Among Treacherous Stars

Chapter 2

2

Scout watched the planet Amatheon slowly rotating under her dangling feet, sucking on a bulb of cool water Liam had given her after helping get her and the dogs buckled back into the seat. It had a faintly metallic taste, but it was also slightly sweet. She was starting to feel a little less lightheaded. She had been pretty severely dehydrated before she had reached Liam’s ship.

Liam would occasionally murmur words into his comm, but other than that, there was no sound but the soft hum of the ship, the occasional yawn from a dog, and a slight hiss of air moving through the vents. The planet was beautiful, but the swirls of clouds slowly twisting beneath her were almost hypnotic. She blinked her eyes sleepily and took another sip of water.

She scarcely needed hypnosis to make her sleepy. Not after the morning she’d had. She had escaped her captors and made it to her rendezvous with Liam on time, but it hadn’t been easy. After the rebel who’d pursued her had tried to stop her by shooting her dogs with tranquilizers, she had been forced to carry them both for kilometers under the hot Amatheon sun. It had been exhausting.

After losing her hat, the only other protection from the burning sun had been her shirt, which would have been enough, only she had been forced to use it as a sling to carry Gert on her back. Her skin felt prickly all over and was turning a frightening shade of red. That on top of the still-tender spot on her chest where she had been hit with a rock days before, the lump over her eyebrow from the rover crash, and abrasions all around her hips from her escape through an almost-too-narrow tunnel made her body one big throbbing, aching, exhausted mass.

And the day was far from over.

She hadn’t realized just how slow her sleepy blinks had become until a hulking mass beneath her startled her fully awake.

It was massive, truly massive, eclipsing her view of the planet below. But aside from its size and its long, cylindrical shape, she could make out no details. The planet behind it was shining so brightly all she could see of the orbiting object was its outline.

“Is that the space station?” she asked.

“Amatheon Orbiter 1,” Liam said to her. “Formerly the colony ship Tajaki 47. Your ancestors arrived on that ship.”

“It’s huge,” Scout said, moving Gert’s head on her thigh to one side so she could bend over. Not that that gave her a closer look, but she couldn’t help herself.

“About the size of two of your domed cities on the surface,” Liam told her. “Of course, it was much bigger before it shed all the components you used to construct all of your cities.”

Scout’s mind boggled. She preferred the wide-open prairies to the crowded streets of the domed cities. This, being inside a dense station hull rather than a transparent dome, was sure to be even more confining.

A sudden vision bloomed in her mind of her and her dogs losing Liam inside that thing. Of getting lost and wandering endless corridors, unable to find him again.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Scout asked, trying to keep her nervousness out of her voice.

“We enter from the far end and fly up the center of the cylinder to the hangar area,” he said.

“No, I meant, once we’re inside,” she said.

“Oh, no worries,” he said with another smile meant to reassure her. “The bureaucracy will come to us. We’ll never even have to leave the ship. Bureaucrats always prefer it that way. They’re in control and able to easily keep track of you. We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.”

Scout hugged her dogs closer to her sides.

Liam guided the ship around in a slow, lazy curve as their momentum carried them past the end of the space station. When the curve ended, they were turned completely around, facing the station that had just passed beneath them. From this angle Scout could see that the cylinder was hollow in the middle, a little crescent of the planet visible through that hollow, dark sky and winking stars filling out the rest of the circle that was the heart of the station.

Details became clearer as Liam piloted the ship closer to the station. The interior wasn’t a perfectly circular cutout. No, the surface of the inner curve of the cylindrical hull was visibly jagged. A few lights, not stars but man-made lights, became apparent.

They were nearly inside the structure before her brain finally put it together: the jagged outlines were buildings. Unimaginably tall buildings, dotted with lights, all converging toward the center. There were other ships around them, smaller and rounder than Liam’s long, gleaming needle of a ship, some zipping between the buildings, a few traversing the open space in the center of the cylinder.

“This is amazing,” Scout said, trying to look everywhere at once and failing.

Liam shot her a look of surprise. “Oh, you’re not joking,” he said. “Kid, wait until you see galactic central. This is all pretty low-tech stuff. It may be your biggest orbiting station, but in broader terms it’s just a tiny speck.”

“I can’t wait,” Scout said, although she was suddenly grateful for this unanticipated stop. Whatever awaited her at the end of her journey, she could use as many steps as possible to get used to it all.

Liam guided his ship to the brightest collection of lights atop a tower that was not the tallest inside the station but was longer and wider. The lights were blinding at first, but then the brightest of them pivoted away all at once and Scout could see the platform was dotted with ships. Most were the small, round ones that were apparently native to the station. They shared a design aesthetic with the rovers back on the planet’s surface, vehicles built for practical durability in a harsh environment. A few were larger, more elongated, but still clearly built from the same tech and materials.

Liam set the ship down on the landing platform and Scout heard a loud clang.

“Magnetic clamps,” he told her as his fingers flew over his control panel. “Not really necessary since this station is under gravity-simulating spin, but protocol is protocol.”

Scout nodded, letting the words wash over her. She had a million questions, but they could wait until she and Liam had resumed their journey.

“Do you need more water?” Liam asked as he undid his restraints.

“Can you fill a bowl for the dogs now that we have gravity?” Scout asked. “I tried giving them squirts from the bulb but I’m not sure they liked it.”

“Of course,” Liam said, moving to the back of the ship and making the sink reappear from its compartment. “And I don’t have anything specifically made for dogs to eat, but I bet I can find something to tempt them.”

“That would be good,” Scout said, releasing the buckles just as Liam set the bowl on the floor. The dogs raced to it, both gulping the water down from opposite ends of the little bowl without fighting for space. The tranquilizers must still be in their systems. But Scout wasn’t about to complain that her dogs were too well behaved.

She looked up from the dogs to see Liam looking at her with deep concern.

“What?” she asked.

“You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?” he asked.

She looked down at her blistering skin and the tattered remains of her cargo shorts barely holding together over her hips. “It looks worse than it feels,” Scout said as Liam leaned forward, examining the lump on her forehead. “It will all heal.”

“Yes,” he said distractedly, turning to stare at all the chrome squares that formed the walls of the ship. “There’s a medical kit in here somewhere . . .”

A soft beep from the console at the front of the ship distracted him from his search. “Here they come,” Liam said, looking out the windscreen.

The nose of the ship was set slightly lower than the back end, allowing them to see the surface of the landing platform in front of them. Four figures dressed in black were approaching their ship at a brisk walk. At first Scout thought they were wearing uniforms, but there was no symbol or insignia on any of them, and although all their clothing was black, the details of the tailoring differed between each of them. Scout couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They all wore black caps pulled low over their faces and walked with their heads bent.

“They seem awfully furtive for officials,” Scout said.

Liam frowned. “I was thinking the same thing. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with us. Just part of the general political unrest. I’ll go down and talk to them. You wait here with the dogs. Once we’re underway again, I’ll break out the food and find that medical kit.”

“Okay,” Scout said, resisting the urge to tell him to be careful. He was a galactic marshal; he knew how to handle himself. But she couldn’t help noticing that unlike Gertrude Bauer, the last galactic marshal she had spent time with, Liam wasn’t carrying a gun or even wearing a belt loaded with handy tools.

Liam touched a spot on the wall, and just as he had made the sink appear out of nowhere, now he summoned the outlines of a door. The door rolled partway up but he didn’t wait for it to finish, just ducked under it and stepped down the still-lowering ramp. He must have touched a control on the other side because the ramp and door both reversed course, closing up again before Scout’s eyes.

That was probably wise. The last thing they needed was a couple of loose dogs roaming the platform.

Scout got up and refilled the dogs’ water bowl; then, not knowing what else to do, she went back to her seat. She wanted to see what was going on outside, but she wasn’t sure she wanted the people outside to see her.

Bureaucracy meant documents: identity cards and permissions to travel, things like that. Scout had a chip in her wristbone that identified her in the domed cities. She supposed it would still work here; the Space Farers had all the technology the Planet Dwellers had and then some.

But she didn’t have permission to be here in orbit. Not for herself, certainly not for her dogs.

Liam was probably being honest with the officials, but just in case he was fudging some facts, Scout decided it was safer to stay out of sight.

It might be safer, but it was maddening not knowing what was going on as the seconds ticked into minutes and the minutes began to accumulate.

Scout chewed at her lip, straining to hear through the hull of the ship. She was certain it was impossible for most sounds to travel through it. There might have been a soft murmur of voices but Scout could never quite be sure, not with the dogs sniffing madly at every centimeter of the ship’s interior, occasionally whuffing out sharp breaths when they located a particularly interesting scent.

Focusing on trying to hear the nearly inaudible was tiring. Her eyelids were getting heavy again.

She snapped awake, heart pounding. Her brain was in the foggy place of not being able to separate dream from reality, especially as she hadn’t even realized she had been sleeping. But even if she hadn’t just dreamt it, surely that softest of sounds she thought she had heard wasn’t enough to warrant such a rush of adrenaline. She wasn’t even certain what she had heard or if she had imagined it. She looked to the back of the ship. Had one of the dogs made that squeak?

But the dogs were both listening intently themselves, heads tipped and ears c****d crookedly.

Scout bit her lip. Had it been a yelp, abruptly cut off?

She needed to see outside, but she still didn’t want to be seen. She leaned forward towards the windscreen, keeping her eyes level with the top of the control console. Someone might see the top of her head, but she had to risk it.

The landing platform was much busier than when they had landed. Two larger ships were sitting on either side of them now and people were disembarking. Most wore the gray jumpsuits of the Space Farers she had encountered down on Amatheon, but a few were decked out in suits of brighter colors.

Then she saw them. The four figures in black were hustling away from the ship, back the way they’d come. But there was now a fifth person between them. At first Scout thought this one was also all in black, but when the figure stumbled, she realized what she had taken as a hat was actually a black hood pulled down over their head to spill around their shoulders, covering the top of their khaki jumpsuit.

Scout’s fingertips gripped the edge of the console so tightly they quickly went cold and white. They were taking Liam away. They had put a sack over his head and were dragging him away.

Whatever was going on, it was far more sinister than mere bureaucracy. And with Liam gone, Scout was left to face it alone.