A Planet's Ransom Read online

  The alien stared at us, and then turned as if to walk away.

  I cleared my throat. No way was I going to let her off that easily. No. Way!

  “What?” I managed.

  She stopped. To give her credit, she stopped and she turned right back around.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked, and it was as if something inside me snapped.

  “No!” I shouted. “I beg yours. What do you mean you might still kill us? What do you mean by that?”

  I hadn’t meant to burst into tears, but I did. I was angry, and I was helpless, and if I didn’t get some answers, well, well, someone was gonna die! That…that thing had two more things beside her, and they both carried guns. Now, I know they were just stunners, but back then? Back then, I thought they were for real—and so did my entire planet.

  “What. Do. You. Mean?” I screamed, and I might have stepped right up to her, if Mitch hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  He pulled me back against his chest, and folded his arms around me, but he didn’t say a word. He just stood there, staring at her, demanding an answer without making a sound. Whatever. I saw that creature give us a long, long look, and then she sighed.

  “This time,” she said, “I will answer you. This time, and this time, alone. Next time, one of you raises a voice at one of us in anger, you will all be punished.”

  I drew a breath to tell her she meant we’d be killed, but Mitch was faster. He slapped a hand over my mouth. I didn’t like it, but it was enough to remind me I had to cool down; I had to get a grip.

  “Your world is being brought into our Federation, and you should be glad it’s us. Others would have just removed you from existence and taken it, or made you their slaves. We’ll bring you under our protection and guide your race until you can stand as a member of the Federation on your own, and then we’ll let you buy back your independence, should you desire it.”

  Have to admit, I might be young, but I’m not stupid. I glared at her, but I kept my mouth shut. Having Mitch’s hand over it helped a lot.

  “And this means your governments have to believe we mean business. We might choose incorporation, but we can also choose destruction.”

  “So, joining’s not optional?”

  Trust Verity to come up with that one.

  The alien just raised her lip in a smile.

  “No, but it sometimes takes a world a little time to realize it. Your world is taking longer than some, but it won’t take as long as others.”

  I shook my head free of Mitch’s hand.

  “So, how many have you killed so far?” I asked, and heard the creak of dryness in my tones.

  She regarded me with careful eyes, and then decided to tell me. I saw when she decided to be, at least, semi-honest.

  “Twenty.”

  Her response brought gasps of shock from around the group. They were followed by silence, but she waited, and I had to wonder how many times she’d gone through this before.

  “Were…were any of them Australian?”

  “No,” the alien said, her voice crisp. “Not yet.”

  And this time she did turn to go. I’m pretty sure there were more questions we wanted to ask, but not a single one of us called her back.

  4—THEY SHOOT THE HOSTAGES

  “Why’d you have to ask?” Callie wanted to know.

  Her face was white, but, this time, there were no tears in her eyes. And why she was questioning me, and not Su-Lynn, I don’t know. We were in the gym—again.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s happening?”

  “No… Well, yes, but not really,” Callie said, and I nearly fell off the running machine.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, but my machine beeped to let me know I’d reached the end of the session, and I got off. Time to hit the showers.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall—funny how some things don’t change between civilizations. Seems everyone who’s gone somewhere wants a way of telling how long it took. Too early for dinner, so I guessed we’d be hitting the books, again. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Actually, I couldn’t have been more right…or more wrong.

  Instead of heading to one of the classrooms, our ever-constant supervisor and her armed guards took us to a lecture theatre. Don’t get me wrong; we’d been in their lecture theatres before—best place for them to educate us on the facts of the universe, and all that kind of stuff. This time, it was a little different.

  Firstly, because this was the first time we’d been able to see any of the other kids from our school since we got put on a bus. Up until then we’d been pretty isolated from everyone else. I later found out that they’d had the same thing happen to them. That meeting in the lecture theatre was the first time we’d seen any of the friends or family who’d been at school that day.

  We mighta got real excited over just that, except that there was this feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong. There were armed aliens everywhere, and not all of them looked the way we were used to. Sure, there were plenty of yvernatch around; Earth was going to be “theirs” after all, but there were others, as well.

  I mighta got busy staring at them, except I was too busy checkin’ out the room. It had a stage at the front, and a big screen, and there was a bunch of techs playing around with the lectern, or podium, or whatever it was at one side. But what really caught my eye was the plastic on the podium floor.

  It looked like they’d spread a whole roll of it out in front of the screen, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a bad sign. Of course, I didn’t have a lot of time for thinking, because the aliens lost no time in separating five of us out of the line.

  It looked pretty random to me. We were being directed to seats, and then suddenly someone would be taken out of line and made to stand against the wall. Callie was walking just in front of me, so when one of the aliens laid a hand on her arm, I didn’t really have a choice.

  She saw them reach for her, and shrank away. She was walking with one of her besties, and they were holding hands. They’d been doing that ever since they’d arrived. Anyway, the alien just sort of lunged forward and grabbed Callie’s bicep. It started to pull her out of line, and Callie started to scream.

  Her girlfriend started to scream, and the kids nearest her grabbed hold of her, and tried to pull her out of the alien’s hands. I saw, from the expression on the yvernatch’s face—don’t give me that look; they do have expressions. Anyway, I saw from its expression that there was going to be one almighty fuss, and I could see from Callie’s reaction there was going to be a fight, so I stepped in.

  I laid a hand on the alien’s arm and told him to leave her alone, and that’s when he grabbed me. I mean What. The… Next thing I knew, I heard this “Hey!” from behind me, as Mitch weighed in, and then another “Hey” as he got pulled out of line with me, and we found ourselves standing up against the wall, next to each other, with Su-Lynn and Davo and Alicia Reed, and a couple of the other kids I hadn’t got to know, yet.

  And that’s when I realized that Callie’s not the only one to have kicked up a stink, that, all over the hall there were kids who were fighting not to be pulled out of line, kids fighting to keep their friends, kids just…and, all of a sudden, things were scary as any nightmare I’ve ever had. I reached out and grabbed Mitch’s hand.

  He was already there, his hand meeting mine half way between us. One of the aliens noticed, but didn’t try to stop us. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said it looked a little bit sad, but the look was gone before I could be sure.

  Yeah, sure, I’m sure I saw it, now. Now, I’m sure of a lot of things, but, back then, not so much.

  Anyway, when they got everyone sitting down—except for those of us they’d got standing up against a wall, the screen went live and I realized they’d organized a conference call. At first my heart gave this little hopeful skip. I’m thinking like, maybe they were going to call our parents, let us speak to them, that kind of thing, but then our prime minister came into focus, and the first group of five kids were led up onto the stage.

  I have to say, our prime minister wasn’t alone. He was standing with pretty much every political big wig I’ve ever seen making noise on the television, and a bunch of men and women in all kinds of uniforms. I think he might have been trying to make some kind of statement, but he didn’t get the chance.

  No sooner than his eyes had focused on the kids on stage than the aliens just shot them.

  They. Just. Shot. Them.

  I saw it. I couldn’t…wouldn’t…believe it, but it was as if a big cold hand just reached into my chest and turned off my heart. The way my face went tingly when the alien-she told us they might still shoot us? Yeah, I felt that spread across my body. It even wiped out the feel of Mitch’s hand squeezing mine so tight, he might actually have broken something. The politicians didn’t even have time to react.

  “That was to show you we mean business.”

  Give him credit, the prime minister was speechless. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and the aliens started talking.

  “This auditorium is filled with your children,” it said. “Your world will agree to become our subjects, or your children will die. And then we will start on the rest of you.”

  The prime minister’s mouth opened and closed a couple more times, and one of the other ministers laid a hand on his arm.

  “Do it,” she said.

  “But we have to vote…” his voice petered away, as the soldiers nearest a group of kids halfway up the auditorium, turned and shot them.

  The hall erupted into screams. Some kids even stood up.

  “Sit down and you will not be harmed,” the alien
leader ordered, and some did.

  I didn’t believe him.

  “Sit down, or you will be shot!” he said and more kids landed their bums on seats; some were pulled down by those nearest them.

  The ones still standing were shot. I heard weeping, and felt hot, silent tears on my cheeks. The rest of me started to shake. Mitch’s hand was crushing mine, and I knew he was as scared and horrified and angry as I was—but neither of us moved. We didn’t dare; the aliens closest had taken aim, and we didn’t want them to pull their triggers. The prime minister and his ministers had gone pale, their faces frozen in horror.

  “Surrender your part of the world to us,” the alien repeated, “and the rest of your children will be safe.”

  “But—” the prime minister said, and that’s as far as he got, before the soldiers nearest us, fired.

  5—EXILED

  I was pretty surprised to wake up, again. Not so impressed to find myself alone in a box. Even less impressed to discover it moving, and not in what I considered a good way.

  For a moment, I thought I was being buried alive, and then I realized it wasn’t that kind of box, and it wasn’t that kind of movement. No, this kind of moving was the kind of moving you get when some ass…idiot sticks you in a box and fires you into some planet’s atmosphere.

  Not that I knew that at the time. Back then, I thought I was in some sort of crazy go-kart box that was having a race all on its own. I wondered where Mitch was, and closed my eyes, hoping this would be some kind of stupid dream, and everything would be back to normal when I opened them again.

  Of course, if it was, there’d be no Mitch, and I’d still have a ton of homework to do, but it would be better. Anything would be better than this. I opened my eyes, again, anyway.

  Yup, I was still in a box. Still being shaken around in spite of the harness and padded walls holding me in place. Still in a box…

  And then a screen lit up just above my head, and that alien was right there, right in my face.

  “Greetings,” she said. “I can see you’re pleased to see me.”

  Given that I was anything but, I figured that must be an alien joke. Sure enough, I saw her lip lift in a lizardy smile. And then her face went all serious.

  “Your country agreed to become a vassal state.”

  Sure, I thought, right. Whatever that is. As if she could read my mind, the alien explained.

  “They surrendered.”

  Yeah, well that made sense. I wondered…

  “How many?” I asked, meaning how many did they have to shoot, and she understood exactly what I wanted to know.

  “Your group was the last.”

  I managed a smile at that, but it was wobbly, and I could feel my face crumbling as tears heated my eyes. She waited, while I wiped the tears away and pulled my face together, watching as I discovered I couldn’t roll away from her.

  “When…” I stopped, too scared to finish the question.

  The alien knew, and finished it anyway, and I figured she must have done this a lot.

  “When will you get to see your parents?” she asked, and I jerked my head in a single nod.

  “You won’t,” she said, and I felt my face do its crying thing, again.

  “Why?”

  “Because there are other countries who have not yet surrendered. If they know we don’t really kill the young, they won’t comply.”

  Comply. It’s a good word. I wanted to cry, and scream, and beg. I wanted to go back to my mum and dad, right then. I wanted to know if I’d ever get to see my family, again, if I’d get to see my friends, my classmates, Mitch. There’s so much I needed to ask that I didn’t know where to begin.

  She watched my face, waiting. She probably saw the jumble and tumble of things I wanted to ask, rolling across my face, and she waited until I found a question I could put words around. I wondered how many others had asked it before me.

  “What now?”

  Again, that smile, but quieter and just a little sad.

  “Now, you will work on surviving. The world we have dropped you on is not a bad place to start a new life.”

  A world. A new life? It wasn’t what I wanted, and I didn’t know what to say.

  “We’ve left caches of equipment for you to find, and the pod has limited supplies.”

  My mouth went dry. I was being dropped on a world where my pod had the supplies?

  “Isn’t there anyone else there?”

  “Just the others your world thinks we have shot. You will have to find them.”

  It was beginning to sound like one of those computer games, only worse. I mean, I knew there were some games where you woke up from being dead, but one where you’ve got to go colonize a whole world by yourself? The whole “find friends, find stuff, build a life” thing—yeah, I’ve seen plenty of games like that. Whatev’s. But, for real? I felt like a rat being dropped into a maze.

  “Are you coming back?” I asked.

  Something shifted across her face that I didn’t quite catch. I know I said they had expressions, but I didn’t say I was super good at reading them. When she answered, she had her professional face back on—the one that didn’t give anything away. And she sidestepped the question.

  “You will not be alone,” she told me.

  I wanted to protest that I didn’t know anything about the world, to ask how I would survive, but she kept on talking.

  “The training lessons will start, soon,” she said. “I suggest you pay attention. Once you land, your power is limited to what you can recharge.”

  And then she was gone. Just like that. One minute, she was on the screen, looking down at me, and the next, the screen had gone blank. I hated her. I hated her so much all I wanted to do was wring her lizardy neck. I wanted to punch something, but I couldn’t, so I just yelled, a wordless yell, one that ended when the screen above me lit up.

  I stopped screaming, and glared at it. This had better be good.

  And it was. I learned what I had in the pod, what to look for when I landed, and what to stay away from—and whether or not I should use my landing site as a permanent base. Apparently, there were flood plains down there, and our landings were randomized.

  Fantastic.

  I was told what plants I could eat, and what plants to avoid, how to use the simple side-arm I’d find in the lock-box, and how to recharge it, how to use the communicator…which, of course, meant I had to find another communicator to tune it to. I was betting there was another way, but I left that as a puzzle for later; the training film hadn’t finished, and the last part was a doozy.

  You see, the last part was where they told us what this world was all about, and it was pretty devastating. I didn’t like it one little bit. These aliens might not kill the children of any of the worlds they conquer, but that was a secret they couldn’t let out into the universe, so they dumped them here…or on one of the other worlds they kept tucked away for just that purpose.

  And how did they stop the different groups from meeting everyone?

  Well, that was simple; they dumped them in ‘geographically isolated’ regions like different islands or continents, or remote valleys or mountain plateaus. And did they tell each different group if another one was sharing the world? Not until one of the group came within five miles of the member of another group.

  Personally, I thought that was a bit too late. Twenty miles might be safer—especially in hilly regions. After all, I could see across a ten-mile rift valley—and I could probably hit what I aimed at on the other side. Bet they hadn’t thought of that, then.

  They’d set us down on the fifteenth world to be used for such a purpose.

  This didn’t mean the other worlds were full, which was my first thought. It just meant they thought we needed to be set down in one of the more remote regions, of one of the more remote worlds. See, the worlds that comply faster, are thought to be ‘gentler’, ‘safer’ peoples so their ‘dead’ get sent to worlds that have groups which are already settled. They still have to find them, but there are communities they can join that they don’t have to build themselves.

  The worlds that don’t surrender as easily, especially those that still have lots of different countries and governments, like ours, well, their ‘dead’ get sent to the wilder worlds, where they have to set up their own civilizations. Personally, I think it’s a not-so-subtle way of getting their children to learn to get along. And, if that was the case, then they didn’t know us humans very well, then, did they?