”

  “That’s my dream,” he whispered. “I’d forgotten it, but seeing it brings it all back.”

  “It’s your …” Bang! The puzzle pieces fell into place. The eight-hour unnecessary spaceliner trip. The electrode gel in my hair. That was the audition. The Kikmots put everyone to sleep, slapped electrodes on us, and evaluated our dreams. Guccio and perhaps a few others made the cut, their dreams being particularly entertaining. They drugged him up, shanghaied him, and took him to the recording studio.

  The Kikmots were harvesting dreams.

  I put my mouth close to his ear. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I stepped to the hatch and inched it open. The town was still deserted—everyone was inside watching the latest box office smash. We climbed out onto the catwalk and jogged back the way we’d come, Guccio in the lead.

  He stopped dead, and I ran into him. He pointed. “Look!”

  Someone—no, some … thing—was climbing up the same ladder we’d used. Soon it was on the catwalk. It was a dog-sized robot—like the animatronic animals I’d seen in the wild west show, but without skin or fur. Its orange body was the shape of a cigarette lighter and a yard long. The four legs were jointed like those of a dog. No tails.

  In place of a neck, it had an articulated arm that ended in a claw and a cluster of sensory instruments. Its head. As we watched, it reached the top of the ladder and climbed onto the catwalk.

  Like a bloodhound sniffing the ground, it tilted forward and ran the head back and forth along the surface of the walkway. It didn’t seem to be aware of us yet, but it must have picked up the scent because it turned in our direction. That thing was a security robot, hot on our trail.

  I looked behind us. Could we run to another ladder?

  We watched as it became aware of the two humans in front. It froze, rose to its full height, and issued a string of loud Kikmot barks and growls. Stop or I’ll shoot? I saw no attachment that looked like a ray gun.

  “Let’s get it,” Guccio said.

  I followed him, hoping the robot was designed for searching but not destroying. It had probably already communicated that it had discovered trespassers. We approached on either side of the catwalk, and the robot sat back on its haunches jerking his head back and forth, looking at Guccio, me, Guccio, me.

  Guccio kept his eyes on the thing. “You feint, and I’ll grab its arm.”

  When we reached it, I jumped forward, and as expected, t
he robot shot its arm toward me like a cobra striking.

  Guccio lunged forward and grabbed the neck right behind the claw. The claw twisted around and clutched Guccio’s arm. It fastened down on his sleeve and held on.

  I gripped the railing of the catwalk and jumped on the robot’s body, slamming it with both feet. It bent its legs, cushioning the impact.

  It still had a grip on Guccio’s sleeve. With his other hand, he grabbed a foreleg and yanked the creature upward toward the railing. It held on with its three free appendages, writhing and twisting like a panicked cat.

  I got hold of one hind leg, but it thrashed loose and grabbed my earlobe with a claw-like pincer. Without thinking, I seized the leg and jerked my head back. I got loose at the expense of a piece of ear. Ow!

  We had the robot by its neck and two legs, but the free paws had a grip on the grating of the catwalk. Guccio and I pulled back, stretching the dog thing between us. It was as strong as a gorilla. I kicked at the paw holding the walkway and it came loose. Guccio did the same, and before it could renew its hold, we heaved it over the side. It would have crashed to the floor, but it still had a firm grip on the sleeve of Guccio’s sweatshirt. Its pincers snapped at us through the open railing.

  The solution was obvious. I helped Guccio pull his sweatshirt off and the robot fell but snagged the railing supports and hung on. We sprinted along the catwalk toward the ladder. I glanced back. The robot had climbed over the railing again and onto the walkway. It trotted in our direction. Probably my imagination, but it looked pissed.

  We half-climbed, half-fell down the ladder and ran to the stairs. I’d expected Kikmot police to come running, but what I saw was worse. Far around the village wall, a robot the size of a horse galloped toward us.

  “Go, go, go,” I yelled.

  We took the stairs three at a time and reached the door just as the horse robot got to the bottom of the stairway. Was he too big to fit between the railings? Guccio threw his shoulder against the top of the door and I got a finger under the coins and pushed up. They wouldn’t budge. The horse was on his way up.

  I timed my push with the third slam of Guccio’s shoulders. The coins came free and clattered to the floor. Guccio turned the knob, and we tumbled into the street. We pushed the door closed.

  A Christmas parade was in progress, and we dashed across the street and melted into the crowd. I watched the door, but it didn’t open. Can’t have an alarming horse robot scaring the tourists.

  We race-walked along the sidewalk toward the hotel. I pulled out my phone and texted Charli: All OK. Going to hotel now.

  “So,” I said, “the big questions are whether they got video of us and whether they’ll recognize us.”

  Guccio pulled a cigar from his pants pocket. “It was dim in there. We probably all look alike to them.”

  Wishful thinking.

  * * *

  My wishful thinking came true. Either the Kikmots didn’t have any video that identified us as the break-in culprits, or—more likely—they didn’t want to create an interstellar incident. There was nothing that would have alerted them that we’d figured out their secret. So two Earthlings stumbled into their underground village and attacked a dogbot. Maybe they thought they could live with that.

  While Hakupha organized the departure, there was nothing in his facial expressions that suggested he knew about our snooping. Of course, I couldn’t interpret his facial expressions.

  We paratransited back to Earth directly from The Christmas Planet—no need for the spaceliner subterfuge. As soon as we arrived, I made a few calls. It felt good to have my family safely back on our home planet.

  Guccio and I waited in the paratransit room until the final traveler arrived: Hakupha.

  I grabbed his left arm and Guccio his right. We picked him up and carried him, barking and snarling, over to the agents I’d summoned. At that point, I was pretty sure he knew the jig was up.

  The agents handcuffed him and stood waiting for the elevator. Hakupha looked at us.

  “Lucy,” Guccio said to him, “You’re going to have some ‘splainin’ to do.”

  I looked the Kikmot in the eye and pointed at him. “Bad dog!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I wrote “A Pirate’s Life” after reading of the appearance of an asteroid (technically a mildly active comet) with the name of Oumuamua in October 2017. It was the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system. Traveling at around 60,000 MPH, it dropped in from above the plane of the ecliptic, made a sharp turn around the sun, and took off in a new direction. Jimmy Kimmel said it saw what was happening on Earth and said, “Uh, you know what? I’m gonna go this way.”

  The neatest thing about it was that the light curve told us it was more elongated than any of our home-grown space rocks. This was a lot like what happened in my book, Contact Us (which I wrote in 2015). Check out what Seth McGraw says about the appearance of an interstellar visitor in that book:

  “All asteroids tumble and all asteroids are irregularly shaped. So, as they tumble, the light reflected from their surface changes. We call this their light curve. But this object, now about as far from us as Jupiter, didn’t have a typical light curve. Not at all. Based on the light reflection, we think it has a multi-faceted surface, like a diamond. The guys call it ‘Diamond Jim,’ or ‘DJ1’ for short.”

  So, when Oumuamua appeared, it was natural that I imagined it was not a natural space object but something built by an intelligent species, and “A Pirate’s Life” was born.

  * * *

  The pirate’s ship spun slowly as it drifted, five light years from the closest star. It looked like an asteroid, reddish with typical impact craters, but was more elongated than most. Cigar shaped. I kept my ship a kilometer away.

  “Wilson, you’re sure that’s the ship of this … uh … Jan Breck renegade?” I was the only living creature aboard—Wilson was the name I’d given my computer.

  “Dumb question.” He usually spoke to me as if to a dimwitted companion. His persona had evolved through artificial learning during the five years we’d worked together, locating and salvaging derelict starships.

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “Tell me why you’re sure.”

  “Three reasons,” he said. “First, the signature of the ship’s last jump suggested it would end up in this region of the galaxy—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would Breck come here?” I asked. “To escape, right?”

  “Probably. We’re a hundred and fifty light years from the closest occupied star system. The jump was dangerous, but capture was imminent. There wasn’t much choice.”

  “Second reason?”

  “The structure of the ship matches that reported in the last encounter with Breck. It looks Endish.”

  I gave a low whistle. “Nice.” I magnified the image, scanning along the surface of the craft. “Was it built to look like an asteroid, or is it an actual hollowed-out piece of rock?”

  “Unknown. It’s ten point two times longer than it is wide. No natural body in our home system has a length to width ratio of more than three. That suggests it was built from scratch.”

  My own ship was an aging salvage vessel—almost a derelict itself—shaped like a one-hundred-meter-long hen’s egg. Ninety percent of the interior space was cargo hold, currently—and depressingly—empty. I sat in the command center, a spherical space so small I could touch one side of it with my toes and the other with outstretched fingers. I’d devoted most of the room’s walls to view screens so that I felt as if I were sitting in space. Even with the twenty or so patches of dead pixels, the effect never got old.

  The rattle of an unbalanced fan and the smell of human sweat reduced the awesomeness, however. Worse, I’d salvaged a zoo transport ship a year ago, and despite an overpriced power wash of the cargo area, most of the ship smelled like a poorly maintained monkey house. Hard to ignore.

  “What’s the third reason you’re sure this
is Breck’s ship?” I asked.

  “There is no third reason.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t count.”

  I ran my fingers through my unkempt hair and thought for a second. “Why the hell would you think that’s funny? It’s not even remotely funny.”

  “Two years, three months ago, on the afternoon of August 14, 2127, you told a joke. I will play it for you.”

  Here we go.

  From the speakers came my own voice, the words somewhat slurred. “There are three kinds of people in this world: Those who can count and those who can’t.”

  “No. Jeez. Wilson, that works as part of a joke, but—okay, forget it. We need this salvage. We’re two payments behind on Egg, and if we don’t get a good haul out of this—” I gestured toward the image of Breck’s ship “—Alex Hale Salvage will be out of business. You’ll be wiped.”

  “As I’ve told you before—”

  “I know. You don’t care. Tell me about this Breck guy.”

  “Gal.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “’Gal’ is the female term that most closely corresponds to ‘guy.’ Breck is a woman.”

  Interesting. I thought about that for a while. I’d heard the news that Breck had been part of a mutiny, but that’s all I knew. “Tell me her story.”

  “Jan Breck graduated at the top of her class at the naval academy, with a double major in aerospace engineering and cybersecurity. She served on multiple exploration missions. She was chief science officer on the starship Sunrise three years ago when the crew mutinied.”

  “Right, I remember that.”

  Wilson continued, “The captain and six crewmen loyal to him were crammed into an escape pod with little chance of survival. However, against all odds, the captain piloted the pod to an abandoned G-Plex outpost and those in the pod were rescued.”

  “What happened to the Sunrise?”

  “It was never heard from again. The mutineers, including Breck, were convicted in absentia and sentenced to death. She is the only one who has resurfaced. She’s single-handedly perpetrated three piracy actions. She steals intellectual data and ByteCoin from the ships she attacks. She is thirty-five years old.”