Durga System Boxed Set One: Starfall - Negative Return - Deviant Flux

5. Starla

5

Starla

Starla’s been wrestled into the interrogation room again, feet restrained, hands free. She shifts on the metal bench, back aching from holding her spine straight in this gravity without a backrest. She slouches. Straightens. Rolls her shoulders.

After what seems like an hour, the Interrogation Twins return: Hali and Mahr.

Mahr looks like she sleeps standing up in her uniform so it — and she — won’t wrinkle. Hali’s in green today, with a fake flower pinned on her lapel. She’s obviously not military. Some civilian contractor flown in to help with the deaf girl. Starla wonders if there’s more call for that sort of thing on backwater New Sarjun than on Indira.

She’s remembered now what they remind her of: it’s an old children’s vid she and Mona used to watch, with a family of clowns living aboard a spaceship. Mahr and Hali are the two moms, one stiff and militaristic, one round and matronly. Starla can’t remember the names of the characters, but it gives her satisfaction to have recalled this much.

“How are you today?” asks Hali, signing and speaking for Mahr’s benefit.

“Water,” Starla signs back.

It’s been the most pressing thing on her mind. The heat of this stupid planet is sucking her dry, her knuckles cracking and lips flaked to bleeding; she can’t stop picking at them.

“Can we get her some water?” Hali asks Mahr, who says something out the door. The water comes in a flimsy plastic bottle that wrinkles under the slightest touch. Starla takes it with both hands to keep it from spilling.

She thinks of Deyva, who had boasted he could make a weapon from anything and had tried to teach her to do the same.

Can’t make this piece of garbage bottle into a weapon, that’s for sure.

She doesn’t look at Hali until she’s done drinking, even though she can tell the woman’s trying to get her attention. Starla sets the bottle aside, nearly empty, and wipes her dry lips on the back of her hand.

“We have some other questions today,” Hali signs and says when Starla finally makes eye contact. “But I’m still here to talk about your home life, if you need someone.”

Starla’s been thinking. It’s obvious Hali and Mahr aren’t going to tell her where her parents are, or what happened to the rest of her family on Silk Station and to the crew of the Nanshe. Not until they get some answers of their own.

She’s considered trying to act feral — she’s read about feral children, raised away from society, raised without parents; she thinks maybe that’s what Hali wants to hear. Poor thing, can you imagine, raised in a situation like that? And deaf no less. It’s a blessing we got her away . . .

“How often did you travel with your parents on the Nanshe?”

Starla blinks. It takes her a moment to process Hali’s signs; she hasn’t been paying attention.

“Never.” Not since she could barely walk, and they’d brought her here to New Sarjun. But she doesn’t remember that, not more than flashes.

“But you were rescued onboard the Nanshe.”

Starla bridles at that word, rescued.

“That was my first time. Training voyage.”

“She says it was a training voyage,” Hali repeats aloud to Mahr. “Her first time on the ship.”

“So she was training to be part of the crew?” Mahr asks.

Starla waits to answer until Hali’s interpreted the question. She doesn’t want to let on how much she’s able to understand. Nor does she trust herself to get all the context without Hali’s help, and she doesn’t want them to start thinking they can just yell at her and be understood.

“Not crew,” Starla answers, and Hali looks satisfied as she repeats Starla’s answer for Mahr. “Just training.”

She’s decided to play the innocent card for now — not the feral card, not the a***e card; she’d never forgive herself for that — but maybe she can distance herself from the more anti-Alliance actions of her parents and the Nanshe.

“Did your parents ever talk to you about their trips?”

Starla senses a landmine here. Probes at it. “Their trips?”

“Did they talk to you about what they did when they — ” Hali fumbles in her signs, here, thinking. “About where they went on the Nanshe? Either before, or after?”

Starla seizes on the last, sensing a distinction she can take advantage of. “Sometimes after. Never before.” Again, Hali looks satisfied, and Starla takes a deep breath. “They liked to talk about the places they visited. They would bring me presents.”

Hali is repeating Starla’s sentences as Starla signs them, and a tension flinches around the room at the last. Starla feels a spike of panic. Presents. Not all of them purchased — and even those that were purchased were certainly not with legitimately earned credits.

She remembers the last gift they brought home from a trip to New Sarjun. Here. Before, Starla had always thought it sounded exotic, but now she wonders how her parents could stand to visit such a horrible place.

It had been at breakfast, a week before that last day.

Raj Dusai was already wearing his shipping-out clothes. The crew of the Nanshe didn’t have a uniform as such, just a pewter-gray jumpsuit with twin stripes across the chest in some sort of glossy black biofabric that glimmered whenever the crewmember was aboard the ship. Raj was wearing the jumpsuit with his many-pocketed flight jacket and a pair of yellowing white socks that looked out of place. His gravity boots sat beside the door.

He wouldn’t wear those on the station, of course, and there they sat whenever the Nanshe was in dock. Starla stared at them, ignoring her father, knowing that their familiar spot by the door would soon be vacant — and he would be gone.

And she would be left behind, again.

Lasadi Dusai came in a moment later, holding a package in her arms.

“Oh, good,” she said, in response to whatever Raj had said behind Starla’s shoulder. “This is for you, sweetheart,” she said to Starla, handing over the package to free up her hands. “We love you,” she signed.

The package was wrapped in one of the brightly colored New Sarjunian scarves her mother favored. They were too flashy for Starla, but that never stopped her mother from picking them up and then gifting them to her whenever they’d stopped on New Sarjun. Starla unwrapped it carefully. This one was a livid lime green shot through with turquoise and gold, the pattern feathered out from the center. Her mother waved her hand inside Starla’s vision. “Peacock feathers,” her mother told her, fingerspelling the bird’s name.

The scarf was pretty, but once unwrapped, Starla didn’t even notice it slide off her lap to puddle on the floor. Inside was a jumpsuit, just like her father and mother both were wearing. Starla gasped in delight and let the whole mess fall off her lap, leaping up to hug both Raj and Lasadi at once, all awkward angles and knobby elbows. She could go on the training voyage. They were going to give her a chance to join the crew.

Starla blinks. She takes a sip of the water. 1, 4, 9, 16 — She’s missed whatever Hali is saying to her now.

“What kinds of presents?” Hali signs and speaks, repeating herself.

Starla shrugs. “Scarves,” she signs. “Toys,” she signs, because it seems like it’ll help them keep thinking of her as a kid even though she hasn’t been one for years.

“Did your parents ever discuss politics with you?”

Starla considers this new line of questioning, wary. What does Hali mean, politics? As in, who did they think was going to win the presidential election in Arquelle? Starla wrinkles her brow, not sure.

“Did they ever talk about the Alliance?”

Oh. Politics.

Starla strains to see a clear path to navigate through this one. “Not really,” she signs. It’s mostly true. Her parents may not like the Alliance but they aren’t overly political about it. They keep to themselves. Maybe they target Alliance ships more frequently than those that call Durga’s Belt their home, but that was just being neighborly. No one throws a dead rat in their own air recyclers.

“Are you very close with your cousins?”

Now another non sequitur. Starla frowns. “Some of them,” she signs. “The ones that are my age. And . . .” She shrugs. “They’re cousins,” she signs. “I like some of them, I don’t like others. Doesn’t everybody?”

Hali doesn’t answer this. Starla has been given to understand that not everyone has as many cousins as she does, and not everyone lives as closely with them. And that not everyone calls every kid they know who’s about their age “cousin.” If she’s honest, she has to admit that she doesn’t actually know which ones are related by blood, and which ones are related by virtue of being part of the family on Silk Station. No one at home cared, and she doesn’t care either.

“Do you know Amit Dal?”

Starla gives her a look that says, Of course, I’m not an i***t. Amit is her Auntie Faye’s oldest son. Auntie Faye is her mother’s sister. He’s blood relations for sure.

“Did he ever talk about politics with you?”

Oh, yes, Starla thinks, but does not sign. And now she begins to realize where this is going. Amit has been deeply involved with the OIC — the Organization of Independent Colonies — and he’s tried to convince her parents to get involved, as well.

Starla wonders if she should pretend not to know what the OIC is.

She’s been thinking too long.

“Did he ever talk about politics with you,” Hali signs again.

Starla shakes her head, gives a bemused little shrug. “I’m just his little cousin,” she signs.

Mahr barks something at Hali when Hali repeats Starla’s words. Hali nods. “I think we’re going to talk about this some more tomorrow,” Hali says and signs. She gives Starla a smile.

This time, when Starla is taken back to her cell, the lights stay on. She wonders if she’s done well today.

She can’t tell.

Starla lies on her cot staring at the ceiling and wonders if Amit made it. If Auntie Faye made it.

If Mona made it.

She wonders if the Alliance blew up her home because they thought her family sympathetic to the OIC.

They aren’t — weren’t? — except for Amit and a few of the cousins his age. Her parents despise the Alliance, but it hadn’t seemed to be in a political way. More in a predatorial way.

The Indiran Alliance doesn’t get out to Durga’s Belt so much, anyway, there at the flickering far edge of New Sarjunian space.

Indira and New Sarjun are next-door neighbors, and the only two inhabitable planets in the Durga System. That was the bright point in the sky Starla’s ancestors had picked as their most likely seed system over a thousand years ago, and Indira had had the distinction of seeming a more likely choice to support a fragile race. The generation ship, the Ark Matsya, was still in orbit over Indira. Starla would love to see it — she can’t imagine tech that ancient crossing galaxies — but catching even a whiff of Indiran atmosphere would have been risky business for her parents, and so for her.

The other planet in the system hadn’t been colonized until centuries later, when rugged, contrary types who bridled under civilized rule decided to see what sort of living they could eke out on New Sarjun’s sun-baked crust. The centuries since had put a polish on New Sarjun’s rough edges, but it was far from gleaming.

Indira had been a bickering collection of petty states until a few decades ago. By force or by guile, the diplomats from Arquelle, Indira’s largest and most powerful country, had talked the rest of the planet into a treaty.

That would have been all well and good, but the Indiran Alliance, led by Arquelle, wasn’t content staying planetside.

Colonies on the Indiran moons were pressured to join next. Then colonies farther out. And that might have been successful, but the planetside alliance on Indira was starting to crumble, and countries who’d been amenable at first got to feeling the wrong end of the deal, feeling over-trampled and misused while Arquelle got stronger and more powerful.

And as the cracks began to show, Arquelle became more insistent that the entire Durga System join the Alliance, stretching fingers out to New Sarjun and into Durga’s Belt, the asteroid chain just beyond, a rat’s nest of unaffiliated asteroid stations and colonies that Arquelle insisted should be registered and taxed. Arquelle and New Sarjun butted heads more than once about that, while most out in Durga’s Belt merely scoffed and ignored Arquellian tariffs.

And those who didn’t scoff? Like Amit? They joined the Organization of Independent Colonies, and started planting bombs.

Starla had gotten most of her gossip about Amit from Mona.

Mona was like a sugar cube set in a spilled pool of tea, soaking up every drop of scandal until she was full and bursting, then running to Starla desperate to spill everything she’d heard to the one person she could count on not having overheard it all first.

Starla found glimpses into this world fascinating. She’d mastered the world she experienced immediately, and was passing knowledgeable about the world she was taught about on TUTOR. But although her family, most of them, had no difficulty communicating with her, she couldn’t overhear the sharp words her aunts and uncles exchanged, the slipped secrets older cousins forgot to keep closed-lipped.

Mona gave her a glimpse into this intriguing silence, flipping salacious signs from her lithe fingers, her facial expressions and posture so perfect that Starla always knew exactly who she was mimicking. Scribbled diary conversations, giggling late at night, rapid-fire texts teasing out secrets about the rest of the family —

The family.

Her parents.

Starla doesn’t realize she’s crying until the water spills from her eye sockets, streaming into her ears. She jams the heels of her hands into her eyes, knowing they must have her on surveillance and ashamed to let them see her weak.

Starla knows she’s never going back to Silk Station.

She’s on her own, now, just as her parents, wherever they are, are on their own.

She can’t sit around forever.

But she can plan.