Read Online Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci - Free Book Online Page B

shuttered. Even the cleaning bots were quiet and in their charge stations. It was normal for many doors and quarters to be boarded up and in disarray, but even this was unnerving. If I didn’t know for certain that there were at least two hundred people on the station, I would be certain that we were alone.
    “It’s quiet. Even Tournour’s gone. It’s a little lawless right now,” I said as I picked through the basket of vegetables that Thado had set out for us.
    “Someone will be back to keep us all in order,” Heckleck said. “The Imperium will place their puppet administrators here to run the Yertina Feray.”
    I remembered the stories I’d heard about the dead and forgotten space stations left to die.
    “Do you think we’ll be forgotten?” I asked Heckleck and Thado. When I spoke the words, my tongue felt thick, and things seemed unreal.
    “We’ve always been forgotten and still managed to exist. Things will return. They always do,” Thado said. He passed us each a glass of pressed juice he had prepared.
    “I never pegged you as a hopeful one, Thado,” I said.
    “I’m not hopeful, I’m experienced,” he said. With so few on the station, we were all eating well from the arboretum. The situation had its tiny perks after all.
    “But no one has returned yet,” I said. It had been over a month.
    “They will come,” Thado said. “You will see.”
    Thado had calmed me before when he’d found me in those first few months, trembling in the arboretum, shaking for reasons I couldn’t understand. His voice was mellow and low, and I would focus on it and the panic would subside.
    “We’re far away but not as far as some, and if the Imperium wants to expand, we’re strategic,” Heckleck said. “We’re still useful as a light skip point.”
    I had to take Heckleck and Thado’s words on this. They were more universal than I was in these matters.
    “The Imperium wants control of its rabble, and even if it doesn’t have enough of a military force to occupy every planet outside of the Central Systems, the Imperium knows that if the fringes are left to the fringe, rebellions could breed like simple life forms that take over if not kept in check,” Thado said.
    Heckleck stretched his little wings out and began to thrum.
    “The people that they place here will keep the rabble from behaving in a manner that is unsuitable to Imperium plans,” Heckleck said. “Never underestimate the power of a lowly bacteria to evolve and thrive.”
    “It’s good to know that we still have our uses,” I said.
    “But it will be a chore to learn anew who is bribable when they return,” Heckleck said.
    “Whatever do you mean?” Thado said, feigning surprise. After all, he’d always been in our pocket, even though he worked for the station. We laughed. It was a light moment, and I was thankful for it.
    *   *   *
    After getting his bearings, Heckleck could see how quiet the station had become. It irritated him that there was almost nothing to do.
    “So difficult getting things done with such a shortage of lowlifes and high-placed officials on the station,” Heckleck said.
    The lack of things to do had made me depressed. I was back at square one. With the travel restrictions and the changing of the currency values, everything I had worked for before the Imperium arrived was now worthless. Heckleck sensed my misery.
    “Do you know what the best thing to do is when a place is empty?” Heckleck asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “Explore,” Heckleck said. “Come, let me show you what I’ve found while I was in hiding.”
    He took me up to sections of the station that I’d never seen before. He showed me secret spots for hiding things. We went into the deep altars of temples where species worshipped no longer. Into the storage lockers of those who left at the end of the mining boom, certain that they would be back to gather their things. Into the vents of air supplies to sections that no longer needed specialized