Not Your Average Princesses Read online

  Since their impromptu park concert on Heralda, SPACEPOP had been getting a lot more attention. Chamberlin had reluctantly broken down and gotten the girls an old computer (with horrifyingly basic 2D images and super unsophisticated voice and print recognition technology), so now Luna spent most of her waking hours searching galactic entertainment sites, digging for any mention of herself … and sometimes the rest of the band.

  Now that the band had a way to interact with the outside world, Luna had also started replying to comment threads and blog posts that mentioned the band, in order to develop a rapport with their growing fan base. She was the only one of SPACEPOP who had made time to interact with fans, and the other girls all appreciated her taking the lead on their fan chats. She had started to develop a SPACEPOP website, too, which was very heavy on Luna images—but at least they now had an online presence. “Someone on this site said my voice sounds like spun Heralda honey. That’s a compliment, right?”

  “Have you tried searching the name SPACEPOP without including Luna in the search, too?” Juno asked. “You might dig up even more hits.”

  “SPACEPOP wouldn’t be SPACEPOP without me,” Luna said seriously. She turned away from the wall of moving galactic web images and smiled brightly at her own reflection in the mirror. “You look gorgeous,” she cooed to herself. She coated her lips in bright red lipstick and frowned. “Even if this color is meteor red instead of meteoric red. It’s just not the same…”

  As another little treat for the girls—after their first few successful shows—Chamberlin had begrudgingly ordered the girls some makeup and a few additional things they needed to complete their SPACEPOP wardrobe. He had let them each request two special things. Of course, each girl had given him a page full of “needs,” begging him to splurge a little. But Chamberlin had wisely pointed out that if they got too many intergalactic deliveries, they would attract unwanted attention from the wrong sort of people. So each princess had to do without many of the things on her wish list. Luna’s lipstick order had gotten slightly mixed up, and she was struggling to get over it.

  The bus came to a stop on the ground, and Juno peered out the window. “We’re here. Looks like the festival is really crowded. This is going to be another great chance to help build up our fan base.”

  “Let’s get out there and give the people of Rhealo what they’re waiting for—me, of course!” Luna chirped. She raced out of the bus, waving as she sauntered through the crowds that were gathered on Rhea’s home planet for a huge outdoor festival.

  This show was an important one for SPACEPOP. They were one of the smaller acts in a huge outdoor concert weekend that had originally been scheduled to take place in an amphitheater near the Rhealo capitol. The Rocket Boys were the headline act, and they were well known throughout the galaxy for drawing an enormous crowd. SPACEPOP was hoping to introduce its music to some of the Rocket Boys fans.

  But when Geela had found out about the festival, she had ordered the organizers to feature her as the headline act … or cancel it. The lead organizer of the show had refused to invite Geela to perform, so she had him imprisoned and then blew up the amphitheater. As an act of rebellion, a group of music lovers had arranged for the show to go on at a remote landing strip outside the capitol. There were multiple stages set up, and different bands were assigned to different stages—bigger, more prominent stages with ample shade for the well-known acts; smaller, more remote stages for the less-famous bands—throughout the afternoon.

  “I’ll check in with the people in charge,” Athena offered. “We need to find out what stage we’re playing on.” She weaved through the crowds, returning a few minutes later with bad news. “We’re on stage five … of five.”

  “Is five the best one?” Luna asked, looking excitedly at the main stage. It was enormous, floating and spinning in the center of everything.

  Rand appeared behind them then, lugging a huge speaker. “Stage five is the one by the toilets,” he announced. “Way over there.” He pointed off into the distance—beyond the crowds, past the food stands, and miles away from the energy of the main stage. There was a puny brown stage squeezed into the open space just beside the portable toilets. Another band—one none of them had ever seen or heard of before—was playing to a nonexistent crowd. There was one lone person, who looked like she was lost or waiting for a toilet to be free, standing near the stage.

  “Do they have any idea who we are?” Luna griped. “We are way too big a deal to be playing on the loser stage. I refuse.”

  “You can’t refuse,” Athena said diplomatically. “This is how bands start. You build slowly and earn your fans. Next time we play a festival with a bunch of bands that are better known than we are, we might get upgraded to the second worst stage. Then the middle stage, and we’ll eventually be the lead act. It will happen. We just have to give it time.”

  “No,” Luna pouted. “This is absolutely humiliating. I’ll play at small clubs and even sing for tiny audiences where at least we’re the main act, but there’s no way I’m pretending to be happy in front of a crowd of zero on the worst of five stages. It’s going to stink over there, and the stage doesn’t even have lights! I’m too good for this.” She stomped off in the direction of the space bus.

  Rand looked to the other girls, trying to figure out what to do with the gear he had strapped to his back. “Should I bring everything back to the bus?” he asked sadly. “Are we leaving?”

  “Nope. Load up the stage, Rand,” Rhea said, shrugging at the rest of the band as she made a split-second decision. “We’ve got to go on, with or without our lead singer.”

  As soon as Rand had wandered off to get everything set up, Juno grumbled, “She’s such a diva. We’re better off without her.”

  “We don’t need a lead singer with an ego—or hair—as big as Luna’s,” Rhea agreed.

  “She’s acting like a child,” Athena snapped.

  “She’s just feeling disappointed,” Hera said, trying to defend her. “Luna isn’t used to not getting her way—none of us are, really. Her ego is bruised.”

  “Our reputation is going to be more bruised than her ego if we have to go on without a singer,” Rhea said. “It’s completely selfish of her to bail on us.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Hera said calmly. “Let me see if I can get her to change her mind.”

  “We don’t need her,” Juno insisted.

  “That’s not true and you know it,” Hera said rationally. “We do need her—and I think when we remind her of how much the galaxy needs us and our music, she’ll come around. Let me try to mend things.” Without waiting for anyone to disagree with her again, Hera skipped toward the space bus.

  “Luna?” she said quietly, stepping into Luna’s sleeping pod.

  “What?” Luna snapped, her head buried under her pillow.

  “Can you please come out and sing?” Hera asked softly. She placed Roxie and Adora on Luna’s bed, urging them to tickle Luna out of hiding. Adora refused—she hated to annoy anyone—but Roxie was happy to tussle and tickle Luna until she broke down and smiled. Giggling, she peeked out from under the pillow. Hera smiled back at her. “Are you sure you want to give up this chance for more people to hear our music?”

  Luna rolled her eyes, then began absentmindedly rubbing Adora’s tummy. The little creature moaned and kicked one leg. “No one is going to hear us. We’re playing to a bunch of toilets. There are literally no fans at the fifth stage. It’s totally humiliating.”

  “Humiliating for whom?”

  “For me!” Luna said. “This is such a waste of time.”

  “It’s not a waste of time,” Hera said calmly. “Luna, I think you’re forgetting the point of this band. When Geela took over our planets, we were all ordered to hide away and wait for the trouble to pass. But we decided that we wanted to fight back, in the only way we could, right?”

  “Yeah,” Luna said. “By becoming famous rock stars. That’s the only way we’re going to make a real difference.”r />
  Hera shook her head. “We’re not princesses anymore. We can’t just snap our fingers and make things happen the way we used to. We need to build this thing slowly, from the ground up, and that means it will be a little harder and take a little longer than we’re accustomed to.”

  “It just seems impossible,” Luna huffed. “I hate seeing all the horrible things Geela has done to our planets and not be able to do something now. We’ve spent all this time practicing and writing songs so we can play to these tiny crowds … I’m sick of it.”

  “But tiny crowds are better than no crowds,” Hera replied. “If you just sit here in the bus, sulking, there’s absolutely no chance of anyone hearing you. If you go out there, and you give it your all, there’s a chance someone might hear you.” She paused, then added excitedly, “Bradbury is the perfect example. That first show we played at Air Bar—well, it seemed awful, right? But if we had skipped it because the crowd looked absolutely dead, we never would have met Bradbury. And if we hadn’t met Bradbury, then we wouldn’t have had any fans at the show on Heralda. Little by little, we’re getting our message across.”

  Luna nodded slightly.

  Encouraged, Hera went on, “If we hadn’t played that show on Heralda, we wouldn’t have caught Captain Hansome’s attention and been recruited for … the Resistance.” She grinned at Luna. “Each show has its purpose—just like each of us has our purpose in the band. We need you, Luna. Don’t let us down.”

  Luna sighed. “You’re right.” She sat up and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry I stormed off.” Quietly, she added, “I know I can be sort of stubborn sometimes—and maybe I’m a little hard to deal with every once in a while—but it’s just that I’m afraid of this new life, you know? I’m scared, Hera. Geela is so cruel, and she’s done so much so quickly.”

  Hera nodded. “That’s why we can’t give up. We need to get our old lives back—but we can’t do that if we just camp out in this space bus and sulk.”

  Luna smiled slightly. “Yeah, you’re right again.”

  Roxie chittered and launched herself into the middle of their hug. “She’s trying to tell you I’m always right,” Hera giggled. “Now, come on. Fix up your lipstick, and let’s get out there and entertain every single person who comes over to use the bathroom! We’ll show them SPACEPOP deserves the main stage from now on!”

  * * *

  As it turned out, plenty of fans came out to hear SPACEPOP. Although their stage wasn’t flashy or centrally located (and there was a distinctly unpleasant odor in the vicinity), SPACEPOP had already started to build enough of a fan base that there was a medium-size smattering of fans who had come specifically to hear them play. The five princesses’ pets also scurried around the festival grounds, urging concertgoers to make their way out to stage five to hear the girls’ set. By the end of their show, a respectable crowd had gathered to cheer for them and sing along to “We ’Bout to Start Something Big.”

  “I’m glad you begged me to come back,” Luna said to Hera as the girls boarded the space bus later that day. “That was a pretty good show. The portable toilets might have actually improved the acoustics.”

  “You sounded wonderful, girls,” Chamberlin said, greeting them at the door of the bus. “Now, please—hurry inside. We just received a communication blast, and it says it’s time sensitive.”

  “Is it from Captain Hansome?” Luna asked brightly, hustling through the door.

  “Just have a listen,” Chamberlin said. “It’s a self-destructing pod and has pesky security measures encrypted in the device, so I didn’t get to listen to his message before you returned.”

  The girls all gathered around a tiny message pod. The small sphere glowed orange and green, and when they pressed each of their fingertips to the outside of the pod for security verification, Captain Hansome’s voice rang out as clear as a bell. “Good afternoon, rebels,” he said.

  “Good afternoon, Captain,” Luna whispered back.

  Rhea nudged her. “He can’t hear you—it’s a recording.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Luna snapped back. “I’m just being polite.”

  “My sources tell me you are on Rhealo,” the recording went on. “I have your second mission, and hope that this time you will be better at following orders. We need you to sneak into the transport bays on the eastern edge of Rhealo’s capital. Once inside, please put tracking devices on Geela’s space-tankers so we will be able to track them to their next destination.”

  “Where are we supposed to get tracking devices?” Juno wondered aloud.

  Hansome’s voice said, “My special ops team hid one hundred tracking devices and some additional instructions inside Juno’s bass drum after your show today. Rand will be delivering them to the space bus at any moment. One hundred trackers should be more than enough to get the job done.”

  Just then, Rand stumbled into the space bus and collapsed under the weight of Juno’s drum kit. He yelled out, “Not to complain, since it’s my job to haul this stuff, but this drum kit is heavy today,” he gasped, panting.

  “Sorry, Rand,” Juno called out as Rand stepped back outside to gather up his next load.

  “Good luck on your second mission,” Captain Hansome finished. “You must complete the job before midnight, when Geela’s army will be moving out. So make haste!” There was a short pause, then Hansome’s voice said in a monotone, “This message will melt in ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…” As the girls looked on, the tiny pod melted into a puddle of messy goo on the space bus dash. Springle launched herself toward it and pressed several of her wiggly limbs into the mess. Then she ran around the room, leaving sticky marks all over everything.

  “Lovely,” Chamberlin sighed. “As usual, I’ll clean up the mess. But how about this time, we consider that my contribution to the rebel mission, shall we? I’m staying home, where there will be a hot cup of tea and no angry guards.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “All aboard!” Rhea called out, waving the other girls toward a bright blue air train in the center of Rhealo’s capital city. She jumped into the train and held the door open, urging the others to hurry. “Pick up the pace, girls. The next express train doesn’t come for an hour, and if we miss this one, we miss the mission.”

  Luna pinched her nose closed and stepped aboard. “Can you imagine what kind of germs are lurking inside this train?”

  Rhea shrugged and readjusted the bag of trackers she had slung over her shoulder as the train whooshed out of the station. She gazed up at a huge poster hanging on the inside wall of the train. Each of the five princesses’ faces were splashed across the poster, along with WANTED and REWARD scrawled across the bottom. These Wanted posters had been cropping up all over the galaxy. Geela was obviously eager to capture the five girls so she could consider her takeover a total success. Each of the girls felt a small glimmer of pride every time they stood under one of these and failed to be recognized.

  As SPACEPOP changed into their spy gear after the show, Rhea had decided that the easiest way to get to the eastern edge of Rhealo’s capital was to take public transportation. Their tour bus was far too conspicuous, she’d pointed out, and a blown-up Skitter would be impractical for getting them from one side of the city to the other without being seen. The space taxi companies had all been taken over by Geela’s employees, which made them off limits. Thus, a bus or train was the only thing that could shuttle them to the city outskirts in a hurry.

  One of the very few positive side effects of Geela’s takeover was that air trains and space buses throughout the galaxy now all ran on time—mostly because people were too terrified to leave their homes unless they absolutely had to. There was never a backup in the traffic lanes since the usual hustle and bustle of people shopping and going to work and meeting up with friends had come to a standstill. So right at the scheduled time of 10:23—with their spy outfits covered with ridiculous capes and several of Chamberlin’s cardigans—the girls boarded an express trai
n to the eastern edge of the city.

  Luna was not pleased about their mode of transport. And she made sure everyone knew it. “Are we there yet?” she whined, gazing out the train’s dirty window at the stark, angular buildings that surrounded them. “Now are we there? Does anyone have any sanitizer?”

  At the second to last stop, a cluster of Geela’s guards boarded the train and stood just a few feet from the princesses. Rhea pulled her hood farther over her face, and the other girls followed suit. The four guards gave them a brief once-over, but didn’t connect them to the five faces on the Wanted poster. “What are you doing out at this hour?” one of the guards snapped at them. “It’s past curfew.”

  “We are on our way home,” Rhea answered quietly. “We were at a Geela support rally in the center of the capital.”

  The guard grunted. “Very well.” Then she turned away to chat with the other guards, apparently satisfied that they were sharing the train with Geela supporters.

  When the train reached its final stop, the black-clad rebels waited until the group of guards had disembarked, then they stepped off the train. The girls hid in the shadows until the air train platform was clear, then peeled off their cardigans and capes and raced down the moving staircase to street level.

  Cloaked in their black spy suits, the girls ran through the streets, making their way toward the enormous transport bays and open spaces beyond the warehouse district. According to the instructions Captain Hansome’s team had hidden inside Juno’s drum kit, Geela was currently storing all her space-tankers in the transport bays at the far outskirts of Rhealo’s capital.

  As they prepared, Rhea explained to the other girls that each of these bays spilled out onto wide open spaces used as landing pads by larger space vehicles—supply tankers, interplanetary passenger transports, military vessels, and the like. Since Geela had taken over the planet, only the empress’s vehicles were allowed to use the landing pads and bays. All large shipments in to and out of Rhealo had been halted for the foreseeable future, and the only way to get from one planet to another was to charter a smaller transport with funds most Rhealo residents didn’t have. This was yet another way Geela was choking the residents of the galaxy.