Tin Star (2 page)

“Why?” I tried to ask, blood filling my mouth.

He hit me again, and now I was too stunned to scream. He did not stop until I was limp. At some point my air mask was knocked off, and the atmosphere of the space station struck me as though it were another blow.

It was only when he thought that I was dead that he moved away from me, into the hangar where the colonists were gathered, leaving me behind the forgotten cargo bins full of grain that had so concerned me.

I wanted to groan, but my lungs ached. I wanted my mother. But I could not call out. I wanted to promise Brother Blue that I would not question his wisdom or mention the cargo bins ever again. But I knew better than to let on that he had not finished the job.

I strained my ears to listen as he gave a speech to his followers.

“Brothers and sisters of Earth! You are on an incredible journey! I envy you as you set out to your new home. Circumstances have forced a change in my plan. I must deal with the politics and datawork that the League of Worlds requires.”

He explained that he would instead be heading to Bessen, a moon which served as the capital of the League of Worlds, to consult with the Five Major Species and the other Minor Species members about new planets that the Children of Earth were bidding for. He would then go back to Earth. He informed the colonists that he had bought a small ship that would leave immediately after the
Prairie Rose
left. I listened to more of his speech, but he did not mention rendezvousing with the colonists on Beta Granade at a later date.

That was a significant change in plan.

Brother Blue always went with the colonists all the way to the planet for first landing day. Only when the first season was through and the colony was deemed as thriving would he go back to Earth to handle the coordinating and recruiting of the next batch of colonists.

There was a collective moan of fear from the colonists. Brother Blue had promised he’d be there with us every step of the way. He had so often told us that he was the only one who could protect us on our journey from the perils of space, from aliens, and from the Humans left over from the generational ships, who’d set out for the stars in the past, settled nowhere, and wandered and roamed. They had grown too wild to join the Children of Earth colonies and were not welcome back on Earth.

I wanted to stand up, but I could not move. And if I did, I was afraid he would surely finish me off. Cowardice kept me quiet.

He continued, hushing them like a soothing father.

“I know, I know. It’s disappointing to me as well. But you are the true pioneers! I am envious of your adventure. The first days on a new planet, full of hope and possibility, is my favorite part of the mission to settle the worlds that we aim to call home. I will think of you as the
Prairie Rose
heads to its new planet. And wish you speed and light as you begin to grow and build and make your new home. Although Earth Gov does not appreciate it yet, you are doing a great thing for Humanity. And when times get tough, as we already see they can by our unscheduled stop here, remember that what you do, your courage, your strength, your perseverance, will always be remembered.”

There was applause. Then I listened as the colonists began to board the
Prairie Rose.
Brother Blue was likely standing at the entrance to the ship, and I could hear him as he shook hands with every one of the colonists and wished them luck.

Surely my family had noticed by now that I had gone missing. I shifted my body and watched as best I could from behind the crates as my fellow Earthling colonists filed past the anteroom that hid me. They walked in order, as they had been taught. They walked with their heads down, as they had been taught. What I had long suspected was true: We only saw what we were told to see. But now I was seeing something else: Brother Blue was like a magician I’d seen once when I was young, distracting the eye from what he was really doing. I thought back to all of the times that he’d confided in me and realized that they were all tactics to keep me from asking questions. I’d been fooled. The grain had been the last in a long line of things that had bothered me somehow. His words always told a different story, a soothing story, a logical explanation for things that didn’t add up. All along I’d known deep down inside that something was not quite right. But I’d been blinded by my desire for a position in the future with Children of Earth. I had been kept in place by not wanting to rock the boat.

I would not make that mistake again.

Though blurry, I watched as Brother Blue approached my mother and sister and heard him say, “Tula will be traveling with me, Mrs. Bane. She’s too valuable a right hand man for me to give her up now.”

“Yes, Brother Blue,” she said. “We’re so happy for her prospects.”

“She’ll rise very high under my tutelage.”

And there it was. No one would suspect that it could be otherwise. My family would never know or have cause to believe that he would lie.

Brother Blue stayed until the last colonist was onboard. He stayed until the docking door swung and clicked shut with a hiss of air. He waited until the sound of the ship unclamping from the station came. Only then did he walk away. From where I lay, I could see that he did not look disturbed that he had just broken his word to the 167 colonists in his care. He looked relieved.

And then he was gone.

No one would care about a dead body on the docking bay. I’d seen plenty of them. They were robbed and then disposed of by the rabble of aliens who looked for work on the few ships that docked.

But I was not dead yet.

I tried to adjust my weight again to make some of the pain stop, and then dragged myself out of the anteroom to the hangar, as though I could somehow catch up with the ship before it left the station. But it was too late. They were gone. What was I to do now? My eyes caught sight of the
Prairie Rose
as it sailed by the window in the hangar. It moved so slowly that at first it didn’t seem as though it was leaving at all. It was only when it began to shrink in size against the blackness of space that I was sure that it was leaving me behind. The
Prairie Rose
sailed on its edge, looking like a thin silver line; when it reached acceleration, it flipped up, ready to slingshot around the nearby depleted planet below and shoot out of the system in a light skip.

It was a sight to see.

The ship had five shiny points, its metal glinting in the glare of the weak sun. It looked like a tin star, the kind I had seen in history books, the kind that officers of the law wore. I managed to lift my hand, as though to touch the ship, before it vanished from sight.

Then, the ship was gone, and so was my family.

They had all left me here, on the floor of the Yertina Feray space station.

That knowledge—that I was utterly alone—felt sharper than the beating. It made the pain in my body intolerable.

Everything—the hangar, the window, and the ship’s fading streak of silver—went black.

2

Unconsciousness did not last long.

It was the pain that woke me. My body ached. My lungs burned. My eyes were swollen shut. I was aware of some aliens moving around me. If I had the standard-issue nanites swimming inside of me, I would have been able to breathe the station’s base atmosphere: the nanites would have worked to adjust the mix my Human body needed by assimilating the gases that my lungs couldn’t process. Some nanites would have made their way to my brain to attach themselves to my cerebral cortex, working with my current language skills to improve and provide better translation of Universal Galactic when it was being spoken.

All at once, one of the aliens let out a noise, and I knew that I’d been discovered.

I stayed as still as I could.

I felt a poke. Then another poke.

I had heard somewhere that if you did not know who was around you, it was always best to play dead. Doing so had already saved me. It did not take them long to see that I had nothing on me to steal. After that, I was someone else’s problem and so they stopped prodding me and went back to their business of taking the grain that was supposed to be seeded on a new planet.
My
new planet. But I was helpless. All I could do was listen in frustration as the creatures spoke in their native language among themselves.

As they left with the cargo, I wondered if Earth grains were valuable to other species. It dawned on me that Brother Blue had perhaps sold the grain to these aliens for profit.

I lost consciousness again and awoke later to discover more aliens surrounding me. I willed myself to understand what the aliens were saying. I concentrated. I still had so much Universal Galactic to learn.

I was certain that they were talking about me. Perhaps negotiating over my body. That made me frightened. Maybe it was true that aliens harvested Humans. That was the rumor on Earth. My interactions with aliens so far made me not believe it. We Humans were disliked, it was true, but this was because of the Human wanderers. We colonists were different than they were, and I had seen no evidence that aliens were the monsters that Brother Blue or ignorant Earthlings said they were.

“Dead?” I understood that word, it was said by the one who seemed to be in charge.

When my mother first committed us to becoming colonists on the
Prairie Rose
, I would often steal away to the library and listen to all the data reels of Universal Galactic I could find. I had learned some in spite of the language’s difficulties, but the accents were tricky and varied. Meaning could be altered by an inflection or a pitch.

I only understood snippets of what the other alien said. I could tell from his clicks and thrums that he was a bug-like creature. The clicks and thrums made his Universal Galactic even harder to understand without the nanites.

“… not an expert on Human … from the state of it … usually one solid color … blues and reds and yellows … puffiness … normal … eyes are closed … sleep or death…”

It was too hard. I wanted to be where I should be—in a bunk on a colony ship—uncomfortable, but heading toward a new home on Beta Granade with my family. If I had not made myself so useful to Brother Blue with my limited language skills, then I could have soon been standing on a new planet, with dirt in my hands, planting seeds, building a new home. Instead, I was crumpled and broken on a cold space station floor.

As I struggled to follow the conversation happening above me, I couldn’t help but think that not giving the translator and breathing nanites to the colonists or letting us learn Universal Galactic was another way for Brother Blue to keep us all under control. If we could not understand, then we could do nothing but follow. I was too inquisitive. I had always been so. My father had said it was a gift. My mother had warned me when we joined the Children of Earth to keep it in check.

The aliens were speaking quickly and using slang, so I couldn’t be sure of anything I was hearing but finally I was able to follow again.

“You weren’t working the docks, looking for work?” the one with the more melodic voice said.

“No … Humans came at once … Ship … airlock … the way that they sound … vibration … voices … my ears … I left … they were gone … cargo … others … then nothing … gone…”

I tried to open my eyes; they barely moved, but through the blur I could see a few of the aliens as they moved toward me. Pain flooded my body as they lifted me onto a stretcher. This was my only chance to do something. My tongue felt too swollen to form words. I wasn’t even sure that I would be understood. But I had to try.

“Wait,” I said in thick Universal Galactic. “Wait.”

To my ears it sounded less like a word and more like an undead moan.

“Ahhh!” the bug-like alien screamed. “That frequency! Terrible. I hate them. I hate Humans.”

“That thing is alive,” the other alien said. He was leaning in very closely to me. He was looking in my eyes, touching my skin, and he felt that I was still warm. He was a Loor, one of the Major Species. I could tell by his antennae. They were folded toward my face, almost touching my skin. “Get the doctor.”

I could feel the aliens’ mood change. Whereas before they were just doing their job, they now moved around with new urgency. I sank back into the stretcher. I’d announced myself. Everyone I knew in the Children of Earth said that aliens were not to be trusted. But it was out of my hands now. They would either finish me off, or save me.

The Loor put a nose mask on my face, and when the air hit me, I could breathe easier. It felt sweet. My mind cleared, and I was better able to follow the Universal Galactic.

“I’ll have to contact the Earth representative at the League of Worlds,” the Loor said. “That means datawork.”

“Do they even have one?” I heard someone else ask. “I thought they were isolationists?”

“Things are always changing with these Minor Species,” the Loor said.

“Too bad it’s not dead,” the bug-like creature said. I wondered if he saw me as a meal.

“If the body had fallen a bit closer to the waste disposal, I would have pushed it in and been rid of it. I don’t like to deal with the Humans,” the Loor said.

“They are a mostly unknown species.”

“But they’re always roaming.”

The doctor came and examined me. I kept still on the gurney.

“Alive,” the doctor said. “Alive.”

“Bring it to the med bay,” the one in charge said.

I felt the stretcher lift up and move. After hours of darkness and pain, I could feel the tiniest spark of life in me.

*   *   *

I awoke, submerged partway in a tank of warm water, surrounded by thousands of tiny water creatures. The water was warm, and the creatures came and kissed my skin. After the cold of the
Prairie Rose
, the floor of the cargo bay, the tasteless food, and the endless boredom of the voyage, I finally felt something akin to contentment. For a moment, I could almost believe that someone had come to help me and thus, the universe had answered my call.

The tank was perfectly adjusted for Human atmosphere and gravity. I floated. It was too blissful. I wondered how far along the
Prairie Rose
was on its journey. I wondered how long it would take me to catch up to them. I wondered if my family missed me as much as I missed them.