Station Fosaan

by Dee Garretson

  The main city and the emperor’s palace had been thousands of kilometers north, on another continent that had been the worst hit by the volcanoes. I wondered how a white cat ended up in small village here. “Emperor,” I said. A new image appeared of an elderly man in an ornate red uniform. When I said, “Enlarge,” the image zoomed in, showing the man’s long thin face, his mouth pulled down in a severe expression. A small tattoo of a three-sided emblem marked his right cheek underneath his eye, the same tattoo Mira and some of the others had on their faces. More words appeared. The last emperor had a reputation for silencing his critics. Little can be confirmed because of the closed nature of the society.

  I tried to figure out how to call up other portrait images of Fosaanians on the datapatch, trying several different words. Finally, when I said “royal family members” I got a series of images of individuals all staring solemnly at me. All of them had a facial tattoo.

  Wanting to talk to someone about the images, I was about to wake up Lainie where a faint noise came from outside. I froze, hoping it was Decker. No more noises, but I had the feeling someone else was close by. Shutting off the datapatch, I got up, trying not to make a sound. A shadow moved across the wall. I grabbed the impak.

  “Water person,” Mags announced, not at all worried. “Beautiful water person.”

  “Quinn?” a soft raspy voice called. It sounded like Mira, but different in a way. Lainie stirred in her sleep.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  Mira appeared over the top of a wall that faced the jungle. She dropped to the ground and came toward me, her arms wrapped around herself. The sight of her face made me start. It was blotchy and red, her eyes swollen like she had been crying for a long time.

  “Mira, what’s wrong?”

  Mira saw Lainie, who was still sleeping. She came closer to me and sank down to the floor, beginning to cry without a sound. “My sister … my sister, Cadia … is very ill,” she whispered so softly I could barely hear her.

  “I’m sorry.” I knelt down beside her and touched her shoulder. I wanted to take her in my arms but she flinched away from me when my hand touched her. I drew it back. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  She lifted her head and wiped her eyes and then began to speak, not looking at me. “She was born small and she could never breathe quite right. And since the accident, she’s only gotten weaker. Today she seems much worse. I know she will never become a citizen, but she should be given a chance.”

  Her last statement confused me. “She isn’t a citizen? Everyone’s a citizen of the place where they are born. Are you saying she wasn’t born here?”

  Now it was Mira’s turn to look confused. “You mean you are all citizens of Earth as soon as you are born? Even the ones who aren’t born healthy?”

  “Of course, what else would we be?”

  The tears ran down her face again. “Here you can only be a citizen if you are strong in all the three, mind, body and clan. If you aren’t strong in one, you can’t be a citizen. You are an unwanted, like Cadia. I wish I could change that.” She clasped the necklace she wore, running her fingers around the cord that held the stone in place.

  “Mira, what’s special about the shape with the three sides?” I touched the tattoo on her cheek and she flinched away again. “Your people use it a lot. It must be important.”

  When she spoke, her voice was so soft, I had to lean in to hear. “It’s a skele,” she said. “It is to remind us of the importance of the three. Mind. Body. Clan. But it’s all so stupid! I hate that I am marked with it. No one should be considered worthless if they are weak in one. Cadia can’t help the way she was born! Even though she was destined to be an unwanted from the time she was born, she is my sister. I still want the Earth doctor to help her.”

  “Where are your parents? Have you talked to them about a doctor?”

  “They’re dead. They died of a wasting sickness a few years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. I didn’t know what else to say.

  Mira shrugged. “Many people were sick and many died. There wasn’t any medicine, or at least Ansun said any medicine would cost too much currency to buy.”

  “Won’t Ansun let Dr. Becca come down if you explain she’ll help and he won’t have to pay her?”

  “Ansun won’t do anything! He doesn’t care if she dies. To him she is just a burden to the clan. I came because I was hoping to help you so you’ll help me. Tasim told me what happened at the depot. What are you planning to do?”

  I was embarrassed to admit we didn’t really have a plan. “We’re not sure. We don’t really understand what’s going on. Have raiders taken over the space station?”

  “Be quiet!” She leaped up and took out her knife, her attention focused on something outside the wall. I didn’t hear anything and Mags was busy preening again, unworried, but Mira’s tension made me think there was something out there.

  The girl whirled around and I was astounded to see Decker standing next to her, a stick big enough to be a club in his hand. Mira’s knife lashed out, but Decker moved back, fast, out of her range. Decker looked confused, like he had expected to find someone else.

  I stepped between them. “Stop you two. Decker, she’s here to help us.”

  “Quinn, you need to stop getting in between two adversaries,” Mira said. “This is the second time you’ve done that. It’s brave but unwise.” She shifted so I was no longer in front of her.

  “You two aren’t adversaries,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” Decker demanded, glaring at Mira. “Do the other Fosaanians know about this place?” He called out to Lainie. “Lainie, wake up! We need to get out of here.”

  Lainie sat up and rubbed her eyes, looking confused and groggy.

  “No one knows I’m here,” Mira said, “but you need to leave this place.”

  “Decker, calm down.” I tried to explain what Mira had told me. “So she’s here to try to help us. Mira, you have to tell us what’s going on. We can’t make a plan until we have more information. Who’s in charge of the space station?”

  “Ansun is,” Mira acted surprised we had even asked. “He sent some of our people up to take control.”

  “Ansun! So why are there raiders here too? What do they want with the station?”

  “They want some of the new MIbots to sell, don’t they?” Lainie got up.

  “So it’s all about currency?” Decker snarled. “You Fosaanians are the same sort of scum as the raiders.”

  “It’s not just about currency, is it?” I said. I activated the data image and directed it so the rest could see. “Why do you and some of your relatives have the same tattoo as the last emperor of Fosaan? Look at the tattoo on his face. It’s in the shape of the skele. No one else has a tattoo on their face that I saw. And why do you have a cat, a felal, when only the Emperor’s family owned them?”

  Chapter 10

  I am weary today. I do not know if I will continue with these musings. I suspect it is my own vanity that convinced me to do this. None of the young will listen to me. They do not even come to me for advice. I know my dear Mira is somehow involved with the Earthers. Perhaps it is better she didn’t come to me before taking up with them. What would I have told her to do?—Erimik, historian of the Family

  Mira reached her fingers out to touch the image, but then drew it back. She didn’t look at us as she spoke. “The members of my family are the direct descendants of the last crown prince. That makes my grandmother the empress and the ruler of Fosaan. Only the royal family may wear the skele tattoo on their faces.”

  I had suspected that, but the revelation left Lainie and Decker speechless for a moment. Lainie recovered first. “Wow! So you are some sort of princess or something?” she asked.

  Decker gave a harsh bark of a laugh. “Royalty of a tiny village on a planet Earth controls, when Earth doesn’t recognize anything but democracies. It’s meaningless.”
/>   “I don’t think it is to Ansun,” I said, “or to the Fosaanians.”

  “It is our planet, not yours,” Mira said, louder now. “I don’t agree with most of what Ansun says, but it’s true we shouldn’t have to work for Earthers to survive. You should be paying us to stay here, not just giving us tiny amounts of currency for the sulfi. We had a thriving planet before the Apocalypse and we can have one again.”

  That silenced us all. I had never heard anyone debate whether or not Earth’s arrangement with the Fosaanians was fair. From the Fosaanians’ point of view, it didn’t sound fair at all, but there wasn’t time to think about that for the moment. “There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “Mira, why are the MIbots working with Ansun? How did he get control of them? They shouldn’t be able to choose to work with him instead of my mother.”

  Mira shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t see how Ansun thinks he’s going to get away with this,” Lainie said.

  I agreed. Decker had been right about how the military would swoop in as soon as they knew something was wrong.

  “I don’t know,” Mira said, “but whatever Ansun wants, he gets. You can’t stay here. This place isn’t good.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Decker asked.

  She shuddered. “Can’t you feel it? It’s full of despair.”

  Mira’s words surprised me. From what little I knew of her, she was a practical girl, so for her to think a building held emotion was odd. “Mira, please tell us what you know. You recognized this place, didn’t you? It’s the same shape as the skeles, It must be important.”

  A frightened expression flashed across her face. “Ansun doesn’t know this place is here and I don’t want him to find out. He’ll use it. I’ve heard him say he will build a new one when he has the chance.”

  “So you do know what it is.”

  “Yes, I’d heard of these places but never seen one. The location of this one was lost. It’s a testing ground, a passage.” Mira clasped her hands together so tightly, every muscle stood out.

  “Testing for what?” Lainie asked.

  “It’s an ancient place they used to use to see if a person was strong enough to be a full-fledged citizen.”

  “I don’t understand. How do these rooms test you?” I didn’t think I’d want to live in the place, but I didn’t see it as frightening. The feeling came more from it being abandoned than the place itself.

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s not the outer rooms anyway. There’s something in the center room that tests you. If you aren’t strong in all three, you fail.”

  “I don’t really care about Fosaanian history,” Decker said. “Once I’m away from here, I never want to think about this place again. We’ve got to get back to one of the units so Lainie can try to override the security.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Lainie said. “I doubt if I’ll be able to. If they are using my father’s security systems, I can’t carve them. He’s way better than me and he won’t share his secrets. He says if I’m smart enough I’ll eventually figure them out, but we don’t have time for that. The only thing I can think of it to sneak into the depot and wait until someone isn’t using a connected unit. I could even send a message to Quinn’s father’s ship from one of those. It will have to go through the station, but if it’s a short message, I think it would go through before anyone realizes what it is and blocks it.”

  “That’s very chancy.” I tried to walk through her plan in my head. “We’d have to assume you could get into the depot without anyone noticing you, hide without being caught, and then find a unit you could access. Any one of those would be hard to accomplish, much less all three.”

  “That’s the only idea I’ve got.” Lainie said.

  “I know where there is another communications unit,” Mira said hesitantly. “But it’s very primitive compared to yours. It’s very old, from before the Apocalypse.”

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised to learn the Fosaanians had communication equipment. If they had been in league with raiders for any length of time, they could have all kinds of equipment we didn’t know about.

  “How are we going to get to it? We can’t just walk into the village.” I said.

  “It’s not there. I’ll take you to it and you can see for yourself. It’s too hard to explain.”

  “Why would you do that for us?” Decker asked. “How do we know you aren’t leading us into a trap?”

  I jumped in to explain about Mira’s sister. I could tell from Mira’s face she was angry at Decker’s question, but I understood why Decker would be suspicious.

  When I finished talking, Decker said, “I guess that’s believable.” He sighed. “I suppose that means another trip through the jungle.”

  “Yes, and we should go now,” Mira said. “There are fewer predators out in the daytime.”

  “If that’s our only option,” Lainie said, “We should do it.”

  At least everyone agreed. I tried to figure out what to do about Mags. There was no way she could come with us and no way I could get her to stay here if she didn’t want to. I took the empty bins and stacked them on top of each other, turning the top one so that the opening faced me. I took another pack of fruit and put the bits inside. “Mags, beautiful cage,” I said, pointing at the bin. The parrot stared at me. “Beautiful cage,” I repeated as I held out my arm for her. She stepped on it and I carried her over to the stack. Tilting her head from side to side, she examined the place, then hopped in and started to eat.

  “You don’t have a door,” Lainie pointed out.

  “I know, but I don’t want to shut her in anyway. At home, she likes to be in her cage with the door open, like it’s her room. I’m hoping she’ll stay here until we get back. Hey, Decker, at least Mags didn’t call you an intruder this time when you snuck in. She must have heard you even if we didn’t. Maybe you’re growing on her. Do you like Decker now, Mags?”

  Mags stopped eating long enough to look at Decker. “Dog person,” she stated, and then went back to her fruit. Lainie burst out laughing.

  “I’m about ready to feed that bird to some hungry sea creature,” Decker pretended he was going to grab her, but Mags just ignored him. “I don’t know why she doesn’t like me. I’ve never done anything to her.”

  “You have to admit it’s kind of funny you draw such an intense reaction from a bird,” Lainie said. “Oh, don’t look so hurt! Other people like you. I like you, at least sometimes.”

  Decker smiled at that. “I think Quinn taught her that. She probably really does like me.”

  “I’ll let you believe that if it makes you feel better,” I said. It was funny Decker actually cared about how Mags felt about him.

  “I didn’t even hear you approaching,” Mira said to Decker. “I didn’t know Earthers could move so quietly.” I thought I could detect a hint of admiration in her voice, though it was hard to imagine she could actually admire Decker.

  “I practice,” he said. “Once I get to the academy I want to be selected for advanced training. You’re very quick with that knife. You almost got me.” There definitely was admiration in Decker’s voice.

  “Can we just go?” Lainie said. She sounded as irritated as I felt.

  “I agree,” I knew the longer we waited, the closer my father was getting to the station. As the rest of them climbed over the wall, I went over to Mags. “Bye, bird,” I said. “We’ll be back.”

  Mags took a step forward and I feared she was going to protest me leaving. She rubbed her beak on the side of the bin instead, and said, “Send word when you find work. Beautiful cage.”

  “Yes it is,” I said. Mags tucked her head under her wing and I went over the wall.

  As soon as I caught up, Mira said, “There’s no path, so watch your footing. And if I give you an order, you need to do what I say without questioning it. Agreed?” She spoke to all of us, but she was looking at Decker.

>   “Yes,” Decker said. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Even without a path, Mira was able to find her way through areas that were passable, leading us between patches of the dense growth that looked impenetrable. I had a strange sense that I was recording everything around me. I noticed every detail of every plant and every twist we took and remembered it all. It was as if an exact map was forming in my head. I’d always had a really good memory for some things, but never like this. If this was also a result of the shock, I didn’t want it to wear off, as long as I could get the other jumble of images out of my head.

  When Mira and Lainie drew a little ahead of us. Decker motioned to me to hang back. “Are you sure we can trust her? She might be leading us right to Ansun.”

  “She wouldn’t do that. She hasn’t said it outright, but I think she hates him.” After letting her parents die from lack of medicine, it would be surprising if Mira didn’t hate him.

  “I hope you’re right.” Decker brushed at his arms and legs like there was something on them. I noticed he was sweating heavily. The humidity clung to us as always, but it wasn’t all that hot. I asked, “Are you feeling okay, Decker? You don’t look so great.”

  “I hate this place,” Decker said, picking up his pace. “And I especially hate the bugs here. I didn’t like spiders on Earth, but these are ten times worse. I can’t stop thinking they are crawling on me.” He slapped at the back of his neck. “As soon as we get this problem solved, I’m going to tell my father I want to go to the military academy early. I don’t want to stay here one day longer than necessary.”

  “Watch out for that plant. Don’t brush up against it.” Mira stopped to point at a plant that had large oval leaves.

  “It’s not carnivorous, is it?” Lainie asked. “Those plants are just too bizarre.”