Page 59 of Meteor Storm

“Juni’ikara. A trade station.”

Every time I asked a question, it appeared that Sunhai was giving me the shortest possible answer.

“Do you have parents?”

“We all have parents,” she chuckled.

“Of course. I mean, parents you know.”

“No.” She crossed her arms, leaning forward on the table in the first guarded posture I’d ever seen from her. “I was part of the Thinning reserve.”

“What’s that?”

“When the gek attacked my people, taking our ability to breed away, all women holding child in womb were forced to transfer babies to monitored environment. We were in freeze. Frozen. Kept safe.”

“Valerian babies were literally put on ice? And then what? You were born in a lab?”

“I was born with number, in a pod, many cycles after the Thinning.”

“Then you don’t know your parents.”

“Valerians do not care about who gives life. It is all a challenge to create life in the first place. I worked on trade ship. Soon, settled on a station. Made extra credits fighting. Then caught notice of Pek-Tol. He take me with him. He never let me go.”

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

“Do not feel sorry. There is nothing for me to go back to. Just to look for work. I am only free now. That is what matters,” she smiled.

I cleared my throat, trying to wrap my head around how different humans were from the rest of the civilizations we were coming into contact with. Humans couldn’t stop having children. Valerians couldn’t have enough. Monrians created children to their liking. And gek? I wasn’t sure I wanted to get close enough to them to understand how or why they had offspring.

“So, valerians have a beef with the gek’tal. Monrians are an army for hire. Why haven’t valerians hired them?”

“That is not my thing to know. I am a rat from a trade station.”

“Makes sense. I’m a rat from the Nexus.” I looked around, contemplating the empty mess hall again. “For a ship filled with military personnel, this place almost seems abandoned,” I said, chewing on another tasteless piece of a nutrient bar.

“Because we are in overflow wing,” Sunhai said. “I checked because I thought the same.”

“An overflow wing?”

“Yes, to keep us out of the way.” She gestured, drawing circles on the table’s surface. “The crew wing is the middle front. The off-shift crew is the middle. They rotate. We are under eye, though.”

“Under eye?”

“Being watched.”

“So, we are literally just here alone?”

“Yes.”

“Are we prisoners?”

“No. I went to crew wing. But they all work hard there. I was in the way and besides, I like the quiet.”

Something about that sounded sarcastic. Sunhai, as I’d come to find out, enjoyed excitement over stillness.

“Well… can I go to the crew wing?” I asked.

“I suppose.”