The Star Mother Read online

  The journey took days or weeks—she had no way of knowing. Food came sporadically, and when it didn’t come for a while she dug into her bread, which she studiously hid from the other passengers no matter how stale it got. She kept both bags in her clutches every second of every day, the straps wrapped around her body whenever she stole an hour or two for sleep. Her body only grew dirtier, the ship’s common latrines running down the outer edges of the vast chamber that held them quickly becoming clogged and overrun. A foul stench manifested before long, and the shortages of food and water on top of that led to flaring tempers. Men and women fought one another, the sounds of flesh pounding flesh becoming a sickening rhythm to this life. Some of them, she realized were not fighting but were doing something that looked an awful lot like it, only by the end they seemed happy and relaxed rather than angry or injured. Their happiness lasted only a moment, though, before the reality of captivity set back in.

  Several fellow passengers tried to talk with her. She ignored as many as she could and rebuffed the ones that tried to press the issue. “I don’t need you. Leave me alone!” She got very good at saying that. A few of the women appeared to take an interest in her—at least, they ran off men who appeared to take an undue interest. Apart from that, they let Sasha have her space, a tiny sliver of the floor near the back of the huge chamber that represented their home for however long this trip was. She began to entertain the possibility that this would be her home forever, that she’d been transported to some sort of mobile zoo. Her father had taken her to the zoo once, and she remembered the animals there. The small ones never seemed to notice they were in cages, but the big ones, the smarter ones, they knew. They glared at the visitors with a combination of despair and contempt. She sensed it, somehow. She told her father she never wanted to go back, that the animals didn’t like being locked up. He laughed and told her she had a wild imagination. If I’m in the zoo now, nobody’s going to let me out, either.

  In time, though, she learned it was not a zoo. She was on her way to someplace worse.

  When the ship finally made planetfall, about a quarter of the passengers remained only as lifeless corpses. The rear of the ship folded down to reveal bright lights and a metallic interior. They were ordered out in multiple single-file lines, stepping around the dead bodies that no one wanted to touch lest they catch something. She carried her bags with what little strength she had left. Though they were lighter from all the bread having been eaten, they somehow felt much heavier than when she and her father had left the cabin. By now, her father’s memory seemed so distant that he might as well have not existed.

  Large men with guns and short tempers ordered the disembarking captives into different groups, with Sasha sent to stand with the other children. They were led one by one into what she recognized as a medical office. Her bags were yanked from her, clothes stripped off, then they prodded her with hard plastic batons toward a shower stall where all the sweat and urine and other filth were finally blasted from her body with unrelenting sprays of cold water. She shivered and cried out from how cold it was, but it didn’t last long and then she felt the floor move and push her into another room where two men looked over her with handheld instruments, saying nothing as if they wouldn’t expect her to understand in the first place. She covered herself with her hands, which they rudely yanked away to complete their scans. She wondered where the bags had gone, if they were going to be thrown away or if she’d find them waiting for her when she got the end of this maze of rooms and hallways and hostile gray-clad creatures.

  The scans eventually stopped and the men gave each other approving nods. One of them came at her with a new implement, aiming it directly at her forehead. She tried to reverse but the other one snatched her by the shoulders, holding her in place. It touched her flesh, and then came the sensation of burning, and the stink of seared flesh. She screamed and passed out.

  Sasha had come to Actis, and she was now marked a slave.

  Her first memory of the slave quarters involved a leathery, green-eyed, gray-skinned visage staring down at her with something akin to concern, and a mildew stink emanating from his body. His lips moved and sounds came out but she didn’t understand a single one. She screamed again, pulling her clothing over her head. Someone or something must have dressed her in a simple brown tunic and basic pants, and she took the opportunity to hide herself from whatever intentions the creature had. Its voice, while gravelly, also held a sonorous, soothing quality, which convinced her over the course of a minute or two to let her shirt down and look into his eyes again. This time, she saw he was holding something familiar. “The chronicle!” she gasped, reaching for the bound volume with the ratty pages. He of the rough skin and thin white wisps of hair pulled it away momentarily, opening the book to one of the later pages which held a pencil drawing of Sasha from when she was a toddler. Her hair was short back then, with chubby cheeks and just a few teeth visible in her smile. She recalled seeing it before when her father would read her passages from the book and she would attempt to parse the words herself, always stuck on the more complicated ones. The creature pointed to the portrait, then to her, giving a quizzical look. She nodded and proceeded once again to grab for the volume. This time, he let her have it, making indecipherable utterances that she regretted being unable to understand. Clutching the book tightly to herself, she began to scan her eyes around the room. She realized she was ensconced in an alcove carved out of solid rock, large enough for an adult to lay down in. She was still short enough to sit up here, but a grownup would hit their head given the low clearance. She saw similar indentations in the rest of the room, with a metallic table holding the center. Men and women milled about, ignoring her with their blank expressions. They were dressed in the same drab, simple clothes as Sasha.

  She then remembered the gray-skinned man whose face she’d awoken to, still standing off to the side, regarding her with concern. He pointed to the chronicle, then wrapped his arms around himself, twisting left and right momentarily in an expression of warmth. She nodded, thinking she grasped what he intended, to which he offered a nod and then extended his hands. Apprehensively, she lifted the chronicle, wondering what he intended to do with it, but somehow trusting that he wasn’t going to take it from her for any evil purpose. Holding it carefully, he turned and walked away. Sasha moved to slip out of her alcove, banging her forehead against the uneven rocky lip above. She cried out and slapped a hand where she’d struck. Blood was her reward, and she began to cry, her head hurting much more than it should’ve given the amount of force. She remembered something being pushed against her head, and how it burned so badly. She lost sight of the tall, kindly creature for a moment, then spotted him in the far corner, kneeling and doing something with his hands. When he returned, the chronicle was gone.

  He tapped a hand over the center of his chest, moving his head up and down in a fluid motion. She hoped that meant the book was safe, because she couldn’t guess what else he might have intended. Noticing her wound, he rushed away briefly before returning with a damp rag, dabbing the blood from it, muttering something incomprehensible again. She stuck out her lip and sighed, wishing there was any way for her to know what he said.

  So much has changed since then, she thought, standing on the observation deck of the Retribution, her eyes fixed on the blue and green and orange and black and white sphere below, the sun crawling away to hide behind its disc. She wasn’t that frightened little girl anymore, and that strange-looking man had become the closest thing she’d ever find to family. And I met William. How different might everything have turned out if he’d never come to Actis? I wouldn’t be here now, she knew for certain. But I owe him a favor. One way or another, it’s going to be repaid.

  Chapter 2

  Never Mined

  Actis: Totality Mining Colony #992, Outpost #4. Sasha had grown to know that designation by heart, spending her youth beneath the surface of Actis amid gray and black and brown
stone. There was also the green—the crystals. They shimmered and glowed, emerging from every crevice and crack and fissure, spreading out as if they were alive. Forming their beautiful spirals and clusters of fine points, they gathered all the light around them from headlamps and harvesting drills and the ever-unreliable overhead fixtures and reflected it back with what always seemed like a redoubled intensity. Everything else was ugly down here, but the crystals? Those were beautiful. Sasha took solace in that beauty, using it as a daily reminder that the universe was not all ugliness and misery. She didn’t know why the crystals looked that way—she suspected it was a matter of science far beyond her comprehension, as if her Totality slavemasters would ever bother to explain. It was enough to bask in the majesty of their colors. Emerald was their natural hue, but other colors twisted in and out, taking on shades of red and blue and purple depending on how you looked at them, always filtered through the shimmering green.

  The other slaves gave her the names for the many shades of green, too: the pale was “peridot,” the dark was “moss,” and in the middle they had “forest.” At least, it was the closest word to “forest” these people had. She never did find out why she was placed with slaves who didn’t speak her language, but the gray-skinned man—Fred was his name—he taught her, slowly and patiently, until she was as fluent as the rest of them. She never complained, but rather adapted and did as she was told. The Totality were a rare sight down in the mines, and even in the living quarters, preferring to remain as unseen observers and occasional enforcers. In truth, it was rarely necessary to send a brute down to ensure they made their quotas, as cutting off food and water made for excellent motivation. Fred was her savior then, too, gladly contributing to her quota for her when she first arrived, walking her through the operations of her mining tools to ensure her safety until she could work them as efficiently as anyone else. She turned out to be a natural, tearing through veins of the green stuff faster than the veterans, or at least all the oldest except for Fred, who always evaded questions of his age. “Old enough,” he would say when she asked. And, of course, he was clearly not human, but he didn’t evade that fact. “Trollkin,” he told her originally, as if the word meant anything to her. All she knew was that he was unlike the others. He worked slowly, patiently, carving off bits of crystal like a sculptor chiseling at stone. It amused her to think of him as some kind of artist—it only enhanced his mystique in her eyes.

  That he was the only non-human in their unit probably didn’t hurt, either.

  Fred spent her formative years acting as a surrogate guardian, ensuring she had enough to eat, giving her language lessons, even teaching her to read her family’s own chronicle. Once she knew enough of his language to converse, he told her he’d rescued the book from a garbage heap that was about to be incinerated. “Same as they do with all the new arrivals,” he lamented. “Anything they can’t use, they burn to help heat the facility. You don’t see too many books around here, and when I saw the pictures of you inside it, I had a feeling you might want it back someday.” When she asked how he knew the language of the chronicle, he laughed. “When you’ve seen as many languages as I have, they all start to seem about the same.” Answers like that only intrigued her more, but the troll clearly enjoyed keeping up the mystery.

  Still, he was hardly her only friend in the mines. People moved in and out of their mining unit over the years, though “moved” was a euphemism in many cases. Every now and then, someone would angle his cutter the wrong way and spark a crystal fire, and those were the worst menace down here. The Totality had a preferred way to deal with crystal fires: seal off the mining unit, living quarters and all, airtight, and let the fire burn itself out. If that meant all the slaves within burned or suffocated, the Totality didn’t so much mind as they always had more. This left the slaves to fend for themselves.

  While Fred and the other veterans did their best to teach standard mining practices, every so often someone would get sloppy, trigger a fire, and usually see the vein blow up in their face. The last time it happened—the first time Sasha had a chance to see the results up close—the poor man’s face had been virtually melted away. To say it was a fatal wound was, of course, stating the obvious. He’d likely died within seconds of starting the fire. The quick actions of three other slaves worked to put out the fire promptly as they threw handfuls of loose sand—waste produced by the mining process—onto it. When that failed to get the job done, they hurled their bodies onto the flames instead. That worked. It didn’t kill them, though it put them all in the infirmary. Some might have imagined time in the infirmary as a welcome break from the mines, but one’s personal quota continued to add up while one recuperated, and the Totality were only so patient. The moment one was well enough to stand and hold a tool again, it was back down to the mines to make up the deficit, and if the Totality were unhappy with the convalescent slave’s progress, punishment was in order. What this entailed, Sasha didn’t quite know, only that the offending slave would be removed from the unit one day at mealtime, and never appear again. Fred told her collective punishments were also possible, and that she wanted no part of those. She had no cause to disbelieve him. As far as individual punishment went, rumors persisted that poorly performing slaves were ground into food for the rest but Fred assured her it was nothing more than indulgent speculation. “People’s imaginations run wild here, I promise you. I’ve heard of crystal fires being started because a man saw his mother speaking to him through the crystals, thought he saw her trapped in there and tried to break her out. That was the explanation he gave once he was able to speak again, in any case. His burned lips and tongue were an unpleasant sight, I can tell you, although I will say he looked clownish with his eyebrows and most of his hair burned off.”

  Sasha didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh at such a macabre story or just shake her head. As she grew older, though, she slipped more and more into anger. Her captors were largely faceless beings who controlled them from a distance, yet she hated them just as fiercely as if they personally bludgeoned her into keeping up the pace. She worked harder and faster because they always demanded it, and she resented it more and more every day. The rest of her unit seemed resigned to their fates, which only galled her more. There was Angel, who knew a thing or two about medical care which she picked up from a brief stay in the infirmary. She was the first to come to the rescue whenever someone was injured, and Sasha learned what she could from her, too. Tau drove Sasha crazy with his attitude—the type to constantly crack jokes no matter how serious the situation. She remembered him making unflattering, “humorous” remarks about Stanley, the man whose face had melted right off. She lost her temper and knocked him on his rear, which only made him laugh harder. Serim was serious and silent, the kind of person she got along with easily. Janus complained about his predicament more than anyone, as if he was the most oppressed of all the slaves, never missing an opportunity to remark that he’d once been the governor of a large province on some planet far from here, and there was nothing more degrading for him than being forced to perform manual labor. Sasha found him insufferable. Then there was the most recent arrival: Demeter, who’d come with a recent shipment of slaves and learned the ropes quickly. Like Serim, he didn’t complain or even say much. She could tell by his composure that he was a proud man who resented his enslavement but was also smart enough not to fight it, at least not when it was so obviously futile. She could respect that, certainly much more than she respected Janus’ incessant whining.

  And then there was Fred, who sometimes irked her with his relaxed demeanor, the way he seemed to float through this life as if it couldn’t possibly affect him. Strangely, he was also the only one without a forehead scar to mark him as a slave, something he assured Sasha was the result of his species’ impressively thick hides. She didn’t know if she believed that or if it should be added to the overall mystery of Fred.

  This day was a typical one in the mines, to the extent they h
ad “days” at all. With no sunlight by which to distinguish day and night, the passage of time was completely arbitrary. Sasha always wondered if their “days” were actually much longer than days back on her homeworld, or if they bore any relation at all to the length of the day on the surface of Actis—if Actis even had days at all.

  Each “morning” began the same way: each slave would climb out of their sleeping alcove and head down a corridor to the right, where they would pass before a bank of bright lights designed to keep their biological rhythms in order. It served to wake them up, in a manner of speaking. The same bank of lights was dimmed and given a warmer tone as they passed by it at the end of the shift, serving the opposite effect of calming them down for sleep. Sasha despised how scientific it seemed, as if they were robots who needed only the right inputs in order to operate to the Totality’s expectations.

  After the lights came food. A dispenser popped out cups of milky, room-temperature liquid which purported to contain the day’s nutritional requirements. Servings of water could be obtained later on a strict schedule designed to prevent dehydration while minimizing latrine breaks. The Totality water-blasted the latrines every night as a basic sanitary measure. Everyone knew the Totality only bothered with this because hygiene was cheap and sick slaves were a drag on production.

  Once the slaves finished their cups of sustenance, the cups went back into the dispenser and each person gathered his or her tools from the rack just outside the feeding area. The rack opened at precisely the right time for everyone to equip themselves, and should the tools not all be returned promptly at the end of the shift, the Totality would lock down the unit and exact punishment. Sasha had never seen such a punishment, almost entirely because Fred kept it as his personal mandate to ensure every single tool was replaced on time. She’d asked him about it once or twice and he assured her, “You do not want to know how the Totality deal with suspected insurrections.”