I didn’t feel myself land. One second I was falling through stars, the next I was motionless in empty blackness.

A metal baseball bat hit me in the gut. I folded over, clutching my stomach.

“I said you’re in me spot, grav,” someone snarled. He sounded Irish or maybe some kind of English. “Move yer bleedin’ carcass!”

I opened my eyes just in time to see a boot swinging at me. I curled up and took the kick on the shoulder. It made that same metallic clunk as the hit to my stomach had, and pain spread through my back. Weirdly, that was the only part of me that hurt. Not the cuts from the paring knife, not the bruises and scrapes from my fight with Blaise. Those were all gone.

“Geez, dude,” I winced, climbing to my knees. “What’s your leg made of, metal?”

The dude in question was a kid my age, tall and wiry, with a nose that looked like it’d been broken more than once and a cauliflower ear. One of those redheads where at first glance you can’t tell whether he’s got light brown hair or dirty orange. You don’t see many redheadeds who look like they could beat the tar out of somebody, but this one did. He grabbed the cuff of his pants and pulled it up, revealing a lower leg made out of dingy greenish metal with grungy brass-looking circuitry running through it.

“Yeah, it is metal,” he growled. “Need it upside yer head, do ya?”

Movement behind him caught my eye. We weren’t alone.

Aliens. Everywhere. This whole metal room was full of them. A guy with pointed elf ears and cat eyes was talking to a chick with zebra stripes and this rubbery white and black curtain hanging around her shoulders instead of hair. A mostly human torso and head hopped across the floor on what looked like a pogo stick.

I swallowed hard. “At least you’ve got more legs than that guy.”

The redhead grabbed me by the back of the neck and hurled me across the floor. I tumbled into something squishy. It gave me a slimy shove, and I rolled over to look up at this enormous slug thing.

“Get off, human scum,” it gurgled.

I realized with a shock that it wasn’t speaking English. I could understand whatever language it was speaking, but at the same time, I could tell that it was something I’d never heard before.

To my left, a wall opened up with a whooshing sound. A humanoid bulldog guy with long, hanging earlobes stepped into the room. It was wearing a long brown duster with a tin star pinned to the chest and waving what looked like a MegaBlaster Nerf gun, but deadly.

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“We’re breaking Van Diemann’s atmosphere,” he announced in this growling cowboy voice. “Grab a seat and strap in if you want to survive the landing.”

He slammed one long-nailed paw-hand down on a big red button on the wall. Panels opened, and seats folded out of the walls and floor. Then he disappeared back through the door, and it whooshed closed again.

All hell broke loose. Everybody scrambled for seats like this was a life-or-death game of musical chairs. I tried to get into the closest one, but the zebra lady elbowed me out of the way and took it. Once I finally did climb into a seat, that pogo-stick torso threw me out. I hit my head on something hard. That stunned me for a few seconds.

The whole room shook like a metal johnboat slamming into a speedboat’s wake. The metal grating under my hands and knees was getting hot.

I half-crawled, mostly fell over to the only empty seat beside the pogo stick torso and wrestled the X-shaped harness on. It took me a minute of looking stupid before I got the buckle to snap together.

Just in time. I’d thought the place was shaking before, but this was like being inside a can of soda while some douchebag shook it up. My teeth rattled against each other, and my head bumped against the seat back and sides. My vertebrae felt like they were in a never-ending car wreck, smashing together. I heard a snap and thought maybe I’d broken something.

But it was the pogo guy next to me. His strap either hadn’t buckled or it had come loose, and now he was hanging from the top half by his throat, head rolling around at a weird, floppy angle while his arms hung limp. His neck was broken.

“Hey!” I yelled, looking toward the closed door the bulldog guy had come through. “Someone! This guy needs help!”

“Can’t help him where he gone,” the zebra lady yelled at me, and a couple of the aliens near her let out harsh laughter.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my head back against the seat, clutching my harness with both hands and praying it would stay locked.

Just when I thought my brains were about to fizz over and spew out every hole in my head, the shuddering smoothed out. My teeth stopped banging against each other, and my backbones stopped grinding together. Cautiously, I started to breathe again.

After a few seconds with nothing more than a gentle vibration humming through the seat, I unclawed my hands from the harness. My palms had rope burns on them from sliding against the straps. I blew on the red marks to cool them down.

“Have we landed?” somebody asked from the wall behind me.

The whole room lurched, and there was a huge boom. I grabbed the harness again, not even caring that the edges of the straps were slicing back into the rope burns.

Something let out a croaking laugh. “Yeah, we landed.”

It was so still. It felt like when you step off a boat, and the fluid in your eardrums is still sloshing around. You get used to the movement while you’re on board, so you sort of forget about it until you get back on dry land.

The door whooshed open, and the bulldog guy with the MegaBlaster stepped into the room. He kept the bore of the gun swiveling from alien to alien while he passed between our seats, then flipped open a panel and pulled a lever marked with black and yellow chevrons.

With a creak and hiss, a grated section of wall at the end of the room swung down like a toy hauler’s ramp. A puff of red dust drifted up, then tumbled away.

“Welcome to Van Diemann’s Planet, criminals,” the bulldog said. “Get off my transport shuttle.”