Tin Star (8 page)

“It’s good to know that we still have our uses,” I said.

“But it will be a chore to learn anew who is bribable when they return,” Heckleck said.

“Whatever do you mean?” Thado said, feigning surprise. After all, he’d always been in our pocket, even though he worked for the station. We laughed. It was a light moment, and I was thankful for it.

*   *   *

After getting his bearings, Heckleck could see how quiet the station had become. It irritated him that there was almost nothing to do.

“So difficult getting things done with such a shortage of lowlifes and high-placed officials on the station,” Heckleck said.

The lack of things to do had made me depressed. I was back at square one. With the travel restrictions and the changing of the currency values, everything I had worked for before the Imperium arrived was now worthless. Heckleck sensed my misery.

“Do you know what the best thing to do is when a place is empty?” Heckleck asked.

“No,” I said.

“Explore,” Heckleck said. “Come, let me show you what I’ve found while I was in hiding.”

He took me up to sections of the station that I’d never seen before. He showed me secret spots for hiding things. We went into the deep altars of temples where species worshipped no longer. Into the storage lockers of those who left at the end of the mining boom, certain that they would be back to gather their things. Into the vents of air supplies to sections that no longer needed specialized atmospheres or gravities. The sheer abundance of sections hinted at the vastness of the number of Minor Species. I felt that despite how many aliens I had seen during my time on the Yertina Feray, I had barely interacted with the galaxy at all.

Heckleck and I crawled in crawl spaces to scoot around high above the closed off sectors, likely used when maintenance was necessary in those places, but now quite forgotten. We had a bird’s-eye view of everything.

One space we stumbled into was a warehouse full of machines that looked like insects.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Miners,” Heckleck said.

They were frightening—rows and rows of faceless mining robots.

We walked, picking our way between them, these miners from a forgotten past that had ravaged and depleted the world below.

“Do they work?” I asked.

Heckleck picked up one of their heads from the ground.

“No.”

“They sort of look like you,” I said.

“My dear girl, just because they are insect-like does not mean that we are similar.”

But they did look like the Hort: the way their legs and arms were folded in an insect-like way, the coppery color of their metal, their pinched faces and the large eyes. The only thing they were missing was tiny vestigial wings on their backs.

“They don’t even have faces,” Heckleck said.

“I don’t mean to insult you,” I said.

Heckleck began to flip switches and slide his appendage on the panel of a computer terminal. But nothing happened. The rows of robots remained still.

“See. Useless,” he said. “We can sell the metal, bit by bit. Galactic expansion always needs metal.”

But I heard a hum to my right.

“Do you hear that?” I asked. I followed the sound, weaving through the rows of robots until I was standing in front of one robot with its lights on, but nothing else.

Heckleck turned the power off and the lights on the robot went dim.

“Not this one,” I said. I took a marking device from my pocket and I drew a face on the one that had lit up. “This one is mine.”

“Suit yourself,” Heckleck said. “You do attach yourself to such strange things.”

We had a good haul from the closed up places we’d discovered. It was useless now, with barely anyone to barter with, but would come in handy bit by bit later. It wasn’t looting if you took items that had been abandoned for over a century. That was fair game. It surprised me what valuables people had left behind in the sections that had been closed for years.

“Why haven’t you ever gone for this stuff before?” I asked.

“Because there were always eyes watching everything. Now, the station is blind. For these few months, we are free.”

When we were back in the underguts with our finds, Heckleck offered me the last of the maggot-like delicacies of his planet that he’d recently procured. I ate them with relish. I had developed a taste for them. They tasted like life to me.

“It’s strange, all these things we’ve taken from those who are likely long dead,” I said.

“The dead are useful to our business,” Heckleck said.

“They are not useful at all,” I said. “They are dead.”

“That is what you think. But the dead, they have ghosts. Ghosts are very useful for haunting. Never forget the dead, Tula. They have their function. They sometimes speak at the most useful or inopportune times.”

I thought about my mother and sister. I could not imagine that they would be useful for anything. They were dead. Nothing that they had to say could ever help me from beyond the grave now. Their time for helpful words was done.

It was when I thought of them that the parts inside of me that used to feel hardened the most.

“I miss my family,” I said. “I wish Brother Blue had died with the colonists.”

When I thought of my mother and her trust in Brother Blue, I became angry. I was angry at him, but I was angrier at her. Why did she trust me with him? Why couldn’t she see that he was dangerous? Why did she blindly take my sister onto the
Prairie Rose
without me? Why did she have to die? Even if I did manage to avenge them, they would still be dead, and they would still be silent. It was the silence that hurt me the most.

I remembered how all of the colonists looked at Brother Blue as though he were a God. Even I did. After assisting him, however, I remembered feeling as though I were faking my fervor. I began to see a normal man who looked to be full of shadows. But I could not place my finger on what was off.

I only knew that he always lit up when he said that the galaxy and its core were full of possibilities of richness beyond dreams. That was the only time that he ever seemed to be telling the truth. I was certain that it was true. There was something to be won out in that vastness.

*   *   *

Soon enough, the station slowly began to wake up as the first ship finally docked. The new, even when unknown, is infectious in its possibilities. I found Heckleck in his bin, sorting his stock of salts.

“I’m going to find out what’s going on,” I said.

“Careful, we’ll have to work hard to see who is bribable,” Heckleck said.

“Maybe it’ll be more interesting,” I said. “Maybe I’ll find another way off of here.”

Heckleck just rubbed his wings together.

I made my way over to the docking bays. I could see the new security force helping to move the transition of new people as they arrived. I didn’t recognize any of them as the new members of station security until they moved into the light. It was Tournour.

I had not expected him to be there. I had not expected to ever see him again. It surprised me that he had been sent back. Part of me wanted to march right up to him and yell at him again for keeping me on the station when I could have been gone months ago and on my way to revenge. But the change in mood on the station kept me in check. I hung back and I watched as some of the other new delegates streamed off the arriving ships. I noticed only the ones in charge spoke. They had been gifted a high-ranking position, even if it was in the backwater of space. They knew they had power. But it was not them that I watched. They were useless to me. Heckleck had advised me to look at the ones that were arriving to be new citizens of the station, the ones with the lower clerical-type jobs. They looked as though they all wanted to be as invisible as possible. They would be desperate. They would be the people to approach. They were the aliens who would trade for favors. But I could not observe them as thoroughly as I wanted to because my eyes kept going back to Tournour as he stood there organizing the whole arrival.

He couldn’t see me from where he was. I knew that it would be better to stop staring and to get out of there as quickly as possible in case he caught me and I did something that got me into more trouble with him. Besides, by the Imperium threads Tournour was wearing, it was clear he was working with them. There was no mistaking his alliance. I felt my heart, which had almost jumped when I saw his familiar face, snap shut. Heckleck had always told me it was silly to think of anyone in power as an ally. Even if their actions seemed to indicate a bond, they would always betray you in the end. The higher up they were, Heckleck always said, the more confusing their actions could be.

I made my way back down to the underguts.

“Well, what shall I give you for the information?” Heckleck asked.

He knew full well that he had to give me nothing.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.

“Then I haven’t taught you well,” he said.

“All right,” I said, pointing to the fattest fruit in his bowl. “I want the fattest, juiciest one. The one I know you’re saving for last.”

“That is a high price,” he said. He pretended to consider my offer. Then he plucked it from the bowl and gave it to me.

“Tournour is back,” I said. “I thought we’d never see him again.”

“He must have done something terribly wrong to be exiled here,” Heckleck said. “On second thought, perhaps if he’s been disgraced there is hope.”

“He’s not disgraced. He was helping to organize the transition,” I said.

“That’s the trouble with officers of the law,” Heckleck said. “They are always on the wrong side.”

“Unless you can buy them,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to buy Tournour for years,” Heckleck said. “Terribly stubborn Loor.”

*   *   *

The first time I saw Tournour again was at the game tables at Kitsch Rutsok’s. He had just gotten off duty. I went up to him as he sat enjoying a drink of jert juice with a female of his species. I thought he looked different. Somehow terrible and quite unlike his old self, and it was more than just his new uniform.

“Tournour,” I said.

He seemed surprised that I would approach him.

I wanted to see up close if he was really changed. I couldn’t say that it was nice to see him. He had chips in his hand. I’d never known him to play the games of chance before. He had never even wagered on a hocht. But here he was, placing bad bet after bad bet. He ignored me, and instead pawed the Loor female he was with. He was laughing, but it sounded forced. I had been reading Tournour my entire time on the station, and he did not seem to be having as much fun as he was pretending to.

And then there were his antennae, they were not pointed at the female, they were pointed away. They were pointed at me. I was keenly aware of them, like they were an extra set of eyes watching me.

I was being ignored, and I saw that it was useless to pursue any kind of conversation with him.

I circled back to exit.

Tournour had followed me.

He was tall, powerful, and, now that I was standing this close to him, threatening. I knew that no one would protect me in the bar if he went after me. He leaned in close. I was surprised at how sweet he smelled.

“I remember the stories of when your people first came,” Tournour said. “My grandfather met a few of your firsts. So primitive were you Humans when you arrived on your generational ships. People who had forgotten what a planet felt like because they were ship-born.”

Earth’s first true pioneers were those Humans who first traveled to the stars on generational ships. Everyone on Earth claimed to have someone who had gone on one of those generational ships. It was romantic to think that you had family in the stars.

My grandmother, who couldn’t even remember her own name or what she had for breakfast, would talk fondly about the day that the first light skip ships piloted by aliens had arrived carrying Humans who had hitched a ride home.

But those Humans came back to a different Earth than the overcrowded one that they had left. They were not welcome, and so they and theirs were forced back to wander the stars.

Tournour had his intense gaze fixed on me, as though he wanted me to say something.

“Aren’t all of us who live on the station a bit like that?” I said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve set foot on a planet. I’ve forgotten what it’s like, too.”

“It’s pleasant,” Tournour said. “Sunlight is pleasant. The warmth of it. We have the same kind of star, you and I. Did you know that?”

I shook my head no.

“Such similar homes,” he said.

He said it as though I was meant to understand something. But I didn’t.

“A sun warms in a way that a lamp can’t. Or maybe it’s the birds,” he said.

“So your trip back home was good?” I asked.

Tournour grimaced. A shadow passed over his face as though he were going to say something but then stopped himself.

“I’m back and in charge. They’ve promoted me,” he said. “That’s how it went.”

I had my answer. He could not be bought.

9

New administrators began to take the place of the old. Aliens boasted of the changes that would be made with the fresh start. Shops reopened. Goods arrived. The ships returned—a few at first—and then more. Things were mostly back to the way they were. I had been on the Yertina Feray for three earth years.

And then one day they came.

I was not prepared for them. I hadn’t heard about their ship arriving. I’d been deep in a series of trades and that sometimes took hours before being resolved.

It was late in the day, and I’d missed the gutter meal call, so I decided to treat myself to a luxury dish at Kitsch Rutsok’s bar. There were three of them. They showed up in a group on their way to get food.

Humans.

Once I saw them I could not stop staring. I had forgotten the sizes and shapes of my species. I’d forgotten the differences between males and females. The different colors of skin, hair, and eyes.

They took a table and sat down; they looked out of place among the aliens that made up the fabric of my day-to-day life. When I looked closer, I realized they looked my age, about seventeen or eighteen. Stranger still, they were all wearing green Imperium uniforms. As far as I knew, Earth was still undeclared. They weren’t part of a Children of Earth colony ship. They must be a part of the Humans that still roamed the stars. It was clear that they had nanites as they weren’t wearing breathing masks or having trouble communicating. They probably had taken up the offer by the Imperium on labor work. I was jealous, but comforted by the thought that they’d likely be on their way soon.