3. Starla
1548 Words
3
Starla
Starla’s back in her cell, door slammed and lights flicked off to pitch black — even the dim lights that had glowed through the other nights. A spike of fear in her chest. Starla wonders if lights-out is punishment for not telling Hali and Mahr what they wanted to hear. Sensory deprivation to make her afraid.
1, 4, 9, 16 . . . She counts her squares like Deyva always told her to do, whenever she was angry at a mechanical problem whose solution was eluding her. She gets as high as 17 times 17 before she feels the panic subsiding.
Starla lies back on her cot with knees bent.
It’s just darkness. It’s not a punishment, it’s just a reminder of the deep black, of that inky, starry night she’s been plucked from. She belongs among the stars, not here.
She realizes her eyes are still open, and closes them.
She remembers.
Starla’s hands were clumsy in the EVA suit she’d stolen from her mother, but she’d been practicing making her gestures bigger so that Mona could read her signs even through the unsubtle suit. Of course, they wouldn’t always have visual communication, so Starla had reprogrammed the heads-up display on her mother’s helmet to show her what Mona was typing. She had programmed a glove to recognize what she was fingerspelling and transmit that to Mona.
Starla carefully removed the right glove from her mother’s suit, replacing it with the one she had modded herself. She stared at the lower left corner of her screen, waiting for the glove to patch into the system.
GLOVE_TEST_3 detected, blinked the screen. Starla suppressed her delight. It was working.
She glanced over at Mona, who looked nervous. “No backup system,” Mona signed. Starla nodded. She knew. But this was a trial run, just to make sure she could communicate. Eventually, they would get a backup system in place. She certainly wouldn’t be comfortable relying only on her modded glove to pass messages back, not if she ever got to go out on the skin of the Nanshe.
Starla slowly began to fingerspell the alphabet, watching as each letter appeared in the lower corner of her screen. A – B – C . . . She glanced over at Mona, who was staring at her comm. Mona nodded, signing the letters she saw back to Starla.
Starla felt a thrill of excitement.
Should work like a charm.
“Ready,” signed Starla, and Mona grimaced nervously.
Her scaredy-cat cousin was as ready as she’d ever be.
Starla’s mother’s suit was snug, but Starla had been nervous about stealing a suit from a taller cousin. Her mother’s would just have to do.
Mona glanced up at the ceiling in that gesture Starla had learned to recognize: an announcement was coming over the intercom. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, everyone looked to the direction the sound was coming from like it helped them hear it better.
As expected, Starla felt her comm buzzing in her pocket — three short jabs. She couldn’t reach it, not geared up as she was, and she hadn’t had time to patch her incoming messages into her mother’s helmet where she could read them.
Starla waved to get Mona’s attention. “What is it? Comm in pocket,” she signed.
“Shuttle docking in the bay right next door,” Mona signed back. “Maybe we should wait until tomorrow.”
“No.”
No way was she getting this close without testing the glove outside. After years of waiting, Starla’s parents had finally agreed to let her join one of their training runs with the new recruits. She would show them that she was ready, that she was resourceful. That she should join their crew permanently.
Starla punched the button for the airlock, and the door slowly began to open.
She felt a tap on her shoulder — the sensation muffled through the suit — and turned to see Mona shaking her head. “We know the glove works,” she signed. “Try tomorrow?”
Starla shook her head again. “Mom’s already going to yell at me,” Starla signed. “Might as well earn it.”
Mona looked resigned. “I’ll get yelled at, too.”
“Tell them I made you do it.”
“That doesn’t work anymore.”
Despite her nerves, Starla grinned. They had been getting into trouble for years together, and Mona had almost always been able to talk herself out of trouble by saying she was just watching out for Starla. It never bothered Starla — even on the times Mona had come along willingly, Starla had always been the instigator.
They were as opposite as could be. Mona was curious about books and history, spending hours on her own with TUTOR learning about the harsh early days of settlement on Indira, about life on the Ark Matsya, about old Earth. Starla had put in the required hours with TUTOR, trying to get the AI to teach her what she was really curious about: electronics, programming, mechanics, weaponry. She soon found that TUTOR’s curriculum was annoyingly theoretical, and although she continued to work her way through the calculus and physics courses just so the AI wouldn’t ping her mother that she was skipping lessons, Starla began spending more time down in the mechanics bay learning about the daily operation of the station and getting her hands dirty in its wired guts.
“I’m going,” she signed. Mona’s shoulders slumped. “Now.”
Fear, delicious and electric, thrilled through her as she stepped through the airlock door. Starla took a deep breath. She could feel the pressure change as the door slid shut, and she deliberately turned away from the window separating her from Mona.
Behind her were the familiar corridors of Silk Station. Behind her were generations of a tangled family tree and many friendly transplants — all too quick to step in and help out whenever she had trouble with something.
In front of her was the black, glittering with stars. She took a step forward, tentative, though the outer airlock wasn’t even open — the thick glass still seemed too thin — and startled when the broad, scarred side of a shuttle lumbered across her view. The shuttle that was docking in the bay next door. Right. She took another deep breath.
A message from Mona popped up on her screen. You OK?
Starla almost turned around to give her a thumbs-up, but she had to break herself from relying on visual communication. She made a fist and signed yes, instead, and to her delight the glove captured the movement. Y-E-S. Starla beamed.
She had never been outside the station in an EVA suit, but she’d done the drills, and she’d read about it. She’d watched TUTOR’s instructional videos and gotten one of her older cousins, Amit, to talk her through it one day when he was in the middle of a passionate anti-Alliance diatribe and too distracted to wonder why she was asking.
She waited until the shuttle was past the window before starting the sequence Amit had given her. Next time she would have to figure out how to patch her comm into the helmet — she felt n***d without her connection to the rest of the station — but that wouldn’t be hard.
O-P-N-N-I-N-G-N-O-W, she fingerspelled, and the glove translated each letter. One typo. Not bad, but still some fine-tuning to do.
Check belt clip, Mona typed back.
Starla sighed and checked her tether, then she did turn back to give her cousin a thumbs-up and a grin. Mona looked terrified.
Starla hit the button.
She could feel it, the sensation of the vacuum a subtle thing yet phenomenally alien. Starla self-consciously checked the belt clip again, feeling the reassuring tension of it tethering her to the station. She wouldn’t be going anywhere. She would be fine.
Starla stood at the edge of the airlock, gripping the handrail on the left side as she stared out into the expanse. Blackness, washed with stars and studded by the ever-shifting vista of the asteroids that made up Durga’s Belt.
It was the same view she’d seen every day of her life, but today there was no glass between her and the void.
She realized the lower left corner of her screen was blinking, annoyed. O-O-O-O-O
She let go of the handrail and the Os stopped.
There was a bug she would have to fix.
Whats wrong, came Mona’s response, predictably.
N-O-T-H-I-N-G-S-T-U-P-I-D-G-L-O-V-N
Starla frowned at the glove, annoyed.
She could still feel the thrumming of the station around her, the minute vibrations and shifts, the way it shivered from time to time like a living creature. It was more intense at the core, but here, out at the edge? Silk Station felt like a distant memory.
Starla fought the wild urge to let herself float free towards the heavens.
She could feel the gravity of the station still, feel its life and energy through her feet. The place she’d known her whole life, the energy she’d experienced for fifteen years. The same old people with their same old stories and complaints and dramas.
The black expanse beckoned her with its tantalizing unknowns, and damned if Starla was going to stand on the edge of it and not taste it.
Good test run. Come back in?
N-O-T-Y-E-T
Starla hadn’t gotten this far just to open up an airlock and stand at the threshold.
Starla stepped out.
It’s still dark in her cell, but Starla is smiling, the memory of floating soothing the ache in her bones, the memory of Mona soothing the pain in her heart.
And the scent that had lingered on her suit when she’d reentered Silk Station, that faint, metallic scent like the fumes from a welder, or the antifreeze Deyva used to flush the systems. The smell of space.
Starla can still remember it, if she tries.
She’ll fly again.
Alliance be damned.
- Writer
