Stardust
Part 1 of the Stardust Cycle
Credits:
"MaxTheFox" (anonymous) - writer
"KittyTac" (anonymous) - co-writer
"Calico" (anonymous) - head editor
Sangyal Palsang - editor
"Crow" (anonymous) - editor
"andrewthewyvern" (anonymous) - editor
"NemoTheAxolotl" (anonymous) - feedback
"Zackbuildit" (anonymous) - feedback
"Maddremor" (anonymous) - feedback
Chidukhul Tahar - feedback
"Amaroq The Kitsune" - feedback
⁂
CHAPTER 1 - A MEETING
17 Jan 2230
The massive screen on the wall was almost indistinguishable from a window. Indeed, it served the same function as a window would, without letting in harmful radiation. The stars encrusted the blackness of space outside like myriads of little diamonds. The starfield seemed to rotate slowly, as did the arid planet’s visibly curved surface below, enveloped in the cyan, cloudless haze of its atmosphere, which was seen on the viewscreen affixed to the other wall. Somewhere below, thousands upon thousands of humans lived in still-young colonies.
Kayden sat on a light faux-wood bench, turned to face the 'window' to his side, in a wide hall that served as a lobby for new arrivals to the spaceport, designated NAS-1. He was a man in his mid-twenties, wearing a plain lime T-shirt and gray pants, with medium-brown skin and a thin build. His almost black hair was short, and his eyes were deep brown, while his other facial features were rather soft. A native of this desert planet, New Arizona, Kayden was not a new arrival. Rather, he had long been waiting for an old friend of his to finally arrive at the station.
"She’s late," Kayden thought to himself, checking the time on his datapad. "She said she’d be here at fifteen, but it’s already half an hour past that. I wonder what’s taking so long…"
The double frosted glass doors at the end of the hall slowly slid open, and Kayden looked up to see said friend swiftly walking towards him. She was decidedly not a human.
"Hey Nheka!" he shouted, waving his hand in greeting as he stood up.
Nheka was a bizarre alien, not humanoid in the slightest. Her lengthy, muscular, eight-limbed body, somewhat resembling an Earth lizard, was covered in small, bright green square scales. Her limbs were splayed out, like those of a lizard or an alligator. Most of her muzzle was taken up by a tapered, serrated yellow beak, below two dull blue eyes with W-shaped pupils, like those of a cuttlefish. Two fins extended upwards from the sides of her head, their membranes covered in striking rainbow patterns. Her tail ended in what looked like an underdeveloped, but still prehensile, hand. Nheka was around seven feet and six inches long and just four feet and six inches tall. She wore, in addition to a pair of form-fitting khaki shorts on her last pair of legs, copious amounts of jewelry, as was usual for her species. From a dangling golden chain necklace to silver earrings in her fins to multicolored bracelets and anklets on each of her limbs to strange, thin, shimmering bands wrapped around parts of her torso, not a single part of her body remained unadorned. She pulled a luggage suitcase with her tail hand, barely avoiding hitting benches or passersby with it.
Once she was close enough to Kayden, Nheka raised her upper body, revealing the first two pairs of her 'feet' to be closer to taloned hands, resembling something like the centaurs of myth and standing as tall as Kayden. They hugged each other as they met, Nheka awkwardly imitating the usual human gesture. This continued for half a minute.
"Takhghari… Kayden… I have arrived. I had ssome issuess witss cusstomss… Sseir computer did not recognize my ID, the data format wass ‘incompatible’… Why doess your civilization rely on flawed ssoulless machiness and not ssapient beingss for ssuch tasskss?" Nheka hissed in a strange accent.
Kayden had a bit of trouble understanding her speech, as they befriended each other over the Internet, and the inherent difficulties of an alien being attempting to speak English were not nearly as apparent over text. This was genuinely the best she could attempt.
"Nheka! Hope you enjoy yourself here", he smiled and continued. "As for your question, it’s because we humans know better than to waste our short lives on such simple jobs," he smirked.
"And sso do we… We draw the line at menial and exhausting physical labor. Not nuanced jobs..." Nheka responded. "I am already feeling cold. The frigid dry air of ssiss station chills and sslows me to my very boness."
"It’s twenty-three degrees," Kayden said incredulously. "You have anywhere to change in?"
"I do not know what Khyzsihs value that iss... But I feel like I am about to freeze to deass... Wait here while I go to the room that I booked to change to my warmer outfit." Nheka responded. "You humans take privacy too sserioussly."
Kayden sighed and sat there, taking out his datapad to play a quick round of a popular shooter game, while his alien friend continued down the hallway, again on all eights, towards the corridor leading to the motel rooms. The other humans in the lobby paid little attention to her; this colony world was at the edge of Terran space and was close to the borders of many minor alien empires.
That was just an attempt to distract himself from the nervousness caused by this. He wasn’t at all surprised by his friend’s appearance or anything like that, as they sent photos of each other before, but it was very different to see her in person. In the end he lost three games back-to-back, got frustrated, and put down his datapad, then stared at the ceiling as he waited.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
***
The corridor was unfurnished and utilitarian, with nary a viewscreen or anything else to decorate the shiny metal walls, lit by lamps that buzzed from poor maintenance. Disoriented and made uncomfortable by their sound, Nheka stumbled into the room labeled '12', seeking shelter from the painful noise.
With a soft whir, the door slid shut as quickly and steadily as it slid open. The room was fairly small, given the low budget of this station’s construction, but adequately furnished with adjustable faux-wood furniture: a bed, a nightstand with a lamp next to it, a dresser, a small table with a chair, and a medium-sized viewscreen on the wall opposite the bed. The walls were painted a plain beige, while the scratchy carpet underfoot was dark green. A human would find it cozy, but Nheka just found it weird. Much of the furniture was unrecognizable to her, and the colors appeared even more dull and washed-out.
"What’s the point of those two things with four wooden legs?" she thought. "I’ve never seen anything like them before…"
The room’s climate control system, as soon as it identified her species, began slowly adjusting the temperature to a comfy 38ºC, and the humidity to almost 100%. But Nheka did not intend to stay here for long. She opened her suitcase, full of various supplies brought from her swampy homeworld, and took out a light blue, nine-sleeved, stretchy jumpsuit with a hood lined with dark orange, authentic fur. It took a while for Nheka to put the form-fitting garment on, but the integrated heating elements immediately warmed her scales, and she felt her lethargy reduce.
She sorted out her other possessions, from a box of holy symbols of her culture’s religion, which she placed on the bed, to a framed photo of her two now-distant mates, which went onto the nightstand. Lighter items, such as snacks and her datapad, were stored in her leather satchel, which she slung around her neck and onto her back. Leaving the suitcase behind, Nheka went back to meet up with Kayden.
***
Her friend was waiting right at the door.
"Comfortable now?" he said, turning to look at her with a smile.
"Yes… On Akeruh, the home, this is northern winter clothing… At leasst do I look ‘neat’, as you humans like to say?" Nheka hissed, the hood nearly hiding her face.
"Yeah, you do." Kayden replied. "You said you want to see the station’s mini-interactive-museum before going down, yeah?"
"Yes… By the sspiritss, I hope the planet… Iss nithe and hot… But museum first…"
The museum was on the other side of the ring-shaped station from the lobby. While the two travelers could go around the long way, it would be faster to take an elevator down the central pillar. Kayden and Nheka barely fit into the cab together, and Nheka had to curl up into a half-circle.
The gravity slowly weakened until it finally disappeared, and the pair floated out as soon as the doors opened. The central pillar was a dimly-lit, thin tube of metal, with one end leading to the dock and the other to the space elevator. They were in the middle, a square-shaped room with four elevator entrances. The walls were covered in small handles for easy traversal in microgravity. It was otherwise empty, at this time of the day, there were not that many people on the station.
***
With a swooshing sound, the elevator doors opened in the small, dark room that served as the entrance to the museum sector of NAS-1. Kayden swiped his cash card twice through the slot on the door, and the two entered the hall. It was long enough to be noticeably curved, though by necessity, it was still small compared to anything one could visit planetside.
The interactive exhibits were arranged in two rows, and were all related to the history of the colony, the station, or both. Before Kayden could introduce her at his own pace, Nheka pulled him towards one of the exhibits.
"What iss that," she said, looking at a screen showing… the local cuisine of New Arizona. "You. Eat. This?!"
It was a normal plate of meatballs with noodles, seasoned with genetically-modified spices. Kayden looked at her in confusion. "…yes?"
"Dissgusting."
The next exhibit was simply a pseudo-holographic model of the Flamerider star system, in which the planet below orbited. Little incandescent orbs of light quickly spun around a brightly-shining, orangish-yellow star with visible solar flares, as tiny dots representing starships appeared, blazed through the system, and disappeared– but strictly at the edges.
Next to it was a jagged, bent chunk of the hull of the ill-fated lander that brought the first colonists here, a mere two decades ago. Charred in places and stripped of paint by sandstorms, the nevertheless thriving colonies below were a testament to human perseverance and flexibility.
Most of the other exhibits were fairly unremarkable, at least to these people: models of settler starships, dioramas of habitation domes, a replica of the station itself. There were also assorted baubles like now-antique prospecting scanners; they resembled dowsing rods of ancient superstition in shape, albeit with provable function. Nheka mostly stayed quiet, just intently studying the exhibits on display and slowly reading the plaques attached to them. They spent around half an hour within the elongated room, and left quite satisfied.
***
"Ready to go?" Kayden asked during the ride back up. "I’m already getting the spins. Feels like I'm on a carousel. Not used to space."
Nheka nodded silently, and the two followed into the space elevator lobby at the ‘bottom’ of the station. It was a cylindrical room, with many zero-G chairs attached to the walls. Everything was sleek and off-white, perhaps what people two hundred years ago would have called ‘futuristic’. There was little other furniture and overall the room felt pretty cheap. They sat down next to each other and started waiting, stuck to the screens of their datapads like everyone else in the room.
"TEN MINUTES REMAIN UNTIL CABLE VEHICLE ARRIVES", the intercom on the wall blared. Though the humans who crowded the room remained calm, Nheka suddenly twitched at the loud noise, startled.
"FIVE MINUTES REMAIN UNTIL CABLE VEHICLE ARRIVES"
"Khow do you humans tolerate this nonssensse?" She turned to look at her friend.
"I dunno. We just got used to it, you know?"
"Terrible."
With a whine, the elevator car arrived, and the large, hollow, cylindrical metal frame in the middle of the room was taken by its shape.
The cab's transparent doors slid open, and the commuters poured in, while the previous passengers poured out. The inside resembled a can of anchovies, jam-packed full of bored, tired humans. This was mundanity for most of them, but a few seemed to be as anxious as Kayden.
While the cab seemed to be only somewhat larger than the one of a terrestrial elevator, Kayden knew that there was, in fact, a sophisticated system of lanes inside the thick cable. Some lanes went to other passenger lobbies, yet most went to the cargo lobby, inaccessible to civilians.
As soon as the vehicle filled, the singular curved screen that took up its inner wall lit up with a live feed of the outside. It was as if the walls disappeared, yet of course the air remained. Then, the tiny room started accelerating, and accelerating quickly. Soon, the desert planet started to seem to move closer and closer at a noticeable speed. Nheka, not used at all to such decorations in space elevators, turned away from the wall and whimpered as Kayden tried to hold back laughter.
The elevator entered the blue haze of the atmosphere, and the wind became audible against the outside, breaking up the ambient noise of quiet conversation with its howls. Below, wide swathes of young green terraforming grass were visible, surrounding small blue patches of artificial lakes, themselves sometimes surrounding the dome habitat cities that glistened like bubbles on the surface of water. The cab was descending into the city of Upper Surwich, and amid the domes was visible the massive First Explorers’ Statue in the center of the city and the remains of the original colony lander in what was now downtown, while far away loomed the Green Mountain with its ancient precursor tunnels, a fair distance from the settlement’s boundaries. Then everyone felt the elevator gently decelerate to a stop, and the doors opened in the depot building.
The two exited into a large, monumental room, its walls tiled with white granite. Various information screens displayed public service announcements, local news and maps of the city, as well as advertisements for various travel-related products. It was clearly a new building, but visibly not with the highest budget: the furniture was pretty bare and mostly limited to benches and vending machines, as well as a few obviously fake potted plants.