Author’s Note: Although the reader can intuit the necessary details of this Peter Pan retelling, an even greater experience can be found by reading previous short stories: Never, Never, The Test, Welcome to Neverland, and Never Games. These shorts have all come from Elegant Literature Magazine’s monthly challenges. In this case, the challenge was to address “Borders and Boundaries” in 2000 words.
Commander James Hoogeveen pondered the paltry boundary wall separating his crew and the feral humanoids of Neverland, and realized he was going to die.
This planet fit mission parameters in almost every way—pure of water and air, verdant soil and virgin timber, plenty of space for a new colony of tens of thousands to thrive—with one small, impossible exception: Earthlings. How his childhood friend Tommy could be here, baby-faced as the day he abandoned Jim at the orphanage, Jim didn’t know. Maybe it was pixie magic, the same unexplainable sorcery that transported Tommy across light-years of space.
Jim shrugged it off. It didn’t matter. Peter and his rabble would have to surrender or die, because Commander James F. Hoogeveen refused to relinquish his own life so easily.
“Doesn’t seem tall enough, does it?” Tris murmured. Since the last attack, she’d hardly left his side. She rubbed her shoulder, which bore a round scar from her former arrow wound, then gave him a doleful, half-hearted smile. “Not when your enemy can fly.”
Jim tried to lighten his expression. “At least it’s only the one.”
“True.” Tris turned from the wild woods, a shadowed tangle of old growth, vines and epiphytics. Instead, she cast her doubtful eye within the barricade. The entire place roiled with activity: workers, builders, carriers. “Jim, I appreciate our crew’s industry, but again I must warn you of careless practices. The road doesn’t even have an infiltrative design. The runoff will create gullies on either side, making it even harder to maintain, and it hurts the groundwater the more we develop—”
“We have to build a town somewhere, Tris—”
“And the farms,” she interrupted, cheeks pink with fervor, “I know you said not to worry about it, but that ground being plowed is highly inappropriate for cultivation unless we use plugs and embrace 58% crop loss probability. One tractor already sunk into mud where it had to be rescued via air shuttle, and now they’re talking about drainage and levees.”
“We need food—”
“No, we need to find balance.” Tris smacked a fist into her other palm and set her jaw. She glowered at him. “Gamma is our chance to not fuck up again. Don’t you see, Jim?”
Jim breathed deeply inward, controlling his inherent reaction of indignation. She was right, but she was also insubordinate. “Mission Specialist Smith, our crew contains the best and brightest of three planets combined. Let them do their jobs.”
Tris’s frown deepened, and she stamped her foot. “Don’t do that, Jim.”
“What?”
“Call me by rank when you don’t want to listen anymore. You saw Beta in the rear-view, just as I did. She’s bleeding already, tears of sediment and acid that run all the way to the ocean. In the years since, she’s probably earned a few pockmarks from the polluting rain and lost her peaks from blasting.” She spat. “Mountain-topping, archaic but effective. It disgusts me. We were meant to be the future, Jim, and instead we drag another planet down with our grasping fingers. Rip her beautiful vestments right off and rape her in the open.”
“Enough!”
Tris shook her head and descended the steps from the wall to the ground, disappearing among the roughly-constructed buildings.
Jim let the remainder of his breath whistle out through his teeth. As usual, Trista Smith hit a nerve. He’d never embraced the whole manifest destiny thing. Such a perspective didn’t jive with a miserable childhood in the orphanage on Earth. Nothing but smog and garbage on the other side of those white walls, nothing but dead rivers and gray skies and bleak misgivings. What right had humanity to another planet?
None, if he were honest with himself. And yet here he was, commander of an exploratory mission and soon-to-be conqueror of Neverland.
He had decided to call it that after the first attack on their colony. The pixie Tink had said no help was coming. Time stopped here, and his missive would never reach its destination among the stars. Never, never. No colonial ship would lurch from its landers, humming with hope and fusion drives, for the decades-long journey to this little planet in the far-flung Numquami System. No, Jim was alone. He would have to guide his crew to victory without the aid of a larger ship.
First step, a base of operations, well-supplied and crowned with this high picket wall all around. Colonists’ homes crowded within, with many tradesmen taking residence upstairs of their workshops. Composite walls were in shorter supply, used only for those buildings most prone to fire such as the canteen and metalworks. The rest utilized the abundant timber, forcing the infringing forest away from the walls with a graveyard of stumps.
Second step, expansion of the safe zone. The pixies had promised to help with that; they patrolled the woods now in twinkling troves. They moved in murmurations like the videologs he had seen of birds, like the colonial insects of Beta. Led by Tink, the pixies reported more reliably and sooner than before to forewarn of that flying demon’s lost boys, in exchange for bespoke clothing and miniature tools.
Third step, elimination of threats. His mission anthropologist hadn’t approved that plan yet, but Jim intended to annihilate the potent danger of Peter’s boys. Too many of them knew Earth. They knew how guns worked, and they had already shown aggression. Damned if Jim wasn’t going to do whatever he must to protect his crew.
A heavy thud interrupted his thoughts, and he spun to see a support beam of the wall crack in half. The guilty stone continued onward, blasting into a building within the walls.
Jim cursed.
“Lost Boys, attack,” cried a familiar voice. Peter zoomed from the shadowed woods, but even as he ascended, a thousand bright lights tugged him down. Pixies swarmed him, and another wave jingled warning. A chorus arose immediately ahead of Jim, where pixie lights burned around a device wheeling from the woods.
“They have a catapult,” Jim cried into his earpiece, raising his phaser gun and firing freely. “We’re under attack on the north side.” He head-shot several boys, one burst each. See if Peter has time to heal them all, he thought bitterly. But more boys flooded out, taking position at the catapult and reloading quickly. The device creaked back again, flung forward again, and another section of wall snapped into splinters. Jim kept shooting, sensing his crew members to either side. Light pulses pierced downward, echoed by screams, but the catapult remained manned.
Jim switched to destroying the device itself, his mind wandering to childhood lessons of Earth history. Fire arrows would be nice right about now, or a primitive incendiary like a grenade. Phasers weren’t great for starting fires. Nevertheless, he aimed carefully, blasting the rocks used as ammunition. The fragments of one severed the tether, allowing one more violent thrust, one more hole in the wall. This time the hole was lower, lacking propulsion to fly but not to shatter wood. The gate burst apart.
He cursed again, even as he realized he was winning. Pixies descended upon several groups of boys in the woods, pulling their hair and occasionally carrying a boy high in the sky before flinging him aside. The disabled catapult seemed to glow, and flames appeared at its wooden base. Phaser shots rang out in alternating cadence with the cries of injured. His crew crowded the north wall, a line of defense for those residents lacking weapons training.
And then a hail of arrows sang from the east.
His crew fell like chess pieces. Jim watched in horror as another assault arced over the wall, piercing man and woman alike. What missed his defenders flew onward to the town, landing on flesh as often as stone. The din of industry shifted to the clamor of terror.
“Guard the entrance,” Jim shouted as a new hole ripped through the east wall. He winced. “They have another catapult. Destroy it. Defend the wall.” His orders were lost in the chaos as a new threat poured through the hole.
These weren’t Lost Boys. These were something else, something that tickled his memory of history, and again entirely impossible. Earth races had lost their distinction with globalization hundreds of years ago; such distinct facial structures and skin colors would not exist again until humans regained space to grow. Yet, here was something unique and ancient.
Time doesn’t move here, Tink had said merrily.
Jim shuddered.
It was true. Lost Boys didn’t age, Peter could fly, and these warriors derived from some lost culture at the edges of his own extensive knowledge. Time in Neverland was stopped, creating a place both timeless and contemporaneous.
He had to get his crew out.
“Retreat to the Celeste,” he roared, panic roiling in his gut. Their missive for a colonial ship would never leave the Numquami System. Their only hope was to depart themselves, to fly the Celeste away from the fouled blackhole of time around this planet, and rally from there.
He waved those he could away from the fight, but the number on his heels paled in comparison to the bodies in the streets. Boys and warriors surged inside, cutting down all they encountered. Jim guided his reduced crew toward a shuttle at the dock, praying they could reach it and the waiting Celeste. His starship floated gently in the bay, her engines off and her defenses down.
“Flight Specialist Daugherty, tell me you’re there.” His voice caught as he pressed his earpiece. There was Tris; behind her, Specialist Roark.
“Here, sir,” came the response. “I’ve destroyed the other catapult via trajectile.”
“Prepare immediately for lift-off, Daugherty. We’re evacuating.” Jim ignored the sputtering acknowledgement, focused instead on ushering the bloodied crew onto the shuttle.
Tris caught his eye, then dragged a blubbering Roark behind her. “Should we wait for anyone else, sir?” Tris said quietly as he worked the shuttle controls to close the door.
He shook his head, about to answer, when a light thump and soft squelch sounded by the door. Roark grunted, stumbling. An arrow jutted partway between her ribs, its blades painted crimson. She ogled it as the shuttle door closed, then collapsed with a cough. Bubbly blood sprayed the floor.
Tris grabbed the fallen woman and turned her to her side, revealing an artful display of blue feathers on the fletching.
Roark muttered through a mouthful of red spittle, her words nonsensical except for one: “Home.” A few more labored breaths, and Roark stilled.
Jim cursed Tink for not being inside the shuttle, for not warning them of such a massive assault from an unknown source, for letting Roark die so easily and so quickly. He cursed Neverland, and he cursed Peter. Surely, this was the demon creature’s doing, an alliance of his boys with warriors who could actually fight.
He piloted toward the Celeste. His surviving crew watched the front view in defeated silence, boots wetted in Roark’s blood. The water of the bay vibrated from each takeoff engine as the starship began to lift from its surface. The rumble turned to a roar.
As Jim requested the bay doors to open, a shape vaulted from the bay. Reptilian, grayish-green, massive beyond imagination. The crocodile clamped its jaws on an engine, dragging the Celeste down, and whipped its head. Another did the same to the other side, and another, and the hull ripped apart.
Jim slammed into reverse, his heart dropping. There was no escape.
Tink appeared beside him, watching dispassionately as the Celeste careened into the bay.
Jim fumed. “I said to guard, damn it all, you useless fairy.” He wanted to scream, to rip her wings from her body, to shake her until her magic dusted out, but she merely laughed that chiming laugh.
Tink simpered at him. “You only said to guard against lost boys. Oh, Jamesy, I told you, you must learn how to play the game, or you’ll keep losing.”