"Honk! Honk!" The damage alarm was louder than the pings and klonks of the meteorite shower our scout ship had accidentally encountered on our emergence from hyperspace.
"A puncture! We're losing energy," Kikinee shrilled.
"Teer! Noot! Take evasive action," the Vmmm's voice hummed over the intercom. "I will fix the puncture."
Teer waved at me to take piloting as she worked at her computer.
I did my best to guide our scout ship around the biggest meteorites. There was no time to set up a course. I punched us back into hyperdrive, and the screens smeared as our engines took us between dimensions.
With no idea where we were going, I yelled to our navigator, "Thisko, can't you--"
"Navigational computer is down," Thisko said, five of his eight tentacles working away.
"At least if we drop out of hyper into a planet," came Smelch's mournful hoot, "we won't have to spend five long hours in the Room for Reviewing Actions."
Kikinee waved at a cable that had shaken loose when the first big rock hit the ship, and chirped, "Quiet, Smelch, and give me a hand with that gravity-link."
Still muttering, Smelch shot one of its six hands across the cabin to the dangling wires. The fingers quickly maneuvered the gravity-link back to where it ought to be, and we felt gravity ripple through the ship again.
Then Kikinee tossed the hand back across the cabin and--with a loud splorch!--it reattached to Smelch's arm.
We were all strapped into our pods, so we hadn't floated, but a couple of the things that had come loose--like part of Kikinee's lunch--stopped floating and dropped with a thud, klank, and a squashy noise. Kikinee and Smelch scrambled to clean up.
When things were stable again, I pulled us back into the realtime dimension, hoping we would emerge in the safety of space.
We were lucky.
)
A spaceship of multi-tentacled alien kids arrive on Earth for an emergency refueling stop ... and negotiate with a group of children for some precious resources.
