The Training Master Read online

  “If you haven’t sliced the meat yet you better hop to it!” said Chibb. “It only gets harder from here on out!”

  I should just cry blue right now and get it over with, I thought. My hands weren’t listening to me, though. They’d found the meat and the knife and were getting ready to make the first crucial eighth-inch slice.

  “Space debris!” cried Chibb.

  Space debris? What is that supposed to mea—

  FWAM!

  Something battered the ship on its left side. This was no simple sound effect: a big, heavy object was somehow rigged to slam into the rocket whenever Chibb desired. The knife slid from my fingers and clattered to the floor.

  I knew he’d find a way to make me blow this.

  FWA-FWAM!

  A second object smacked the ship on the right side, more forcefully than the first. At the same time Chibb rotated the ship into a nosedive position and pumped up the vibration level by several notches.

  Forget it. Cry blue already!

  But my hands reached down to the floor and—to my surprise—recovered the knife with very little fuss. Using my knees on one lever and my forehead on another, I managed to stabilize the ship without losing my grip on the sandwich.

  FWAM, FWAM, FWA-FWAM!

  I began to discern a certain pattern to the blows of the space debris, and was soon able to anticipate their arrival to a certain extent. I created a system for slicing the meat only when it was safe to do so. But just when I’d gotten to the last slice …

  “Nitro-groxide leak!”

  FFFSHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh

  Pale green gas began to spray into the cockpit from just behind my left shoulder. I coughed once, twice, then launched into a barrage of coughs that I knew wouldn’t stop until the end of the exercise. Gasping for air, I grabbed hold of a dial with my teeth and switched on a ventilation system that blew most of the nitro-groxide out of the cockpit.

  “I sure hope you’re done with the condiments by now!” cried Chibb.

  FWA-FWAM, FWA-FWAM!

  My eyes were watering like crazy from the nitro-groxide. I stacked the slices of meat on the bottom piece of bread as neatly as I could and began applying the first of the three condiments: not too much, not too little.

  “I’ll show you, Chibb Fallaby,” I whispered to myself between coughs. “I don’t care how badly you want me to fail!” Suddenly there was no longer any question of my crying blue. I was going to complete this exercise no matter what.

  I finished up with the condiments. A little messy—the gunk was all over my hands and shirt by then—but well within the guidelines. All I had to do was get the veggies on and I’d be done.

  “Fire in the cockpit!”

  Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.

  A burst of orange sparks suddenly erupted right in the middle of the dashboard. They sputtered and flew, pelting me in the face and arms. There was very little smoke—I think the designers knew that anything on top of the nitro-groxide would just knock you unconscious—but the heat was incredible. Within seconds the cockpit was like a furnace.

  So that’s why there’s so much sweat in here!

  It didn’t matter, though: I had three of the four veggies squarely in place, and the fourth one on the way. I was coughing, and crying, and sweating a river down my face and my back, but there was no getting around it: I was excited.

  This sandwich is perfect. I’m going to get an F, I just know it. An F!

  Sparks stung my forehead and cheeks as I moved the final veggie into place (a furry green thing that looked like a week-old piece of roadkill) and reached for the second slice of bread. Pressing it down on top of the veggies, I shouted at the very top of my lungs: “Done! I’m done! I did it, I did it!”

  Chibb switched off all the controls at once. The fire on the dashboard went out. The nitro-groxide stopped spraying. The rocket stopped humming and gently sank to the ground.

  “Done, are you?” Chibb said as he popped the cockpit door open. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  I submitted the sandwich to his watchful eyes. He took it from my hands, held it in front of him, and carefully turned it around.

  What would he say? Would he find some problem with it? Or would he finally admit that I’d done something well?

  “This,” he said, turning and showing it to Mr. Beeba and the others, “is really quite satisfactory, for a beginner.” It was very faint praise, but there was no denying it. Chibb was impressed.

  “Hoo-doggie!” cried Spuckler. “That is one ding-dang-dandy little sammich!”

  I have no idea what I looked like at that moment, but I’m sure I was grinning like a fool. I was so proud I was ready to burst into tears.

  Chibb looked me in the eye, the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.

  “Not bad, child. Not bad at all.”

  My grade? Not first-rate, but distinguished: a D. The funny thing is suddenly I didn’t even care about the grades anymore. All that mattered was that I’d gotten the job done.

  Chapter 16

  The rest of the afternoon sped by. Lessons were cut short at the end of the day because the training masters had to attend an official function—a ribbon-cutting ceremony or something like that—on a nearby planet. This meant that we were finally allowed a bit of rest and relaxation. Even though it was nothing more than an hour or two hanging around by our holes before dinner, it was like heaven to get a little free time after having had so little of it for the first couple of days.

  The next morning in the Gathering Plaza we all stood waiting for our training masters as usual. For some reason, they were taking an awfully long time to arrive.

  K’CHAK

  All eyes turned to the door of the training masters’ quarters. No training masters emerged, though. Instead, a short, plump alien in Zarga Baffa uniform waddled forward and delivered a brief message to all the trainees: “May I have your attention, please? I have some unpleasant news to share with you all this morning. As some of you may be aware, all the training masters left Zarga Baffa yesterday evening to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the planet Yorbi. They were given the honor of being the first passengers aboard the new Virpling Canyon Cruiser.”

  There were envious murmurings among the trainees. The Canyon Cruiser was evidently something they’d all heard about.

  “Due to a disastrous technical failure, the training masters are now trapped inside the cruiser, suspended high above Virpling Canyon.”

  The murmurs were replaced by horrified gasps.

  The training masters were in trouble! It hardly seemed possible. I raised my hand and asked a question without waiting to be called on: “What’s holding them above the canyon? A bridge or something?”

  “No, no,” said the little alien. “There is no bridge. The cruiser is attached to an enormous cable stretching from one side of Virpling Canyon to the other. Once the training masters have escaped from the inside of the cruiser, they will simply climb across the top of the cable to safety.”

  “But if it was that easy they would have escaped already,” I whispered to Spuckler before raising my voice to ask another question. “Is there an escape hatch?”

  “Yes, yes,” said the alien, clearly flustered by my questions. “They’ll have it opened just as soon as they’ve discovered a way to do so without sending them plunging to the bottom of the … er …” The alien found himself in the middle of a sentence he didn’t want to complete. He abandoned it and launched several new ones in its place: “Please don’t worry. Everything’s fine. The training masters are not in any danger of anything dangerous …er… endangering them.”

  A buzz went through the crowd of trainees, which the little alien hushed with frantic motions of his hands.

  “Please remain calm. All is well, I assure you. The training masters will extricate themselves from the situation, but it could be some time before they are able to do so. In the meantime, I have been instructed to have you all return to your holes and wait for further orders.�
��

  The alien went back through the door. All the trainees immediately began the long trek back to the holes, everyone jabbering at once about the significance of this new development. I grabbed Mr. Beeba by the arm and motioned to the others that we should stay back and become the last in line.

  “We can’t just go back to our holes,” I said. “We’ve got to rescue the training masters.”

  “RESCUE THEM?” said Gax. “BUT HOW?”

  “Here’s my plan. We find some sort of transportation, fly to the planet Yorbi, and go to this Virpling Canyon place. Then we can climb across the cable, use some of Gax’s tools to open the Canyon Cruiser from the outside, and get the training masters out before their situation gets any worse than it already is.”

  “Now, now, Akiko,” said Mr. Beeba, “it seems to me awfully presumptuous of you to be talking this way. Why, yesterday all you could talk about was crying blue and running back home.”

  “This is different,” I said. “This isn’t just another lesson. This is for real.”

  “Yes, but we were told to go back to our holes and await further orders. You can’t just ignore rules and regulations whenever they don’t suit you. I’m sure they’ve got a very efficient system in place for these sorts of—”

  “Forget about the system.” I turned to Spuckler, Gax, and Poog. “Think of the training masters. They’re trapped inside that cruiser, and they could fall to the bottom of the canyon at any time. They need help. Our help. And if it means breaking the rules … hey, some rules deserve to be broken.”

  Spuckler nodded.

  “’Kiko’s right. The trainin’ masters must be in a mighty tough spot. They’d have got themselves out by now if they weren’t.”

  Mr. Beeba said nothing, but I could see it in his eyes: Spuckler was right about this, and there was no denying it.

  “Time’s a-wastin’,” said Spuckler. “Us loungin’ around in our holes ain’t gonna do nobody a lick of good.”

  I turned to Poog. “What do you say, Poog?”

  Poog paused before answering. When he finally spoke, his response was longer and more in-depth than I had expected. The warbly Toogolian syllables followed one another in rapid succession. Mr. Beeba’s jaw dropped. He looked as if he didn’t want to translate what he was hearing. When Poog finally stopped talking, there was a long silence.

  “Well, c’mon, Beebs,” said Spuckler. “Spit it out!”

  “Poog says …” Mr. Beeba frowned and adjusted his spectacles. “Poog says the situation is far more dire than has been revealed. He senses that the training masters are in a very precarious state, that their lives are quite literally hanging by a thread.”

  “That does it,” I said. “We’ve got to go, and we’ve got to go right now.” I watched as the last of the trainees disappeared over a distant hill. “Now, listen. The other day when that nognag went haywire, I went straight through a hangar filled with spare astroshuttles. It’s not that far from here, just a minute or two if we run. I say we borrow one of those astroshuttles and get to Virpling Canyon as fast as we can.”

  “Borrow?” said Mr. Beeba. “You mean steal ! Flying off in one of Zarga Baffa’s astroshuttles without permission … why, it could be grounds for expulsion!”

  “I’m sure it is,” I said. “But at least we’ll know we tried to do the right thing, instead of sitting around here playing it safe. C’mon, Mr. Beeba. We’re a team. We can’t do this without you.”

  Mr. Beeba cast a mournful glance back at the doorway to the training masters’ quarters.

  “I’m going to regret this,” he said.

  Chapter 17

  Within minutes we were making our way through the Zarga Baffa complex toward the astroshuttle hangar, moving on our hands and knees so that no one would see us.

  “That’s the sports field over there,” I said as I took a quick peek over a wall. “So the hangar should be …Bingo!” There it was, one of its big sliding doors wide open.

  “The hangar should be bingo?” asked Spuckler.

  “Bingo,” I said. “It’s an expression.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “What does bingo mean?” I scratched the side of my head. “Well, it means, um … I don’t really know, actually. It’s just a word. Sort of like voilà.”

  “Vwah-Lah?” said Mr. Beeba. “As in the Vwah-Lah galaxy?”

  “There’s a galaxy named Vwah-Lah?” I asked. “No way.”

  “And there’s a planet called Bingo, come to think of it,” said Mr. Beeba. “But the stress is on the second syllable rather than the fir—”

  “I HATE TO INTERRUPT THIS SCINTILLATING CONVERSATION,” said Gax, “BUT SOMEONE IS CLOSING THE DOOR TO THE HANGAR.”

  Sure enough, a big hairy security guard in a Zarga Baffa uniform was pulling the door shut.

  “You guys go ahead,” said Spuckler as he jumped to his feet. “I’ll distract him.”

  “But Spuckler!” I said. Too late: he was already gone, off to do whatever it was he planned on doing.

  “Don’t worry, Akiko,” said Mr. Beeba. “I’m sure he won’t do anything crazy.”

  I gave Mr. Beeba a sideways glance.

  Mr. Beeba furrowed his brow, reconsidering what he’d just said. “Well, no crazier than usual, anyway.”

  Suddenly, from Spuckler’s direction:

  “YOOOOoooo-HOOOOooooooo!”

  The hairy guy stopped shutting the door and turned his head to see what was going on.

  “Over here, fuzzy face!” Spuckler was standing up on a wall a good fifty yards away from the hangar door, shaking his butt from side to side and flinging his hands around in ways that can only be described as moves from the golden age of disco. “Wanna dance?”

  The security guard growled and took several big stomps in Spuckler’s direction. He barked something in an alien language that needed no translating. This guy did not want to dance.

  You are a madman, Spuckler, I thought. I turned my eyes to the still-open door. There was just enough space for all of us to squeeze through. And a madman is just what we need right now.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “This is the only chance we’re going to get.”

  Mr. Beeba, Gax, Poog, and I all dashed to the hangar door and slipped inside. Poking my head back out, I saw Spuckler running circles around the furious security guard, who was throwing wild punches at him and missing every time.

  “Dang, that’s some mighty fine hoofin’ there!” cackled Spuckler. “You been takin’ lessons?”

  I didn’t want to blow our cover, but time was running out.

  “Spuckler!” I whispered as loudly as I dared. “Get over here!”

  The security guard spun to face me. His face twisted into an angry scowl as he understood the trick that had been played on him.

  “Thanks for the dance, pardner!” said Spuckler. He dashed to the door and leaped through, seconds before Mr. Beeba and I closed and locked it. What followed was the sound of one very angry security guard: two furious fists pounding like thunder and a barrage of shouted threats I was glad I didn’t understand.

  “Spuckler, you idiot!” said Mr. Beeba. “Now all of Zarga Baffa will know what we’re up to!”

  “Which is why we gotta vamoose,” said Spuckler as he trotted over to the first available astroshuttle, “and I mean right now, pronto!”

  We didn’t have the luxury of questioning Spuckler. The guard would get in through another entrance soon enough, and this time he probably wouldn’t be alone.

  Spuckler jumped into the driver’s seat and revved the engine. “Virpling Canyon,” he said as Mr. Beeba, Gax, Poog, and I piled into the back of the ship, “here we come!”

  There was no exit big enough for the astroshuttle except for the one we’d just locked, so Spuckler did the next best thing. He blasted us out through one of the windows. This brought the number of Zarga Baffa rules we’d broken to a grand total of nine (as Mr. Beeba angrily pointed out, listing them all in great detail), and somewhere deep
down I wondered if it was really okay to be doing all this stuff: sneaking around, tricking security guards, borrowing astroshuttles.

  It’s all in the name of rescuing the training masters, I told myself. That makes it okay.

  I looked out the windows of the astroshuttle as we rocketed into the morning sky, leaving Zarga Baffa behind.

  Or pretty close to okay, anyway.

  Chapter 18

  It didn’t take us very long to get to the planet Yorbi. As we zoomed down to its surface, the astroshuttle began to rock from side to side and make sudden, unpredictable movements.

  “Zallamite,” said Spuckler. “There ain’t nothin’ a rocket pilot hates worse.”

  “Zallamite?” I asked.

  “A fascinating type of mineral, Akiko,” said Mr. Beeba. “Virpling Canyon is practically built of the stuff. As it happens, I wrote an exhaustive essay on Zallamite back in graduate school.” His eyes glazed over as he recalled what must have been one of his greatest achievements. “Ah, yes, and what an essay it was! The bibliography alone was no less than forty-eight pages long. My professor said it was one of the best geological treatises he’d ever seen. Or the heaviest, at any rate. Why, I even submitted it to the Intergalactic Journal of Geolo—”

  “Cut to the chase, Beebs!” said Spuckler. “You’re gonna put the girl to sleep!”

  Mr. Beeba shot Spuckler an irritated glance.

  “Ahem. The long and short of it is that Zallamite emits ultrasonic waves that interfere with the anti-gravity cells of rocket ships. That’s why the people of Yorbi had to attach the Canyon Cruiser to a cable in the first place. There’s no way of getting anywhere near the canyon with a conventional flying vehicle.”

  Gax, who had a complete map of the planet Yorbi programmed into him, served as our navigator. “IF WE MAKE OUR APPROACH FROM THE SOUTH, WE WILL BE ABLE TO GET RELATIVELY CLOSE TO THE CANYON BEFORE HAVING TO COMPLETE THE JOURNEY ON FOOT.” He paused, examining his own robot body, and added: “OR ON WHEEL, AS THE CASE MAY BE.”