The harnesses all released simultaneously, and the seats folded out from under us and disappeared back to where they’d come from. I spilled onto the floor, and pogo stick guy’s torso fell across my legs. I let out a not very manly yipe and kicked him off.

The rest of the aliens walked out of the shuttle and into the brilliant sunlight. Some of the aliens seemed happy to be there, taking deep breaths of the air like they’d been away a long time and missed all that red dust. The rest looked like they were being sent to their deaths.

“Outta the way,” the redheaded guy with the metal leg growled, shouldering me as he passed.

I scowled at his back. Was he limping slightly, or did it just seem that way because I knew about his prosthetic? Was it even a prosthetic, or was that just how people were built here? Like cyborgs?

“Off the shuttle,” the bulldog snapped at me, jerking his flat snout at the dusty alien landscape. “Your sentence awaits.”

I blinked. “Sentence?”

“Your time, your punishment, the judgment passed down on you for committing whatever heinous crime you committed on your home planet, for which you will now be paying in a set amount of Universal years here on the prison planet.”

“But I didn’t commit any—”

A crackling sound ripped through the air, and something blue streaked over my head. I flinched. A hole the size of a bottlecap melted in the metal wall behind me, and the air filled with the sharp stink of melting plastic.

“Get off the shuttle of your own volition or I’ll kick your corpse off it,” the bulldog said.

“Fine. Geez.” I stood up and walked toward the ramp, still listing a little. My inner ear wasn’t adjusted to the stillness yet.

I hesitated on the threshold. It felt like something awful was waiting just outside the shuttle’s gaping mouth for me, like once I stepped out there, I’d never be able to get back home to Gramps.

I turned to the bulldog. “Is there like a passenger manifest? I’m really not supposed to be here. I promise.”

He pulled back the hammer on his MegaBlaster and pointed the business end right between my eyes.

I stuck my hands up and kept walking.

The heat hit me like a fist. Immediately, sweat started running down my back. A hot breeze blew through, gluing my shirt and red sand to my sweaty skin. I squinted against the sandblasting and the murderous sunlight.

There were two suns hanging in the sky. A huge white fiery one that looked close enough to touch, and a distant pale blue one. And when I turned around, there was another sun, a weird black one with an orangey-magenta corona, just barely sticking up over the horizon.

No freaking wonder it was so hot.

Flat, red dirt stretched out for miles in every direction, broken up by nothing but silvery heat distortions and mirages of dancing water. Not a tree or hill in sight. The only shade was the shuttle we’d just climbed off of.

And when I say shuttle, I mean spaceship. Not like NASA, but like a little Twinkie-shaped thing all scuffed and patched and sitting on six pairs of legs tipped with wheels.

All around the shuttle, the aliens—or criminals, I guess, depending on who you asked—were tapping these huge watches on their arms with screens the size of a smartphone.

“This ain’t none of the usual dropoffs,” a squid alien said to the shuttle driver. “Where we at, boss?”

“They’re having some weather down in the Southern Hemisphere,” the bulldog grunted. He let his MegaBlaster dangle from its strap, one hand stabilizing it while he pulled a red cigarette out of his duster with his other hand. He didn’t light the cigarette, but the end started smoking as soon as he took the first puff. “Had to fly around. This was the raincheck point the CPA had listed. New Iron Hills should be about fifty miles east, across the Rust Flats. There’s a closer settlement in the opposite direction, on the other side of the Shut-Ins, but you’d break your neck getting to it.”

“Cain’t be much,” the squid said, holding one of his tentacles up in front of his folded face. He poked at a watch the size of a paperback book. “It don’t even show up on the map.”

“Not wort’ de risk,” the zebra lady said. She flipped her cape of rubbery white head skin over her shoulder and turned the way the bulldog had said was east. “New Iron Hills is de smarter bet.” She smirked at me, then at the redheaded guy with the prosthetic leg. “If you can survive de radiation.”

“Worry about yourself, Pilonian,” the redhead snapped at her. “Humans can survive anything.”

That set off just about everybody within hearing distance. Whoops and gurgles and snorts of laughter, along with a round of insistence that “every human squishes if you smash ’em hard enough” and “don’t start with that meat roach nonsense here, boy.”

The guy with the elf ears and slanted cat-eyes stepped up toe-to-toe with the redhead. I wasn’t tall, five-seven when I stood up straight, and at sixteen I still had my fingers crossed for another growth spurt. The redhead had to be close to six foot, but this elf was a head and shoulders taller than him.

“I know your face, human,” the elf said. His accent was more exotic than the redhead’s. Arabian or maybe Indian. The Hindu kind of Indian, not the kind of Indian everybody in America claims they are. “You’re a Thompson. From Lai’Saeq.”

The redhead’s hands balled into fists, and he stood up taller, facing the elf down. “You musta worked for me ma, then, along with everyone else on that planet. How’d ya like it, groveling to one of the humans who sent you pointy-eared bastards running?”

The elf’s eyes narrowed.

“You didn’t send us anywhere, roach,” the elf growled, bumping chests with him. “Your elders tried, but all they managed in the end was to lose the war, the system, and the respect of every planet in the Confederation.”

“The Confederation proper screwed us. Too much Ylef money coming in to do right. No way you trash coulda beat us fair.” He shoved the elf.

The elf jumped at the redhead.

This fight was a lot faster and bloodier than the ones in the movies. The elf hooked a big right at the redhead, his long arm glowing with blue light. The redhead’s upper body caught fire—literally, it whooshed up like a gas-soaked brushpile—and he slammed out a flaming red block followed by a kick to the elf’s gut with his prosthetic. When the elf doubled over, the redhead rocked him back with a burning uppercut to the jaw.

There was a nasty crunch as the elf went down. I’d been too caught up in watching the punches to realize it, but the redhead had been standing on the elf’s foot the whole time, pinning him in place. One more solid shot to the chin knocked the elf out cold.

Nobody seemed too shocked. For the most part, the aliens who hadn’t left yet were just messing around on their big watches, not paying attention.

The big slug, though, was like, “Stellar, I got all of that! This is so going on FightScreen.”

“Good,” the redhead snarled. “I want the Big Five to know Warcry Thompson is here and ready for recruitment by the time I get to New Iron Hills.”

“You should not go to New Iron Hills, human,” said the zebra lady, nodding down at the elf guy. “’Less you want to fight many more Ylef.”

The redhead—Warcry—wiped some blood off his knuckles onto his shirt. “Maybe I do.”

“Are you that Warcry Thompson?” the slug asked, raising one eyestalk higher than the other. “Two-time Intergalactic Fighting League Under-18 Champ?”

“Forget the IFL,” the squid guy gurgled, pointing a tentacle at Warcry. “You’re Emmie the Annihilator Thompson’s son. She’s a legend on Guvo-4. Her and the Meat Roaches led the first human uprising in the system. They held off the Ylefs for six weeks straight with nothing but fifty-eight of her fellow slaves and a dozen stolen gunships.”

Warcry rolled his eyes. “Sure, and she’s a saint for it.”

Whatever the squid said back was drowned out by this loud, skirling whine cutting across the Rust Flats. Red dust billowed up behind a tiny silvery fleck in the distance that became an enormous rusty chopper-style motorcycle with tractor-tire sized wheels.

The chopper skidded to a stop, throwing up a lungful of sand and dust, making everybody yell with irritation. Except the slug. He slithered over to the chopper and climbed on behind a shark guy. The shark revved it up, and they were gone in another ear-busting, sand-throwing second.

Pretty soon, the air was full of whines and whooshes and zooming sounds. Transportation arriving to pick up the waiting aliens one by one.

I frowned.

“Do I need to call somebody?” I asked the zebra lady. “I don’t have one of those watch things. I’m not from this…” I tried to think of the right word. “…galaxy, universe, anything. I’m not from here.”

She grinned, showing big flat teeth that looked like they should be chewing grass.

“We already in one of de Five,” she said. “You a member of de Big Five, human?”

“Is the Big Five a gang? I’m not in a gang, I—”

“Hmm, complicated.” She sucked her big teeth. “You die ’less you get in a gang.” Then she looked me up and down. “Maybe I help you.”

“How?”

“I bring you wit’ me to Jianjiao sect. Get you bed, food, clean, safe.”

I might’ve been in a different galaxy, but I wasn’t stupid.

“In return for what?”

She turned her eyes up like she was thinking about it, but you could tell it was just an act. She already knew what she was going to say. This wasn’t her first rodeo.

“Only one year,” she said.

“One year of what?”

“You serve me one year.”

My face twisted up. “Screw that!”

“One year, it isn’t so much on Van Diemann. Your sentence is how long?”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not a criminal. I’m not joining a gang.”

She shrugged. “Your corpse. If you change your mind, you find me in New Iron Hills.”

Then she took off running east. After she got a few yards away, her arms stretched out until they were as long as her legs, and she dropped to all fours and galloped away.

Freaky. Even compared to everything else I’d seen in the last twenty-four hours.