Stars Are Bodies

CHAPTER ONE

“Riska,” she said, holding out her hand in greeting.

The young man beside her at the bar took her hand in his, nodding eagerly.

“Bodin,” he answered, flashing a bright smile. “I haven’t seen you here before, Riska, where are you from?”

Riska took a long swig of beer before answering.

“Oh, you know, here and there.”

Bodin nodded, holding his smile, perhaps waiting for her to clarify her vague explanation. Riska waited awkwardly for him to continue the conversation, before realizing he probably wanted more of an answer.

“Well, my dad was IDO,” she continued suddenly. “So you know, army brat.”

Bodin laughed cordially. “Ah, gotcha. Pretty cool.”

“Yeah,” said Riska with a forced smile.

A bit of ruckus down the bar caught her attention, and her gaze slid past Bodin to where a gaggle of young men surrounded an angry-looking old woman, leering at her and chuckling amongst themselves. They looked like the kind of boys who had multiple bank accounts filled with their fathers’ money, and had never worked a day in their lives.

“Where was your favourite place to live?”

Riska startled, having forgotten for a moment she was supposed to be hitting it off with this sweet, attractive young man who seemed very eager to get to know her.

“Um…that’s a good question.” Riska returned her gaze to the old lady, who suddenly looked her way. Even from across the bar, Riska could see her eyes blazing. Riska shook her head knowingly, mouthing Don’t you dare, as a mother might scold a child in Church.

“Sorry?”

Riska glanced back at Bodin, who was looking at her quizzically.

“Oh well, I just mean—“ Just then, chaos erupted down the bar, and the two of them spun around to see the old lady in the midst of a rather violent bout of fisticuffs with the group of bank boys. One of them landed a solid fist on the lady’s cheekbone, and she slammed into the bar, the boys around her howling in amusement.

"Oh my god," said Bodin, turning back to Riska with raised eyebrows. "Should we do something?"

The old lady shook off the shock, and with the energy of newborn pup, launched herself at the young man, bringing them both crashing to the ground.

Riska rolled her eyes, downed the last bit of her drink, and slammed the glass on the bar. She stood and gave Bodin a mildly apologetic look. “To be honest,” she said, “I never really liked living anywhere.”

_____

The old bag was insufferable. Seventy-two years old and picking fights in bars with men less than half her age and at least twice her size. Now, having been rescued (as per usual), she lay back lazily on the once-ivory-upholstered infirmary chair, with a ridiculous smirk on her puffy and blood-spattered face.

Riska shook her head, letting out a frustrated huff, and slapped the metal first aid bin onto the counter, glaring at her patient as she rifled through its contents.

“Aggy,” she said, her voice low and taut, as though she were about to explain something very complicated to a child, “One of these days someone’s gonna throw you on your ass, and you’re not gonna get back up.”

Aggy shrugged. She pulled the tissue from her nose, and scrunched up her face a few times, testing the integrity of the blood clotting somewhere in her skull. No new blood came pouring out, so she shrugged again, satisfied.

“You know,” Aggy began, her deeply accented voice gravelly with age and use, “I have twelve years old, first time I am stabbed. Twelve years. These boys now, today, they know nothing.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the story.” Said Riska distractedly. “Now stay still.”

Riska dabbed a clean rag with alcohol and swiped it across the ugly gash on Aggy’s wrinkled and sun-spotted forehead. Aggy hissed and ducked out of the way, sending a venomous glare at Riska, who clenched her jaw and stared right back.

“Jesus, clearly getting stabbed as a kid didn’t make you any tougher.” Said Riska, raising her eyebrows in Aggy’s direction.

“Man who stab me have softer hands than you,” Aggy spat back.

“Fine,” said Riska, tossing the rag onto the counter, “I hope you get gangrene.”

Riska turned on her heel and swept out of the room, her halo of tight curls bouncing lightly as she shook her head once more.

Aggy’s gruff voice called after her, just a hint of mischief cutting through her words.

“Ya i ty, Zaika.” You and me, both.

_____

Riska plopped into the chair beside Barrow, and swiveled to look at him. He was snoring peacefully, head tipped back, mouth hung open, boots crossed and propped up on the main console. Maybe not the best place to put your feet, what with all the important buttons and switches. But he was the captain, and this was his ship, so Riska supposed he could do what he liked.

She watched him for a moment, trying to figure how he could possibly be a snorer with a nose like that. It came off his face like a mountain, formidable and elegantly sloped. A truly regal addition to his otherwise frog-like visage, his eyes buggy and widely set, his lips thin and flat. A rather handsome frog to be sure, but a frog nonetheless.

Riska kicked Barrow’s chair and he jolted awake with a snort. In true frog fashion, he opened and closed his mouth a few times, giving his dry tongue some needed moisture, and blinked slowly in Riska’s general direction, waiting.

“Aggy got her ass handed to her. Again.”

Barrow blinked again and eased back in his chair, nodding thoughtfully.

“Anybody we should be worried about?” He asked.

Riska rolled her eyes. “Just a couple of frat boys.”

Barrow nodded. “Good.”

“You want me to kick her to the curb?”

Barrow smirked. “One of these days, I very well may take you up on that.”

Riska chuckled quietly, spinning around in her chair. “So when’s this pickup?”

Barrow plucked a small tablet from the console and handed it to her, tapping the screen to bring it life. Riska scrolled through the open order to the transpo notes at the bottom.

“The Carneen Embassy?” Riska looked incredulously at Barrow. “What is it with you and these uppity, cabbage-brained butt-lickers? They have flags on their suit jackets, Barrow. Flags.”

“They also have a lot of money. I like you well enough, Riska, but I like money more. You will just have to sit this one out.”

Riska scowled and swiveled away from Barrow.

She hated being alone on the ship. It was empty enough with the three of them on board (four if you counted Hamon, that puffed-up boar of a physicist with beady blue eyes, which Riska did not)but when it was just her, the place felt suffocating. A small, contained space devoid of noise and chaos was one of her least favorite things in the universe, just under food poisoning, and just above guys with flags on their suit jackets.

“Toilet broke,” came Aggy’s gravelly voice from the doorway. Riska spun back around, jaw hinged to the side in annoyance.

“And whose fat butt is the culprit this time, Aggy?”

Aggy smirked. “Not clog,” she clarified, splaying her hands out innocently, “Broke. Does not vork.”

Aggy gave her signature shrug and turned back into the hall.

“Well,” declared Barrow, rising from his chair as though something momentous had just happened. He clapped his hand on Riska’s shoulder and gave it a good, encouraging shake. “At least you won’t be bored.” He gave a cheeky smile and loped out of the room after his snarky, aging engineer.

__________

The door to the cargo hold hissed shut behind the crew, and Riska was left to stare hopelessly at the corrugated metal, feeling the silence of the ship creep towards her like a demon in the dark.

Her shoulders shuddered and she let herself turn away from the narrow, dirty window through which the crew was slowly disappearing, and climbed the cramped stair back onto the main level.

Days like this, Riska liked to imagine a life where she was a certified, born and raised Caruan with the papers to prove it. A life where she attended university on Hemeset, studied to be an engineer, fell in love with a doctor and had little Caruan babies who grew up to be members of parliament. A life where she spent her afternoons ambling through grand museums and her evening sipping Hemeseti wine at the finest restaurants in the Bloc.

But that wasn’t her life.

This was her life. An unregistered adult orphan with no home planet, last on a long list of nobodies waiting for citizenship, working as a glorified janitor on a ship with shitty pipes.

She stared down at the toilet with a grimace on her face. The chrome colored bowl was half-filled with a disconcertingly bright, yellow liquid. At least it’s just pee, Riska thought to herself. But she hated that she knew whose pee it was based on the severity of its color.

“That stupid old lady never drinks any water,” Riska mumbled.

She went to work unscrewing the back panel, found the wires she needed, and hooked them up to her tablet for diagnostics.

A blinking red dot on the map of the ship’s pipe system showed her where the problem was. She unplugged, rotated a white lever to turn off the tap, and slammed the panel back on, heading out into the hall as she shook her head in annoyance.

_____

The heavy floor panel screeched painfully as she slid it out of its place, exposing a gaping hole in the hall where pipes and wires ran along one side like tangled and colorful vines grown wild. On the other side was a small metal cot of sorts, attached to a greased rail beneath it.

Riska lowered herself onto the cot, and fumbled around on the wall for the light switch. She clicked it on, and rows of soft, white light sprung up along both sides of the tunnel. She took another look at her tablet before placing it on her stomach, and using her arms to pull her way further in, by way of periodic handles welded between the removable floor panels above her.

A few meters down, she stopped and turned another white lever to cut off the water, and just past that, she stopped again, at the pipe in question.

She plugged the tablet in to a console hiding between pipes and wires. Accessing the system controls, she unlocked the pipe above her, which made a soft mechanical click and hiss.

Riska twisted the plastic lock between the two pipes, and pulled them apart with some force. Suddenly, a ferociously noxious smell hit her in the face, and she gagged, turning her head as far away from the pipe as she could get.

“Oh god,” she whined, coughing a little despite herself. “What the fuck is that?”

Grimacing, she held her breath and turned back to the pipe, pulling it as far towards her as she could, peering into its darkness. Despite the ambient light, she couldn’t see jack inside the pipe. It was pitch darkness. She fumbled awkwardly with the tablet on her stomach, turning on the flashlight and aiming it into the pipe.

At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It was as though the pipe just stopped a few inches in. Then, it started to take shape. A rotten mess of fur and flesh, a little eyeball just barely visible, crushed against the wall of the pipe.

A dead, water-logged, and rotting rat.

Riska felt her stomach threaten to come up her throat. She instantly released the pipe and pulled herself back to the opening in the floor, sitting up and taking a deep breath of fresh, rat-less oxygen.

“For fuck’s sake!” She yelled at no one in particular, and then, as though to the rat itself, “How the hell did you even get in there?”

She launched herself out onto the floor, and strode down the hall, wiping her hands on her pants with fervor, as though that would somehow rid her of any rat remnants.

I have skills, Riska thought to herself. For Christ's sake. She was better in a fight than Aggy and Barrow and Hamon combined. She could speak two and a half languages, which was one-half more than Aggy, and one and a half more than Barrow or Hamon. She could even fly the ship about as well as the captain himself. And she could beat anyone in the world in a game of Spit.

But no, this is how she spent her time. Pulling squished and half-rotten rats out of crooked pipes and babysitting a rust-bucket of a ship while its crew was out siphoning money from the silk-lined pockets of snot-nosed political types, and probably drinking for free. Nothing was fair.

Suddenly, the faint hiss of the cargo door opening sounded from below. Riska stopped in her tracks, her heart suddenly beating fast. There was no way the team was back. It’d been too long for them to have to forgotten something, and certainly not long enough for them to have completed their mission.

Riska breathed as quietly as she could, listening. Voices echoed up the stairs and into the hall. Voices she didn’t recognize.

Her heart dropped into her stomach. She had never been burgled before. She didn’t have any weapons on her, and the closest guns were locked up somewhere down below, probably in spitting distance of the intruders. She silently cursed Barrow for not letting her carry a pistol.

The voice slowly grew closer, and Riska started to panic. She took a few hurried steps down the hall, rushing past the stairwell like her life depended on it, and closed herself into the maintenance closet she’d been headed for. She grabbed a sizable wrench from the wall before switching off the automatic light, and stood there in the darkness, trying to control her breathing.

She could hear them in the hallway now. At least five or six men, by the sounds of it.

“Search it,” one of them ordered quietly, his voice muffled and indistinct through the metal of the door.

Riska looked to the floor, where the thin line of light beneath the door quickly fell in and out of shadow, as the men walked past. She let out her breath after a moment, convinced they were all far enough down the hall that they wouldn’t hear her.

She pressed to ear to the door, straining to hear. After a long moment of nothing, Riska held her breath and reached down for the doorknob.

Just as she was about to turn it, the faintest metallic squeak sounded just outside the door. She froze, unable to keep her heart from thumping against her chest like a madman. She took a silent step back, just as the knob began to turn. Riska started shaking, the wrench gripped so tightly in her hand she could no longer feel it.

The door opened and a shaft of light fell on her face. In the doorway stood a young man, a solid foot taller than Riska, his face dark and velvet as the night sky. He looked down at her with elegantly hooded eyes, and blinked, his expression unreadable.

Time stood still, Riska unable to move or even to breath as she waited for the silent stranger to call out. To grab her by her useless, frozen arms and pull her out into the light, where his crew would undoubtedly descend on her like a pack of wolves on a lone little rabbit. A stupid, cowardly zaika.

The man suddenly took a soft step back, and Riska startled. He looked down the hall, then back at Riska, the glowing, black pools of his eyes boring into hers.

“Clear!” He called out, without looking away from her. Then, before she could understand what had happened, he closed the door and left her there in the darkness, listening to the sound of his footsteps receding, still clutching the wrench in her trembling hand.