Tin Star Read Free

prospects.”
    “She’ll rise very high under my tutelage.”
    And there it was. No one would suspect that it could be otherwise. My family would never know or have cause to believe that he would lie.
    Brother Blue stayed until the last colonist was onboard. He stayed until the docking door swung and clicked shut with a hiss of air. He waited until the sound of the ship unclamping from the station came. Only then did he walk away. From where I lay, I could see that he did not look disturbed that he had just broken his word to the 167 colonists in his care. He looked relieved.
    And then he was gone.
    No one would care about a dead body on the docking bay. I’d seen plenty of them. They were robbed and then disposed of by the rabble of aliens who looked for work on the few ships that docked.
    But I was not dead yet.
    I tried to adjust my weight again to make some of the pain stop, and then dragged myself out of the anteroom to the hangar, as though I could somehow catch up with the ship before it left the station. But it was too late. They were gone. What was I to do now? My eyes caught sight of the Prairie Rose as it sailed by the window in the hangar. It moved so slowly that at first it didn’t seem as though it was leaving at all. It was only when it began to shrink in size against the blackness of space that I was sure that it was leaving me behind. The Prairie Rose sailed on its edge, looking like a thin silver line; when it reached acceleration, it flipped up, ready to slingshot around the nearby depleted planet below and shoot out of the system in a light skip.
    It was a sight to see.
    The ship had five shiny points, its metal glinting in the glare of the weak sun. It looked like a tin star, the kind I had seen in history books, the kind that officers of the law wore. I managed to lift my hand, as though to touch the ship, before it vanished from sight.
    Then, the ship was gone, and so was my family.
    They had all left me here, on the floor of the Yertina Feray space station.
    That knowledge—that I was utterly alone—felt sharper than the beating. It made the pain in my body intolerable.
    Everything—the hangar, the window, and the ship’s fading streak of silver—went black.

 
    2
    Unconsciousness did not last long.
    It was the pain that woke me. My body ached. My lungs burned. My eyes were swollen shut. I was aware of some aliens moving around me. If I had the standard-issue nanites swimming inside of me, I would have been able to breathe the station’s base atmosphere: the nanites would have worked to adjust the mix my Human body needed by assimilating the gases that my lungs couldn’t process. Some nanites would have made their way to my brain to attach themselves to my cerebral cortex, working with my current language skills to improve and provide better translation of Universal Galactic when it was being spoken.
    All at once, one of the aliens let out a noise, and I knew that I’d been discovered.
    I stayed as still as I could.
    I felt a poke. Then another poke.
    I had heard somewhere that if you did not know who was around you, it was always best to play dead. Doing so had already saved me. It did not take them long to see that I had nothing on me to steal. After that, I was someone else’s problem and so they stopped prodding me and went back to their business of taking the grain that was supposed to be seeded on a new planet. My new planet. But I was helpless. All I could do was listen in frustration as the creatures spoke in their native language among themselves.
    As they left with the cargo, I wondered if Earth grains were valuable to other species. It dawned on me that Brother Blue had perhaps sold the grain to these aliens for profit.
    I lost consciousness again and awoke later to discover more aliens surrounding me. I willed myself to understand what the aliens were saying. I concentrated. I still had so much Universal Galactic to learn.
    I was certain that they were talking about me. Perhaps