Tin Star (5 page)

I went to the bar and looked at the menu. I knew from having run my errands for Brother Blue that not much on the menu was actual food. Real food and nonrecycled water were rare and expensive. The bulk of the menu was different kinds of protein paks similar to what we had been rationed to eat on the
Prairie Rose
. The variety offered was to cater to the different nutritional needs of different kinds of aliens. At this point for me, being so malnourished, anything would do. The barkeep came over to me, and I pointed to a random item and presented the currency chit. The barkeep ran my chit through.

“Sorry, Human. This chit says pending. It needs to be authorized. Come back in a few hours.”

Heckleck had cheated me. Or rather, he had ensured that I would do the job before I did anything else. My stomach growled. I felt faint. But hunger has a way of energizing a person. I pushed through the crowd to confront the blobby captain.

“Move out of my way,” he said as I squeezed in front of him, hitting my side with his hovering seat.

“Heckleck told me to give you this,” I said, presenting him with the bloodied linen.

The captain bumped me with his hover seat, pushing me aside to place another bet.

I was too hungry and too tired to deal with being ignored. I threw the linen onto the gaming table. When it landed, the digit rolled out and onto a number.

“No more bets,” the game master called.

Everyone fell silent when they saw the body part on the table with the gambling chips.

The captain turned to me.

“Tell Heckleck he can go jump out an air lock.”

“Number 24,” the game master said. “The number is 24.”

The captain and his companions uttered a noise. I didn’t know if it was because they lost the bet, were horrified at the bloody digit, or if they were simply laughing at me. I knew from my rounds with Brother Blue that most ships that came here were small and every crew person essential. The Yertina Feray was not a station where you could easily replace someone, and running a ship without a full complement could mean your death. I watched as he placed another bet. And then I took my own gamble.

“What does your crew member do?” I said. “Probably something important. Can you really do without him?”

The color drained from the captain’s face. His skin went from red to almost pig-pink.

“Tell Heckleck I’ll bring him what he wants,” the captain said, and turned back to the game.

“No,” I said.

“You are just an errand boy,” the captain said, not able to tell that I was a Human girl. “Deliver the message and leave.”

“I haven’t eaten, and I won’t get paid until I bring the package to him,” I said.

The captain sighed. He picked up the digit from the table and indicated for me to follow him. I tried not to lose him as he glided. He brought me to the guest quarters and made me wait outside his room. Just when I thought he would never come out again and that he had somehow evaded me, he emerged with a piece of metal that looked like a gear and a small wooden box.

“Here,” he said. “Tell Heckleck to let my man go and that our business is done. Tell him I owe him nothing now.”

I took the items and made my way back down to Docking Bay 12, where I had left Heckleck and the plant. The box vibrated, as though it were alive with energy. I wondered what was inside.

“That was fairly speedy,” Heckleck said when I arrived. “I expected it to take you a few days.”

“You didn’t pay me,” I said. “I couldn’t eat. I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

“I told you not to trust me,” Heckleck said. “You’ll find that your chit works now. I’ll add a little extra since you did it in record time. Meanwhile, you must be starved. Share this snack with me.”

Heckleck opened the box. The inside was slithering with what looked like maggots. Heckleck dipped what passed for a finger into the box, and the maggots clung to him like writhing honey. He sucked them off his digit and closed what I thought of as his eyes in what looked like delicious satisfaction.

“What is that?” I asked. Looking at them sickened me. But my stomach growled as I watched Heckleck eat.

“It’s a delicacy of my planet,” he said.

“And what’s that?” I pointed to the gear.

“That’s how I cobble together my pitiful existence here,” he said. “I barter things for things and favors for favors. That captain needed his cargo unloaded and sold, which I did for him quickly and quietly in exchange for that gear which another client of mine needs. This treat was my bonus.”

“You’re a thief,” I said.

“No, I never steal,” he said. “But sometimes I persuade. Don’t worry, that digit I took will grow back. His species regenerates them.”

My stomach growled again as he offered the box to me.

“You see, I’m not so different from you,” Heckleck said. “I am stuck here just as you are. I would have died, unless someone had helped me. I suppose it is just my turn to help a fellow gutter dweller.”

“Actually, you are pretty different from me,” I said. I was certain that we were nothing alike. I would wager that not even anything in our DNA could be similar.

He offered the box to me again. I could not be picky. I dipped my fingers into the box. The maggots clung to my fingers like leeches, and when I popped them into my mouth, they crunched. My body was grateful, and although looking at them sickened me, I forced them down.

They tasted like sweet potatoes.

6

The longer I was stranded, the more I lost all of my feelings except for one.

Numb.

I was numb. If you asked me, I could not remember if a week or a month or a year had gone by. There was only making it to the next day. I could only remember to fight for my life. There was only one rule I lived by: Survive.

I tried to get used to my new reality.

I lived in the very bottom of the Yertina Feray with the others who had nowhere to go and no way to leave. I did not have a home, per se; it was more like I had a bin. I didn’t mind squatting in the underguts because it meant that every currency chit I earned I kept. I was interested in leaving, not making a home here.

But the underguts were not an easy place to live. It was dirty and dark and there were noises that I could not identify, which on my first nights scared me. The only noise that did not frighten me was the familiar knock of Heckleck’s appendage against the side of my bin.

I preferred not to know most of what Heckleck dealt in. I was just his errand girl. I knew that Heckleck dealt in the more shady areas of trade, finding the things that no one else wanted to. He had no problem with the dark and the perverse. The fact that I had excelled in that first errand had made me invaluable, but he never asked me to do something with body parts ever again. Not knowing about the darker parts of his business was the only way that I could bear to be in his company. He respected my feelings about that, and whatever the bulk of his dealings were he did not speak of them with me. It was a silence between us; a silence that always stretched to the limit of what was acceptable between two people who still only cautiously called each other friend. But a silence that allowed us to have trust.

So he spoke to me about the small things that seemed unimportant. Things that my heart could handle. The gossip overheard in Kitsch Rutsok’s bar. The quality of the harvest in the arboretum. The varieties and kinds of waters and salts he’d traded that day. The amount of time he’d logged in the Sunspa.

“We’re in for a treat tomorrow,” he said as we walked through the arboretum. “There’s to be a hocht.”

“What’s a hocht?”

I still had so much to learn about the Yertina Feray and living among aliens.

“Ah, a hocht,” Heckleck said. “Let this be one of your first introductions to the delights of the station and its ways of keeping the peace among its citizens. Sometimes there are quarrels between aliens and satisfaction can only be gained by a fight.”

“It’s a sport?” I asked.

“No. It’s not exactly a sport,” Heckleck said. “This hocht has been called because a Per who lives in the underguts is demanding satisfaction from another Per who lives in the upper quarters who denied him entry to his sister’s wedding because of his low grade status.”

“So it’s a duel?” I asked.

Heckleck cocked his head to his side as the nanites in him worked to help translate the English word I’d slipped in. Then he nodded.

“Yes, let’s agree it’s the same,” he said.

“So I could have challenged you to a hocht over the plant?” I said.

He smiled, or rather what I knew now for his species passed as a smile.

“Interspecies fighting is forbidden.”

“Why?” I asked.

“No two alien species are equally matched. One species always has an advantage. When two species fight, one always ends up dead. The hochts are meant to settle the minor disputes. After all, it’s easier to clean up blood off a mat when the two contenders walk away alive.”

It had surprised me to learn that most aliens carried knives, which was the leading cause of murder in space. Only the officers of the law like Tournour were allowed to keep two shot phase guns for absolute emergencies. Guns were too dangerous. Projectiles could cause hull ruptures. Phase guns could cause electrical problems. Both of those things meant death for all. Everyone followed this gun law on a spaceship or a space station.

The color of the dreary days changed when a solar flare or a meteor shower forced us all to evacuate to the station’s emergency shelters. When a hocht happened or a ship arrived there was equal excitement. New people meant a slight increase in activity. The few legitimate vendors on the station would raise their prices. The black market thrived. The dwellers in the underguts would rush to the docks to beg for day work. The prostitutes got paid enough to get them through until the next ship wandered this far away from the Central Systems.

After that first hocht, I grew to enjoy going to hochts when they were called every few months. I liked that there were postings that called out the charges that the instigator held against the opponent. The injustices were made public for all to see. I took a slight comfort in imagining myself calling a hocht on Brother Blue if he ever came back to the station. I liked the idea of everyone seeing his sins on display. But my argument with him was not minor, and I would not be soothed by a fight. I would not want him to walk away.

When Heckleck tired of gossip, he would sometimes talk to me about the old days. Of his youth. Of his planet. Of the places he’d seen. Of the enemies he’d made. Of those who he’d destroy when he could finally save enough to leave the station. He never talked about what had stranded him here, and I could read that it was a deep wound—likely as deep as mine. Betrayal and grief have a certain color no matter what the species is. Everyone in the underguts seemed to carry that color with them in their voice or walk or hunch.

If Heckleck was not around, I kept to myself, always plotting my way off the station. But eventually time dragged on and a few months turned into a year and here I was still on the Yertina Feray.

Despite my permanent numbness, there was a shard of hate in my heart that the inevitable march of time did not quell, and every day I was hit with the fact that everything was still strange. Still
alien
. The only thing that soothed me in any way was to look out of the largest windows at the planet Quint.

The arboretum was the only place with plant life, and it held the best view of the planet. No one ever seemed to gather there, as though looking at the greenery reminded them too much of the metal shell that surrounded them. But I liked it for the dirt and the strips of gel floor, soft to the feet, which mimicked standing on the surface of a planet.

Only Thado, the caretaker, ever spent as much time there as I did. After seeing that I did not come to do harm to the plant life, or to steal anything, he began to trust me. Often he would hand me a flash pad with a wish list of things he needed. Most of his harvest was presold at set times of the year. Legally, he was not allowed to sell anything from the arboretum. But anything that fell and was not harvested or matured out of season was fair game for him to trade with. He gifted the fruits and vegetables to me, and I made sure that they were gifted around the station. In return, the things that he needed seemed to find their way to him. I took a cut and no rules were breached. It was usually only a small basket, but fresh produce meant everything to space dwellers, regardless of if they lived in the underguts or above. Everyone traded for something fresh to eat.

I would go there, mostly to stare at Quint and at her continents and oceans until I swear I saw a life there. My imagination swelled at the thought of all of that land. I pictured a house built on what I supposed was a desert. I pictured the sky, filled with colors I could only pretend to know. I imagined cooling myself in the waters that I saw cut across the expanse. But in the end, I always had to return to my sorry state of being stuck on this station. And whenever my thoughts returned to the here and now, the loneliness was too much to bear. My reverie would end when the station rotated away, showing only space.

Then I would return to the underguts a little smaller. And I gladly suffered through any one of Heckleck’s myriad conspiracy theories and reminiscences just to hear someone’s voice.

“Why doesn’t anyone live down there now?” I asked.

“No one can live down there,” he said.

“But they did at one time,” I said.

“Yes. But once everything got taken, miners moved on to the next place there was a rush for. And those that couldn’t had the misfortune to be stuck here on the station. There were some who stayed and lived down there for a while. Hangers on. But even they eventually gave up when supplies became so short as to make living unlivable.”

“But why not make a go of it?” I said. “Why not try to make the planet flourish?”

“There are many places that are not made for staying,” Heckleck said. “They are too harsh, too hard, and too far away from whatever you call home. You don’t root where you don’t have to, unless you’re unlucky.”