by Cally Black
Wisps of dark hair over his forehead, large dark eyes giving a sideways look, showing lots of white, like he don’t trust the person holding the screen. My heart breaks.
Button nose, flattened on the end, delicate eyebrows, arms longer, thinner, than I remember, clothes I never seen before. When I try to breathe, it comes shuddering in, then catches and chokes. He’s clinging to someone. Gub’s tubby little fingers wrap tight around a small hand, smooth skin, small fingers, trimmed-short nails white from squeezing Gub’s hand right back. A boy bends down, about eight years old, hair cut real short. He pushes Gub forwards a little, towards the screen, and points at me.
‘Gub?’ I say.
The video turns to pixels, stalls and starts again. A man’s voice says, ‘Come on, Whisper. Talk to your cousin.’
‘That’s my cousin, that’s Tamiki Situ!’ I say.
The video gets closer to Gub’s face. ‘He don’t do more’n whisper,’ the man says.
I get closer to my screen too, so Gub can see my face better, know it’s me.
Gub’s large brown eyes finally turn to the screen. His dark lashes lift right up like he can’t hardly believe it’s me. He leans in, pulls the screen to his forehead. ‘Tamara-mawa?’ he whispers, and it’s like every forehead-to-forehead whisper we ever had, right now, flooding back to me.
I swallow hard and touch my forehead almost to the screen too. ‘Yes, Tamiki-miki?’ I say.
‘I never told dem my name.’ His tiny whisper is full of pride at keeping himself a secret like my aunt taught him. My heart breaks again.
‘Good, Gub. You’re good,’ I say, cos I can’t find words to tell him what he means to me.
‘Dey call me Whista,’ he whispers. The image stops, flickers some pixels and jumps ahead.
‘Gub, I love you, never mind what name,’ I say.
‘Tamara-mawa?’ he whispers. ‘Where my ma?’
Shit. ‘Gub, baby.’ My voice croaks. I breathe in. ‘She had to go. She couldn’t come back like me. She wanted to, but she just couldn’t,’ I say.
Gub don’t say a thing. His eyes blink, stare at my mouth like it just spat at him.
‘She loves you, Gub. I love you,’ I say. ‘Now I found you again, we’re gonna be together,’ I say.
‘Soon?’ he asks.
‘Soon,’ I say.
A smile sneaks over Gub’s little pink lips, shows his white peg teeth, then his smile drops. He looks up, straight up at the ceiling so I only see his chin and the line on his neck underneath. His mouth opens. The screen goes black.
‘Song!’ I shout.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Something’s gone wrong. Dropped out maybe. He’ll be here in just ten days. It’s not so long to wait, is it?’
‘It’s too long!’ I say. ‘I don’t even know how he survives a minute without me!’
‘Tamara, it’s okay. He’s fine, you’re fine, and everything’s going to work out. I’ll try and get him back.’ She makes a call out to some engineers on Five, asking them to hook up again, but then her face goes pale as, and she takes a deep breath.
‘What?’ I shout, cos my bones have gone cold. Something’s happened to Gub! Gub, his tiny hand clinging hard as to the hand of the little boy. Both of them too tiny to be out here. Too precious. I should’ve gone to Dios. Why couldn’t they just send me to Dios?
The door flies open. Rochford steps in, stares at Song as she’s thrashing around on the big screen, flipping through charts, buzzing down to the flight deck for answers.
Song waves me down to calm me, cos I’m yelling at her, asking what’s happened, why won’t she tell me, but then she gives up and just says it.
‘His ship,’ she says. ‘It’s vanished.’
THE PULSE OF MOVEMENT
Tweetoo’s screams don’t let me think. I can’t hardly hear Antonee’s taps through it, but I pick out, ‘Come back,’ in the static.
‘No, I have to wait for Gub,’ I say.
‘Weku!’ Tootoopne orders.
And I shout, ‘No, I won’t give up on Gub!’
I wake up. Israel is there, mumbling something to Song, a small kit bag in his big hand.
‘Oh, you’re back,’ he says. ‘How are you feeling?’
I don’t answer cos all I am right now is confused. I’m lying on the couch in Song’s cabin. Was I asleep?
‘Tamara?’ Song asks. ‘You were very emotional.’
I sit up. ‘Is the ship moving?’ I ask, never mind the pulse of it thrums through the floor.
Song nods.
‘But he was almost here!’
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘We’re going to look for him.’
But it’s not okay. Once again, I don’t know where Gub is or if he’s even alive. ‘You promised you’d get him to me,’ I snap at her. ‘I translate, you get me Gub. That was the deal!’
‘I know, and we will, soon as we figure out where he is,’ Song says, tight as.
‘Give it a few minutes to wear off,’ Israel says, like I’m not thinking straight. He sits opposite me on the coffee table, swipes a selection on his watch and the bracelet on my arm pops open. He prises it off my arm and wipes a tiny red dot on my skin where the bracelet stabbed in. He polishes the bracelet, then snaps it back on with a dull click that almost sounds like what I heard in the static. A scritch.
‘Now behave yourself,’ he says.
And I remember what happened then, why I was out cold. I remember Rochford demanding answers from me about what the Garuwa are up to, as if I’m part of some big plan. And me, swinging at him, seeing him reaching for his watch. Me, just before that sting in my wrist, punching him in the face.
Shit.
Israel leaves, and Song waves at the headsets. ‘There’s only a couple of translations there. Why don’t you have a shower while I get us some noodles.’
I nod and take my groggy, confused self off to the bathroom, the sounds in the static scritching claw-marks in my mind.
When Song’s back with the noodles, I’m slouched on the couch, hair dripping, thinking this freighter full of mercs and weapons and fighter rockets is an arse full of stupid. They have no clue where the missing freighters are.
‘Come on.’ Song shoves a screen and headset at me. ‘It might be important.’
It’s a couple of recordings about hauling some big space rock back to the hive. The static is going crazy. I dunno if it’s cos it was recorded when we started moving or what.
Song takes the translations down to Rochford and leaves me to choke down noodles.
I think back to my dream, to the message in the static. And never mind that’s all it was, a dream, something finally, finally clicks deep in my brain.
Heart pounding, I grab the headset and replay the recordings. This time listening to the static under the whistles. ‘Crush, crush, crack, crack, crush.’ Like a code. Like it’s spelling out letters in a code that I know.
It’s the code Antonee taught me.
Three people know that code. Just three. But Antonee wouldn’t have had time to teach it to anyone else before he died, and anyway, it’s code for letters. It’s no good to a Garuwa.
Those times I thought I heard ‘8’ or ‘G’ in the crackle, all those times. It took a dream to make me pay attention!
Never mind I’m bad at spelling, and it’s been a while since I played with the code, I’m picking out words from the crackle. ‘Not’, ‘now’, ‘new home’. I replay it, then replay it again. ‘Not long now, you will like new home.’ Is it a message to me? There’s a pause. Then ‘G’ for got it, and ‘excited’.
Two people. Not me. Daniel and Antonee. But it can’t be. Daniel’s on Dios. Antonee is dead. But who else? Who else? What’s going on?
Gub’s missing. The crew of the Jolene don’t know what’s going on. Tootoopne is up to something making whole ships vanish, and someone is using Antonee’s code. Something is going down and I’m sitting here, doing nothing to find Gub. This is not me.
I buzz Song and ask h
er for door access so I can go to the mess hall to get something sweet. The door slides open and I take off into the sweaty stinky corridors, dodging mercs, slipping past a card game where chips are stacking up in front of a big guy with circuitry tattooed across his muscly face. He scowls at me, sticks his giant boot out so I have to jump over it, but the cards are keeping him busy. Tiles clack and mercs hoot further down the corridor. Long as I keep moving, they don’t have time to start nothing.
The next level in is deserted and cold after Level Four where all the mercs hang out, and it’s just one level from where I ditched my helmet and jacket and hid my little Garuwa tool in the locker. If I move fast, I can get it. Nobody ever said they found it. If I have that, all the vents and wet walls will be mine again. I will be me again. Playing the Starweaver game to get Gub back has got me exactly nowhere.
OVER THEIR HEADS
The tool is still cold against my leg, back in its pocket in my boot, when Song catches up to me in the mess hall.
She laughs at the scraped-empty dessert bowl beside me that I grabbed from another table on the way in. ‘You sure can eat for a skinny thing,’ she says, like I’m naturally skinny, never mind I only ever spent a year on Dios with decent gravity to build up my bones. But Song don’t know. She’s a Sixer, she’s never had to worry about bones wasting away till she moved to Level Four to be with me. Even for saying stupid Sixer things, and believing I’d be eating sweets just after hearing my Gub is missing, she’s still a real good person.
‘I’m not running up a debt, am I? Cos technically,’ I wave the bracelet, sending all the handmade bracelets rattling too, ‘technically, I’m some kind of criminal.’ I’m really hating this bracelet now. Now I want to move around the ship without people knowing.
‘No debt,’ she says. ‘And I wouldn’t call you a criminal.’ She sighs. ‘Yoisho. Sorry about Rochford, you know? He’s an impatient person. I report to the captain and Starweaver though, and they’re both pleased with your work.’
‘Makasih, for looking out for me,’ I say.
She smiles. ‘All part of the deal. And with all the information you’re giving me about the Garuwa, I’m starting to realise they’re not as simple as we first thought they were. We may be in way over our heads.’
‘You really are,’ I say.
‘What makes you say that?’ she says.
And I have to think a moment, cos I was just agreeing with something I thought was obvious as. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘They have Tootoopne, who knows everything, and you have Rochford, who only thinks he knows everything.’
Song laughs like I’m joking around.
Sometimes I think it was wrong of me and Antonee to tell Tootoopne so much about humans. Especially now Gub is missing and Antonee is dead. Or at least his hand is dead in a cabinet. After the code in the static, I’m not sure.
Song’s watch alerts and she moves away to take the call. Then she spins back, her face pale and stiff, staring at me, her hand over her mouth, whispering.
It can only be about Gub. Nothing else matters to me. ‘What?’ I say. ‘What’s happened to Tamiki?’
Rochford’s at the door to the mess hall, and he looks like he’s just taken a beating. I don’t think I punched him up that much. His pale eyes are washed out and the side of his bubble-scarred face is red. Song and I both stand up.
‘I’ve got some news on the Hey There Delilah,’ he says. ‘We’ve located it.’
‘Is Tamiki okay?’ I ask all in a rush.
He pulls a screen out of his jacket and makes a few selections, then shoves it at me.
It’s a fuzzy image of a hive, but not a complete hive. Just a black dome top, absolute black against the starry night, dark tendrils crawling down over three freighters stacked up like pancakes. All of them spinning on like they’re still okay. The whole thing spinning on.
‘It’s in there,’ he says, and it sets my heart pounding. ‘We don’t know if anyone’s left alive, but it seems to be feeding on them.’
I nod, never mind I don’t think the hive is eating the ships. Maybe if the ships were blasted to bits I’d believe it. But still, tiny Gub, trapped by Garuwa, or worse, maybe dead. He was supposed to be with me. He wasn’t supposed to be there. ‘Did his ship get any messages out?’ I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
‘Nothing. That’s the Tiffany’s on top, from the safe zone, thousands of clicks away. And the Roxanne, which was even further away. Suddenly here they all are, together like they were hauled through space faster than they can travel. I have no clue how they appeared here, to be fed to this monster hive,’ Rochford says, shaking his head. He takes a deep breath. ‘We’ve got to take it apart before it gets bigger or whatever it’s doing. We’ve got to attack it while it’s forming. Who knows what kind of power this thing will have when it’s complete.’
‘No!’ I yell. ‘Gub might still be alive in there!’
‘Look at it, girl!’ Rochford yells. ‘It’s eating ships! You said it yourself, the hives are alive, and can feed themselves!’
‘But not whole ships! The Garuwa break rocks down to feed to the hives.’
‘Who knows what’s going on inside,’ he says, like he’s the only one who does.
‘I need to talk to them. Link me up. I’ll find out what they’re doing,’ I say.
‘They don’t know we have this intel. We are swinging round for a surprise attack, before they stock it up with their little ships. Last thing we need is you blowing the element of surprise,’ he says.
‘I’m on your side,’ I say. ‘Last thing I need is you blowing my cousin to bits and getting this freighter fried, when there might be another way. There has to be another way.’
He pokes his fat finger at me. ‘What you will be doing is sitting with Song, waiting for any messages we can intercept from the Vultures,’ he orders.
Song grabs my arm and stops me from shouting something at Rochford’s back as he stomps away.
THE TINY DARK SPACES
Everyone is on high alert. The mercs in the corridor outside Song’s cabin are thumping and shouting, all of them in boots and full uniforms, when Song opens the door for a look. Bits of weapons clatter and click as they’re cleaned with oil-stinky rags and made ready. Made ready for war.
But in here, me and Song are waiting. Sitting with muscles too tight. The recordings have gone silent. Song’s long search for the missing ships is over. Both of us sit here, staring at each other, waiting. I get up and pace up and down the cabin till Song begs me to sit again, never mind she can well-see there ain’t nothing relaxing about sitting.
‘We can’t do nothing!’ I say, and slam back onto the couch. ‘Attacking this is wrong.’
Song holds up her hands. ‘We don’t know that.’
‘That’s the problem. You don’t know nothing!’ I get up and go back to pacing, trying to link the pieces of clues together in my brain, like if I just think hard enough, I’ll understand. But after an hour of pacing, I’m no closer to figuring it out.
‘I’m gonna have a shower. A long hot shower,’ I say, like I think it’ll help.
‘Good idea,’ Song says.
I lock the bathroom door, turn on the shower and jam a nail file into the mechanism so it can’t stop after a two-minute standard shower. The bolts on the plate of the wet-wall come out easily and I ditch my jacket and slide into the gap, grabbing the damp pipes to haul myself in.
It feels like coming home, being back in the tiny dark spaces, close to the grinding hums and groans of an old freighter making its way through the cold dark night. Reminds me of a better time when we were all together, broke, poor and hungry, but alive and together, and mostly safe.
Scaling the pipes is easy as with the gravity lighter on each level in, never mind the slippery damp, but squeezing into the tiny cold vents is harder than it used to be. I’m finally growing, maybe.
I head towards the landing bay, not worrying if I make a noise cos it’ll be covered by the noise of mercs getting ready. I pr
ess my face to a broken grille in the landing bay wall, scanning the bay, looking right around the whole curve of the floor, spot-patched since the Garuwa attack, areas of black polymer covering blast patches on the floor.
Mercs are all around the rows of rockets, some standing on their casings, checking them over. Dragging tool trolleys, calling out for engineers to come and double-check fuel-injection lights, or compression valves, or weapons system warnings or whatever else some merc’s found that he or she don’t understand. The grey-suited engineers are left bouncing from rocket to rocket, handing out tools, diagnostic machines and quick advice so mercs can make adjustments themselves. Behind the rockets, pushed up against the wall, out of the way and tethered to the floor like it’s a prisoner, sits something I was hoping to see.
A round black Garuwa flyer. Maybe it’s Tweetoo’s. Maybe some other Garuwa who died in that trap the Jolene set. It don’t matter now. When it’s less busy, that flyer is how I get to Gub.
PUPPETS!
I crawl back the way I came, back through cold vents of freezing levels meant for cargo, back into the wet-wall, and slide out to Song’s bathroom on Level Four. She’s knocking at the door already.
‘Gimme a minute,’ I say, my head through the hole. I wind the bolts back in with one hand, rubbing at my eyes and slapping my cheeks with the other. Then splash my face and hair and hang a towel around my neck. I unlock the door as I’m drying.
‘It’ll be okay,’ Song says, like I’ve been locked in there, crying in the shower, for ages. She holds up her screen. It’s pinging to alert that a new intercept is waiting to be translated. I nod and plop onto the couch beside Song.
The door slides open and Rochford is there, waving a finger at the screen like, what are we waiting for? Translate it already!
