Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  Noa hunched at the wheel. Her nostrils flared. Her lips turned down. And then up. “Okay, that is actually kind of funny.” He felt a sensation like victory, and his jaw shifted with the smirk he wanted to give, but couldn’t manage.

  “So, here’s my plan,” Noa said, her smile getting broader. “It’s kind of crazy—”

  James’s urge to smile vanished. “We are heading into the capital, the fortress of our enemies, the figurative belly of the beast—how much crazier can it get?” And he had strange tattoos, augmented vision, didn’t need oxygen, was too good a shot, and he was too fast—but he couldn’t bring himself to say all of that.

  “You’re really getting the hang of this!” Noa laughed.

  It took a few moments for James to process that his completely honest question had been interpreted as a joke. Seeing her happy made him happy and that was irritating. “Onward to the Death Star,” he said dryly, apparently unable to help himself.

  Noa laughed aloud, and it felt like a victory and a defeat of all that was logical in the universe.

  The Universe was packed. The floor of the Earth night club throbbed with a pounding beat. Normally, these were things Noa enjoyed. But right now they were getting on her nerves. She peered around the corner of the booth she’d commandeered and looked for Tim. He’d gone off to get drinks. They were supposed to meet friends here.

  Catching her unspoken question over their shared ethernet connection, Tim spoke into her mind. “I got our drinks, making my way back to the table now.”

  Noa squinted, trying to see him. The room was pulsing with blue strobe lights, and bodies were writhing on the dance floor, a step below where the booths were located.

  Timothy’s thought came, “Ugh, I just spilled half my beer.”

  Noa’s lips pursed. Over the ethernet she said, “I know what’s bugging me. This place is just too damn crowded.” On Earth they were close to people all the time. Humans were inescapable; even in “wilderness areas,” humanity was only a shout away. There were no wilds on Earth. On Luddeccea she was always looking for a crowd; here she wanted space.

  “I’m not going to argue. More packed than a starship,” Tim muttered. She thought she saw him holding two beers atop his head, and sent the image to him with a thought.

  “Yep, that’s me,” Tim replied, his thoughts a soothing balm in the noise and the crowd. Probably to make her laugh, he spun in place in time with the beat, beers still on his head. She smiled, but over the ethernet chided, “Don’t spill my drink.”

  The music stopped suddenly, and the dancers slowed. The flashing strobe light dimmed, and Noa lost sight of Tim. A single man’s voice singing a haunting melody floated through the room:

  “We sent our probes out into the dark,

  Hoping ours was not an uncommon part,

  But the probes came back, and we found out

  We are alone in the black, alone in the black … ”

  Noa glanced up at the speakers. It was a song she’d heard for the first time a few days ago. Humanity’s inability to find another sentient space-going race was a frequent theme in art on Earth—it was as though timefield bands and having ten settled systems linked a heartbeat away by time gates wasn’t something to celebrate. Earthlings’ romanticized first contact. It might have been Noa’s Luddeccean upbringing, but the prospect of eventual alien contact stirred mixed emotions in her. She wanted to be there the day they met another sentient space-going race—but another part of her realized such a race was equally likely to be friend or foe.

  Music throbbed again through the speakers, and the singer’s voice became a wail:

  “Dance! Dance! Dance all night!

  We have to make our own light!”

  … and then his words were overcome by the sounds of an electronic sitar and drums. The strobe light flashed again.

  Noa turned in her seat, and caught sight of a man staring at her. Facial tattoos had been in fashion last time she’d been to Earth, now scarification was the thing; you could tell who was an Earther by the raised scars that swirled around their eyes. In another month the scars would be gone, replaced by something else. Noa shook her head, “So much wasted energy,” she thought.

  Over the ethernet, Tim quipped, “Keeps the surgi-centers in business.” Noa laughed. The man who’d been staring at her started to point in her direction—maybe because Noa’s scars were natural and not fashionable, maybe because she was a throwback. The man nudged his date—and she scowled at Noa. Rolling her eyes, Noa scanned the crowd. She saw Tim again, just a few paces away, eyes on the drinks he now carried in front of him. In the blue strobe light his pale skin shone like the moon. His blonde hair had been bleached by the sun during training in the Sahara, and it glowed.

  Noa smiled at him.

  Catching her eyes, Tim smiled back. “Hey, gorgeous,” he whispered in Noa’s mind. He was only two steps away when a man stepped in front of him and shoved him hard. The drinks spilled, and the man’s voice boomed above the sound of the music. “Throwback Purist! What are you doing here?”

  Noa was up in an instant, but a crowd of people were already dragging the man away. Tim was glaring and running a hand through his hair when she reached him. A man who’d helped drag the boorish man away blinked between the two of them. “Oh, you’re together. Sorry about that.”

  Noa sighed. As if being visibly of one race was only acceptable if you were with someone who was not—or you were with a throwback of a different race. That proved you thought “correctly.” She huffed. Incidents like this one were too common on Earth. On Luddeccea she’d faced racism too; but, in the small farming community where her parents lived, everyone knew her, and she was always accepted there.

  “I can’t wait to get back into space,” Tim grumbled over the ethernet, putting a hand on her hip.

  She knew what he meant. In the Fleet, racism was practically non-existent. The joke was that the Fleet treated everyone like throwbacks.

  She turned to him, a warm feeling in her stomach. She was about to say, “Let’s get out of here,” when he began to fade before her eyes. Noa’s stomach fell, and she realized she was in a dream … dreaming of Tim. “No wait! Timothy!” she said, just wanting to have him for a moment longer, but he just kept fading, the bar scene disappearing with him, until all that was left was darkness.

  Noa blinked. And found darkness, and for a moment thought she was still dreaming. “Timothy!” she called. And then she felt the prickle of hay beneath her back, and the side to side sway of the magni-freight car. She almost cried. It had been years since she’d had a dream where Timothy vanished before her eyes like that. Why of all times was she having one now?

  She heard hay crunch, and a dim light flickered on. James’s face was suddenly suspended above her, his body too close—and his face too similar to Timothy’s own. That was why she had the dream.

  “Noa, are you alright?” he asked, with his too perfect, too Earther intonation.

  For a moment, she could only stare at him. His eyes were wide, his brow drawn—he looked worried. She averted her gaze to the hem of the blanket. Sometimes, when she looked at him, she felt she was looking at an impostor, not a real human being.

  The car swayed, and Noa looked up at the ceiling as though searching for something she’d lost there. “Stupid hay, it is too prickly,” she said, to say something, anything, that wasn’t about the dream she just had.

  James took an audible breath, and then, mimicking Noa’s voice perfectly, said, “This freight car is the perfect way to get to Luddeccea Prime.” No grin tugged at the corners of his lips. Tim would have cracked up halfway through that joke. James wasn’t Timothy, but he wasn’t an impostor, he was himself.

  “Shut up,” said Noa, but she smiled, trying to let him know she was grateful that he had changed the subject. He was picking up on the witty banter thing, at last.

  James narrowed his eyes. His jaw moved from side to side as though he was trying to grin. “I don’t think you mean that
.”

  “Yes, I do.” Noa glowered, but it was feigned. In the freight transport container behind them some cows lowed.

  “If more than five minutes pass without conversation, you talk. Or prompt me to talk,” James parried.

  Raising an eyebrow, Noa put a hand to her chest as though she were affronted. “Are you calling me a chatterbox?”

  James looked up at the ceiling as though searching for something hidden in the eaves, just as she had a moment ago.

  “Never mind, I’m going back to sleep,” Noa said, rolling onto her side. James flicked off the light.

  Beneath them, the track the freight container was elevated on must have hit a rise, because the container rocked. They’d dumped the hovercraft in the forest a few days ago. They couldn’t refuel it—their faces were all over “television”—so they’d hopped on this freight transport. The hay was prickly, but soft. This container and the half dozen behind and in front of it were hitched together, and hovered on a magnetized track. It was less energy-intensive than antigrav. The rocking usually put Noa to sleep.

  Noa shifted beneath the blanket she shared with James. It smelled like him. No man should smell as good as James did, especially not after a few days without a bath. Scowling, she closed her eyes. As much as he gave her nightmares, she was attracted to him on some base level; she caught herself observing him too closely, and she felt herself flushing when he was close. That attraction ran smack into a wall in her heart or her head or both. He looked too much like Timothy and had the same sort of constantly curious mind Tim had. But Timothy wouldn’t have thought twice about going to Prime; Timothy, even more than Noa, would always do the right thing. She closed her eyes. She was beginning to like James, but she wasn’t sure she respected him. It was annoying that he had to be so good-looking.

  Sleep didn’t come, even with the gentle rocking of the car, although she was warm and not hungry.

  She sighed. “You have to admit, hopping a ride in this freight car was a pretty good non-crazy idea.”

  “Four minutes and thirty-five seconds,” James said dryly.

  Putting a hand to the side, Noa found her canteen. “Admit it,” she said and took a swig. James was silent. Returning the canteen to its spot, she plucked up the flashlight—recovered from its dip in the water—and shone it at James.

  He scrunched his eyes in the spotlight, and held up a hand. She knew him much better after a few long boring days in a freight car. His father was a cybernetics expert, his mother was a biomechanical engineer—occupations that made perfect sense for the parents of a hyper-augment. She knew he didn’t have a grip over all of his augmented bits; he was not sure how fast he could run or how strong he was, and the mysterious origins of his tattoos bothered him—but whenever a beam of sunlight streamed into the car, he invariably wound up sunning himself in it, shirt open, the tattoos turning black on his pale skin. He didn’t need to shave, though he had a touch of stubble and didn’t look like he’d had his facial hair follicles surgically depleted. Also, she’d never met anyone who ate as much as he did. She’d thought he’d overdone it when she saw how much food he’d packed, but now they were nearly out.

  She realized that she was still shining the light on him, and he was blinking furiously.

  She dropped the light guiltily—and then realized the spotlight had been like a wall between them. Flustered by how close he was, she looked away.

  Taking a long breath, James said, “It’s probably more comfortable than a cave in the Northwest Province ...” his voice trailed off.

  “But?” said Noa, shoving him back with her shoulder and instantly regretting it.

  “I can’t help thinking about the Nazis loading the Jews into cattle cars.”

  Noa rolled her eyes. He was obsessed with this.

  James continued. “We’ve done the work for the Luddeccean Guard, loading ourselves onto our century’s version of a cattle car.”

  The transport jostled as it hit a bump in the track ... as though emphasizing James’s point. Noa groaned. “Not with the Nazi’s again, James!” She put a hand over her eyes. “And nothing about ISIL, or North Korea, or the gulags of the USSA—”

  “USSR,” James said. “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

  “Whatever!” said Noa. “They’re dead and gone!”

  “The impulse for genocide and reigns of terror isn’t gone, it’s alive and well here.”

  Groaning, Noa dropped her head to her knees and banged it several times. He’d filled her in on all of those despotic regimes, and she had to admit, he had a point; but she didn’t want to think about it. They’d be in the thick of it soon enough. She’d already been in the thick of it on her own.

  Not catching the not-so-subtle body language, or not caring, James slipped into professor mode. “Usually, this sort of fascist, self-destructive upheaval comes about because of corruption within, or from intolerable stress from without.”

  Hoping he would get to the point and change the subject, Noa groaned again. Loudly.

  James kept going. “I don’t know of any external pressures on Luddeccea right now.”

  And that rankled. Against her better judgment, she found herself drawn into his useless philosophical meanderings. Again. “Of course you don’t know about the external pressures … you are an external pressure.”

  James blinked. “What? Me?”

  Noa waved the flashlight. “The original settlers to this place didn’t want to be part of the Republic. You guys just showed up—”

  “You”— he pointed at her chest — “are a member of the Galactic Fleet of the Republic, you are ‘you guys.’”

  Aiming the flashlight in his eyes, Noa ignored his commentary. “The Republic showed up, offered to build the time gate to allow Fleet and traders through. Luddeccea said no—but then the third-wave plague broke out, a vote was held, the yes votes just barely prevailed, and this planet joined up. Now that there are no longer huge epidemics, and the place has been basically tamed, off-worlders are moving in, building enormous houses, not hiring locals, driving up real estate prices and making it hard for young people to buy farm land … ” She gestured at him absently. “And looking so pretty with all your augmentations and leading easily impressionable youth astray.”

  “Looking so pretty?” said James, an eyebrow shooting up.

  “But that’s not the same as having two superpowers wage war on your turf like what happened in North Korea,” said Noa. She thought it was a pretty good recovery, even if it slightly negated her point.

  James exhaled. “You are right, it is not as extreme as the influence wars on old Earth. The local regime … it is corrupt, though, too.”

  Noa tilted her head. “It’s static more than corrupt. The same families have held sway in Luddeccea since the founding of the first colony … but you can still have a very nice life here if you want to start a farm and make babies.”

  “Isn’t ‘static’ the same thing as stagnant … and isn’t that corrupt?” James said.

  Noa shook her head. “Maybe a little. But it isn’t like the way you described Earth’s Middle East in the early 2000s. You don’t have to bribe officials. Business permits are slow, but you can get them.” She tapped her foot and frowned. Her baby sister had complained it was harder to do if you were female, too. Noa thought she’d been exaggerating—her sister had tried to start a composting plant when she was fourteen, based on a science fair project she’d done. That had been a little ambitious for a fourteen-year-old, in Noa’s opinion, and Noa could see where the authorities might not trust a kid to follow safety protocols. Noa rubbed the back of her neck. But she’d also understood why her sister had been hurt and angry when a twenty-year-old boy from one of the old families had taken her idea and had gotten a permit for it right away. That incident was shortly after Noa went to the Fleet, and shortly before her sister had graduated and moved to Earth for schooling. One by one, her other siblings had followed, and then her parents. Kenji had gone off world
for a while, too—but then had come home.

  James tilted his head. “If ambitious men cannot get ahead by legal means, they will do so by criminal means … I remember reading the new Premier isn’t from a First Wave family; he’s just very good at promoting their agenda.”

  Noa stared at her feet, her thoughts catching on the words “ambitious” and “criminal.” “I’ve been called ambitious and criminal, and I’m not a fanatic.”

  James lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “How do you think I knew how to hotwire a grav bike? I borrowed one from a neighborhood Guard patrol when I was a teenager.”

  James blinked. “Why would you need to hotwire a vehicle you were borrowing?”

  Noa looked up at the roof. “I didn’t ask to borrow it first.” She pursed her lips. “Although it wasn’t technically a crime, since the charges were dropped when I told them I was going to join the Fleet as soon as I graduated. The judge’s last words to me were, ‘good luck and good riddance.’” She tapped her chin. “So maybe I wasn’t really a criminal since I was never charged. Although I did hop transports like this too, I just never got caught. If you don’t get caught, is it really a crime?”

  “That seems like something a criminal mind might ask.”

  Noa grinned at the wry humor. “But I’m not a criminal. I joined the Fleet and flew straight, figuratively, if not literally.”

  “And if you had stayed here?” James asked.

  Noa rolled her eyes. “Not worth thinking about. There would be nowhere for me to go, especially as a woman. The Republic may grant women rights, but culturally, on this planet … ” She shook her head. The law was only the first step in such things. “My family wasn’t like that … and they all left.” She touched the scars on her abdomen self-consciously. “My mom always said the Luddecceans are slightly cult-like, and cults need to make babies. When babies need to be made, women can’t be out making a living.”