Someone had replied to my ad. Win.

The trouble with advertising was that a million other bozos were also advertising for people to share costs on the traditional post-graduation planet-hopping tour — schoolies time, right? — and they had more to offer than I did. I got sick of seeing words like ‘luxury’, ‘carefree’ and ‘classy’ in their ads. If my ad had been honest it would’ve had descriptions like ‘almost trouble-free’, ‘comes with plenty of hard work’ and ‘probably safe’.

So, someone answering was a double-win, really.

I met her on the space dock, as far away from the Port Vila as I could manage. She was taller than me, and she had a really good, really white smile with none of that distracting tooth art. A tiny, tiny animated tattoo was on one ear lobe, but I couldn’t make it out. She was wearing sensible space-going gear — shorts, T-shirt and bare feet — which was a good sign, and she had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. It wasn’t too big, either. If she’d rolled up with a couple of suitcases, some hat boxes and a bunch of garment bags, I would have known to back away.

‘Is that you, Tekura?’ I held out my hand.

She dropped her canvas bag on the deck and we shook. Her grip was firm enough without trying to make a point. ‘And you’re Damien Heong. When do we leave?’

‘You don’t want to see the ship first?’

‘I’ve checked it out on the Stream.’ She tilted her head. ‘I’ve checked you out, too.’

‘And?’

‘You’ll do.’

There’s nothing like being tagged ‘adequate’ to get your day off to a good start. ‘There’s still work to be done before we can ship out. I warned you about that.’

She picked up her bag. ‘I’m not staying on this station longer than I have to. Show me this deathtrap and we can get to work.’

She marched off. I stared after her, open-mouthed. Deathtrap? She was calling my spaceship a deathtrap? How dare she!

Uncle Jayden had lent me the Port Vila. It was a mini-freighter, one of dozens he had chugging their way around the solar system picking up and delivering whatever could make a profit. I’d spent some happy times with him and his crews, and that’s where I learned to pilot, starting when I was fifteen, and soloing a year later. Not that there’s a lot of real work to do these days, with the tame AI-running ships. Piloting between planets isn’t hard, but I still remember the jeebies the first time Uncle Jayden let me dock at a space station. Everything you’ve learned about the way things move, change directions and stop has to be thrown out the window and a whole new set of skills learned. Mess it up and it’s a few billion bucks and/or lives, including yours, at stake.

Pricey.

I caught up with Tekura in the airlock. Because it was the Port Vila, the airlock was cheapskate, supposedly licensed for two people, but it was really only comfy for about one and a half. It meant we stood face-to-face, far too close for strangers, trying not to do anything awkward with our hands.

Tekura sniffed. ‘Smells.’

‘All spaceships smell.’

‘You should do something about it, you know.’

I whipped my doodad out of my pocket, expanded the display and poked away at it. ‘There. It’s added to the list.’

Tekura stared at me — or rather, at my doodad. When she saw me looking at her, she put a hand to her mouth. ‘Sorry. I was being rude.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m used to it.’

‘It’s just … You don’t see many of those things, is all.’

‘Yeah, we’re a very select group, AyeAyes. Just me and a couple of hundred others, worldwide.’

‘AyeAyes?’

‘Implant Intolerance people. It’s a special club. We won’t have just anyone.’

Tekura squirmed a little. I could see that she was curious, but also that she knew how rude it was to probe people about conditions like Implant Intolerance. I held up a hand. ‘Look, I know what you want to know so I’ll answer before you ask. First of all, it’s genetic and it can’t be cured because I can’t tolerate any of the gene manips that usually fix up genetic conditions. Second of all, no I can’t access the Stream like everyone else. That’s what the doodad is for.’

I didn’t go into the third question that people ask, because I was sick and tired of it. How do I feel being cut off from the modern world and unable to join in like everyone else? How do you think I feel?

Tekura nodded. ‘Kharaab kismat.’

Yep, bad luck in a bonus-sized package — but that was almost the last I heard of it. She rarely mentioned it again, and when she did it was in a way that made AyeAye sound completely ordinary and boring.

The Port Vila really was the bottom of Uncle Jayden’s barrel, right underneath the clunkers, hacks and floating bombs that usually end up there. These mini-freighters were designed to run with a minimal crew, a dozen people maximum, and, as usual, the crew quarters were primitive. No private cabins, just a shared dormitory area with triple bunks and walls — bulkheads — a more-than-dull shade of metal grey. The ablutions area was three tiny, side-by-side shower cubicles. The kitchen — the galley — opened onto a tiny living/recreation area, with a table that folded away when it wasn’t being used. Chairs likewise.

This was stripped down, pared back, a no-frills style taken to the extreme. If you ripped out every bit of flair, then sandblasted away every ghost of colour, then exterminated any idea of comfort, then you’d nearly have the Port Vila, the place Tekura and I would be spending the next three months.

Cosy.

So it turned out that Tekura was sensational with AI systems. When we got down to work, she thumped the Port Vila resident AI into shape in a couple of hours. She complained about it while she was working, going on about how cutting corners was the way to disaster and how some people wouldn’t know how to set things up if their life depended on it. Mostly, I fetched and carried for her, while trying to wallop the life-support systems into working order, a job that got a lot easier after Tekura looked over my shoulder and pointed out exactly what needed doing.

She’d been on Banger Station for a month, which was about twenty-eight days too long, according to her. But it did mean that she’d made some contacts. She was able to lean on a drive specialist to come and recalibrate the Port Vila’s drive for mates’ rates. I still nearly fainted at the cost, but the Port Vila wasn’t going anywhere without a calibrated drive.

Things were actually going okay, until I got thrown in jail.

After some successful heavy-duty arc welding on some external sensor flanges, Tekura and I decided to take a morning off. It was the first downtime in two weeks since we’d started on making the old bucket space-worthy. We’d been working hard.

We left the space dock and since Tekura had had time to explore Banger Station with her mother before the massive argument and the storming off, she was able to lead the way to the tourist-trap sectors. Welcome to casinos, bars, music from holospeakers and buskers, restaurants, souvenir shops and other, seedier possibilities that you could only access through side alleys. Tekura pointed them all out, in a voice loud enough to get me blushing and to annoy the barkers, who stood at the heads of these alleys touting for business. It was noisy, colourful and about as classy as a two-buck yo-yo with extra glitter, and with Tekura there it was the most fun I’d had in ages.

Cheery.

Tekura was pointing out which of the burger joints used real meat and which used processed recycled algae, when a hunched-over figure shambled out from between two of the shops that lined the street. He had a flat hat that obscured most of his features, and a beard that finished the job, and overalls that only stayed on because of the amount of duct tape keeping them in one piece. And I had awful imaginings of duct-tape underwear. He glanced at us, then glanced around so furtively that I had to look to make sure we weren’t being set upon by assassins. He was apparently reassured by what he didn’t see, so he sidled up to us. ‘Spare any change?’ he growled out of the corner of his mouth.

We didn’t get a chance to answer. Sirens sounded and lights flashed. Doors banged open. Three squads of different uniforms pounced on our beggar.

He didn’t run. He put his hands to his face, threw back his head and howled like somebody who had lost all hope.

The yellow team reached him quickest, but not before half a dozen floating spy eyes homed in, hopeful of getting some juicy shots to make money out of on the Stream. The Yellows didn’t slow down at all, bowling him over and grappling him to the ground. They wrapped him up in one of those elastic restraining webs, but it was the laughing and high fives that got to me. I stepped up. ‘Hey, take it easy, he’s not resisting.’

That was all it took. Bam. I was stunned, wrapped in another restraining web and locked up until I could pay the fine for interfering with lawful processes. And when I say, ‘I could pay the fine’, it actually meant Tekura paying the fine and getting me out because I had no money.

‘Don’t say anything,’ she ordered when I was escorted out of the holding cell. ‘Just come with me.’

I held it in until we were back on the Port Vila. I kicked the nearest bulkhead. ‘Can’t wait until we’re out of here. Money-grubbing, soulless, heartless, brainless hellhole this station is.’

Tekura was looking off into the distance. She flicked left to right. ‘There. I’ve hit your bank account with a request to reimburse me for the cost of the fine, and the accommodation. Pay it back when you get the money.’

‘Accommodation? What accommodation?’

‘You were in their cell for hours. User pays.’

I ground my teeth. ‘I take it back. This place isn’t heartless. It never had a heart in the first place. And what about the old guy? What happened to him?’

‘There’s nothing you can do, Damien. I made some enquiries. He was a stallholder, small time, couldn’t afford to renew his licence, went broke and had no backers. His family left him, and finally he was reduced to asking tourists for money. A big no-no, that. The bounty hunters love scooping up those guys.’

‘Bounty hunters?’

‘It’s a thriving business off Earth. No police, except in the really big places, so it’s up to bounty hunters to snap up any lawbreakers or loan defaulters. For the reward.’

‘He won’t be able to pay for his cell.’

‘He won’t go to prison. He’ll become an indentured worker. That’s supposed to mean he can work off his fine, but it really means he’s a slave from now on and that’s the way he’ll die.’

I kicked a box of welding rods. It hurt. I did it again. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘Out here, the market rules. User pays is God. Business is business.’

‘Whatever happened to taking care of people?’

‘Oh, that’s okay. Lots of money in patient care, child care, geriatric care.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘I know.’ She patted me on the arm. ‘And it’s sweet to find that some people are still naive.’ She swung her arms wide. ‘Travel the universe, remember? See other places and other ways. Learn about the differences that unite us.’

‘Someone should do something about travel writers.’ I thumped the bulkhead with a fist this time and scowled. ‘They have a lot to answer for.’

In the end, what I thought was going to take a couple of months took a couple of weeks, thanks to Tekura. I felt awkward about it, as I hadn’t put anything in the ad about getting the ship ready for the journey. She didn’t complain, though. She complained about the stupid programmers, stupid engineers, the stupid systems analysts and the stupid cargo configurers, but she didn’t complain about the work. She didn’t complain about my cooking, either, but then again she would have had to be really picky to do that. I’m a great cook, even with the sort of basic ingredients that I was able to scrounge up on a limited budget.

That’s when we talked most, I guess, over meals. At least, after about ten or fifteen minutes when we’d finished stuffing our faces. Hard work makes you hungry, right?

We raked over the usual stuff about where we went to school and what was on the horizon, ambition-wise, and about what we were looking forward to while poking around the solar system. I was glad she was looking for the same sort of out-of-the-way places that I was. She thought that visiting a mining colony on Calisto sounded exciting, and the prospect of a visit to Tycho Crater made her punch me on the shoulder, her eyes bright with excitement.

It was on one of these sessions that I finally made out that her ear-lobe tattoo was a little cat, one of those statue ones that wave their paw up and down. Once I worked it out, it was hypnotising. I couldn’t stop looking at the way its paw bobbed, bobbed, bobbed.

Cute.

I got so comfortable I even told her about Uncle Jayden. I had to pick and choose carefully, though, because I didn’t want her to think that I came from a family of total crazies.

Uncle Jayden is a strange mix of the old-fashioned and the new-fashioned. He owned a fleet of mini-freighters that ploughed all over the solar system, but he preferred old hardcopy books to text on display. He taught me how to cook by preparing and combining my own ingredients instead of printing out meals. And he wanted to be called ‘captain’, but he was happy with ‘skipper’ if no-one else was around.

He ran everything by the Law of the Sea, too. That’s how he used to talk about it, with the capital letters. I think he really wanted to be back in the days of sail and oceans, to tell the truth. He had an antique brass barometer that he took with him onto every vessel he commanded, even though it was one hundred per cent pointless out in space. He loved buying old charts, unrolling them and poring over the details of sand bars and currents. His favourite books were by people like Melville, Forester and O’Brian, and he read passages out loud to me. Liked the sound of his own voice. And, like lots of people, he was into true-life history. His favourite stuff was maritime disasters. Shipwrecks, mutinies, castaways, especially those with a bit of cannibalism, lost-at-sea episodes that end up with people drinking their own urine, all that sort of goodness. He loved the idea of the war, too, in a way that was the opposite of my parents, most likely because it was so far away from the other side of the galaxy. He always had sensors on maximum gain just in case one of the spaceships from the Green–Blue war made it all this way and wanted to go hostile on us. Not that there was much we could do about it, since none of Uncle Jayden’s freighters was armed. All we’d be able to do was turn tail and run.

So I gave Tekura an edited version of that and then remembered my manners. ‘And you? Tell me about your family.’

Her face set like stone. ‘My family is out of bounds.’

‘What? Come on, family is juicy. Share all the embarrassing details.’

She shook her head. ‘Promise me you won’t go sneaking around my family, all right?’

‘Now you’re making it irresistible.’

‘Don’t be stupid. If you do, I’m jumping ship the first chance I get and you can whistle for your money.’

It wasn’t the money I was worried about. Tekura was being serious. No fun stuff here, no playfulness, complete opposite of her normal self.

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to hit a sore spot like that.’

She sighed. ‘My family. Sore spot. That’s about right.’

‘And I’ve officially lost interest in them. I promise.’ I yawned and stretched. ‘What were we just talking about?’

Eventually, the Port Vila was ready. She squeaked through the space-worthiness test and I don’t think the inspector was totally joking when she asked me for the name of my next of kin, just in case.

We were fully provisioned — at least as well as we could afford. I’d managed to scavenge some stuff that we might be able to trade, but I wasn’t hopeful and it wasn’t the main point of our journey. We were tourists, footloose and fancy-free, just having a good time following our noses across the solar system. I filed a departure request as soon as the inspector left and it was granted immediately. I took the pilot’s chair. Tekura took the copilot’s chair. We ran through our lists, double-checking each other.

‘Looks like we’re all set,’ I said.

‘There’s one thing.’ Tekura had tied back her hair and I could see more of her face and the waving cat. ‘What’s our first destination?’

‘Mars looks lovely at this time of year.’

She grinned and strapped herself in. ‘Mars it is, then.’ She gazed off into space, then used a finger to flick in front of her eyes. ‘No solar-flare warnings, but it looks as if the Greens have attacked several Blue-held systems in the fourteenth quadrant.’

‘As if that’s going to worry us.’ The fourteenth quadrant might be one of the closest to our solar system, but it was still thousands of light years away. Before I was born, my parents — Rob and Daz — did a tour of duty as special advisers to the Blues. Now, they didn’t want anything to do with that stupid war and the way it dominated politics back on Earth. Politics was banned in our house and that suited me because it was possibly the most boring thing in the whole universe, sports-star biographies included.

‘Don’t you care about the war?’ Tekura asked.

I punched the engine-priming display. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

Tekura gave me a look but didn’t say anything.

Less than twenty-four hours out, I was still getting used to being in space again when I remembered what I’d forgotten. It’s always like that. Whenever I go anywhere I’m always sure I’ve forgotten something. It burns away at the back of my mind until it hits me and then I swear a lot at how stupid I’ve been.

This time, it was a sensational forget: I hadn’t organised entertainment. This might not sound like a big deal, but it was. It takes ages to get anywhere in a solar system. In fact, it takes less time to hop from star to star than it does to chug around planets. That’s because once you get outside a star’s gravitational field, the Asoka drive can be engaged. That’s the one that folds up space and lets you travel light years in a couple of minutes. Without it, humanity wouldn’t have spread halfway across the galaxy like it has. The downside is, though, that once you reach the planets circling whatever star you’ve arrived at, you have to use good old impeller drives. They’re a whole lot better than the rockets they used back in the early days of space flight — those guys were basically strapping themselves on top of bombs, something I wouldn’t do in a million years — but it still takes a long time to get from planet to planet.

On our trips together, Uncle Jayden could have happily spent the journey immersed in the Stream for entertainment, but he knew I couldn’t. So when we visited Venus and the asteroid belt, he made sure to have the latest movies, plenty of books and lots of games aboard. He even interrupted his favourite between-planets pastime (making those stupid ships in bottles, naturally) to do stuff with me. Some of my happiest times as a kid were those long weeks between planets laughing away with Uncle Jayden at those old-time flat-projection classics like Simple Jack.

My wail brought Tekura running. ‘I forgot the entertainment!’

At first, she didn’t understand. Why should she? She had the Stream to keep her amused. ‘Can’t you read books on your doodad?’

She was right. I’d just associated good old-fashioned hardcopy books with long, boring space flight. ‘Okay, okay, it’s not as bad as I thought. Nice one. Thanks.’

‘You don’t sound very grateful.’

‘No, really, it’s fine. I like reading. I’ll read a lot. See you when we reach Mars.’

The next day, Tekura dropped a large square of plastic shielding on our table. It was marked up in a square grid. ‘I’m going to teach you Go.’ She saw my startled expression. ‘Calm down. This shielding is spare stuff. I didn’t rip it off the walls.’

‘Bulkheads,’ I said automatically. ‘On a ship — or spaceship — walls are bulkheads.’

She emptied her pockets of dozens of hexagonal nuts. Half of them were white. ‘I found these right at the back of cargo bay two. I used nearly all my nail polish on them.’

‘You don’t wear nail polish.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who thought of trade goods. Someone on a lonely outpost would pay an arm and a leg for something like that.’

‘And you used it to make white nuts?’

She looked at me very seriously and held one up. ‘Stones. The pieces are called stones.’

And so began my initiation into the complex and meditative game of Go. Tekura was patient and knowledgeable, and put up with me asking the same question over and over again, like, ‘What’s a liberty?’ She had an interesting approach, too, to welcoming a newcomer to the world of Go. She did it by thrashing me in every game. She could have been an expert, she could have just been a little bit better than me, I couldn’t tell, but she definitely had no intention of letting me win a game or two to encourage me. At the end of each game she’d simply bow, grin and ask, ‘Again?’

I’d almost always agree. This was an eye-opener, as I was never the world’s most gracious loser. In games, I mean, not out there in real life. I could handle trying hard and losing out in a competition for a job, but there was something about the whole business of game playing that brings out the competitive streak in me. Uncle Jayden found that out early on and as a result we never played cards or anything like that. The only games we played were cooperative, where we were both working towards a goal, which would take days to complete.

Go with Tekura was different. I lost, but I never felt like jumping to my feet, flipping the board over and scattering the pieces — stones — all around the room. Maybe it was something about the nature of the game, or maybe it was who I was playing it with.

And didn’t that open a whole can of worms that I wasn’t quite ready to dive into.

Uncomfortable.

That was one of the things we hadn’t talked about and continued not to talk about. We were both nominal grown-ups, healthy, who liked each other, and we were confined in a small space very close to each other in all sorts of ways. Shared dormitory, right? And yet neither of us suggested a really obvious way of passing the time. Reluctance? Awkwardness? Or was Tekura uneasy about my handicap?

Or was it just me?

I was working in the hydroponics section, the one that helped refresh the air and provide us with fresh veggies for our journey, and I nearly dropped my pH meter when the whoop-whoop-whoop of the alarm sounded.

I sprinted for the bridge, but Tekura was there ahead of me. ‘A small ship of unknown origin has set off a repeating beacon. No other details,’ she said. ‘I’ve contacted the authorities. What do we do now?’

‘We go to their aid.’

‘We what?’

‘It’s the Law of the Sea. The nearest vessel to a vessel in distress is obligated to render assistance.’

‘That’s your Uncle Jayden, isn’t it?’

‘It’s the right thing to do.’

I peered at the ship’s display then jabbed at my doodad so hard I lost my grip on it, but I caught it after it bounced off the deck. ‘Two, three hours, maybe less, we’ll be there.’ What sort of vessel would be all the way out here? It was millions of kilometres from the asteroid belt. No prospector in her right mind would be in this part of space. A smuggler? A schoolies trip gone badly wrong?

Mystery.

Nothing happens fast in interplanet travel, so we kicked back with the Go board. I practised my calmness while being slaughtered.

A few hours later Tekura lifted her head. ‘Uh-oh. The distress call. It’s loose on the Stream.’

‘We’re live? Spy eyes are all the way out here?’

‘News sellers are looking for any news everywhere, all the time.’

It took me a minute or so, but my doodad showed me that a couple of spy eyes had picked up the distress call and had beaten us to the drifting vessel. Tekura interfaced my doodad with the ship’s display so I could get a better view. It was a battered-looking spaceship of unfamiliar design but looked even older than the Port Vila. It was both rolling and yawing, and it wasn’t a good sign. No captain would allow a ship to tumble like that if she had a choice.

My hands hurt and I realised that I was gripping the armrests of my chair really, really hard.

‘It’s Palmeenee.’ Tekura was staring up and away to her right, making that twirly index-finger motion that I’d been told meant some serious data diving. ‘War refugees.’

Wow.

Humanity has met very few alien species in our push into the universe. The Palmeenee were one of them and, as alien species go, they were about as alien as they come.

A Japanese exploring team found the Palmeenee world circling Kepler-186 and must have been overjoyed. Yorokobi was reasonably Earth-like, except for the lack of just about any dangerous animals or plants. It was such a paradise it took nearly a hundred years before the settlers realised that the planet was already home to an intelligent species. The Palmeenee hadn’t been noticed earlier because there weren’t many of them — and they kept to themselves, mostly in underground settlements. They were smart — incredibly so in areas like social dynamics — but they had no real curiosity and so never sought out the newcomers to their world. Even after first contact was made and a linguistic bridge set up, they weren’t hungry for interaction. Trade, commerce, exchange of ideas didn’t interest them. Dancing, swap meets and speed dating weren’t even on the table. They weren’t aggressive, and any dealings were almost painfully polite, but they left humanity to itself.

Strange.

The earliest contact did come up with one stunning fact, though — the Palmeenee had been a spacefaring species but had given it up ‘a long time ago’. When the settlers had got over a bad case of the WTFs, they pressed the Palmeenee, who just mumbled vaguely about how they’d had enough space travel and couldn’t see any point in going further.

Which made them the perfect collateral damage when the war spread to that quadrant. Neither the Blues nor the Greens avoided Palmeenee settlements when trying to smash each other. Casualties were high, but the Palmeenee never retaliated, which meant they continued to be overlooked and continued to take casualties.

Some of them, though, had had enough.

The Palmeenee ship shouldn’t have made it this far. It looked as if it was made for short hops, and from the signs of damage on it, it had been caught in at least one skirmish. The Port Vila’s AI managed to edge us alongside so Tekura and I could rig up a connection to bring the refugees into one of the cargo bays.

Describing alien species is tricky because they’re alien. Which sounds stupid, but it’s actually profound if you think about it. For a start, their biology works in different ways from ours. They’ve sprung from different origins, after all. And as for psychology and behaviour, that’s spawned all sorts of research. Careers have been made out of trying to make sense of Palmeenee minds. Still, we make the mistake of assuming that aliens behave like we do. I guess we’re trying to find some basis for connection in the grand human way.

But if I’m getting all philosophical, I say that there must be a few things that all life shares, and valuing self-preservation is one of them. If your home is being crushed by a disaster — and it doesn’t matter if it’s natural or something else — then you’re going to want to get out of there, fastest. You’ll want to look for somewhere else to live, somewhere that’s safer. And — here’s where I could be going out on a limb — most intelligent species seem to have some sort of regard for their offspring. They want to protect them, help them grow up and live a decent life. That has to give you even more motivation to get the heck out of a war-torn planet.

Sensible.

Physically, it’s hard not to compare the Palmeenee to crustaceans of some kind. Insects, maybe? They have eight limbs and a hard exoskeleton at least. They spend a lot of their time with their spine arched back and the forelegs raised. These are their manipulators as they have sets of opposable claws. When upright like this, they can get to a couple of metres tall. I’ve heard them compared to praying mantises or scorpions, but now that I was seeing them up close I scrapped those comparisons. The Palmeenee were simply something else.

And they smelled like bread. Warm, fresh bread. Mmm.

Their contact with humans had taught them a few things. One of the taller Palmeenee pressed forward as a spokesperson. It — I wasn’t going to even guess which of the four sexes the spokesperson was — tried a few languages in its whistling, clicking voice before settling on English. ‘We have hurt. We have injured. We ask your help. Please. Please.’

A full-scale tourist spaceship would have a doctor on board, maybe two, and a nice shiny clinic. All the Port Vila could offer was a first-aid cabinet.

Tekura went into a near-constant Stream trance, diving for information on Palmeenee physiology and the best way to render first aid, working side-by-side with the Palmeenee spokesperson. I helped by finding blankets, bringing water, mopping up bright-red Palmeenee blood, sorting through our supplies to see what food would be acceptable, stopping Palmeenee trying to access the rest of the ship, and even holding Palmeenee down by their raspy shoulders while Tekura and the spokesperson went to work.

We had no anaesthetics that were effective on Palmeenee, so I found out what the Palmeenee sound of agony was, something I wish I could scrub from my memory.

Look, it was grim. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t, so if I’ve edited out some of the more awful parts, you’ll understand. The stuff about the injured Palmeenee kids, particularly.

Tekura accessed the Stream in a way that made me jealous for about the billionth time in my life. She was even able to grab a few words of Palmeenee to help calm and reassure our guests. Me? I couldn’t handle my doodad while I needed both hands to help carry a wounded Palmeenee, or shift pallets, or drag useful items from the Palmeenee ship to ours. I was dumb labour, mostly, but doing the best I could. How could I not?

All I could do was slap in a course for Mars, the nearest port. Get them there quickest and they’d have the best chance of surviving.

Time went blurry in the urgency. I don’t know when Tekura dragged our Go board down from the bridge, but she found time after reading an article by one of the early settlers on Yorokobi.

I now know what excitement looks like among Palmeenee. When Tekura and I presented the board, there was a lot of straightening and tapping front claws together, almost like applause. Five of the little ones clattered over to us and the spokesperson had to herd them away to let us through. When we reached the spokesperson he/she/it/jher bowed. ‘We are honoured. Will you take black?’

While just about all of the able-bodied Palmeenee clustered around, Tekura beat the spokesperson three games in a row. The spokesperson bowed. ‘You play well.’

Tekura bowed in return. ‘So do you.’

‘We learned from the settlers on Yorokobi. Playing Go with them was good.’ His/her/its/jher upper body rose and twisted from side to side. ‘Do you know what happened to them?’

‘The settlers?’ Tekura bit her lip, riffling through the data in front of her. She went pale. ‘None of them are left.’

Silence fell in the cargo bay, a stillness it hadn’t had since the Palmeenee arrived. Eventually, the spokesperson tapped his/her/its/jher chest with a claw. ‘Go is a worthwhile product of your civilisation. War is not.’

Soon, Go became the centre of Palmeenee activity in the cargo bay. As a distraction and a time filler, it was a winner. The Palmeenee organised tournaments and league tables in a way so complicated that my doodad gave up analysing it.

I found out something, too, that made me feel even warmer towards the Palmeenee. They had no access to the Stream. No implants, no doodads, no curiosity, remember? I had a whole bunch of Streamless buddies, and they were as alien as I sometimes felt.

Irony.

By this time, the Port Vila was well on its way to Mars and it was surrounded by a flock of spy eyes. All of the news dealers, looking to make a buck out of selling news to the universe, were desperate to know what was going on inside our vessel. Vultures? Scavengers? Bottom-feeding slime suckers? Honest workers? Who could tell?

One of the mid-size Palmeenee pushed a cup of water into my hands and herded me away from the chaos. He/she/it/jher took me to the corner of the cargo bay and waited until I slumped onto a stool before bustling off. I sipped and got my doodad to cast a display. The Port Vila was trending hotter than hot on the Stream, swamping just about everything else in the news sphere. Billions were talking about us, offering opinions, making promises and threats, wanting to proposition us, demanding to know our motives and how we felt about it all. I was even on a T-shirt.

We were the biggest thing in the solar system.

As tired as I was, I had to laugh. Without trying, we’d achieved something that half of humanity desperately wanted. We were scaling skywards, we were bobbing up at the top of news feeds, we were bumping celebrity weddings aside. Anyone who saw themselves as up to date with current affairs had to know about us. The history of the Port Vila was being searched as we worked. Even our backgrounds were being picked apart. I shied away from that. It took an effort, but I honoured the promise I’d made to Tekura not to probe about her family, even though there it was being kicked around the news sphere. I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, but then I saw that she had her arm around the tallest Palmeenee and she was helping him/her/it/jher to some bedding against one of the bulkheads. She was humming a song, gently, softly, as she eased the Palmeenee to the blankets.

I killed the screen of temptation, picked up a broom and started sweeping up old Palmeenee scales. Before too long I started humming, too. After that it was a short step to soft shoe shuffling a little, side to side, as I swept.

‘You can do better than a broom for a partner,’ Tekura said.

I jumped. I hadn’t seen her draw near.

She held out a hand. I gave the broom to a junior-sized Palmeenee, who stared at it, and then Tekura and I were in each other’s arms, dancing. We had no music, but it didn’t matter much. For a few moments, our exhaustion disappeared and for a moment that was a bubble in time, instead of being caught up in a refugee emergency we were enjoying an end-of-year schoolies interplanetary trip.

‘You can dance,’ Tekura murmured.

My head was on her shoulder. She smelled good. ‘You sound surprised.’

‘Pleased, is all.’

‘The Palmeenee are staring at us.’

‘Let them stare.’

‘They’re good starers.’

‘We’re good dancers.’

Tekura and I shuttled between the bridge and the cargo bay that was now the Palmeenee sickbay and living quarters. We must have spent a little bit of time in the mess, feeding ourselves, I guess.

Our refugee rescue blew up a political storm. For years, the Earth government had backed away from taking sides in the whole Green–Blue war, but it was facing a general election in a couple of months’ time so we became hot stuff. Real-time constant polling was showing that the government had been losing popularity for ages. It’d been in power for a decade and it looked as if people wanted a change, so the Palmeenee refugee situation was an opportunity for the government to show how strong it was. Commentators were frothing at the mouth and barking about keeping these aliens out, wanting to send them back to where they came from, and the government bigwigs were quick to respond.

Commentators? Who are they? As far as I can tell they’re people who work totally from a ‘no evidence at all’ basis and simply say whatever comes into their head. Trouble is, people — and governments — listen.

Incredible.

Tekura was cynical. ‘Okay, Mr Naive,’ she said over a rare moment when we were drinking cups of coffee at the same time. I didn’t want to start yawning as I thought I’d never stop. She had dark circles under her eyes from tiredness. ‘Let me explain it to you. Xenophobia is fantastic for governments. They can use it.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ I was sitting down and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get up again. My head was made of iron and the table was a massive magnet pulling it down.

‘Can be, but that doesn’t stop them using it. It’s the classic us-and-them ploy. They’re going to come and grab our jobs from us. They have a different way of life from us. Our culture/heritage/breakfast cereal is going to be taken away from us by them.’

‘That’s stupid.’

‘Yes. Yes it is. But it serves those who need to use it, like for elections. They manipulate the truth, keep it from people, and so xenophobia grows. The best way to overcome xenophobia is to share knowledge, to share the truth.’

‘I thought we were going to be heroes, coming to the rescue like that.’

‘Looks like we rescued the wrong ship for that.’

Mars wouldn’t let us dock at Deimos Station.

I let the ship’s AI put us into orbit while I scrambled to find Tekura. As usual, she was in the middle of a knot of little Palmeenee while trying to understand what one of the big ones was getting at and keeping an eye on the worst of the injured. Not far away, the Go tournament raged in silence.

You know, one of the more amazing things about the Palmeenee was how quiet they were. If this cargo bay was full of humans it’d be full of chaos. Noisy, too. The Palmeenee went about their suffering quietly. Maybe that was part of the problem. Too quiet for their own good? I’d hate it if that was how things worked.

Tekura’s eyes went wide. ‘They what?’

‘The government back on Earth says that we can’t bring the Palmeenee refugees into port. Deimos Station is closed to us.’

Tekura rubbed one of the little Palmeenee behind its ear plates. It jumped up and down and squirled. ‘What are we going to do, Captain?’

I looked behind me, but then I realised that Tekura was being serious. I rubbed a hand over my face. How long had it been since I’d had a shower?

‘Damien?’

Tekura was still waiting for an answer. ‘We’re going to follow the Law of the Sea,’ I said. ‘The Palmeenee refugees are owed assistance at the nearest port of call — and Deimos Station is the nearest port of call.’

I tried arguing with the authorities. I cited international, interplanetary and interstellar law. I tried to lean on their humanity, but I couldn’t find any. The government authorities controlled passage through Deimos Station, and they were standing firm.

I may have shouted a bit, too.

After kicking things and punching things and storming around for a while, I had an idea. Businesses down on Mars hated the way the Earth government controlled who could and couldn’t land on Mars. In fact, most of the businesses on Mars hated the whole idea of government, but that’s another matter. I had a sneaking suspicion that some of these mavericks might not mind breaking the government embargo — if there was a profit in it. And hosting a bunch of alien refugees and then selling media access to the highest bidder, could be a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot, enough to make company chairpeople dizzy.

So I had to wheel and deal with a whole bunch of people who were expert wheelers and dealers. After five minutes, my head hurt. After ten, I wanted to blow them all up. After thirty, I was in a dead zone and automatically playing one off against the other.

This was going to take some time.

The Palmeenee spokesperson asked for an update, wanting to know what was going on, but it wasn’t through curiosity. It was through worry. While I could provide info, though, I couldn’t supply explanations. Why were we still in orbit? What was taking so long? Why were the Palmeenee still suffering?

Politics. At least I had someone who was more expert than I was with that muck. I found Tekura tending to an old Palmeenee, helping to feed him/her/it/jher some of our last ice-cream. The Palmeenee loved ice-cream, especially vanilla.

‘Tell me about politics.’ I sat on a three-legged stool next to her.

She glanced at me with a ‘what took you so long?’ expression. ‘Make yourself useful. Use a broom while you listen.’

‘I can’t stay long. I have a Martian logistics firm waiting for my response to their offer.’

‘Sweep. Ask questions.’

I swept. ‘So why is the government so keen to stop us from docking at Deimos Station? We’ve got injured beings here.’

‘The government’s making a point. Once refugees set foot on land — and a space station qualifies as land, apparently — they qualify for all sorts of legal status. They can appeal to courts, ask for representation, move from Mars to Earth, the sorts of things that would make it hard to get rid of them.’

‘And the government wants to get rid of them?’

‘The government wants to be seen as taking a tough stand on who comes to Earth.’

I had an answer for that. I’d been doing some research. ‘But universal law states that refugees — of any kind — are entitled to seek safe haven.’

Tekura scooped up some ice-cream and ladled it into the Palmeenee’s mouth. ‘That’s right. It comes from an agreement made way back in the early twentieth century.’ She dropped the spoon in the bowl she was holding. ‘Wars have been displacing people for ages and refugees have been refugees for ages. If we’re going to be humane, and make any claim at being civilised, we have to help those in need. Who’s more in need than refugees?’

I rocked back on my heels, then held the broom in front of me as a mock shield. ‘Hey, I’m on your side, remember?’

Tekura frowned, then patted the Palmeenee on the shoulder and rose. She took my arm and steered me out of the cargo bay.

‘Get ready, Damien,’ Tekura said. ‘The politicians are about to use every tool in their bag of dirty tricks.’

‘That doesn’t sound good.’

‘It isn’t. And we’re caught up in it, like it or not. Be prepared to be trashed.’

‘Me? What did I do?’

‘Nothing, but that doesn’t matter. Smearing someone is an ancient and effective tactic.’ She sighed. ‘Politicians are really, really clever, in some ways, at least. Find a hair, and they’ll split it. They’ll start to raise doubts. Are these Palmeenee really refugees? Are there Palmeenee aboard who could be criminals? Could these Palmeenee be carrying diseases that could spread? Could it be that some of these Palmeenee are just taking the opportunity to look for a nicer place to live, a place where they could make money? And what about the people piloting the ship they’d come on? Surely they’re criminals of some sort or other. Accepting refugees would be condoning the activities of these lowlifes.’

‘Wow.’

‘Much wow.’

I leaned against the bulkhead near the entrance to the bridge. ‘Can we do anything about it?’

‘Sure we can.’ Tekura’s smile wasn’t pleasant. ‘The government’s spinning stories, but two can play at that game. It’s time we got the media on our side.’

So in between all her other duties, Tekura became our Media Liaison Officer. I even made her a badge out of an old Second Officer badge that Uncle Jayden had left lying around. She held it in her hands and studied it carefully. She turned it over and then back again. ‘Thanks. But I think I need to tell you something.’

Uh-oh. ‘Don’t if you don’t want to.’

‘I don’t want to, but I think you need to know that I’m sort of running away.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘I mean it. My mum has no idea that I hooked up with you. She’s been sending me angry messages, constantly, ordering me back home.’

‘Ordering? Ouch.’

‘She’s like that. You get that way when you’re important.’

Double uh-oh. ‘How important?’

‘She a minister in the government.’

‘One of the big ones?’

‘She’s number three in the hierarchy.’

‘Your mum is Minister for the Arts?’

‘That’s right. She was inspecting Banger Station to see about turning it into another artist studio cluster. She dragged me along to stop me jaunting off post-graduation.’

‘And is this out there on the Stream yet? Minister’s daughter saves refugees!’

‘Not yet.’

‘I bet your mum can’t wait.’

‘She doesn’t know. Not yet.’

I rubbed my head. ‘And you’re telling me this now why?’

‘It’s going to come out sooner or later. Thought you might like to hear about it ahead of time.’

Tekura negotiated with some of the spy eye operators and allowed access to half a dozen. She managed things, of course, so that any video would show the Palmeenee as suffering calmly, as acting with dignity in their small family groups, of being no threat at all.

The best response came from showing the Palmeenee playing Go. That rated through the roof. More likes than a cat snuggling with a penguin while a duckling looked on.

I continued my sneaky discussions with Mars corporations, which impressed Tekura. ‘Mr Naive becomes Mr Cunning? Nice.’

I wanted to see if any were prepared to send shuttles to dock with us directly and take the Palmeenee dirtside. Once they landed, Tekura assured me, everything would be different. The Palmeenee would have rights. ‘But don’t be surprised if the government goes to the next stage in the dirty tricks,’ she warned.

‘With the whole galaxy watching? What are they going to do? Blow us up?’

I didn’t like the look Tekura gave me, but she was towed away by a gang of little Palmeenee. She was in the semi-finals of the Go tournament.

Not long after that, two things happened in quick succession. First, another Palmeenee ship drifted into our system. It was detected out near Neptune. It was in a worse state than the vessel we’d rescued, but it wasn’t picked up by a merchant ship like us. It was picked up by the military, which started to tow it away, out of our system.

Everything went supernova.

You see, this crippled vessel started to come apart under the strain of towing and the situation turned chaotic. Soon, all over the Stream were government claims that the aliens on this vessel, the Palmeenee, had ejected their children, thrown them out into the vacuum of space in an effort to get the military spaceship to stop the towing and to take them in as refugees.

None of this actually happened, and that burned. Lies were told with perfectly straight faces. When spy eyes offered evidence that contradicted the government statements, they didn’t apologise, didn’t back down. The Prime Minister just got louder, denouncing such heinous actions and declaring that our borders were sacrosanct, that the decision about who comes to our worlds was ours.

Nice.

The Stream can’t overload, but my doodad nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to cope with the flood of alerts I’d set up. Tekura managed better, but she said it was like trying to navigate through a swarm of bees. Bees that were on fire. With lasers.

Second, while the attention of the universe was on this other Palmeenee vessel and the little ones overboard, we were boarded by the military.

The hatch was blown off and the cargo bay started to decompress. This only lasted a second until a temporary airlock was snapped into place, but it was enough to throw everyone on the Port Vila into panic. Little ones climbed up as high as they could, squeaking and rattling. The mature Palmeenee stalked around, rattling claws. Loose items were sucked towards the hatch. Tekura caught hold of one of the bulkhead struts and grabbed my arm as I stumbled and flailed.

The door to the temporary airlock opened and space marines in full battle gear marched in. They didn’t point their weapons at us. Not quite. The leader surveyed the cargo bay and made one of those fist-pumping, pointing motions. They flipped their helmets back and I was relieved to see that they all looked embarrassed, uncomfortable and even apologetic. The leader could have been used in advertising — tall, with a good-looking skull, striking angular features. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ she asked.

I looked at Tekura. She rolled her eyes and elbowed me. ‘He is.’

I brushed myself down. ‘Damien Heong. What’s the meaning of this?’

‘Just following orders, Captain,’ the leader of the marines replied. She pointed to the Palmeenee. ‘There,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Secure the area.’ She turned back to me. ‘If you and your crew will leave the cargo bay, Captain, we can complete our business.’

I took a deep breath. ‘And what is your business?’

‘We’re taking these illegal entrants to a safe place where they will receive the best care possible.’

‘Mars? Earth?’

The marine shook her head. ‘A safe place.’

I felt the heat rising in my face, but I didn’t care. ‘These are my passengers. I’m responsible for them. They don’t just need the best care, they need immediate help. I’m taking them to Mars.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Captain.’

‘But the Law of the Sea says we must.’

‘The Law of the Sea?’ The marine frowned. ‘What century are you living in, Captain?’

So maybe I shouldn’t have sworn at a marine. And probably, certainly I shouldn’t have pushed a marine in the chest. That’s what caused me to be beaten up by a squad of marines, I guess. ‘Restrained’, I think they put it, but with a few well-placed punches and kicks just to let me know not to mess around with marines.

Groggily, from my position on the deck, cable ties around my hands and feet, I looked for Tekura. She was being cooperative, apparently, as she wasn’t on the deck and cable tied. She caught my eye and gave me a grim thumbs-up sign. What for, I had no idea, so I fumed and struggled and swore and all I did was end up exhausted and bruised and ignored by the marines.

What they were doing was wrong. It was inhuman. All the good things like kindness and pity and sharing were thrown overboard just to help win an election by playing to the worst in us. The Palmeenee as bogeymen? Spare me. Evil outsiders, nasty others, we fear them … Well, the big guys didn’t, not really, but they knew they could use the Palmeenee to scare enough voters into voting for them.

Smart.

I lurched from angry to feeling sick — gut-deep, punishing nausea. I lay there, helpless and ashamed, until the marines had gone and Tekura cut me loose.

The marines took the Palmeenee somewhere way out in the Oort Cloud, somewhere the government claims isn’t part of the solar system, and so landing them there doesn’t grant them any rights. No rights at all, no chance for anyone to learn about their hardships and suffering, no pity.

Tekura and I were left on a ship that was now allowed to dock at Deimos Station, but the cloud of spy eyes and actual news vessels gave me the shudders. Tekura and I put our heads together and set course for Saturn.

It’s funny, but the Port Vila was back to how it was when we left Earth’s orbit, but minus the Palmeenee it now felt so much emptier.

We talked a lot. Now, after everything, Tekura was able to share about her mum and about politics and what it had cost her. She laughed at the embarrassment all this had caused her mum. She said it was payback time. I told her about my parents, Rob and Daz, and how scarred they were from the war and how I’d like to stop that sort of thing from happening.

‘We can change things, you know,’ she said. I’d set up a wide horizontal display on the bridge to show us the way ahead. Saturn was a tiny bright dot, getting bigger.

‘How?’

‘Politics.’

‘I thought you hated politics.’

‘I’ve just seen too much of it much too close.’ She shuddered, then grinned. ‘But that’s taught me a few things, like how not to do it.’

‘Are you sure you’re not just trying to surprise your mother?’

‘Oh, it’ll surprise her all right when we get a whole lot of people on our side and start a movement for change.’

‘Lovely idea, but what’s going to get people on our side?’

She pulled a spy eye out of her pocket. ‘A nice close-up video of space marines beating up a heroic ship’s captain who was only trying to do the right thing for dozens of despairing and injured refugees?’

‘Heroic?’ I liked the sound of that.

‘It’s the truth, and that’s what we’ll offer that old-style politics doesn’t. We’ll be open and truthful. No lies just to grab and hold onto power. We’ll share what we know. We’ll even answer questions when we’re asked instead of talking around in circles.’

‘You really have seen it up close.’

‘You bet. Close enough to know that even if the truth is a sticky and uncertain concept, it’s worth striving for.’

‘What about the Palmeenee? The refugees? We have to do something for them.’

She was drumming her feet on the deck with excitement. Her cat tattoo waved at me. ‘We have to help anyone who is so desperate they flee their home. How could we not?’

How could we not? That was something to live by. ‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

‘That means we won’t be seeing Saturn.’

‘Saturn can wait.’

Tekura’s hand found mine. ‘It’s going to take us weeks to get back to Earth. What’ll we do in the meantime?’

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’

She did. We used the time to plan how we were going to change the system.

With time left over for other stuff.