Stone in the Sky (7 page)

“Me? Of a Human?” Then he laughed, his scales rippling up and down his body, while his sly reptilian-looking eyes squinted and teared up. The Brahar only cried when they were laughing.

“Then we both have what we want,” I said. “Now leave me alone.”

Just then, Tournour entered the bar and took a good look around. Everyone hushed when he came in, as though somehow Tournour would ruin the excitement of the times. He nodded to me and then sat down. Once everyone was certain that he would not interfere with their dreams, the excitement flared up again.

“It's a bit calmer here than in your place. There, people are already spending money that they don't have,” Tournour said to Kitsch Rutsok.

“Then I'd best get back to it,” Kitsch said. “I wouldn't want to miss a single drop of currency.”

Kitsch left with his goons, but I knew that a line had been drawn. Territory had been staked up here on the Yertina Feray just as much as it had been down on Quint. I could have the business of Quint on my back wall, and sell my treats and sweets, but the gambling and the whoring would belong to him.

I opened up a bottle of premium water for myself. I imagined my old friend Heckleck and what he would do at the news of the rush. He would know exactly how to place it, how to trade it, and how to make the best of it all. I wondered how I could turn it into getting me back onto the path of destroying Brother Blue.

“I'm just back from Quint,” Tournour said. He was overwhelmed ever since the Yertina Feray administration was suddenly charged with handing out claim stakes to the once uninteresting planet below, and I had seen very little of him.

I was jealous that Tournour had gone down to the planet, but with the rush in full swing, infrastructure had to be put into place.

“What's it like?” I asked. Although I could have easily staked a claim and jumped down to Quint to harvest alin pollen, I only daydreamed about doing it once or twice. But in the end, that kind of madness wasn't for me. I still had a larger mission in my life, and it didn't involve becoming a speculator. I repeated the names of the colonies to myself so that I would remember what my path was.
Killick. Kuhn. Marxuach. Andra. Beta Granade
.

“It's an explosion,” he said. “It's beautiful. I suppose with everything else stripped away, the alin had a chance to bloom.”

“I'm going down as soon as I can to lay a claim,” said the old alien at the bar next to Tournour.

“You do that,” Tournour said. He drained his water and tipped his antennae toward me and did what passed for a Loor wink.

“What's down there?” I asked. I had imagined my own booming town, but I supposed that really the image that I still had so firmly in my head was the vision for the town I had hoped to grow on Beta Granade with my mother and sister and the other Children of Earth colonists. That was a hard dream to shake.

“There is a shantytown down there. Mostly tents. But Reza has built himself a little cabin. It's quite sweet,” Tournour said.

“You saw him?”

“Of course,” he said.

I searched Tournour's face to see if he'd noticed how I'd sounded desperate when I'd asked about Reza. A Human would have picked up on this and been annoyed with me. But Tournour wasn't ruffled at all.

“He seems to be doing well. A little thin, I think. I was worried for him, so I insisted on taking him out for a meal. We had a good time. He's quite amusing. We did a lot of laughing together.”

They were supposed to be rivals, but here Tournour was showing him kindness. It stung me that they got along when I felt torn in my feelings for them.

“Does he have enough sweaters?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Tournour said. Then he jotted something down on his data pad. “I'll make sure to tell him you want to check on that when I next see him.”

“No!” I said. “Don't tell him I asked about him.”

Tournour looked completely confused.

“I don't understand. You did ask about him.”

“Yes, but in general. I was really asking about the planet. The town. Not him specifically.”

Tournour processed what I was saying, and I could see him chalk it up to one of my strange Human emotional quirks that were beyond his comprehension.

For the past three years when I looked at the empty Quint from the arboretum window, it filled my imagination with possibilities. I knew that while it was cold and barely fertile, it was livable for a Human. Livable in the way that the arctic or the deep desert was habitable before the Earth warmed up. Now Reza was down there alive, walking around, eating, sleeping, and looking up at the stars from that planet. He was looking up at me.

Truth be told, I was jealous. It bothered me that he was down there. When I looked at Quint, instead of seeing the oceans, the clouds, the rust belt, or the landmasses, I imagined his shadowy figure lumbering across what I had begun to feel was my special place. My lonely world. My stone in the sky.

Now with all of those people down there, it was as though my own heart was being invaded.

And I preferred for my heart to be untouched.

 

9

The one thing about the rush is that there was no time for anything else. No time to think about Reza. No time to spend with Tournour. No time to wonder about Caleb. No time to mourn my mother and sister. No time to hate Brother Blue. Everyone wanted something from me: a rack of water, a trade for an introduction, a currency advance for gears and parts.

The quality of items that arrived to be bartered on the station rose as the empty wings filled up and the wealth from the alin began to flow.

Everyone wanted more than what their goods were worth. Everyone tasted riches just within their grasp, and they were impatient to start accumulating their wealth and spending it. Prices were inflated, and I noticed that those with the worst attitudes felt that their claim would be worth the most. Most of them I saw days, weeks, months later, defeated and broke. Then they would sit and be glad to trade someone their useless depleted claim for a glass of mediocre water.

I argued with everyone. I did not budge. I held the line. I charged high prices to keep up with the rest of the madness on the station and with Kitsch Rutsok's outlandish prices, but I never refused a person their water, salts, or sweets. All of my years of trading favors to survive made me bend in strange ways. They could pay what they wanted, and mostly I found that they paid me fairly. It wasn't that I was a soft touch. They knew they owed me, and they knew that while I preferred to deduct from currency chits, I could still always be paid in favors or information, just not in pollen.

In the middle of arguing with a particularly obnoxious Hort by the bar, a silence came over the room as someone entered. It struck me because it had not been quiet in the Tin Star Café since the beginning of the rush.

“What's going on?” I asked, straining my neck over the throngs of aliens to see what had everyone's attention.

I started to move away. The Hort put her appendage on my arm to stop me from moving.

“An alien who wants to stay alive never leaves a Hort in the middle of a negotiation.”

I shook her off.

“You'll take your stub off me or you'll never come in here again,” I said.

She knew that my threats were not empty and that a ban from the Tin Star would be worse for her down the line than an interrupted negotiation. She removed her appendage and let me pass. She would never dare kill me.

The door opened again, and Kitsch Rutsok came in with his goons. They had knives prominently displayed. Guns were not allowed on the station or on spaceships, since a stray laser or bullet could tear through the hull and cause damage and death for more than just the intended.

“No knives in my place,” I said, following Kitsch, who was making a beeline for the claims board. His face told me that something was going terribly wrong. I put my hand on him to slow him down but he shook me off as he headed straight for an alien. It was only then that I noticed that near the claims wall there were two bipeds in bright Imperium uniforms of high rank with their backs to me. I had heard through Tournour that the Imperium would be sending some people to check into the situation on Quint, but he had said that wouldn't be for a few more weeks. I hadn't seen them come in because these days it was so crowded it was difficult to see everyone that came into the place. But I was surprised that these Imperium delegates looked like Humans. Tournour had inferred that it would be low ranking clerical workers. He'd made certain that it would be nothing more than a formality.

“You can't do this,” Kitsch Rutsok said. “I've paid my taxes. I've paid my hush money, and I've paid my Imperium operating dues. I've
paid.
”

“You should be glad that with all of the illegal activities you engage in you are not paying more to stay open.”

I knew that voice. When he turned around to face us, I couldn't speak.

It was Brother Blue.

Kitsch signaled to his goons who flanked him.

“Hey,” I said, finding my voice. “Take it outside!”

“Whatever this Imperium stooge is doing here, he's going to make your life a living hell, too. You should let me cut him,” Kitsch said. “Maybe then they'll send another whose hands are not as sticky as this Human's.”

“Get out of my place, Kitsch,” I said, hoping beyond hope that Brother Blue would follow him outside. Kitsch didn't leave, but some of the tension in the air dissipated.

I hadn't recognized Brother Blue at first because his hair was short and his face was cleanshaven. He looked like a younger man. His eyes met mine, and I could see that he looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He managed to compose himself faster than I could.

“Tula Bane? You look rather well for someone who is dead,” he said.

When he actually said my name out loud my heart leaped to my throat. I stumbled backward and placed my hand on a chair to steady myself.

I turned to look at the young woman with him, almost thinking that it would be Els. That somehow Els had made it out alive after he had shot her, but it was not. It was a Human girl, a little older than I was. She was Asian with bobbed dark hair and perfect bangs. She had eyes so dark that they seemed to have no irises. She had not one curve on her. I did not recognize her. There was no reason I would. She smiled at me, and not knowing what to do, I nodded my head stiffly in return.

Brother Blue went directly up to the claims board and pulled out a data plug and plugged it in. Immediately the map changed, and a new map was overlaid onto every claim that had been made.

“Attention, people of the Yertina Feray. My assistant and I are here on behalf of the Imperium. It has come to our attention that Quint is once again a viable planet and worth our interest. Upon looking at the claims list of two hundred years ago, the map of Quint is being divided. I have been placed in charge of this endeavor.”

The bar exploded.

All the aliens looked to me. This was my place.

“We have a system,” I said. My voice sounded thin and pinched. Once again he was besting me and there was nothing that I could do. “You can't come in here and make claims on staked claims.”

They had sent the Imperium here to mess with virtual claims. We were firmly on their radar now. It didn't take any more than looking at how the Yertina Feray had blossomed in a few short months to see that there was real money to be made here. Of course Brother Blue was the one who came. He was the type of person who knew how to exploit something that was booming. I wondered if they were down on the planet doing anything to the prospectors on Quint. My thoughts flew to Reza, and I grew as worried for him as I was for us.

“Calm down. We are not here to mine the whole planet, but we are happy to lease you our spots. We are basing our claim on the old maps from when the planet yielded different substances.”

Brother Blue pointed to the map. The places where we all knew alin didn't grow but where the lodes had been best for mining were all claimed by Major Species. Large tracts of the planet were claimed by the Per, the Brahar, the Loor, the Moldav, the Kao. The Dren Line was where the ores had poor yields and so those claims sported the names of many Minor Species, some names that were familiar to me, Hort and Nurlok, for instance, but many I'd never heard of: Freng, Volla, Gej, Ypsem. I wondered if they had never managed to grow their stellar colonies, gone extinct, or if the Imperium had made them go silent.

“No one has heard from the Gej for a long time,” I said. It was feared that they, with their peace-loving ways, had been the first to fall. We'd all heard that the Imperium had been razing planets with less than five colonies for resources. I had once tried to sign up for that kind of work. I shuddered at the thought now.

Brother Blue looked at me.

“So you are correct,” he said. Then he lifted up his datapad and the claim on the coveted Dren Line that once said Gej now said Earth.

He smiled at me.

“You see. I'm still helping Earth's expansion,” he said to me.

I wanted to vomit.

“What about those other claims by Minor Species?” an alien with a gourd-like head asked.

“What does this mean for us?” a Nurlok behind me yelled.

“Those of you who have claims may all keep your claims as long as you pay a healthy fee for the privilege,” Brother Blue said. “And if you can't, then your claim will be turned over to the Imperium. We'll transport in some of our workers. And of course, anyone here is welcome to sign up for work with the Imperium.”

He went on to say that workers on a claim could only be of the same species, or non-Human, meaning that more than half the speculators would have to scramble to find or trade workers or their own kind to keep their claims.

I held my mouth shut. Because it dawned on me that Brother Blue claiming the Gej claim for Earth had actually protected Reza. He'd made a mistake. It lifted my spirits to see that Brother Blue could fumble in his mad grab for power. He would realize it later, but there was nothing he could do about it. He'd set the rules.