Local Star

by Aimee Ogden

  Praise for Local Star

  “Local Star is a heartfelt, heartwarming polyam romance driven by mystery, intrigue, and action, whose grease-stained main character works to repair more than just ships. Ogden assembles a universe of complex people and problems, then drills down to a story about love, family, self-acceptance, and forgiveness.”

  —Valerie Valdes, author of Chilling Effect

  “A smart, witty exploration of what it means to be a family, Local Star combines the thoughtful humanism of A Closed and Common Orbit with a delightfully quirky setting reminiscent of the best works of Bruce Sterling.

  For years now, members of the SFF community have known that Aimee Ogden is a writer who can be counted on to deliver insightful stories packed with beautiful, flowing prose. The day after this book is published, everyone will know.”

  —Robyn Bennis, author of The Guns Above

  “I pick up everything I see with Ogden's name on it and I am never disappointed! Local Star sits in that lovely intersection of the personal and the operatic, hinting at intergalactic-level conflict while remaining deeply wedded to the life and loves of its heroine—a former guttergirl-turned-ship-mechanic who doesn't meet a problem she can't barrel through. Sweet and romantic. Highly recommended!”

  Samantha Mills, short fiction author

  "In navigating familial ties amidst a backdrop of war, Triz carves out a space in a queer community that, despite its far-flung location, rings familiar and true. A dazzling tale of interstellar intrigue, Local Star is beautiful contemplation on what it means to be a family."

  Suzanne Walker, , co-creator of the Hugo-nominated graphic novel Mooncakes with artist Wendy Xu

  Also by Aimee Ogden

  Sun-Daughters, Sea Daughters (2021) from Tor.com

  "A Song for the Leadwood Tree" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  "His Heart is the Haunted House" in Apparition Lit

  "Seb Dreams of Reincarnation" in Escape Pod

  "Shelter, Sustenance, Self" in Fireside

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  LOCAL STAR

  Copyright © 2020 by Aimee Ogden.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author and publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover illustration by Oleg Tsoy.

  Edited by Holly Lyn Walrath.

  Published by Interstellar Flight Press, Houston, Texas.

  www.interstellarflightpress.com

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-953736-00-0

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-953736-02-4

  First Edition: 2021

  Local Star

  Aimee Ogden

  Interstellar Flight Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Cover Artist

  Interstellar Flight Press

  New Releases from Interstellar Flight Press

  Chapter One

  Normally, there was nowhere Triz Cierrond would rather be than elbows-deep in a starfighter. But twenty levels above her, the Hab’s main Arcade was crammed with people celebrating the victorious return of the Confederated Fleet. For once in her life, the station wrenchworks were the last place she wanted to be.

  And Kalo was the last person she wanted to be stuck there with.

  It was partly her fault for making him wait while she finished checking the other six light attack Swarmers. But if she had to be miserable, her ex might as well be too. Soon, soon, she’d be uphab celebrating with Casne and her quadparents. A small part of her knew she was hesitating over that too. Probably best to wait a few hours anyway, to give them some time to try being one big happy family. She still didn’t know how she fit into that equation.

  Triz ducked under the left-hand engine pod of Kalo’s swarmer, noting an oozing coolant leak where the wing had partially sheared away from the fuselage. Scorch marks streaked the cockpit, and the nosecone was less of a cone now than an impact-flattened nub. She shook her head and recorded a note on the tablet: total wrench job. “Shitting stars,” she muttered, and pulled her facemask up over her nose and mouth. “How are you not dead after this?”

  “I apologize on behalf of the Cyberbionautic Alliance. I’m sure the Ceebees wish they’d finished the job almost as much as you do.” Kalo sprawled atop Triz’s eternally-in-progress refit of an Escoth V-27 engine assembly. The Escoth, as well as the pile of damaged ore-Scoopers hurriedly rearranged behind it, had been set aside for the sudden influx of paying work. Ships like Escoths were fast and sporty, great for fixing up and selling for a little credit. The Scoopers were scavenger crafts that filtered through the silt layers on the outside of asteroids, panning for something richer than iron oxide in that dust. Kalo didn’t seem to mind his precarious position. If the prospect of getting oil on his dress greens alarmed him, he didn’t show it. He didn’t look at her but combed one hand through wavy, dark hair. He needed a haircut.

  Not that it mattered much how he looked. Once he escaped to the festivities uphab, he and anyone else in a Fleet uniform would be deluged by offers of drinks and dalliances tonight, and those with a Light Attack Swarm pin on their collar more than most. Greaseball mechanics just didn’t invite the same level of attention—especially the ones who’d grown up as guttergirls in a recycling engine, with the manners to match.

  Casne would probably be just as beset with admirers as Kalo . . . but Triz knew her best friend and most significant of others wouldn’t be entertaining outside interest tonight. Some things were worth waiting for. Triz dragged her stylus across the screen of her tablet, scratching out her notes one slow stroke at a time. She glanced over at Kalo, who was fidgeting with one of his silver-ringed cuffs. Good. Let him be impatient.

  “I was thinking,” said Kalo, and Triz’s stylus froze against the screen. There were a lot of things that could come after those three words, and she doubted any of them would improve the current situation. “The atmospheric handling hasn’t been great for me lately. The greaseheads over at Auzhni Hab got a little creative with the repairs after that little to-do outside Hedgehome, and it’s not exactly sticking on a hard turn, but it’s not exactly not, either. If you could just get in there and change the calibration of the—”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” She scratched off the rest of the note in shorthand, signed it, and stormed across the wrenchworks bay to thrust the tablet at Kalo. “It’ll take me forever to get this thing spaceworthy. How long is the Fleet here?” Longer meant more time with Casne; it also meant more chances for head-to-head collisions with Kalo and the shrapnel of their former relationship.

  It was supposed to be fun. Kalo was supposed to be fun. Until he’d neatly snipped things off right before the Fleet left for Hedgehome: no reasons, just a polite this-isn’t-working-is-it, just shy of nine cycles after Casne had enthusiastically introduced them—almost a whole year together, reckoning by the local star. But no great surprise there: they’d been skimming that event horizon for a while already. Triz had found herself starting idle fights whenever Kalo was back on-Hab, finding annoyances in little things that hadn’t bothered her before. They’d had a screaming fight when the Hab got ‘po
rt footage of the destruction of the CFS Graithe and the Iuelo outside Ceebee territory. Just as well he’d ended things not long after that, because gods, was it annoying to ask someone to give a shit about you as they flew blithely off to their untimely death!

  At least Casne crewed a whaleship, one of those practically Hab-sized behemoths with just enough engines attached to nudge them through space. Whaleships were built to withstand fire, cradling their heavy-fire tactical arrays, providing a safe haven for their battered swarms to return to after battle. Whaleships always came home . . . almost always. With Light Attack Swarms, the odds weren’t so good. And when they did come home, it might well be in pieces of a size suitable for packing in a mealcase.

  He’d left her. And now he was back here, in her ‘works. Trying to be friendly. If Kalo noticed her taut silence while scanning through her notes, he didn’t reach out to strum it. He scrolled upward several times to get through her full report, and he whistled low when he reached the end. “Gods of Issam. I really should be dead.”

  “Better luck next time.” She poked his hand that held the stylus, and he dashed off a signature. The tablet chirped politely, and an invoice estimate winged its way to the Fleet bursary at Centerpoint. “Maybe next time, don’t burn so hard on a wing you know is busted.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” Kalo tossed the tablet back to her, and she caught it low, just a few inches above the ground. “Thanks for the lookover. The Fleet’s parked here for three days while we refuel and wait for Centerpoint to stop shitting their pants over what to do with the Ceebees and actually send usf new orders. If you don’t have the time to fix me up altogether, at least get things started so the techs on the whaleship don’t have to start from scratch.” His mouth twisted in that familiar half-smile she couldn’t help but love to hate. “Or if you’re short on time, you can skip making it spaceworthy and just set up a feedback loop in the coolant line so I blow up halfway between here and Centerpoint. That’ll save both you and the techs a lot of trouble.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Dragging a clearance hose, she retreated back under the Swarmer, as much to put some space between them as to start working. “Casne would know it was me, and I’d never hear the end of it.”

  He followed her over to the repair bay and leaned against the good wing with one arm. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want my murder to cause you any inconvenience. Besides, you’d miss me if I was space dust.”

  The hose was heavy; Triz bent her knees to get under it and tried not to look like she was struggling. He might do something really hideous, like offer to help. “The only way I’d miss you is with a lancet gun. And not more than once.”

  He ducked his head under the fuselage. “And yet here we are, alone in the wrenchworks. By your plan, by the way, not mine. Not that I’m objecting. If there’s anything you wanted to say—”

  The metallorganic seal on the hose suctioned itself onto the gaping wound in the side of Kalo’s Swarmer, and Triz flipped the switch on the pump with her foot. The vacuum clattered twice then roared to life, slurping down the coolant spillage and its unwanted fumes. “We’re all set here,” Triz shouted over the noisy belching of the pump. She wasn’t sure if Kalo could hear her over the noise and didn’t especially care. The vacuum spoke for itself.

  He yelled something back at her and gestured to the pair of lifts that stretched through the Hab. The wrenchworks made up the bottom of the station—or at least what everyone agreed via the consensus of artificial gravity counted as “bottom,” in deep space—and the lift started here, then crossed the recycling and recovery levels, the living quarters, and the Arcade, ending in Justice at the very top. Maybe he was asking where to go now? Triz couldn’t pick just one of the seven hells, so she shrugged and slipped her earmuffs from around her neck to cover her ears. Finally, Kalo gave up and disappeared into one of the lifts.

  Triz gave it two minutes to make sure he was really gone, then collapsed against the battered Swarmer. Intellectually, she knew the fighting between the Ceebees and the Confederated Fleet had been ugly. She’d seen the vids of dead alien intelligences after the Ceebee commander’s attempts at rapidfire terraforming: lifeless mounds of iridescent tendrils and broken segments of carapace, poisoned by the introduction of atmospheric oxygen. Sitting beside the newsport, she’d listened to the rolls of names of planetary colonists killed in the forcible resettlements at Hedgehome. Ceebees never balked at remaking their own bodies, using any and every tech available to fit themselves to their environment; they’d proven they had equally few qualms about remaking an environment to better serve them—to often horrific effect.

  It was strange now, to have the war brought to her own door like this. Usually, the wrenchworks here at her home habitation ring of Vivik didn’t see more than the odd freighter every week or two. Vivik’s local star had no habitable planets and nothing particular to recommend it beyond a gas giant resort for platform jumpers. Even its economic role as a shipping-lane nexus for the past hundred years only allowed freight to pass through on its way to the bigger systems farther out.

  Triz liked Vivik Hab’s usual quiet. Her home for the past ten years had always offered her safety. But Moxu and Vogett, the two closest big Habs on this ragged edge of settled space, had been destroyed in the fighting, leaving Vivik the only nearby survivor able to pick up the pieces of the Fleet and send it on to the center of the Galactic Web. Ships weren’t the only wreckage clotting the Hab. None other than Commander Rocan shitting Dustald-3 Melviq himself was a prisoner of Justice here. Many of Vivik’s citizens had already gone to war; now war had come to the Hab itself.

  When she could breathe again, she emerged from under the Swarmer’s belly and hurried into the wrenchworks office. The earmuffs clanged when she tossed them into her locker, and she scanned her wristfob for a tiny water ration to splash her face in the sink. She didn’t want to open the fighter up until she was sure it was coolant-free, so no reason not to celebrate with the rest of the Hab. She could buy a round for some friendly-looking whaleship crews and still give Casne time and space to enjoy her quadparents for a while yet.

  No time to bother with changing into something fancier; Triz ducked out of the office and fussed briefly with her hair. She wondered if she’d be able to find any of Casne’s Fleet friends to follow around for the night. If nothing else, she might be able to find them on the outskirts of the crowd of admirers the favored Captain Casne Vivik Veling had surely collected by now. They could hit Ganit’s Pantry, and hopefully Ganit hadn’t jacked up the price of boot gin by three hundred percent for the night—

  The lift flashed an alert: visitors incoming. Damn Kalo. What, did he decide to give it one more go for old time’s sake? Her heart lurched. But then a comfortably familiar scowl settled into her face, and she folded her arms.

  The lift doors parted, and Triz choked on the deep breath she’d held. Casne exploded out of the lift and picked her up in a hug. Triz’s arms locked around Casne’s back, and she gasped down a deep breath to keep from bursting into sudden, silly tears. Casne’s tight curls carried the faint electric smell of the interior of a whaleship, but she still smelled like home to Triz.

  After several long moments that would never be quite long enough, Casne pulled back. “All right, greasemark,” she shouted over the vacuum’s roaring and laid a warm kiss on Triz’s lower lip. “Are you going to buy me a drink, or what?”

  Chapter Two

  The lift moved too fast: up through Metal Reclamation and the Terraria level that served as the Hab’s living lungs, through the umbilicus ring where Fleet ships trailed on the ends of their leads, then layers and layers of living quarters. After a too-short minute’s frantic reacquaintance behind the closed lift doors, Casne and Triz were deposited at the top end of the Hab in the middle of an utterly unrecognizable Arcade. Gray and gold streamers spanned the space between the central lift column and the businesses that wrapped around the station perimeter. Some of them were proper custom-printed decora
tions, while others had been hastily assembled from paper scraps or mealcase wrappers. The decor closed in the wide-open Arcade, made it feel smaller, more enclosed, despite the windows all around that peered out into the open void of space.

  Triz recoiled from the sight of all that empty black, chopped up into tiny pieces as it was by the myriad of windows lining the Arcade. In one corner of the window, over the main recycling chute, a small arc of the local star could be seen—a glimmer of gold against the darkness. All the orange dwarf’s planets were tidally locked and uninhabitable, so the Hab’s solar arrays had been built to take advantage of the otherwise-unused light and heat.

  Triz appreciated the change in the Arcade’s atmosphere, but she paused a moment in the frame of the lift doors. That was a lot of people. A lot of noise, a lot of everything. Not many folks here had ever recoiled from her as if she still reeked of recycling engine—and she suspected Casne had sorted those out long ago. People here didn’t remember her as the guttergirl she’d grown up as back on Rydoine. Still. She couldn’t shake the sense she didn’t totally belong here, in this world of smiles and songs and light.

  Casne smoothed Triz’s hair back from her forehead. “Come on, guttergirl,” Casne said, “you’re with me now,” and Triz took a deep breath as they careened out into the crowd.

  They leaned into one another to stay together in the press of bodies, tripping over other people’s feet as well as the occasional empty moonshine bottle.