Tin Star (11 page)

But that wasn’t the truth. They should have gotten an answer by now from the Earth Imperium Alliance members on Bessen.

“Yes, of course,” the alien said and bowed his head to indicate that I knew better than him.

Life was cheap out in the black. I had learned that, and it still hurt to know it. But those Imperium representatives being dead was trouble all around, and someone would be made to pay. I didn’t want it to be me.

*   *   *

Heckleck banged on the side of my bin with his appendage in the way that let me know that it was him. I pushed aside the curtain.

“Have you heard? A shuttle docked with two Imperium representatives aboard,” Heckleck said.

“And now they’re dead,” I said.

Heckleck’s mouth changed to a diamond shape, which after knowing him as long as I had, I knew meant that he was amused.

“Many would have killed for what they had. Look at this.”

He pushed two data cards toward me.

“Travel passes,” I said. “So what?”

“Not just any travel passes. These come with immunity. They cannot be questioned. They cannot be revoked.”

“Impossible,” I said.

I’d rarely seen travel passes. They were beautiful. They glowed with color and holograms. Then I realized that they were open passes. They gave free travel access to anyone to go anywhere any amount of times. Since travel was now so strictly regulated, these passes meant absolute freedom.

“How did you get these? Did you kill them?”

He probably hadn’t. Heckleck was not squeamish about cutting off body parts, but he drew the line at murder. That was why I still did jobs for him on occasion.

“No,” Heckleck said carefully. “I’m no murderer. Someone who owed me too many favors was lucky enough to find the bodies first. Now our debt is settled and I have the passes.”

“You’ll get a good price for them,” I said. “Plenty of takers for something like this.” I liked the feel of them in my hand. I wondered what it would be like to be able to buy them myself. I could go anywhere. I could follow every lead until I found Brother Blue.

Heckleck leaned in and lowered his voice.

“I am not going to sell them,” Heckleck said. “I’m going to use them.”

I froze.

“Does that interest you?”

“Why would it interest me?” I said carefully.

“I could sell you one,” Heckleck said.

I felt a rush of hope. With a pass like that I could go anywhere. It seemed like an impossible wish coming true. I had to be careful. Heckleck could be tricky. I tried not to show my excitement.

“I don’t have enough currency on my chit for something as valuable as that,” I said.

“I see that you have a bag of Brahar salts on your shelf there,” Heckleck said.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Well, what with the favor I owe you from yesterday, and the fact you gave me an extra trest, and that time that you went left in the corridor, instead of right, which gave me a distinct advantage with the representative from Per, I believe you’ve curried almost enough to earn you a pass. But I’ll have to have that salt. I can see your mind already racing. You are not good at covering up your thoughts from me. You have always been set upon revenge.”

“Not revenge,” I said.

“Answers that if you get them will likely lead to you wanting revenge,” he said.

“You’d get more from someone else,” I said. I had kept a running tally in my head of favors exchanged between us, and while they were many, they were nowhere near the value of a pass that meant ultimate freedom.

“I knew you would say that, too.” Heckleck said. “But I like you. And there is not much that means much in this world. But liking someone whose species you dislike is something—worth more than currency on a chit. Why don’t you think about it? Or are you too afraid to leave the comfortable life you’ve set up here?”

My life here
was
comfortable. It wouldn’t look like that to an outsider, but to me, it was familiar. I knew how to make it good. Out there everything was unknown. Places were unknown. Beings were unknown. I had staked my survival on knowing. Leaving, as much as I wanted desperately to do it, would be hard. But although the unknown was frightening, perhaps there was a different kind of life for me waiting somewhere out there in the galaxy. I reached over to the shelf and took the bag of salts down and gave it to him.

“All right,” I said.

“There,” Heckleck said. “This will be a great adventure.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“Oh, I have my own questions that need answers too,” he said. “But they can wait a little longer while I accompany you.”

“You would go with me?” I asked.

“Well I can’t very well have you leaving and traveling around without knowing how to get a ride on a ship, what destinations have the best light skip jump points, who is more amenable to taking on Humans, and how to get information that you require. No, no. Our tally begins anew.”

“I will owe you,” I said.

“You already do!” Heckleck said. “I have business to attend to in order to prepare. I want to leave as soon as possible, before more Imperium representatives come with their questions about the disappearance of the first ones. But I don’t want to take the travel passes with me. They’re too hot. Will you hold them for us?”

“How do you know you can trust me?” I asked. “I might sell your pass to the highest bidder.”

Heckleck looked amused. As though he were proud that he’d taught me so well.

“It would only be for an hour or two,” Heckleck said. “And then we’ll be directly on our way.”

“All right,” I said. I took the cards and put them in my breast pocket.

“I always knew I could trust you, Tula,” Heckleck said. “You’re the only one down here I can.”

It was a high compliment. Heckleck trusted no one. He closed the metal curtain behind him, and I heard him scurry away.

Two hours later, he still hadn’t returned.

I didn’t think much of it until the sirens started blaring.

“Raid!” someone yelled. “Raid!”

The law enforcers came, pulling down everyone’s curtains and pulling people out of their bins. Before they got to me, I put my valuables and the passes into the tiny secret panel Heckleck had helped me devise when I moved in. I had just closed it when Tournour whipped open my curtain.

“Tula,” he said.

“Tournour,” I said.

“Will you come with me?”

His guards did not handle me roughly or pull me out. Tournour always made sure that his guards treated me with respect. I stood up and followed them. Outside, I joined all of the other petty criminals until we were all rounded up and brought up to the chief constable’s office and detained. Tournour would talk to us all one by one.

I waited my turn and was relieved when I was finally called in.

“Your cutting has grown,” I said.

“It thrives. Three flowers this year,” Tournour said, “but no pollen.”

“I’ve heard that it blooms all year on Quint,” I said.

“Yes, I enjoy making a tea from the flowers,” he said. “A rare delicacy.”

I wondered if he’d ever been down there. I liked to think of Tournour smuggling a cutting back onto the station.

“I have news for you, and I don’t know how one says these things to Humans in a kind way so I’ll just say it. Heckleck’s dead,” Tournour said. “And I know that he meant something to you.”

I wanted to cry out in pain. Heckleck just couldn’t be gone. Not as quick as that. I knew that to get through the interrogation, I’d have to let myself forget my friend. Deep down, I knew he was dead because of those travel passes, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d be dead soon, too. I would have to grieve for him later.

I composed myself.

“No one means anything to anyone down in the gutter,” I said.

But it wasn’t true. Heckleck had meant everything to me. He had been my parent, my mentor, my advisor, and my
friend
.

“I’m sorry to hear the news,” I added.

“Do you know what he was into?” Tournour asked.

“Something bad, I guess.”

“Did he talk to you today?”

“He talks to me most days,” I said. “But I don’t always listen.”

“Did he talk to you about those Imperium representatives?”

“Everybody talked about those two.” I was sure that was true, even though I’d only talked about it with him and the alien who had told me about it at mealtime.

“They had travel passes, and we need them back,” Tournour said.

“We?”

“The Imperium,” he said.

“If I had the travel passes,” I said. “I’d already be on my way out of here.”

“Of course,” he said. “Tula, you didn’t help him did you?”

“Help him what?”

“Kill those Imperium representatives?”

“No,” I said. “I trade for favors only. Besides, as shady as some of Heckleck’s dealings are, he never kills.”

“Do you really believe that?” he asked.

“I know it,” I said.

“They were Humans,” Tournour said. “Did you know that?”

“I didn’t see them,” I said.

“I know you have issues with other Humans,” he said.

“Do you think I killed them?”

“What do you know about a Human named Brother Blue?”

My blood froze.

“What does he have to do with anything?” My voice was rising.

“So you know him?”

“He left me here,” I said.

Tournour keyed something into his datapad.

“Did he have something to do with this?” I asked.

“I’m just getting information to send my report to the Human Ambassador at Bessen.”

How could Brother Blue be brought up at that same time as Heckleck was?

“Did he have something to do with Heckleck’s death?”

“I’m not permitted to comment on current investigations,” Tournour said.

“I’ll trade you,” I said.

He considered me.

“I think Heckleck cared about you more than I thought,” Tournour said.

“Tournour, I’ll trade you anything you want,” I said.

“I thought the name sounded familiar,” Tournour said. “This Brother Blue has a habit of leaving his Humans behind.”

Without saying anything definite at all, I knew in my bones that he meant that Brother Blue had been here and he’d gotten away. I’d been this close to my revenge and hadn’t known it, and somehow it had gotten Heckleck killed.

“Am I free to go?”

“You are free to go,” Tournour said.

I made my way back to the underguts, and when I got back to the safety of my bin I checked my hiding place. Nothing had been touched; my things, my currency chit, and the travel passes were safe.

Only then did I let it finally sink in that Heckleck was dead and if Tournour was to be believed, that somehow Brother Blue was involved. Heckleck had run things on the docking bays for years, and he was my only friend, the only one I trusted. Now he was gone. Heckleck had been everything to me. I hadn’t felt this alone since the day I’d been left behind by the
Prairie Rose
, and now I had one more reason to hate Brother Blue. He must have wanted to leave badly enough to put himself in a position to be killed over those passes.

I locked the travel passes back into the hiding place. They were too hot to have any value now. The best thing to do would be to destroy them. But I couldn’t. They were the only things I had left of Heckleck.

They were the only piece of hope he ever had. And they were the last gift he’d ever given me.

15

For Heckleck, there would be no memorial.

I had no idea how a Hort was buried or eulogized. Here, on the Yertina Feray, memorials were mostly for those who lived in the above levels and had the luxury of grief. But in the underguts there was an unspoken superstition that to mark a death was to invite it to take you next. Heckleck likely didn’t expect anyone to step forward for him after he died, although part of me wanted to mark his passing. But that was the Humanness rising up in me.

Out in space, on a ship or on a station, organic materials were rare and useful. I knew that when an alien died, if the body wasn’t claimed, it was considered to be an organic compound that would be broken down and used where needed on the space station. To the arboretum to fertilize the greenery, or liquefied and pushed through the coolant system, or broken down into needed biocompounds in the med bay. Until it was determined that no one would come forward, send a message, or arrive on the station to do a memorial, a dead body was put into a cryocrate to preserve it until enough time had passed. If no one came forward, the body was recycled.

Cryocrates on the station were used for these kinds of preservations, but they were also commonly used by some species for interstellar travel. There was one hangar that housed all the dead bodies and sleeping travelers. Death and sleep have no distinction. Although I did not step forward for Heckleck, I spent that week sitting by his cryocrate in mourning.

I was not alone. There were a few others who sat with their loved ones, and there were medical personnel tending to the travelers who were being revived or being put into sleep stasis for a voyage. And so in the quiet, it was all types of Major and Minor alien species that sat in that hangar bay by the crates.

When they came to take Heckleck’s body away for disposal, I steeled myself. I feared that it meant that I was doomed to die here, too. It hit me that when I did, no one would likely care to claim me or to sit with me before I was recycled.

With Heckleck gone, something changed. Perhaps it was the air of the station. As though the nanites no longer worked and it was harder for me to breathe. Or like gravity had been somehow made heavier. It was difficult to move sometimes. I covered less ground. I was much too overwhelmed with the burden of surviving my grief to admit that I was lonely.

I am supposed to be young
, I thought.
I’m supposed to be carefree.

Instead of those things, my thirst for revenge only grew greater.

Heckleck’s absence was profound, but I never cried. I had given that up long ago. I found myself often going to the robot warehouse, to the miner robot that I had drawn a face on when Heckleck and I had explored the empty station together. The way that it sat there, with its tiny knife-like appendages and its back legs folded reminded me of the way Heckleck used to sit. I would confess my heart to the robot but no tears came, and instead of easing my sorrow it made it more profound.