Stone in the Sky (2 page)

I felt a pang for a minute thinking about Heckleck. Were he alive, he would not go to an underguts shelter if he could help it.
A good time to get a good price for things is when people are facing their mortality. Rich people have the most to barter when they think they are in peril.

Heckleck was always looking for a good deal.

The underguts shelter was no place of luxury. It was the dregs of the station, near the shantytown. Even though I had gotten myself out of the underguts, when a lockdown happened, I always threw my lot in with them.

I had a soft spot for the forgotten and overlooked. Because once upon a time that had been me.

In a way it still was.

When I got to the shelter, a thick-metal-walled room deep in the center of the station, I could smell the fear on everyone. Aliens were sitting everywhere they could. There were no beds in this shelter, so aliens would string up hammocks and put makeshift bedding on the floor. It was crowded and uncomfortable. I didn't have to check to know that there was not one Human in the bunch. When I first arrived on the Yertina Feray, it was nearly two years before three Human Youth Imperium cadets became stranded on the station. That was when everything changed for me. When I discovered the depth of Brother Blue's betrayal.

But those Humans had been gone for over a year, ever since I sent Reza and Caleb, who had become my close friends, to the Outer Rim, frozen in deep sleep in cryocrates. I had no choice—I had to save their lives, although my fear was that those crates had become their coffins. The third one, Els, had met her death here on the station. Brother Blue had killed her for what she knew and because he thought she was me.

I squared my shoulders. This was not the time for regrets. This was the time to make sure that I made it through another day.

I signed in with the Brahar guard and tried not to shudder when her reptilian-like scales brushed my hand. They reminded me of a purse or a belt. The Brahar were cold blooded and cold hearted. It was their world that had set the Imperium into motion, and so they seemed to always be in charge whenever there was an emergency.

“We've run out of salt paks,” she said.

I knew that this shelter had probably never had them. She waved me away as the next aliens checked in and the long last siren wail signaled that shelter doors would now close. There was no leaving now until the all clear sounded.

I walked around the shelter and began handing out the trests to the aliens holed up in there with me. We would be huddled together for at least thirty hours, and the aliens in the underguts were always lacking in the essentials that I now had.

I didn't want to forget where I had come from, so I freely handed out what I could during these lockdowns. Real fruit was always a welcome treat on a space station, but during the long uncertain hours of waiting in a shelter, it was a piece of comfort.

It made me feel good—
Human
—to be able to help others in some small way. I had made it clear long ago that these were not favors owed to me, but I was no fool. I knew that my good will went a long way in keeping me in every alien's good graces. I liked to think of it as insurance. It was hard enough being Human. And if Heckleck had taught me one thing, it was to always have favors in the bank that you could call in.

When the last trest was handed out, I settled in, finding a space where I could. Then there was nothing to do but sit with my thoughts.

 

2

This space station, the Yertina Feray, was likely the only home I would ever know.

At times, that depressed me.

I had always hoped beyond hope that the colonies Brother Blue had promised the Children of Earth really did exist. I said the names of the colonies to myself in a pattern to pass the time.
Killick. Kuhn. Marxuach. Andra. Beta Granade.

But I knew that if any people were living on those planets, it was probably only a handful of Brother Blue's stooges, who manned radio stations to give the illusion that anyone was there. I knew the truth, but I had no one to tell. If I did, Earth would be in danger of being destroyed. And as much as I wanted to take Brother Blue down and expose him for the lying conniver that he was, I would not doom Earth.

Brother Blue and his organization, the Children of Earth, had been scamming people like my mother into giving him everything for a chance to settle the stars for decades. And when the Imperium rose to power, he had taken advantage of his scam to trick the Imperium into thinking that Humans had five colonies and were an up-and-coming Minor Species. He did it as much to get power and riches as he did to save his own skin. But I had to admit that he had saved Earth in the process.

I wondered what had happened to those other colonists who'd bought into Brother Blue's tall tale. Had their ships blown up like the
Prairie Rose
? Or had he let them loose into the universe to wander like the other Humans who couldn't go back home?

There were only Humans on Earth and Humans who wandered. I was neither. Or maybe I was both.

Solar flare.

Solar flares were nothing to sniff at. They could be dangerous to the station depending on where we were on our rotation around Quint. If we took it full force, electrics could be fried, ships could lose navigation, and radiation levels could swell. For some species that was not a big deal; for others, even a minor shift in radiation levels was catastrophic.

I soothed myself with this thought: it was a known problem with set solutions. There was time to take shelter once the sun erupted since it would be hours before its radiation reached us.

It was the unknown events that were terrifying—asteroid or meteor showers, or something that compromised the station. We were only a bulkhead thickness away from space and nothing, except perhaps for some hearty bacteria, could survive outer space. And then there were the alien threats, like the Imperium and its plans or the increasing rumors of attacks by Pirates on small ships on trade routes. One unknown event thousands of light years away was sometimes way more dangerous than a solar flare.

It made me angry that Earth had fallen to the Imperium after having been isolationist for so long. When the Imperium came, half the planet wanted to fight, but the other half was afraid, so when Brother Blue swept in with his five colonies and a way for Humans to be folded into the galaxy, they took it. They were now under its thumb. The Imperium protected Earth from being razed like other worlds. Then again, every planet that could colloborate did. The planets and species that had fought had dwindled—or disappeared.

Brother Blue.

His name, even the color, filled me with a furious fire of pure hatred.

One day I'd out him, maybe even kill him, for the things he'd done. One day the time would be right, and I'd expose him. Earth would know that there were no Human colonies on the planets he'd claimed to colonize:
Killick, Kuhn, Marxuach, Andra
,
Beta Granade.

The map is always changing.

The thought of that always made my self-preservation kick in. It galvanized me even though I knew killing him would likely bring about my own death. Meanwhile, time marched on, and that day always seemed to slip further and further away as years passed and Brother Blue's position in the Imperium and with Earth Gov became more and more solidified.

Brother Blue was out there, free, and I was stuck here, broken. I would have to ruin him if I ever wanted peace.

I closed my eyes to calm myself, repeating one of the lessons that Heckleck had taught me when I was first on the station.

“Think of the big picture, Tula Bane. One week. One month. One year. Five years. Ten. One hundred.”

By the time I got to one thousand years away from this moment, I had regained my calm. The all clear blasted, and we emerged from our safe shelter cocoon.

I took the lift and walked to the living quarters to get Trevor, the mining robot that I looked after for Caleb, and to wash the thirty-plus hours of alien sweat off of me. Life on the space station returned to normal. We all pretended that there was no more danger.

But nothing was ever normal on a space station, and by the time I reached my quarters, the whole station was buzzing.

During our lockdown, an unknown non-Imperium ship had crashed on the planet Quint.

 

3

The difference in my life from last year or from when I was first abandoned on the Yertina Feray was that I had elevated myself from living in the underguts of the space station and bartering to stay alive to being an almost respectable citizen here.

For so long my only goal had been to leave and, if I could, kill Brother Blue. But I had softened. Circumstances and experience had changed me. Or perhaps I had just grown up.

I had managed to talk my way into my own living quarters on one of the residence rings as well as secure space for a water, salts, and sweets shop on the entertainments deck.

If there was one thing that I had learned was true in the universe it was that no matter how bad things got, people always wanted their home-world water and their home-world sweets. And every species needed salts. All were welcome in my place, and in a pinch, one could always trade me a favor for some low-grade water to drink.

I called it the Tin Star Café, although I hadn't tasted anything that resembled coffee since I was on Earth.

“What's coffee?” aliens would ask me. I would try to explain it to them, although truth be told, I could barely remember it exactly except for the smell. Coffee was something that my mother and father would drink in the morning, and I would get a taste of it on special occasions as a child. But I could still remember the smell of it, and that was something. The aliens would shake their heads and say a different word for a different thing that did the same thing from where they were from. When a ship came in with that item, they would bring it to me to taste. None of them were coffee, but all of them were interesting.

The Tin Star Café would be the best place to get information on the castaway below, and I was as curious as everyone else. It was an event. When you lived on a nearly empty space station along a trade route that no one really used anymore, any event was significant. The Yertina Feray used to be less desolate when there had been mining on Quint, but those days were long gone. No one ever went down to the planet anymore; it was so depleted.

When I'd left the underguts, I hadn't taken advantage of all of the empty quarters. My living space was not large—just a small room—but it was mine, and it was better than the metal bin I'd lived in for two years in the underguts. Having real quarters made me a bit sad, though. It seemed to cement the fact that I was here to stay on this station.

“On, Trevor,” I issued a command to Caleb's robot, which was in rest mode in the corner of my room, and then stepped into the sonic shower to clean myself. It felt good after having been squashed in with aliens for so many hours.

Trevor had other uses besides music, news, and companionship. He was, in a way, my protector. One word, one secret word uttered from my lips, and Trevor could do great damage to whoever menaced me. He had arms that could mine through bedrock. He had data that went back 500 years. He had no voice, but I swore that he had personality.

I had found him in a warehouse when the Yertina Feray had been in transition between governments. I had painted a face on him, but until Caleb had fixed him, he had done nothing but turn on and off. Now, Trevor did so much more, but with his painted on face, he looked almost comic and docile.

Until you noticed that he had knives tucked in his hands.

Trevor began a steady outpouring of news from the galaxy. I had programmed key words for him to scan, so the news was read out in a jumble as he skipped around doling out tidbits of information. My heart always sank at any news report about another planet that had fallen to the Imperium. Every victory for the Imperium felt like a wound.

While I washed and dressed, I listened to the stream of shipping news trying to learn what items of use would be coming into the station and what would move off. Knowing what was around to barter, even though it wasn't my trade anymore, was a habit I could not shake.

I had also programmed Trevor to find any hint of what had happened to Caleb and Reza on the Outer Rim. Where were they? Were they even alive? Every time I thought of how I had poisoned them to sleep and shipped them out in cryocrates to the far rim of the galaxy, I was wracked with guilt.

It had been hard to be the only Human on the Yertina Feray, and when Reza, Caleb, and Els had arrived, I had not wanted to know them. But they had been more than friends to me; Caleb, with his soft ways and his heart on his sleeve, a friend that I could talk to in a real way. And Reza. I had tried to push the idea of love or romance away. What did I need of that when all that fueled me was hate? But Reza had changed all that. With his warm, brown eyes. With his strong arms. With his deep kisses.

And then there was Els, who had betrayed us all. She was the real reason I had sent Reza and Caleb away to the Outer Rim.

But now she was dead, and they were gone.

I had tried to save them when Brother Blue demanded that Els and I kill them to prove our loyalty. I had used Els to get close to Brother Blue, but things didn't go as planned. She had been killed because of what she knew and because Brother Blue thought that she was me.

What had I done?

Earth had been in civil war, half of it wanting to remain isolationist—Earth Gov—and half of it kowtowing to the Imperium so it wouldn't be stripped. We had been caught in the middle of it. These were things and machinations too large to understand.

Caleb and Reza were lost and probably dead, but I couldn't stop hoping that I'd hear news about them. That they would get word to me and tell me that they were all right.

I had meant to send Reza to Earth and Caleb, along with his robot Trevor, to the Outer Rim to search for allies for Earth, thinking that would give the rebellion its best chance. Instead I had sent Caleb and Reza both to the Outer Rim and Trevor had been left on the docking bay.