Stone in the Sky

by Cecil Castellucci

  “Those were to get to pods,” I said. “Not to spacewalk.”

  “You’ll step outside with a tether,” Caleb said. “You’ll hide underneath us, and then when they leave, we’ll pull you back inside.”

  Caleb and Siddiqui started dressing me, pulling the suit tight around me. Asking me about the airflow. Putting the helmet on my head. Asking if I could hear them.

  “I need you to listen to me,” Siddiqui said. “When you get out there go slow. Very slow. Actually, slow is too fast.”

  “Okay,” I said. But I didn’t know what that meant. “Don’t make any sudden moves, and try to concentrate on your center. You are your own gravity. Think of yourself as a dancer,” Siddiqui said.

  “And never let go of the structure. Use your tether,” Caleb added.

  “To move, go hand over hand, sideways. Up and down are nearly impossible,” Siddiqui said. “Your wrists aren’t strong enough.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “There is no resistance in space,” he said. “That’s why you have to go slow.”

  We could all hear the ship coming alongside of us.

  “You have to go,” Caleb said. “They’re here.”

  “We’ll come get you when it’s safe,” Siddiqui said.

  Caleb blew me a kiss, and then they both backed out of the docking bay and sealed the door. I was alone. I could hear as the air got sucked out of the room. The hatch opened, and I was pushed outside. The tether kept me from free falling, but the door closed and I couldn’t help but try to grab for it. I was weightless, and it was silent. I was alone with the universe. My heart was beating so hard I thought I might explode. I was twisting, and I could see the small ship as it docked.

  Quint was below me, and I had a sudden sense of vertigo. As though I were falling even though I was floating. I tried to find my center.

  Would I get a signal of when to come in? I just had to wait it out. Wait until they left.

  I had to know what was going on in the ship. I slowly went hand over hand to a point where I could see the windows.

  There they were: Caleb, Siddiqui, and the two other Pirates. A door slid open and in came Brother Blue. I could see him screaming at my friends. They were shoved. Two Imperium guards, both Per, raised their four arms menacingly brandishing their two-shot pistols, one in each hand.

  The crew was subdued. I could tell that orders were being given.

  Another Imperium guard, a Brahar, started pushing open bins and pulling out things. I watched as others filed down the hall of the ship, finding secret panels. Pulling things apart. They were looking for me.

  They all joined Brother Blue back on the bridge, shaking their heads. I could not be found.

  I watched as Caleb said something, and I could see Brother Blue’s face twist and turn red. I knew that look. It was the look he’d had when I’d pointed out the grain on the docking bay. It was the look he’d had before he’d beaten me and before he killed Els. I feared for Caleb, but breathed easier when I saw Brother Blue smile and turn away.

  Then I saw Caleb shout something after him and watched helplessly as Brother Blue stopped and grabbed one of the two-shot pistols from the Per and shoot Caleb.

  “No!” I screamed inside my helmet, the sound echoing like crazy.

  Caleb crumpled to the floor. Siddiqui and the two other Pirates stepped forward, making surrendering signals with their arms.

  “Come in,” I said desperately flipping the channels on the radio I had trying to hail someone. My fingers were clumsy in the thick gloves. “Come in.”

  I could do nothing as I watched them get their hands tied behind their backs. I kept hoping that Caleb would somehow get up and be taken away with the rest of them. But I knew in my heart that my friend was dead.

  “Hello? What do I do?” I asked. “Where do I go?”

  It had been over an hour since I’d exited the ship. I wanted nothing more than to return to it. To Caleb.

  A Per stepped up as though he had noticed something outside and I moved to the right out of sight. Minutes later I saw the shuttle disembark from Caleb’s ship and head toward the Yertina Feray.

  I was stranded in space.

  All I could hear was my own frantic breathing. I waited ten minutes and then I slowly worked my way back to the window and confirmed my worst fear. There was no one on board to let me back in. I turned around and looked at the Yertina Feray, but knew that it would be crazy to try to approach one of the docking bays. There were too many ships, and I’d be caught or shot or worse, shoot right by it into eternity.

  I only knew one thing: that I did not want to die in all of this black vastness. I turned again and looked at Quint below me and had a mad moment where I thought I could just dive toward it.

  Just when I could bear the silence no longer, I noticed a single occupant ship coming toward me. I watched as it became bigger, as it closed in on the Hort ship. I was free-floating and I did not want to be noticed, so I started to pull myself closer to the hatch. The ship must have spotted me because it changed direction. It was a small ship, with an Imperium flag on it. It was heading right toward me. It had guns on its nose. I tried to keep my breathing even.

  The ship came up close to me, and we stared at each other. The solar shade came up and I could see the pilot. It was Tournour. Relief washed over me. He made an indication to his head and then put his fingers to the number three twice. Thirty-three. It took me a minute but then I realized he meant the channel for my com set. I dialed in thirty-three.

  “Can you hear me?”

  I had been holding my breath, and hearing his voice made me burst into tears. As if all of the fear was flooding through me and out of me.

  “Yes,” I said. “They shot Caleb.”

  “Don’t cry,” he said.

  “I can’t help it,” I said.

  “Is this a Human thing?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  Now that I had learned to cry again, it came so easily.

  “What can we do to make it stop?” he asked.

  I laughed and shook my head and willed myself to stop crying. It was uncomfortable. The tears had steamed up my visor. My nose was running, and I couldn’t wipe it.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  Tournour was here. I was going to be okay.

  “You’re going to have to untether yourself from their ship and attach yourself to mine.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. If I unattached myself, I could float away.

  “You have to,” Tournour said.

  It struck me that there had been a backup plan all along. Caleb had been buying me time.

  “What do we do?”

  “I’m going to nose up to you. Keep you in place. You’ll disengage and attach yourself to the outside of my ship. You’ll ride me back to the station.”

  “Like a horse?”

  It took a second for the nanites in him to translate.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He nosed the ship so gently up to me. I was astounded at the skill he had as a pilot. I could feel the nose of the ship on the outside of the suit. I unclicked the tether and clicked it onto his ship.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m secure.”

  I pulled myself over to him and sat on top of the hull. He thrust forward, barely using any engine. We glided along the bottom of the ships above us so that they wouldn’t be able to see us, and we headed toward the station. I checked my oxygen. I still had some air, but it would be tight. The Yertina Feray loomed larger in front of us. A docking bay opened, and we entered, gravity hitting me like a ton of bricks. I rolled off of the ship with a thud to the floor.

  Tournour ejected himself from the cockpit and jumped down to me.

  He helped me take off my mask.

  I hadn’t been this close to him in months.

  He didn’t say anything to me. Instead, he looked at me with his deep dark eyes, and then I reached up and did something I’d never done before.r />
  I kissed him.

  46

  It had been so long since I’d seen Tournour I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d missed.

  “We must hurry,” he said, and though he removed my arms from around him, I could tell that he did not want to let go of me either.

  “Follow me,” he said. He led me to the catwalks and the secret tunnels that Heckleck had shown me when he was alive, and it made me ache for how everything was now different. We went up and up and up until we arrived at a lift that was very small and clearly rarely used. It was no bigger than an average-sized biped and it could barely hold us both. The door slid open and we went in. We had to become one in order to fit.

  “What are you doing back here?” he asked. “It’s too dangerous. The Imperium is clutching onto what power it has by using force instead of silence. That’s always the sign of the end of a time. Every species is scared for their homeworld and for their colonies.”

  “Can we gather everyone at the Tin Star Café?” I said.

  “Everyone is frightened,” he said. “I can barely keep control of the station. If they were all to gather in one place, I can’t tell you what would happen.”

  “All those species on Quint, we all worked together. There was none of that Major and Minor business.”

  The lift jolted me closer to him.

  “As the Imperium feels the noose, they lash out at Minor Species and even my cousin Hendala who is working to expose them from the inside trying to root out the corruption is failing in her attempt to get those in the Imperium to work together to bring it down. Everyone is scared.”

  “I know we can’t do anything about the Imperium, but we can fix this on a small scale. This is our station.”

  My mouth was so close to his antenna that my lips brushed them. He shuddered. I couldn’t tell if it was with pleasure or disgust, but he held me tighter.

  “Do you know why I was sent here?” Tournour asked. “What my family’s big shame was?”

  “No,” I said. I had never dared to ask.

  “My mother and father,” he said. “They thought like you did. They saw the galaxy as a place where we could all work together to bring the best out of each other. They were high in the League. They were Loors of real power. They went to Minor worlds and encouraged them to think that way. To ask for more and to expand, and to join forces with other species.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “They were killed, of course,” Tournour said. “Our lands were stripped, and as I was the youngest, I was sent away in shame to the farthest place as punishment. No one rises from this low on Tallara.”

  I looked up at him. It seemed strange to me that he had been so hard hearted.

  “I used to hate what my parents believed in, that all aliens should be equal. It was terrible to me to be separated from Tallara, assigned to a space station, and to have to work with so many different kinds of aliens. But then I met you. And I understood everything that my parents believed in.”

  “We are going to survive this,” I said touching his face.

  “Tell those we can trust, Thado, Kitsch Rutsok, Bitty, to gather who they can, and have them meet us at the Tin Star Café.”

  The elevator stopped, and the tiny door slid open. The corridor was small, and we were still close to each other, but after being so close, the inches felt like light years apart. I ached to touch him again.

  Tournour reached over me and pushed on a panel that opened, and there, before me, was a place that I knew all too well. The underguts.

  “You’ll have to wait here until I can gather everyone together,” he said. “It will take some time.”

  We moved through the hallway of bins, and I could feel his hope rising with every step. Finally we stopped in front of my old bin. I opened the metal curtain and there it was. It looked so small and ugly and empty.

  “I must go,” he said. “I have duties to perform. I have to keep the Yertina Feray safe. Stay here and out of sight. I’ll send word.”

  “Will I see you again soon?” I asked. Now that I was with Tournour, Reza was a distant memory.

  “There is always hope,” he said. “Carry that with you and so will I. If we both do, then the chances of us meeting again are better.”

  He bowed down to me, and I cupped his face and kissed his forehead. Then he left.

  Once he did, the other dwellers of the underguts began to look at me. They all seemed to be new aliens who had fallen low.

  I was back to my beginning, but it didn’t feel like home.

  47

  I had been down in the underguts for a few days before there was a knock on my bin. I lifted the metal curtain.

  I expected no visitors and I was under orders from Tournour to mix and mingle with no one until I could talk to everyone, but I was restless. My bin felt like a coffin.

  I opened the curtain. There stood a Nurlock. Kelmao. I’d heard she had taken over the Tin Star Café.

  “Hello,” she said. She had sureness to what she was doing, even though she was small. She was well-dressed. It made me happy that she had come into her own. She signaled and two other Nurlock stepped forward with boxes that they started to put into my bin.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Your things,” she said. Then she smiled timidly in the way that the Nurlock do, pressing her lips so thinly until they disappeared into the barest line.

  “I don’t have any things,” I said.

  I opened the boxes. Inside were waters, salts, and sweets.

  “This is the portion of the inventory that was left in my store,” she said. “It’s only proper that it goes back to you.”

  I pressed my lips to the thinnest they could go in thanks.

  “The Tin Star is good?” I said. I missed the bustle of it and the life I’d made there.

  “You’ll see it soon enough,” she said. “I’m to take you there tomorrow at twenty-first chime.”

  * * *

  I was the first one to arrive with Kelmao, and she pointed out to me the improvements that she’d made. The Tin Star Café was the same except for more tables and chairs. My three alin plants still hung behind the glass on the window. The door slid open, and Siddiqui walked in with the surviving Pirates and Trevor rolling behind them.

  “Caleb would have wanted you to have it,” Siddiqui said.

  I hugged him and then commanded Trevor to go to the corner. Seeing it stand there, as it cycled through alien music, made me miss Caleb. I couldn’t believe that he was dead.

  Siddiqui, the Pirates, and I helped Kelmao to set up bottles of premium waters and sweets on the tables for the people who were going to join us to enjoy.

  “We should mix them up,” I said to Kelmao.

  She nodded, and we went about mixing the sweets from different planets onto the same plates and placing the premium and low quality waters into the same cold buckets to imitate what I was going to try to accomplish. It might have been wishful, but as the aliens started entering and were forced to crowd around the same plates and cold buckets, conversations began. I saw Bitty enter with a few other Humans, and she waved to me. Thado and Kitsch Rusok arrived soon after and purposefully mixed with other species. Merchants and old timers trickled in from all corners of the station, and I was pleased to see a good representation of all species present. It was everyone I’d traded with back when I’d first arrived to those from Quint who had left the planet but were still not able to leave the system.

  “Looks like everyone is here,” Tournour said calling the meeting to order. I surveyed the scene noting that it was exactly the right amount of aliens who could be trusted.

  “Planets are given to a species to colonize,” I said. “There can be a small amount of other species, but no more than three percent. That’s the way it’s always been, even before the Imperium.”

  I was telling them what they already knew.

  “It’s how they regulate the balance of power,” Tournour said. “But th
is is our station. And we don’t need to live in the past.”

  There were murmurs as the aliens commented to those standing next to them.

  “I saw what this Human did on Quint,” the Nurlok who owned the eatery said.

  “I didn’t do anything except make it safe for us to work together,” I said.

  “You started a community,” Bitty said.

  “Yes. We need to do that here,” I said.

  I had done that on Quint. I had brought us together. And looking out on the crowd, I knew I was doing it again. I found some courage inside of me and said what I thought from my heart. So many familiar faces were in the room. Thado. Kitsch. They were here to listen to me.

  “If we work together to fight the taxes; to stave off the terror; to protect the species who are smaller in population here on the Yertina Feray and to help them thrive; to share planets, like so many of us did on Quint; or wherever the next rush is, then the Imperium cannot harm us. Not here. And maybe after a while, not anywhere.”

  The crowd erupted, some agreeing and others disagreeing, many with questions, but everyone was still standing together, not in separate groups. I knew one thing was certain. The conversation had begun. The aliens were debating amongst each other, not taking sides with their own kind. Not caring about Major or Minor status.

  Just as I let my guard down to enjoy the lively debate around me, the door burst open. Every alien went for their weapon, and a heat rushed over the room as though there was going to be a riot. Or a war.

  But it was not the Imperium.

  It was Myfanwy and she was alone, but visibly upset.

  “What is she doing here?” I asked Bitty.

  Immediately I could feel the tension in the room rise and I worried that we were about to lose what traction we’d gained. Everyone in the room had been burned in some way by the Imperium and, more specifically, by Brother Blue. They had no great love for Myfanwy because of that.

  “I don’t know, but I know that she’s a friend,” Bitty said to me loud enough that the gathered group could hear.

  Myfanwy pushed her way through the crowd up to me.