The Girl Who Stole A Planet (Amy Armstrong Book 1)

  The Girl Who Stole A Planet

  by

  Stephen Colegrove

  Copyright Information

  THE GIRL WHO STOLE A PLANET

  Copyright 2016 Stephen Colegrove

  First Edition: August 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Holder. Requests for permission should be directed to Stephen Colegrove via e-mail at [email protected].

  Cover design by Lilac

  Editing by Alice Dragan (https://alicedit.com)

  Find out more about the author and upcoming books at the links below:

  stevecolegrove.com

  amishspaceman.com

  Facebook

  @stevecolegrove

  Also by the author:

  The Amish Spaceman

  The Roman Spaceman

  A Girl Called Badger

  The Dream Widow

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Part I: Teenage Thief

  Of all the orbital prisons in the galaxy, of all the rough-heeled planets that ever shot their violent, rough-heeled trash into orbit, this was the worst. Not just according to popular opinion, mind––they had a bag full of galactic trophies to prove it.

  The penal station rotated against the vast panorama of space like a brilliant, four-spoked wheel, a white speck of discipline and free television hanging above the cloudy planetary orb of Kepler Prime. Inside the tubular hull, Detention Officer First Class Nistra tapped on the window of a thick titanium door with his claw.

  “And thisss is Prince Treem,” he hissed. “The former ruler of Alpha Centauri, who murdered twelve million across four systems. Thisss gender-anomalous filth received one hundred thousand life sentences.”

  Recruit Officer Flistra bowed his reptilian head and clacked his sharp teeth in respect.

  “Yesssssssir.”

  Nistra pulled down on the jacket of his dark blue uniform and tromped in huge boots to the next porthole.

  “Doctor Fistula,” he snarled, “designed a virus that wiped every trace of life from the outer rim’s third arm. He was given three billion life sentences and a subscription to People magazine.”

  “Yesssir,” said the recruit.

  Nistra strode quickly past several doors, dismissing them with a wave of his scaly hand.

  “Pop star, pop star, radio DJ … here we are.”

  Nistra unsealed the heavy security door with his thumbprint and marched along an empty corridor that had a gentle upward curve. After a full minute of walking, he stopped in front of a hatch covered in diagonal red and yellow stripes.

  “There she is,” the giant reptile said with a shudder.

  Recruit Flistra approached the hatch with small, reluctant steps. A digital placard fixed to the wall caught his eye.

  “Armstrong, Amy,” he whispered. “Horrible! But I don’t see a viewing window, Commander. I mean, Officer. Sir.”

  Nistra shook his scaly head and stared at the recruit. “Didn’t you have maximum security spheres in the outer rim?”

  “No, sssir. We didn’t, sssir.”

  “Well, that’s what it is––a maximum security sphere. There aren’t any windows, because it would interfere with the stasis bubble.”

  “How do you monitor the prisoner?”

  Nistra waved a claw over the front of the door, and a hologram of the interior appeared in mid-air. A pale teenage girl lay on the concave floor of the chamber, both arms around the knees of her orange jumpsuit. A tangled mess of blonde hair covered her face and spread across the bottom of the sphere.

  “I don’t understand,” hissed Flistra. “It looks undeveloped and weak, like a five-toed poona who hasn’t been given enough slurm.”

  “Soup brain!” snapped Nistra. “Haven’t you been watching the telefeed? She’s the most dangerous prisoner in the five square kilometers of this orbiting station! Did you just fall off the galactic shuttle?”

  “Actually, sir, I did, sir. You met me in the hangar bay five minutes ago.”

  “Never mind, then. This is the most destructive, rapacious, and annoying creature that ever drew breath in this arm of the galaxy. It has an appetite greater than a legion of soldiers, a foul stench that can poison the atmosphere of a Class-M planet in fourteen seconds, and a voice louder and more annoying than all the drunken lizard fraternities at the galactic conference of drunken lizard fraternities! It’s a vile, disgusting beast from a species that hasn’t won a match in the Galactic Cup since the Galactic Cup was invented!”

  “My apologiesss, Officer. I don’t watch football. Please ssssir, what is it called?”

  Nistra opened a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and snarled.

  “My dim-witted, fizz-brained recruit from the outer rim––that’s a human teenager.”

  ***

  1995 A.D.

  Earth

  Amy Armstrong stared out the window at the fog rolling up Forest Avenue, a white, billowing cloud that whipped across the street like smoke from a campfire. She wished it really were smoke and the whole town was burning down, starting with Pacific Grove Middle School.

  Amy wrapped a strand of her long blonde hair around a pencil and rolled it all the way from the waist of her blue plaid skirt to above her ear like one of her foster mom’s curlers. She was bored, and all the other eighth graders in third period science were bored, too. It was the most boring class on the most boring morning in the most boring school in the most boring city in the entire universe. This would be the deduction of a neutral alien observer, if aliens actually existed and were the kind of nice peeping Tom aliens that liked to watch eighth graders yawn, doodle in their textbooks, and stare vacantly out the window at the occasional over-the-hill citizen walking his or her over-the-hill dog over the hill.

  It might have been the fault of the substitute. Mr. Gomez had been a promising young man at one point in his life, with dreams of aeronautical engineering and designing interstellar warp engines, but that was before he checked the wrong box on a college application, triggering a cascade of events that began with a mis-categorized form and ended with a very pale and overweight man with a face like cold butter trying to teach physics to a room full of fourteen-year-old kids.

  “Force equals mass times acceleration,” droned the tubby Mr. Gomez, and scraped a sliver of chalk across the blackboard.

  Amy sighed. She wasn’t confused by physics or theories or theorems at all; in fact, she liked math and science. She knew that a television dropped from a second-story window is probably uncatchable, no matter how much your foster brother Tony whispers up to you that “it’s all good” and that “he can catch it.” The natural laws of the universe did their jobs without question and without dreaming about being someplace else. Gomez probably wanted to be at home watching the Sci-Fi Channel and the teenagers wanted to smoke behind the movie theater at the Del Monte Center or wander over to Asilomar and dig up clams. Amy hated c
lams and she hated cigarettes. What she liked was a free television. Next time she’d find one on the ground floor.

  Mr. Gomez paused and the small portion of the class that wasn’t sleeping watched an ambulance flash by the window and disappear up Forest Avenue, siren wailing.

  Amy Armstrong didn’t have a problem with school. What she had a problem with was anything that got in the way of her very local and very lucrative “property relocation” business. Certain people had a need for a certain type of property, perhaps a nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo. Amy found the certain property and relocated it to the new owner for a fee. The goods she collected in a secret compartment under her foster mom’s garden shed had sometimes come into her hands serendipitously, falling “accidentally” into her pocket while on a visit to a schoolmate’s house. At other times more planning was required, such as pretending for a month to be Sammie Wong’s friend just so he’d invite her to his birthday party and just so she could drop his nineteen-inch television down to her foster brother Tony in the azalea bushes. Tony’s shoulder was still sprained and bits of glass still sparkled in the azalea bushes.

  A square of folded paper somersaulted through the air and landed on Amy’s desk. She unfolded it in her lap, her eyes on Gomez. Scrawled on the note in pencil was, “HELP ME I HAVE SCABIES.”

  Amy laughed out loud at Helen’s note, and then slapped a hand over her mouth.

  Mr. Gomez turned from the blackboard and peered down his round, buttery nose at the class.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He leaned over the class roster on his desk.

  “Seat twelve––that would be Amelia Armstrong. Miss Armstrong, please explain Newton’s law of universal gravitation.”

  Amy cleared her throat. “The attractive force between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and indirectly proportional to the distance between them.”

  The boys in the back of the room snickered, and the class wag Robert Calcetti spoke up.

  “Bodies? She meant boobies!”

  “Quiet!” Gomez’s bald head turned crimson and he slammed his chalk in the blackboard gutter. “Thank you, Amy. You are correct.”

  Ten minutes later a bell clanged in the hallway, and the drowsy teens sprang up like it was The Final Trump and they were a blue-blazered, plaid-skirted throng of believers heading for the sky.

  Amy and Helen squeezed through a hallway lined with slamming lockers, dropped books, and uniformed kids scrambling for their next class. Eighth graders hooted and hollered at the seventh graders, the seventh graders scowled and yelled at the sixth graders, and the sixth graders squirted desperately through the human mob, trying only to survive.

  Helen nudged Amy with an elbow and yelled over the din. “Are we still skipping out during fifth period?”

  Amy nodded and leaned into her friend’s ear. “Yeah, but I’ll meet you at DMC later. I have to deliver a Sega Saturn.”

  The first day of sixth grade, Amy had seen Helen sitting alone in the cafeteria and decided that the short and chunky girl would do for a best friend. She was one of the only Asian kids in the school and a good student, which always helped if you were Amy and had a reputation that needed a boost at times. Lay down with dogs and you get fleas, as the old saying goes. Amy was an unrepentant thief, but she did everything she could to appear as clean as the wind-driven snow.

  Appearance was half the battle. Amy kept her blonde hair long and straight, cut her bangs razor-sharp, and flattened the pleats of her skirts with an iron “repurposed” from an open window of Timmy Wilson’s house. She always kept her face washed, fingernails clean and short, and spoke in the sweetest and politest of tones when around adults. The few experiences she’d had with the juvenile justice system and authority figures in general had taught her that anyone who acts like a criminal, gets treated like a criminal. Nose piercings and tattoos didn’t earn trust with suspicious adults. The problem of looking like an innocent fourteen-year-old girl was that people didn’t want to buy a hot Miata from you, but that’s what foster brothers were for.

  Helen hugged Amy. “See you later!”

  “Bye! I’ll be there at two o’clock.”

  Amy leaned against the lime-painted bricks in the hallway and watched the tubby girl twist through the crowd of kids toward her art class. It was funny––Amy had picked Helen because she looked like the one kid who’d never steal a paper clip, and two years later she was as good at “property repurposing” as Amy.

  The bulbous face and brown, stringy octopus hair of Mary Katherine Prezbolewski rose above the heads in the noisy hallway, her great black eyes rolling back and forth over the crowd like those of a hammerhead shark. A pair of spindly seventh-graders trailed behind the mountainous body, carrying her field hockey stick and backpack.

  Amy imagined the Earth’s gravitational forces shifting with every step of the impossibly huge fifteen-year-old. She gritted her teeth, pulled her shoulders back, and put on her best smile for the giantess.

  “Good morning, M.K.,” she chirped.

  Mary Katherine Prezbolewski slowed to a stop in front of Amy and the black, emotionless eyes glistened down at her.

  “Armstrong, you little insect. Where’s my nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo?”

  Amy shrugged. “It’s not the best choice for a birthday present. I’ve got a slightly used Casio synthesizer your dad would just love. Let’s see … Oh! Does he play golf? I can get you eighteen holes at Pebble Beach or Spyglass, take your pick.”

  M.K. towered over Amy like a corpulent mermaid, one who smelled like she took frequent showers in mackerel guts.

  “Listen, Armstrong,” she growled. “When my dad wants a nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo for his fishing boat, he gets a nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo for his fishing boat. It’s his birthday today, and that’s what he wants. Are you trying to ruin his birthday by not giving him a nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo for his fishing boat?”

  “You don’t have to keep repeating it, you know. I get it. There’s just been a problem with the TV.”

  M.K. poked a finger on Amy’s chest. “If it’s not at my house by five today, your little blonde head won’t have any other problems to worry about.”

  Amy beamed. “Thanks, M.K.!”

  “No. I mean I’ll break you in half, you skinny little Barbie. I’ll come at you like Hurricane Hugo!”

  The bell rang and Amy sprinted away from M.K.’s oceanic mass and toward fourth period math.

  She was ignoring algebra completely and in the midst of considering last-minute sources for a television, including getting a ride to Circuit City, when the ancient brass grille of the intercom speaker crackled above the classroom door.

  “Amelia Armstrong to the office, please,” came the hollow voice of the office secretary. “Amelia Armstrong to the office.”

  Amy stuffed her books and papers into her backpack and left the rest of the envious and bored eighth graders with their algebra formulae. She skipped down the hall, certain it was Tony getting her out of school early to help unload some merchandise that had “fallen off a truck.” That boy always had something in the works. Just in case it wasn’t Tony, she dumped a half-dozen stolen Tupac CDs in the trash and a Mont Blanc pen she’d swiped from Mrs. Pound when the librarian hadn’t been looking.

  The nurse met her in front of the glass doors of the office. Her face was pale and her eyes didn’t want to stay on anything too long, so Amy knew something was up.

  “Good morning, Nurse Nelson!” Amy said brightly.

  The nurse twisted her mouth. She opened and closed it strangely for a few seconds, as if she didn’t know how to begin, and then cleared her throat.

  “Amy, your mother had a heart attack.”

  Pacific Grove spread across the western rocks of the Monterey Bay like green moss on a cold, sea-sprayed wooden piling. It was a town full of perambulating retirees with halos of white hair, a town of driftwood artists, ceramic frog collectors, coconut painters, photographers, golfers, tourists, s
eagull haters, scuba divers, aquarium lovers, and during the monarch butterfly festival, was packed from Lighthouse Drive to Asilomar with visitors from the rest of California who had discovered last week that they loved butterflies. It was a foggy town with a slow, foggy way of life, which is one of the reasons Lucia Armstrong liked it.

  Amy had always been Lucia’s favorite among the six foster children, and she hadn’t made a secret of it. The other children didn’t mind because everyone liked Amy. She kept them supplied with the newest electronic toys and video games, and added the income from her “business” to the household by secretly replacing the staples that everyone needed but nobody kept track of like soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent, shampoo, bleach, toilet paper, milk, eggs, flour, sugar, butter, and pancake syrup. Lucia was neither superstitious nor religious, simply an overworked FedEx driver with six children and too few hours in the day. If leprechauns or fairies or Old Scratch himself were topping up her dandruff shampoo and Tide, she wasn’t asking questions.

  The school nurse drove Amy up the hill to Community Hospital where she, Tony, and the four little ones watched a team of white-coated doctors and frantically busy hospital staff wheel Lucia out of the emergency room. She was still in her navy blue FedEx uniform. A clear oxygen mask covered her face and a rainbow of wires crossed her body, monitoring her heart, providing intravenous fluid, and displaying the oxygen saturation in her blood.

  “Where are they taking her?” Amy asked.

  Tony shrugged. “Probably surgery. Lots of knives and lots of blood.”

  “Stop saying things like that,” hissed Amy. “You’re scaring the little ones.”

  The four younger kids––Billy, Anna, Viv, and Eugenia––stood together in a tight pack, their eyes wide and their small knuckles white on the handles of their brightly colored lunch boxes.

  “Sorry,” said Tony. “I’m sorry. I just … what do we do now?”

  Amy squinted at a television hanging in a corner of the waiting room. “I don’t know. But I need to find a nineteen-inch TV-VCR combo.”

  Tony spread his arms. “Lucia had a heart attack and you want to go shopping?”

  “It’s a life and death situation!”