Stars Gods Wolves

by Dan Kirshtein

  Attempting to recover, Gally straightened her black skirt and sat up. She tried to stifle the sudden urge to cry. Due to how unreal her current situation felt, she was mildly successful. He’d been on assignment for so long, and the distant promise of his eventual return was so deeply embedded within her, she couldn’t erase the feeling that he’d be back soon. This made the whole trip feel as if she was sitting in someone else’s dream.

  The people around her spoke over or through her, as if she wasn’t there. She heard the crisp sound of conversation over the hum of the vehicle, dashed with occasional sniffling or nose-blowing. Though most conversations were barely audible, she didn’t hear any of the people speak of her father. Some of them spoke of government policies— about which they knew nothing—or banal and unrelated things, as if this wasn’t happening.

  Her lip wanted to curl, but she restrained it and let her upturned nose speak of her obvious discomfort. She adjusted herself once again and sat up straight, as a proud reminder to everyone, including herself, that she existed, and that she was at this funeral, in this moment, without him.

  The craft came to a stop, and she realized that she didn’t actually want to get out. She had just gotten comfortable, not just physically, but emotionally. She wasn’t ready to leave with the others, and it showed in how many people exited before she stepped out. Her black high heels sank slowly into the thick, green man-made grass. The rectangular field was full of military personnel, caskets, families, and flowers. As busy as it all looked, it was silent. Not that she had time to notice that, as she was quickly swept up in the crowd of mourners.

  Gally was one reluctant fish in a fast-moving school. She looked at the names on the caskets as she passed them. Piece by piece, the large mob eventually fluttered into different, smaller groups, and Gally found herself walking alone. The feelings of loss and loneliness were amplified now that she was separated, and she wondered if she should confront those feelings. Wanting to do no such thing, she walked faster, checking each casket. The only good part about the crowd dispersing was that it was easier to see the names.

  Her last name was so familiar yet so strange when she finally found it engraved upon the edge of her father’s dark chrome coffin: Ramone. It stood on a small platform with a folded Human Government flag and flowers. Next to it sat her father’s picture: the same overused picture from when he’d enlisted. In it, he was young and not how she remembered him. As Gally winced at it, she wondered how much thought was actually put into these things. Before she could finish the wince, a figure caught her eye.

  Also dressed in black, there stood a woman with unnaturally tan skin and a figure that was skinny once, but no longer. Her face was aged by years of hard times, despite the heavy makeup’s best efforts. The woman softened to see her daughter and opened her arms. “Oh, honey.” She went in for a deep and long hug.

  Gally wasn’t particularly thrilled to see her mother, even less so to be hugged by her. But she eventually reciprocated the hug, folding upward. After a short time, Gally patted her mother on the back: a signal to let go, which came quickly. Two words slowly fell from her mouth, as if even they didn’t want to be there. “Hey, Ma.” When she stepped back, Gally fixed her hair and refused to make eye contact. “I don’t know if they told you, but uh,” she looked to the casket as she searched for the words. “He’s not in there.”

  Her mother stared at her, as if re-establishing eye contact was just a matter of patience. “I know,” she replied, softly. She was a relatively young mother—barely nineteen years senior to her thirty-year-old daughter—but she looked much older. After a brief pause, her mom pried. “How’ve you been?”

  Gally perked up her shoulders and gave a brief nod while speaking a bit too quickly. “I’m good.” She ran a hand along the casket. “I’m good. Work’s been good, and, uh—” she lost the words, finally looking her mother in the eye with a weak smile. “Good.”

  Her mother smiled patiently, and shook her head, still not moving her eyes from her daughter’s face. “I meant, are you okay?” Her voice was insistent and gentle.

  Gally blinked and looked away. “This is stupid, isn’t it?” She looked around, motioning to the casket. “I mean; he’s not even here. I don’t even know why you came.” She flapped her hands up. “You two haven’t been together since, what?” In truth, Gally had lost track of how long her parents had been divorced; she’d always rounded up in her head and wasn’t certain if her number was accurate. She hadn’t meant to be hurtful, only honest.

  But her mother looked hurt nonetheless, something that had grown more and more common as Gally got older. After a moment, her mother straightened her posture and responded. “I didn’t come for him,” she said, forgivingly.

  Gally blinked again, tossing her head back as she sniffled. “Yeah.” She nodded and carefully averted her eyes, picking literally anything else to stare at while she gathered her thoughts. “Well.” When she eventually did look back to her mother, it was with a sudden and forced positive energy. “You wanna meet some of my friends?”

  Her mother smiled gratefully. “That would be nice.”

  Gally wrapped an arm around her mom, as if they were old college buddies, before walking off with her.

  The two ladies approached a man dressed in a forest green military outfit. It was rather ceremonial, but still sleek and minimalist. Upon being poked on the shoulder, the tall man turned and erupted into warmth and solemnity. He hugged Gally with all his might. “I am so sorry,” he said, earnestly.

  Gally wished people would stop saying that to her, and the tone in which she thanked him may have given that away. She stepped back after breaking from the hug and motioned to her mother. “Major Sims, allow me to introduce my mother: Ariel Baker.”

  Ariel stuck out her hand to give a weak, unpracticed handshake. But Major Sims turned it and placed his other hand on the back of it before looking the unprepared woman in the eyes. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  No one had talked to her with such sincerity for some time, and—though it was very subtle and probably went unnoticed to Sims—Gally watched her mother go weak at the knees. “Oh,” Ariel nearly blushed. “I love your accent. You haven’t lived here long, have you?” Ariel was suddenly a teenage girl. Gally rolled her eyes.

  “I’ve been stationed here for five years.” Though the rest of him remained stoic, a very subtle smile appeared on the major’s lips.

  Gally interjected, happy to change the subject and distract her inappropriately curious mother. “When are you getting deployed?” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out, and her face recoiled at the sound of doing so. But it was an earnest question; one that kept her up at night. She wanted her father to be avenged, even if she couldn’t do it herself.

  The question took Sims by surprise, though he handled it with the manners of a scholar. “Sorry?” he turned, with his eyebrows up.

  Gally rephrased the question, though it retained her usual firmness and persistence. “Are they keeping you here for the war?”

  Sims seemed lost for a moment, then hesitantly landed where he thought she was going. As he spoke, he suddenly realized he was breaking bad news to her. “Gally, there isn’t going to be a war for this.”

  Whatever lightheartedness remained on Gally’s face quickly dropped. “What? They violated neutral borders. They attacked a vessel full of military non-combatants!” While she wanted to stop there, she couldn’t. Her words came spattered, as if any one of her next thoughts might convince him. The awkward silence and curious stares from the other mourners only made her angrier. “In cold blood!” Sims’ eyes darted uncomfortably as Gally lost her nerve. “For shit’s sake!”

  Sims’ lips twisted as his face awkwardly switched between being a soldier and a friend. “High command doesn’t feel we’re ready for another war.” His sympathy seemed to fall on deaf ears, so he continued. “They decided that an apology would suffice.” He trailed off, realizing that half of that sentence was spoken to Ga
lly’s back. She had stormed off.

  Her mother followed—although she made sure to wave goodbye to the Major as she left. “It was nice meeting you!” she called out before turning to her daughter a few feet ahead of her. “Gally! Gally, wait! Where are you going?”

  “Home!” Gally snapped, her face turning pink.

  “In the craft?! They’re not leaving for hours.”

  “I’ll call a cab!” Despite being so slight, Gally always managed to make people move out of her way.

  Ariel possessed no such talent. She huffed as she chased her daughter through the crowd [of human (and other) obstacles]. “Nonsense! Let me take you. But please! Oh, excuse me.” She bumped into a portly man. “Honey, please slow down!”

  Gally finally slowed to wait for her mother, who grappled her arm as if she might bolt again at any moment. Gally watched her mother struggle to catch her breath. She wanted to say something, show concern for her mother’s health, or ask if she was okay. But the words never arrived; they were blocked by the years of a motherless childhood.

  But she did wait. “Ah,” she carefully wiped her eyes with one finger, trying to avoid smudging her eyeliner. “Goddamnit.”

  “Oh,” her mother caught her breath. “Honey, come here.”

  “No.” Gally blocked a hug, putting a hand on her mother’s sweaty shoulder. “No, I’m okay, Ma. Can we just, please?”

  Ariel stepped back and her face changed to hurt again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Heru: Dwarf moon of Sabile

  Undisclosed location

  He heard every one of his breaths reverberate off the steel walls. Every time he coughed, cleared his throat, or shifted position, it bounced back at him as if through a metallic filter. It was jarring at first, but, after so long, he’d grown accustomed to it. In fact, he couldn’t recall what he sounded like without it.

  Three steel walls, which sat atop a steel floor, dimly reflected his actions back at him while one glass wall held his only view of the outside world. When the sun rose the whole room would turn white. While the room was climate controlled, it possessed no curtains, no blinds; not even bedsheets to block the blinding light. For a few maddening hours every morning, he could see nothing. He told himself he didn’t mind, as there was nothing else to do in the cell. So, he would sing at the top of his lungs. Mindless songs, songs he hadn’t actually heard in some time. And when he could see again, he moved.

  As his first act, every day, the prisoner would breathe onto one of the steel walls and sign his name in the resulting fog: Martin Collier.

  Cursive was very nearly a dead font, only used for signatures of those who felt an attachment to the pens and paper of old Earth. And yet, Martin was well practiced in signing his name, no matter how temporarily it would appear against the wall.

  He stepped back, and his small, shrunken frame stood to admire it yet again. It would fade over time, but for that shining moment, he remembered himself: his childhood, his contributions to science, and the woman he loved. But he was not here because of any of that. He was here for what he did. History remembers it as a horrible thing, but history is short-sighted. It bangs its gavel and judges man and his accomplishments for all time.

  Collier was to live out the rest of his days within these walls. The cell had been designed as the worst punishment the Heruleans could administer, for crimes unimaginable. Although there were different types of convicts in the facility, Martin was the first in what the civilization hoped would be a very short list of prisoners that would deserve such treatment.

  He approached the large window and looked out with tired blue eyes that rested within browned skin. He watched the crescent sun hanging in the sky now that it was finally angled away from his room. Collier never tired of how beautiful the moon was; not from a traditional viewpoint, but a scientific one. It shouldn’t have existed. By all counts, life here was nothing short of a miracle. The sun gave off barely any light, despite his daily morning arguments to the contrary. The red sand that covered the ground provided little in the way of sustenance. And whatever food the refugee Heruleans did manage to grow or cook had very little nutritional value—to Humans, anyway.

  Martin had lost so much weight during his stay, any semblance of the gut he had arrived with had long vanished. Malnutrition had taken its toll. His once brilliant and proud eyes had grown desperate and defeated. His fingernails and toenails had grown quite long; he was promised a solution to that was on its way, but promises in this place meant very little. He sometimes imagined that would be how he’d finally die in this place: accidentally impaled on his own fingernails.

  As his dull eyes stared out the window, he realized he had been picking at his fingers again. He looked down to see the skin around his thumbnail bleeding, the outer layer of flesh peeled nearly to the knuckle. He winced, covering the area with his palm as if to protect himself. He didn’t know why he had started doing that; he’d just recently felt compelled to do it. He winced from the pain of the sensitive, bleeding skin underneath.

  He wondered if the time here was changing him, making him a monster. The worlds would forget about the man who ended a horrible war; they’d hide him away to assuage their own consciences. Martin had been a man of science for so long, and when he first arrived to this desolate cell he insisted that they could not imprison his mind. But, in fact, they had done just that. With no tools, nothing to write with, no books or stimulation of any kind, Martin wondered what kind of man would step out of this place, if one ever would.

  Planets were sacred to the Heruleans: a mother made of rock and nourishment. His horrific crime, in their eyes, was his greatest accomplishment in the eyes of the Human Government. He used the Heruleans’ own planet against them, and the deaths totaled in the millions. It was a thing of genius, he was told; he was hailed as a hero, though this victory was bitter and costly. And, even though they would eventually come to surrender to the Humans, the Heruleans sought him out.

  He remembered the day they took him, remembered not resisting, as the guilt weighed heavily on his heart. They walked him to their ship, and didn’t even care to blindfold him or handcuff him; all parties involved knew that Collier would never see the Maxian sun again. It had been five years since that day (four and a half since the war ended). Five years staring out the same window, looking at the same scenery.

  With its red sand, orange mountains, and a purple sky that had never seen a cloud, Heru was inhospitable to Humans due to its almost complete lack of moisture. The only plant life that he could see was a rantoh root, which grew approximately six inches per month. From his window, he measured the root, using his finger as a ruler. From that he’d been able to surmise approximately how long he’d been there.

  As Martin’s forehead and fingers pressed against the glass, he mused that even if he could get out, he’d die out there. The only reason he’d survived this long was because they kept giving him hydration pills, which, now that he thought about it, must be terribly expensive to import. Good, he grunted to himself; let them drive themselves to bankruptcy. Let his expensive suffering deal one last blow to his captors, at least.

  His breakfast arrived late again, slid under the door. One lump of dried vitamin loaf and a cup full of hydration pills to dry swallow throughout the day. As much disdain as he carried for the sour biscuit with the texture of drywall, his stomach urged him toward it immediately. He would debate with himself, as he often had in his past, though that was about scientific things. Now it was much more primal: His head knew it was the same garbage he’d been fed for five years, while his stomach needed nourishment of any kind.

  As he slowly walked toward the tray, he pondered the amount of dedication it must take for prisoners to starve themselves to death. It was either that or die of thirst, which was also a horrible way to go. But it was a way out. These things sped through his mind as his bare toes reached the end of the tray. His long white hair hung down, reminding him he’d forgotten to tie it back. And whi
le his vision was impaired by it, he heard a voice.

  “Poison,” it whispered in plain English.

  He nearly leapt from his skin. Whipping a hand through his hair to view the corner, he leapt backward. He’d landed half on the bed’s rails as his eyes tried to make sense of the empty corner.

  Nothing was there.

  Clear as day, he had understood the word. Poison or not, he’d still eat the sustenance. As he tied his hair back into a misshapen ponytail, he considered the outcomes. They all led to some form of break from the mundane routine, even if it was a painful one. Still, he took the tray to his bed, crossed his legs, and ate the galaxy’s worst pastry. As he did, though, his eyes remained fixed on that corner. That damned corner.

  The Wendigo:

  Entering the Milky Way Galaxy

  It took a long time, but the Wendigo finally quieted down. Her rowdy passengers settled down into a dull roar; with very few things left to celebrate, even the smallest of jobs ended with slight debauchery. Josie watched Nitro throw a racquet ball at the wall for all of the thirty seconds for which it was interesting. The others looked calm, as if she were a puppy among lizards. They bored her, which led her to realize that she hadn’t seen Zerich in some time. Slapping the shoulder of their terrified prisoner, Josie stood up and walked to the cockpit. The door opened and the ship’s familiar hum filled her ears. She smirked when she saw the top of Zerich’s head as he leaned back in his seat.

  “Zerry, where’s the beer?” Something on one of the screens caught her eye: the word ‘auto-pilot’ slowly pulsed on the screen in red letters. Her brow twitched, but she walked forward to get a better view of the front of the pilot’s chair. “Zerr.” She found him leaning back and pale. Her eyes fell to the floor and found the red spike at her feet. A green stain was still visible under the crimson blood at the spike’s tip.