Young Writers Society

The crew dashed through the shipping sector, with Crane in the lead, snarling and leaping and scaring people out of their path. Somewhere in the mayhem, Ellipse had shoved Focci and one duffle bag into Tejal’s lap. Crane gripped the other in his jaw.

They reached the dock quickly. Ellipse had guessed right about its proximity. With a long, exhilarating drift (Tejal’s wheels needed better steering, seriously), the kids crashed into the large dock holding both the Conics and the Ink and scrambled to pick themselves off the metal floor. Crane, with all of his feline grace, had made the turn and stop with much less fanfare, and already had unlocked the Ink and begun lowering the boarding ramp.

Ellipse leapt back into action the moment the ramp hit the ground. She rolled Focci back onto his stomach and shoved Tejal up the ramp, breaths coming in great heaves and too-short exhalations. Her muscles burned.

Crane helped Focci up the ramp with a bit of nipping and growling, and the moment the siren collapsed into the Ink’s body, a white streak zipped into the dock, alone. Shell’s tail whirled, and he yowled something that Ellipse guessed was a warning.

Grimacing, Tejal dumped his duffle bag on the floor. “The earthling bounty hunter went back to his ship. We might be looking at a dogfight.”

“What did he say?” Focci asked, gills flapping about in search of water.

“Aerial combat might be a thing that happens today,” Ellipse told him. She watched as Shell pressed a green button to close the ramp and Crane disappeared into a further chamber of the ship.

Focci propped himself up immediately. “Ask Tejal about the piloting system on this ship.”

The boys really ought to have brought out the tablet, but Ellipse figured she could translate for a bit. She raised her voice as the dock’s main doors rumbled shut and relayed Focci’s question to Tejal.

“Huh?” Tejal squinted for a moment, and then his face cleared. Ellipse heard the hiss of air draining from their dock and felt her feet lift almost imperceptibly from the floor. “Oh! Oh, I see. It’s set up for my parents, but I have a lot of the Conics’s operating system backed up. We could definitely pull this off.”

Clueless about the understanding that had just been reached, Ellipse translated directly as best she could.

Focci grinned, all his sharp canines showing, and whacked his tail on the floor, propelling him forwards and up, through the doorway where Crane had gone earlier. Tejal followed soon after, jumping from his chair and fishing his magnetic mini-grappling-hook out from his pockets. After a short moment spent grimacing at the mess they had all left—someone would need to strap down the floating wheelchair eventually—Ellipse figured she might as well join them and see what they were up to. She pushed off the floor and dove through the doorway.

The Ink was a tight ship. She was built like a sports car, with wide-grained blue wood from some conifer-like species on Mao placed tastefully over the interior surfaces. Chrome mouldings joined the floor and wall. Ellipse felt almost bad for touching anything, but she had to for the sake of propulsion.

A small hole had been cut into the hall on either wall, and each led into a cramped room with a bed. Ellipse assumed Tejal slept in the room with the green-on-black binary-code-print comforter. She liked the Ink. It was not nearly as spacious or colorful as the Conics, but the Mao wood lent an alien hominess that Ellipse knew she would not have appreciated had she not come here of her own volition.

She found everyone else in the cockpit, at the end of the short hallway. Focci’s tail swished back and forth above the doorway, and Tejal floated by the ceiling with a halo of tools and wires, already snapping off the back panel of his tablet.

“What is happening?” Ellipse asked.

“We’re loading your pilot interface into the Ink in case we need to do something reckless,” Tejal replied. He snapped a wire onto something inside of his tablet.

Surely Tejal’s parents were better pilots. Scrunching her face, Ellipse glanced over at the dashboard.

The dash looked much like the rest of the ship’s interior, all smooth, carved wood and clean metal. The lights glittered in a consistent pastel blue, and Ellipse wondered if Focci saw them all as different shades, or if they really were all the same. She could not remember exactly how gato eyes worked, but they were not the cone system that earthlings and sirens had.

Crane and Shell hovered over the dash, paws and tails constantly running over and flicking switches. They partially blocked the view out of the large, glass window beyond, but Ellipse could still see the space station against the backdrop of stars and black, empty space. Brightly colored dots, probably other ships, zipped to and fro around the station’s exterior.

She noticed a blindingly orange dot that grew larger the longer she looked at it. Was it coming for them, or was the ship just headed past them?

A low snarl ripped through the cockpit, and Ellipse flinched. She pulled back into the doorway to watched as Crane leaned towards the window. His tail curled down and wrapped around the handle of the joystick, and Ellipse felt her stomach turn as the view dropped toward earth.

“Get on the dashboard, Ellipse” Tejal said. He passed the tablet to Focci, who jumped right into coding. “We’re about ready to switch interfaces.”

Shrinking further into the doorway, Ellipse sent him a suspicious glare. “Why exactly am I going to pilot us?”

“Because you don’t have good flying habits. Now scoot. I think that other ship has grapplers.” No one had guns in space except militaries and unlicensed ships. Besides, no good bounty hunter would shoot down someone they were supposed to bring in alive.

“What do good flying habits have to do with anything?” Ellipse grumbled. She inserted herself between the gato and took a closer look at the dashboard. All the buttons had everything written in the pictorial gato script, and Ellipse figured she could guess well enough what all of them were for. A large screen in the center showed the view from the back of the ship, and yes, the orange ship was trailing after them.

Shell purred something.

“The plan is to fly by the ISS and weave around all the incoming and outgoing ships,” Tejal said. He prodded at an exposed wire in the open panel. “You’ll stay on the joystick until we get through the asteroid field.”

“Ugh. I was really hoping this drop-off business would be cleaner,” Ellipse groaned.

Focci’s tail flicked. “We all did, Ellie.”

“The system upload is about done. We’ll reboot in three… two… one.”

Still grumbling, Ellipse reached for the joystick. Crane’s tail unwound from it, and Ellipse watched the center screen in the dashboard for an indication that she could start piloting.

The ship’s steering stalled for a moment, dropping their acceleration and continuing a straight trajectory, and then the dashboard blinked into a new rainbow of colors. The screen still showed the rear view, but little distance markings overlaid the video feed in bright red.

Ellipse shifted her view up towards the ISS in the windows and gritted her teeth. She shoved the Ink into a spiral straight towards the thin stream of traffic heading into the station and gunned the engines. They shot forward like a bullet, and Ellipse tensed for a moment.

“How stupid fast is your ship?” she asked.

“We have the same engines as the Conics on a smaller body,” Tejal explained, sounding flat and unfazed. “Less mass means the propelling force creates more-

“I know that equation, yeesh. It is not like my head is a black hole.”

“If your head was a black hole, wouldn’t you remember everything?”

Ellipse brought the Ink right under the belly of a great, bulbous hydrogen floater barge, so close that they almost skimmed the large metal expanse visible at the top of the window. “Nothing comes out of a black hole, Tejal.”

“Stop bickering about Ellie’s bad metaphors,” Focci griped, voice turning reedy.

Her metaphors were not bad. The barge’s belly disappeared from view, and Ellipse pulled the ship up, cutting right in front of a second hydrogen floater barge. She spiralled around it, gathering speed the whole time, and shot off to fly directly towards a solar sail ship. A quick downward glance showed her that the orange ship was somehow still catching up.

Perhaps the spiral had been a waste of time. Changing tactics, Ellipse swerved off of her collision course and headed for an empty spot. She shoved the throttle as far forward as it would go and let the ship continue building speed. “Which way to Titan?” she shouted.

Focci mumbled something in his native language, and a blue arrow popped up on the window. It pointed left, and so left Ellipse turned.

The orange ship followed, lagging behind finally, and Ellipse eased up on the accelerator. She kept her eyes peeled for debris for a few seconds, and when she deemed it safe to look down at the rear view again, almost froze at what she saw.

The orange ship was suddenly hundreds of meters closer, and a small explosion lit up from its side. Something small shot forwards, attached to the other ship by a thin, shiny metal rope, and Ellipse cringed. That had to be a grappler. Another small flare burst from the orange ship’s other side, followed by the onset of a second cable.

She licked her lips and turned the Ink up in a half-loop to fly straight towards the other ship. The rear feed showed the grapplers following her trajectory, and Ellipse grinned. She brought the Ink into a hairpin turn around the orange ship’s stern, then jerked right. Urging the Ink into a spiral, she turned again and flew a neat loop around the other ship.

“Very nice,” Tejal said. He sounded a little awed, and Ellipse’s pride swelled. “Good use of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The other ship had to slow down and deal with the force of the grapplers firing.”

That killed the awe. Snorting, Ellipse took a moment to observe the tangled grappler cables floating around the orange ship, and then followed Focci’s blue arrow on the window. Andra-Media, she thought, here I come.