by Cally Black
I nod. I’m not gonna mention the food I made for the squad. I have to fit in here, not remind people I lived with Garuwa.
Song waves at the open cupboards. ‘Go for it. I’ll set up.’ She grabs a couple of screens and carries them to the table.
I mix a packet of beans in hot sauce with a packet of potato salad, divide it into two bowls, then crush a packet of spicy noodles and sprinkle them on top of each bowl. I carry the food to the table.
‘Oh,’ Song says when I give her a bowl. She frowns but shoves a fork in and tries it. ‘Hey, this is actually good.’
‘The creamy potato cuts through the spiciness and the crispy bits change the texture,’ I say.
‘Spoken like a true chef,’ she says, and my cheeks hurt from grinning, my aunt in the food, in me. I’m so close to her again. Song holds up her hand. ‘Unfortunately, Rochford has employed you as a translator. Now I realise this work is going to bring up some bad memories, but I’m going to do my best to help you out.’
I nod.
‘First, I found something that you might like to see.’ Song opens a screen and shows me a Starweaver News article about Gub arriving on Dios. ‘It’s dated four months ago,’ she says. ‘Cute kid.’
I smile. Gub’s peering up at the camera from behind a chair. His little hand wraps around the chair, like he’s afraid to stand alone, maybe. He has on new clothes and a hat that’s half off the back of his head, cos it’s too big. His dark eyes are round and serious. My heart breaks for him.
‘The little boy everyone is calling “Whisper”, sole survivor of Starweaver Layla, has arrived on Dios, where he will be housed in the Port Authority Children’s Home,’ the reporter is saying. ‘The survival of the toddler, who only whispers, has everyone asking: do Vultures have hearts after all? Or was little Whisper quietly overlooked?’
‘Why does he only whisper?’ Song asks.
‘Cos we taught him. How else to keep a baby secret?’ I say. ‘Do you have any more reports about after he got back to Dios?’
Song shakes her head. ‘I can’t find anything more. But it won’t be long before we can hook up a ship-to-ship relay, and you can speak to him yourself.’
‘Makasih,’ I say, warmth spreading through me. ‘For everything.’
Song smiles softly, leans over and starts the report on screen again. Lets me watch it all the way through. When it’s done, she rubs my shoulder, takes the screen back, and flicks it over to some other app. ‘Well, I’ve been studying this language you call Garuwa for a while, and I’m excited to learn more. You speak it as well?’
I nod.
‘How do you manage those whistles?’
‘If I can’t whistle it, I squeak it,’ I say.
‘I’m going to get you to show me how to do that, but we need to get moving on some translations or Rochford’s going to be down here demanding answers.’ She slides a headset at me. ‘These are recordings we have intercepted from the Vultures. Most of them are pretty old, from months ago, so they might not make much sense. Do this to play.’ She holds out the screen, swipes a snail line one way. ‘And this to replay.’ She swipes it the opposite way. ‘If you understand any of it, just start speaking and it will record in a parallel timeline. After you’ve done the first one, tap two times to bring up the next.’
I pull on the headset and play the recording. Me, only thinking about my Gub, I play the recording three times before I actually hear it. ‘Now they see us. Taking the hull in one bit. Line up. Clean this one out for the hive.’ I’m glad I don’t recognise the tone of the whistles.
‘Take your time,’ Song says, like maybe I don’t understand it. She’s wearing a headset too, and watching her own screen.
I replay it and translate, then double-tap and move on to the next recording. It’s a couple of Garuwa calling in the spotting of a freighter. I translate that too.
Song listens and asks questions and we work through the whole day that way, and the next one too. We get into a way of working, me making the snacks, doing the translating, Song listening and making notes on her own screen, sometimes asking me to whistle words so she can copy, sometimes asking me to explain things, and I think I’m doing good.
As I work, Song shreds scraps of plastic, then weaves them into a colourful bracelet for me to wear to cover the security bracelet Israel put on my arm, the one the mercs see that reminds them to yell, ‘Vulture!’ at me.
I do maybe twenty translations in the morning and the same number in the afternoon, so I’ve done a lot by the end of the second day, and I wonder then how it is that Tootoopne is sloppy as about letting the humans listen in. It’s not like her to make mistakes.
Budapest stops us by buzzing the door and making us go for dinner in the mess hall. And never mind that the mercs hoot and growl, I feel like maybe I’ve found a place I can work at belonging. I miss the hive’s warmth and care, and Tweetoo and Wooloo, but maybe I can make friends here. Maybe even I can make a life working for Starweaver, same as Song does, and that will keep me and Gub fed and housed and putting some money away for when he’s grown.
That’s if this freighter can keep away from the Garuwa ... but cos its job is to find and kill Garuwa, I don’t think that’s gonna work out.
THESE COLD METAL WALLS
The third day of work, and the door slides open to the noisy stinky corridor. Rochford steps in. I jump up. The door slides shut.
Song salutes.
Rochford don’t salute back. ‘Why is the locational information so vague? We’re damn near chasing our tails out there!’ he says.
Song looks at me, and that makes Rochford turn his glassy eyes on me. ‘Why are there no specific location co-ordinates?’ he demands.
I shake my head. ‘The Garuwa don’t talk about it, sir.’
‘So they fly around in space blind?’ he asks.
‘No, sir, they just seem to know,’ I say, and think of how to explain it. I think about a doco I saw. ‘Maybe it’s inbuilt, like bees or pigeons. They feel their way.’
‘Ridiculous!’ Rochford spits. ‘If I get one hint you’re holding out on us, if you are protecting the Vultures by subverting the transcripts, I will have you in interrogation so fast your feet won’t touch the floor between here and the cells.’
I back away. A chair grates across the floor behind me. ‘I’ve never heard Garuwa talk about it.’ I turn to Song for help.
‘You know you’ll always be on a freighter or outpost in deep space, don’t you?’ she asks. ‘You’ll always be one of us, so you wouldn’t hold back any information that could help us, would you?’
I’ll always be one of them? When have I ever been one of them? But I have to be now, don’t I? Even if it means hurting the hive. When my back’s slammed against the wall, will I be able to point my finger at the hive that saved me?
‘If that giant Vulture walked in here right now, you’d salute and do whatever it told you!’ Rochford shouts, like he can smell my doubt. And he’s such an idiot that it makes me burn.
‘I would, cos you’d all be dead!’ I yell.
‘Calm down, both of you!’ Song says, pulling herself as tall as she can. ‘Major, what’s got you running so hot today?’
Rochford throws his hands up, stomps across the small room and back again. ‘A huge shipment of phosphorous has just vanished. Gone. No trace of the ship,’ he says.
‘The Vultures?’ Song asks, as my blood runs cold.
‘Maybe, but it’s thousands of clicks away from here,’ Rochford says grimly. ‘Nowhere near where the Vultures are supposed to be. It was taking a back route towards Dios, a massive shipment to make up for Starweaver’s losses. So how would the Vultures have found it? There’s no wreck. No report of an attack. The Breakfast at Tiffany’s was fine one minute … gone the next.’
CRAZY TALK
I’m thinking Tootoopne must have learned something about Starweaver from Antonee, and this is some new trick, a new way to outsmart humans. When Rochford turns his eyes on me, the
y narrow, and I reckon he can see my thinking with his cold-arse eyes.
‘You know something!’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Not for sure. Maybe it’s Tootoopne. She’ll be angry about this ship. Maybe she found something else to take. For payback.’
‘If Starweaver can’t keep the supply chain running, they don’t collect money. They don’t collect money, and none of us have jobs,’ he says. ‘This is a huge hole in the supply chain. It’ll force food prices up all over deep space, maybe even all the way back to Earth.’
Even when the hive was scarred and hurting, she knew to feed her Garuwa, feed them so they could protect her. Never the threat of starving in a hive. We should be asking the Garuwa how to build hives, not killing them or ourselves in these cold old hulks. But I can’t tell Rochford the Garuwa got things worked out better than us, or he’ll be calling me a Vulture-lover again.
He’s waiting for me to say something. I shake my head. My scalp’s prickling up, telling me something bad’s going on. Something we can’t even imagine, but I don’t know how to explain that.
‘We don’t know really if it’s the Garuwa,’ Song says. ‘I’ll hunt through the last known co-ordinates, maybe it’s just gone black for a while. Could be all kinds of anomalies out there.’
Rochford’s still staring at me.
‘We’re all on the same side,’ Song says, and I reckon she’s reminding both of us.
Rochford grumbles as he leaves.
‘I’ll go get us some noodles,’ she says, then she’s gone too.
‘I’m doing the best I can,’ I say to the sliding-shut door.
When Song comes back, she’s got a pile more plastic scraps and bits of wire and stuff, and we sit on the floor with the stuff between us, making bracelets and eating noodles.
‘This is good,’ she whistles in slow Garuwa.
‘You are really good at learning Garuwa,’ I whistle. She’s so much faster than Antonee.
Song laughs and says, ‘You’re a good teacher. You make it seem easy.’
I give a little smile, shovel more noodles into my mouth and keep weaving the plastic string in my lap. I’m kinda pleased I’m good at something, never mind it don’t always end well. ‘I’ve taught someone before,’ I whisper.
‘Oh, who?’ she asks.
I shrug, swallowing hard. ‘He’s dead,’ I say. ‘Tootoopne got the information she wanted from him, and that was it.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Well, you’re a natural with language.’
I snort. ‘I think sometimes, I’m better at whistling than speaking,’ I say.
‘You’re a smart cookie.’ She smiles and goes back to working on her bracelet. It’s a good one, made from packing plastic, shredded, twisted and plaited by four. Somehow she’s got the colours to circle around and around the bracelet like snakes coiling around a stick.
‘If we were sitting on a hive floor,’ I say, ‘she’d make the floor soft and warm right where we’re sitting, so our arses wouldn’t get cold and sore.’
‘Really?’ Song asks. ‘How?’
‘She’s alive,’ I say. ‘She only lets in people who’ll help her. And then she gives them everything they need, warmth, shelter, light, food, everything.’
‘How does she keep people out?’
‘The hives have gates. Just fuzzy air really, and when you pass through, she reaches into your head, and it feels like wire slicing you up, looking at every part of your brain, and if you don’t think real good thoughts, she’d kill you probably.’
‘It sounds scary, but I’d like to see a hive,’ she says.
‘I never seen Sixer cabins, but I reckon the hive is nicer,’ I say.
Song shrugs. ‘Sixer cabins are just bigger boxes.’
‘Did you have a Sixer cabin before you had to slum it here with me?’ I ask.
‘Ha! I’d rather slum it on Four if it means I can hang out with you,’ she says. ‘Tell me more about the hives.’
I tell her about hearing the hive’s warbles through the walls or floor. How she grows food for everyone, and makes them furniture, or light, just by them touching her walls and thinking what they want. I tell her about the warm updraft in the hive’s centre and how the Garuwa use it and their wings to go up.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘Garuwa would have five fingers like us, except two of those fingers grew into massive structures to support their wings.’
‘Really?’ I ask. ‘How do you know?’
She shrugs. ‘We get one to examine occasionally.’
I’m sick with thinking what they would’ve done to Tweetoo’s body. And then sick at what I did to Tweetoo. I swallow down the tightness in my throat. ‘So they’re like us?’
‘Well, as similar as a bird or bat,’ Song says and smiles. ‘So, yeah.’
‘Similar enough so maybe one day we could get along?’ I ask, cos weren’t me and Antonee and Tootoopne all getting along fine for a while there before Tootoopne went back to her old ways?
Song just lifts her eyebrows at me, like it’s crazy-talk.
BRINGING GUB BACK
I throw myself into the translations, cos that’s how I pay for them shipping Gub to me. Never mind the recordings are all crackly and hard to hear, it seems like there’s not enough no more. Just the ones that they intercept that day, and they’re all full of scratching. It’s so bad, I can’t hardly hear the whistles. A couple finish with a scritch-scar just like someone saying ‘G’. And I think of Antonee. I miss that big old lump of kindness. I wonder if the fuzz in the recordings is the Garuwa trying to cover up their messages, at last.
One day, Song says, ‘I found a family to mind Tamiki until he reaches us here on the Jolene.’
‘A Sixer family?’ I ask, cos I want him to have good muscles as he grows, and maybe to be picking up some nice ways of speaking. That sorta stuff is up to me now.
‘They’re travelling on Level Five, on board Starweaver Hey There Delilah, but don’t you worry. He’ll be fine. They heard his story and really want to help him,’ she says. ‘Once they’re closer, we’ll set up a ship-to-ship relay, so he knows just who he’s coming to see.’
I can’t even talk for that swelling feeling taking over my heart that he’s on his way. That he gets to live with a family for a month instead of just in a children’s home. Never mind I know life can’t be like on screen, I can’t stop thinking about him curled up, smiling softly at the family around him like in those happy Earth movies he used to watch to go to sleep. I take Headless out of my pocket and hold him to my lips.
‘What’s that?’ Song asks.
I hold up Headless for her to see. ‘It’s Tamiki’s toy. He gave it to me to hold when I hid him in the kitchen storeroom.’
Song smiles. ‘Through everything, you’ve kept it?’ she says.
I shrug. ‘It’s all I have of him, and he’ll want it back.’
‘I’m so pleased to be part of bringing you two back together,’ she says, and smiles a smile I can trust.
Day after day, it goes like this: I translate the fuzzy recordings, Song stops searching for the missing ship and checks my translations for locations, then sends them on to Rochford. Far as I can tell, he’s chasing down every mention of a star or planet, looking for the Garuwa.
Then a second ship goes missing.
Song works day and night on her searching, combing through reports and screens. When she sees I’ve finished my translations for the day, she makes me check through recordings of the missing ships. She’s already checked them, but says I might pick up something she’s missed with her ‘too human’ thinking.
‘They’re too far away to have been attacked by the Garuwa,’ Song says. ‘Both ships just blipped out. There one minute, then gone.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘But if it is the Garuwa, then they’re up to something new. As master of prospects, I’m running out of options. Even if it’s rich in small planets and space rocks, maybe we’ll have to pull back t
o Dios and let all those beautiful minerals lie unclaimed.’
‘But they’re already claimed,’ I say. ‘By the Garuwa. That’s the problem. They think you’re stealing their space rocks and mining their planets.’
She shakes her head. ‘They can’t own space.’
‘They do own space. They’re not land creatures. They live in space.’
Song nods, rubbing her eyebrow like it’s a weird idea irritating her and she’s having to massage it into her brain. She looks over the extra work she’s given me.
From the first freighter, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there was a broadcast just before it vanished. A scream into the darkness, like all the flight crew crying out together for just a second. Me thinking that could be what a Weku sounds like. Then silence. The second one, the Roxanne, got a message from Starweaver that they say they never sent. Then it vanished too without even a squeal.
After the first ship vanished, that’s when the static started up. That’s when the Garuwa messages for me to translate slowed down. I tell that to Song but neither of us know what it means. Never mind understanding it, something changed the day the first ship vanished. And I reckon the Garuwa did it.
WHISPER
Some days there’s so much static in the intercepts it’s like voices are trying to interrupt the whistles. It’s almost like space is calling to me, or ghosts of the ones I’ve lost. One day I even think I hear 8: scar, scar, scar, scritch-scritch, love never-ending. I take my headset off then and ask Song, ‘Can I speak to Tamiki on the ship yet?’
‘I’m sure I can set that up,’ she says, and holds up a hand to calm me down, cos I’m sitting upright ready to talk to him right now. ‘It’ll take me a day or two to get the link-up running. It’s not an easy thing, but our comms systems out this far are getting really advanced with all the military-grade hardware Starweaver are installing to keep their ships safe.’
I sit, staring at the black screen. A picture of me in the corner, my dark eyes staring back, waiting, worrying, my face stiff. I try a smile. Looks weird. I glance at Song. She smiles and nods at my screen. And then he’s there, and I’m smiling for real!