ZOE AND THE GOLDEN GENIUS
A Beast Planet Kitchen Adventure
Chapter One: Falling to Beast Planet
The thing about a soufflé is that it does not care about your feelings. It does not care that your ex-cooking-partner is standing four stations away with a smirk that could curdle milk. It only cares about heat, and time, and whether you have the nerve to open the oven door at exactly the right second, and Zoe Martinez had exactly nine seconds left before her nerve, and possibly her entire future, ran out completely.
Nine seconds. You have made forty of these. You can make one more.
The Culinary-Aerospace Academy's Final Trials arena buzzed around her, a vast silver dome ringed with floating cameras and a judging panel that included, this year, an actual admissions officer from the Interstellar Chef Registry, the kind of person who could hand a sixteen year old a golden ticket out of a struggling family restaurant and into an entirely different life.
Zoe pulled the soufflé from the oven. It rose, perfect, gold, unashamed of its own existence, the way a soufflé should be.
Bob Higgins did not clap.
Zoe had known Bob since they were both twelve years old and covered in flour at the same regional bake-off, back when he still thought she was funny instead of threatening. They had been partners for two years, right up until the semifinals three weeks ago, when the judges had announced, in front of the entire Academy, that Zoe Martinez's plating showed instincts Robert Higgins simply did not possess yet.
Yet. As if instinct was something you could grow into, like a mustache.
Bob had not taken it well. Bob, currently, was not taking anything well, which Zoe noticed with the specific, prickling unease of someone who has grown up around enough kitchen disasters to recognize the smell of trouble before it actually catches fire.
"Pilots to your shuttles," called the arena announcer, a soothing computerized voice that had clearly never once had to actually fly anything. "Final Trial component two: zero gravity plating. Report to Bay Seven immediately."
This is it. This is the part where I either get a scholarship to the Registry or go back to reheating my abuela's albondigas for the dinner rush at Casa Martinez for the rest of my natural life.
Zoe did not hate reheating albondigas. She loved her family's restaurant fiercely, in the specific, complicated way you love something that is also slowly, quietly failing, the way you could see the worry lines multiplying on her mother's forehead every time the electric bill arrived, the way the Baron Vex Culinary Consortium kept sending letters with words like acquisition opportunity in them, which was corporate for we will buy your grandfather's restaurant out from under you whether you like it or not.
A scholarship to the Registry meant money. A scholarship meant her family's restaurant, three generations deep, might actually survive long enough for a fourth.
She climbed into Shuttle Fourteen, strapped in, and did not notice, because there was absolutely no reason she should have been looking, the very small, very deliberate way Bob Higgins lingered near the shuttle bay's control panel exactly forty five seconds longer than his own preflight checklist required.
TEDROS
I would like it noted, for the record of whatever universe eventually asks, that I tried to warn her. Golden retrievers are excellent at reading body language. It is a scientifically documented skill, right up there with unconditional loyalty and an inexplicable talent for opening refrigerator doors. What golden retrievers are generally not equipped for is being four hundred light years away at the exact moment their future best friend needs the warning most.
I did not know Zoe yet. I would like that clarified too. But I feel, having gotten to know her rather intimately since, that some cosmic force owed her a warning, and some cosmic force did not deliver, and I have made my peace with picking up that particular slack ever since.
The shuttle launched.
For the first four minutes, everything was ordinary in the specific, breathtaking way spaceflight always managed to be ordinary and impossible at the same time, stars smearing past the viewport, the gentle hum of the shuttle's mini-kitchen warming up for the zero-gravity plating challenge, a bowl of stabilized mousse floating obediently in its magnetic containment field.
Focus. Plating in zero gravity is ninety percent physics and ten percent not throwing up. You have practiced this. You are ready.
The shuttle's navigation console beeped once, wrong, a sound Zoe had never heard it make in six months of simulator training.
Then it beeped again, worse.
"Warning," said the shuttle's onboard computer, in the same soothing voice as the arena announcer, which felt like an enormous betrayal given the words that followed. "Navigation override detected. Course correction failing. Structural rift ahead."
A rift. A structural rift is not a thing that shuttles are supposed to encounter during a school competition. A structural rift is a thing that happens in the news, to other people, in stories that start with tragically and end with a memorial scholarship named after you.
Zoe grabbed the manual controls, hands shaking, running through every emergency protocol her instructor had ever drilled into her, and found, with a cold, sinking certainty, that none of them were responding, that something in the shuttle's core navigation had been quietly, deliberately rerouted before launch, rerouted by someone who had known exactly which panel to access and exactly how long it would take before anyone noticed.
Bob.
She did not have time to feel the full, furious weight of that realization, because the viewport ahead of her had stopped showing stars and started showing something else entirely, a tear in the fabric of ordinary space, swirling violet and silver like spilled paint, and the shuttle was falling into it whether Zoe agreed to that plan or not.
The last thing she heard, before the world turned inside out around her, was the shuttle's computer calmly announcing a complete loss of navigational control, and the last thing she thought, absurdly, uselessly, was that her mousse was almost certainly ruined.
Zoe woke up to the smell of ozone and burnt sugar and, underneath both of those, the specific, unmistakable scent of dog.
Dogs do not belong in space. Dogs especially do not belong wherever I currently am, which does not look like Bay Seven, or Earth, or anywhere a reasonable shuttle crash should have deposited a person.
She was lying in a bed of enormous, faintly luminous ferns, purple sky stretching overhead in a way that made her stomach flip just looking at it, twin moons hanging low and close enough that she could make out craters with her bare eyes. The wreckage of Shuttle Fourteen smoked quietly a few dozen feet away, split open like an egg.
And sitting directly in front of her, golden fur catching the strange violet light, head tilted with the specific patient attention of a creature waiting for a human to finish being confused, was a dog.
A golden retriever. Wearing, Zoe noticed with the particular clarity that comes right before your brain fully accepts an impossible situation, a small silver collar with a screen embedded in it, currently displaying a scrolling readout of what looked disturbingly like calculus.
"You're going to want to lie very still," the dog said, in a voice that came not from his mouth but from a small speaker built into the collar, pleasant and clipped and entirely unbothered by the fact that he was, in fact, a dog, speaking. "There's a hunting patrol two kilometers out, and they've got scanners tuned specifically for your particular genetic signature. Humans read very loud on their equipment. I don't fully understand the physics of it, but I've had six years to observe the pattern, and the pattern is extremely consistent."
I have hit my head. I have definitely, certainly hit my head, and none of this is real, and in a moment a nice person in a white coat is going to tell me my mousse survived after all.
"You did not hit your head," the dog said, which was, Zoe would learn, a running theme of knowing things he had no reasonable way of knowing. "Well. You might have. But that's not why any of this is happening. My name is Tedros. I've been on this planet for six years, ever since some extremely irresponsible smugglers left me here as cargo overflow, and in that time I have developed a functional understanding of local hacking protocols, orbital mechanics, and, unfortunately, exactly how dangerous it is for a human to be caught out in the open on Beast Planet."
"Beast Planet," Zoe repeated, because it seemed like the safest possible thing to repeat, the two words that required the least amount of her brain currently working correctly.
"That's the polite translation. The literal one involves several syllables your throat isn't built for." Tedros stood, shaking dirt from his golden coat with brisk efficiency. "Humans are rare here. Rare enough to be valuable. Rare enough that certain collectors, zoos, and extremely wealthy individuals pay considerable sums for a live specimen, which is a phrase I deeply regret having to say out loud to another actual human being, but there it is."
Specimen. He just called me a specimen. This entire situation has officially gotten worse than the mousse.
The ground trembled, distant but unmistakable, a low mechanical thrum that Zoe felt in her back teeth before she consciously registered it as sound.
"That," Tedros said, ears twitching toward the horizon with sudden, focused attention, "would be the patrol. Sooner than I estimated. They must have picked up the shuttle's crash signature."
"What do we do?"
"We run," Tedros said, already moving, "and then, once we're safely not running, you and I are going to have a much longer conversation about how, exactly, a Culinary-Aerospace Academy shuttle ended up crashing through a class-four spatial rift on what was supposed to be a routine training flight, because in my professional, six-years-of-data-collection opinion, that kind of failure does not happen by accident."
Zoe scrambled up, ferns crunching underfoot, the mechanical thrum growing louder behind them, and found, despite the terror currently flooding every part of her body, one single clear thought rising above the rest, sharp and furious and entirely, completely correct.
Bob did this. Bob actually, genuinely did this, and I am going to find a way to make it back to Earth specifically so I can tell him exactly what I think about it.
The patrol's spotlight swept across the fern field behind them, close enough that Zoe felt the heat of it against the back of her neck, and Tedros put on a burst of speed that seemed, for a golden retriever, entirely too fast to be biologically reasonable.
"They've spotted the crash site," he said, calculations still scrolling across his collar even mid-sprint. "Which means we have approximately ninety seconds before they widen the search radius to include us. I don't suppose you know how to disguise yourself as anything other than extremely, obviously human?"
"No," Zoe gasped, lungs burning, purple sky wheeling overhead, twin moons watching with the particular indifference of things that had seen this exact kind of chase play out many times before. "I know how to make a soufflé."
"Well," Tedros said, and if a computerized voice could sound grimly amused, his somehow managed it, "let's hope that turns out to be more useful here than it currently sounds."
They ran until the fern field gave way to a rocky slope, and Tedros ducked them both into a narrow crevice half hidden by a fallen slab of purple stone, the patrol's spotlight sweeping past overhead close enough that Zoe could hear the mechanical whine of its engine, and then, slowly, fading into the distance.
Zoe sat in the dark, heart still hammering, and allowed herself exactly one full minute to consider the complete, catastrophic size of the situation she had somehow landed in, before she made herself breathe, because her abuela had taught her a long time ago that panic never once improved a dish, and it was not likely to improve a interplanetary crisis either.
"So," she said, once the patrol's engine had gone fully silent, "you said something about a longer conversation."
"I did," Tedros agreed, golden eyes glinting faintly in the dark of the crevice. "Starting with the fact that whoever sabotaged your shuttle is very lucky they're several hundred light years away right now, because I suspect you have several things you'd like to say to them, and I would genuinely enjoy hearing all of it."