Attack of the Spider Bots (12 page)

The creature looked at them like they were monsters. Probably thinks he's been abducted by aliens, thought the ensign, which, come to think of it, is exactly what's happened.

The creature began waving his weapon and talking to them in a language with a lot of words that ended with sss.

Captain MacIntyre held out his hands in the universal “calm down” gesture and started using hand signals — the “me Tarzan, you Jane” approach. Lieutenant Bruzelski joined the game, throwing in all kinds of weird gestures and expressions. The alien seemed to calm down when they got his name — Weenoh — out of him.

All at once, Commander Ives slapped himself in the forehead and said, “The universal translator — I forgot all about it.” He wheeled his chair over to it and began adjusting the controls. “Keep him talking.” A wild combination of hand signals and words continued for awhile until Ives gave them all ear phones and they heard the creature's voice saying, “Dumkoff! Ich liebe an der — ”

“German — drat it!” Ives griped. He banged the box.

“Bang Dang,” the alien's voice now said in Chinese.

Commander Ives hit the box three more times before they finally heard him say, “%$#$@&^*^*!” A lot of words in English that we can't print.

After some discussion, the Star-Fighters learned that the creature was upset that they had ruined his comet-surfing equipment. He promised that his parents would sue the dickens out of them. It would even be worse, he said, if they didn't take him home immediately. All of this was said along with a lot of hissing and spitting.

Ives guessed that he was the equivalent of a teenaged human with a major attitude problem.

“Where is home?” the captain asked him.

“It's that ice-covered moon,” Weenoh said, pointing to the lower left corner of the view screen.

“Captain!” said Bruzelski, “Do you see what I'm seeing?”

The Star-Fighters suddenly responded like they'd seen a ghost. The ensign's eyes widened when he saw a space platform dangling just above and to the right of the moon, like a toy hanging from a string.

“Yes, Lieutenant, we're back at the space platform. Change course, Commander Ives, toward that moon,” ordered the captain.

“Aye, aye, sir,” said the commander.

They continued to toss questions at the young fur ball as the blue-white moon grew in the view screen. Weenoh relaxed and started chatting away. They learned that surfing a comet wasn't unusual for the teenagers of his home. Comets were fairly common in this sector of this solar system. The people had personal force fields that allowed them to bounce off the flying boulders.

As they skimmed down into the moon's atmosphere, alarms began to sound. A shadow suddenly enveloped the ship.

“Ready with those weapons, Ensign?” asked the captain.

“Wait a minute,” said Bruzelski. “It's just a white bird.”

“A very large bird,” echoed Commander Ives. Then another one whisked by.

When a third giant bird joined them, Weenoh's eyes grew into oblong saucers, and his hissing sounds were translated into words like “dead meat” and “crow bait.”

“Get us out of here, Commander Ives,” the captain ordered.

“Battle stations!” he said as an alarm wailed. “Parker, we don't want to shoot unless we have to.”

Ives took the ship into a steep corkscrew dive. The birds, however, dived right along with them.

Ghoulie the kid scanned his memory of movie scenes for defensive ideas.
A canyon — that's what I need. I can weave
through and make the birds crash into the canyon walls.

But all he could see were a bunch of icy buttes on the surface, bumping up into the sky like so many frozen smoke stacks. The commander shrugged and began weaving around and through them.

“Oooh,” Bruzelski warbled as she began to wobble with dizziness. The captain grabbed a table but still kept weaving around.

Unfortunately, Ives rounded one butte to see a frozen ice shelf hanging between two buttes dead ahead. He sent the ship into another dive to avoid the shelf but ended up plowing into the snow-bound turf.

“Aiiiiiiiiiii” yelled everyone onboard like a heavy-metal band. Weenoh dived for the floor, letting his weapon careen across the room.

One bird crashed into the shelf with an ear-shattering screech, but the other was still coming! Visions of becoming a birdie snack swirled through the commander's mind as the ship skidded sideways through the snow. An ice cave suddenly loomed in the path of their slide. Ives slammed his eyes shut as the ship skimmed between huge icicles that guarded the entrance like giant teeth.

15

Escape from Ice Planet Zero

At that moment Commander Ives considered the possibility that the cave might not be a cave. He'd seen that in a movie somewhere. In the meantime, though, the remaining bird was trying to reach them through the barrier of ice “teeth.”

The noise of its squawking was almost as scary as the fact that its claws and beak were getting awfully close. Ives wiped sweat off his brow. How can a guy sweat when he's surrounded by ice?

Suddenly, one of those giant icicles fell, spearing a beak and a claw at the same time. The resulting screech was off the decibel chart! Bruzelski switched off the speakers to rescue their ears. Still squawking bloody murder, the bird flapped its wings, shaking more icicles into falling, and flew away.

“Commander Ives,” shouted the captain, “get us out of here before some other life form thinks we're below it on the food chain.”

Commander Ives fired the thrusters, and they shot out of the cave. He shifted the monitor for one last look at the cave. What was that — a tongue licking out after them? Ives shook his head and blinked. It couldn't be, could it?

“Ives, watch where you're going,” shouted the lieutenant. The commander switched his view in time to “shoot the gap” between two buttes.

“Keep a wary eye out for those bird things,” ordered the captain, “and keep closer to the surface.” He picked up Weenoh's weapon. It looked more like a cell phone than a gun. Then he turned to their unwilling visitor. “Weenoh, if you want us to take you home, you'll need to update our guidance system.”

Weenoh just shrugged his furry shoulders and pointed ahead and to the right.

“That's what I like — precision,” muttered Commander Ives, turning the ship in line with Weenoh's finger.

“Hey, take a look — civilization!” exclaimed Ensign Parker, pointing toward a building that looked like several igloos all patched together. “What is that?” he asked their passenger.

“Fish farm,” Weenoh said. “There are many underground lakes where fish have survived the ice age.”

“Ice age? Do you mean your home wasn't always an ice world?” asked Bruzelski.

“Of course,” Weenoh said, rolling his eyes at what he apparently thought was a stupid question. “Our world was once covered with plants and animals. But that was many thousand eolsss ago.”

The translator didn't know what to do with the word eolsss.

Young Ensign Parker suddenly appeared next to the commander. “Commander Ives, do you realize how many years he's talking about?” he asked in a hushed voice. “My instruments indicate that the planet their moon circles has a very large orbit around its sun.”

Ives glanced at the numbers and his eyes grew large. “I wondered how that moon could be so cold next to a super-heated planet and with such a big sun in the sky.”

“Me too,” said Parker. “That big sun is actually very, very far away!”

“Which means that it's not your everyday red star,” the commander added.

“Nope, not even a red giant,” said the ensign. “It's a one-in-a-billion red supergiant!”

Giant as in colossal
, Ghoulie exclaimed in his head
.
It was hard enough to visualize a giant star. Those were big enough to swallow earth's sun and the inner planets almost up to earth without so much as a belch. That's a waistline of nearly 300 million miles! But a supergiant could be big enough to swallow the solar system all the way to Jupiter!

“According to my calculations,” said the commander as his hands flew over the instrument panel, “one orbit of this planet and its moon takes a little more than a thousand earth years!”

“That's my home straight ahead,” Weenoh suddenly interrupted them through the translator box.

Looks of amazement were on every face. Ahead of them was a city. A large palace with towers built upon towers dominated the center. Around it were buildings of every size and shape — all made of ice. There were ice Castles, domed buildings, and ice skyscrapers with soaring spires that pierced the clouds. But they weren't all white like you might expect. Most were multicolored and semi-transparent. Add to these the nearly transparent ribbons that swirled around and through all these buildings and you had a crystal city right out of a fairy tale.

Suddenly, two fireballs streaked by on either side of the ship. The words, “Ichnesss basiness speeleepluss comoraotoss maronuss,” blared in their communications system. Two speedy aircraft were on either side of their ship.

Never fails. Somebody always has to get huffy, thought the commander.

“Redirect the signal through the translator,” said the captain, and Lieutenant Bruzelski made the adjustments.

“Please identify,” said a voice in the speaker. “Passage over the city is restricted.”

Captain MacIntyre looked at Weenoh and said, “We are visitors, returning one of your citizens to his home. We mean you no harm. I am turning the communicator over to your citizen who will identify our destination for you.”

The captain handed his communicator to Weenoh and nodded for him to speak.

He spoke words they could not understand, but the translator picked up, “I am Weenoh of the house of Sereniusss in sector 5C northwest.”

“Safe passage is granted,” said the voice through the translator after a moment's pause. “But follow our lead so that we may monitor air traffic for you.”

“Nothing like a friendly little escort,” said Commander Ives, not really believing there was anything friendly about it. Still his eyes grew large as they flew above freeways crammed with motorized snow sleds and other sleek vehicles.

“It's amazing how you adapted to the change in climate,” Ensign Parker said to their visitor.

“Our teachers say that our civilization almost collapsed when waves of panic drove people to riot and revolt.”

“I can imagine,” said Parker. “How did your people manage to survive?”

“New leaders grew up who drew upon faith that God had not abandoned them and would provide a way,” said Weenoh. “I had a test on ancient history two days ago, and I'm pretty sure I aced it. Anyway, driven by that faith, ‘ people in every profession poured all their resources into adapting their civilization for a colder climate.' That's a quote. I'm sure I got it right. We found new energy sources and improved the older ones. I put in more details about that for extra credit.”

“But the lakes and rivers and forests — all the animals — it must have been hard to give them up,” said the Lieutenant.

“Yes, we have books and movies and songs and poems about such things. But our forefathers finally accepted the belief that God was leading them to a new dream. We have plenty of wildlife. It's just a different kind of wildlife. We have beautiful buildings. They're just made differently.”

“Some scientists want us to repair the space station,” said Weenoh. “It is very old — built by the civilization before the ice age. Last eolsss, though, it was voted down because of the cost.”

Eolsss can't be the same thing as a year, thought Commander Ives. Maybe it's the time it takes their moon to revolve around the planet.

“I think it would have been really eeeechinoyiass,” added the fur ball.

That caused another glitch in the translator. Bruzelski said, “Cool — I think he means it would be really cool . . . or maybe hot in their case,” she added with a shrug.

There was no open space large enough for the ship to land, but they were able to “beam” Weenoh down into his street.

They'd never tried beaming before, the Ghoulie within the commander suddenly realized. Back in the tree, it was just a plywood elevator lifted by a pulley. But, like everything else, it worked differently during one of their adventures.

Luckily, Weenoh had become much friendlier and no longer threatened that he would get his parents to sue them. Just when everything looked like their trip was going to end up hunky-dory and they were preparing to rocket back to space, a sky full of aircraft blocked their escape. Then they were ordered to follow their air escort and land at the nearest military base.

Well, it's probably what would happen on earth if aliens suddenly dropped in for a little chat, thought the captain. All kinds of diplomats, doctors, and scientists were probably gathering to dissect and study them. Just what they needed — a little vacation in a bubbly test tube. “We appreciate the invitation,” he said. “That comet skiing sounds like a lot of fun, but — ”