Garbage Star (Galaxy Mavericks Book 4) Read online

  The coilshots had connected, causing minor damage to the ship’s hull. The company adjusted Refugio’s mortgage upward. There were riots everywhere, claiming breach of contract, racism and corporate slavery.

  Eddie and his family sued and joined a class-action lawsuit against Macalestern. But they didn’t even make it to court.

  A sleepy gringo attorney for the company showed up one day with a few pages of the contract highlighted. Eddie’s grandfather was waiting for him in his wheelchair, with a cowboy hat, string tie, and signature bushy mustache. He held a shotgun across his lap, told him to bring it on.

  And then the attorney explained—in Spanish with perfect form—that the planet had violated the Survey clause, that the company had every right to countersue, and oh, by the way, here are seventeen other clauses that you’re violating, too, and we’ve known about this for the last few years but were nice enough not to say anything because we had empathy for your situation so why don’t you drop this little action while you’re ahead and we’ll pretend you’re not in breach of contract for those other things… but you better clean them up because we did you a favor in selling you this prime real estate that others would have paid double the money for, comprende?

  It wasn’t the threat that had rubbed Eddie the wrong way. He expected those the moment the attorney walked off the ship. It was the comprende at the end, like a hammer coming down on a nail. Like he and his entire heritage didn’t mean a thing in the face of corporate profits.

  It pissed him off. Made him want to punch that guy right in the face.

  But his grandfather listened calmly, anger quietly boiling inside him. He cocked his shotgun, and then said “Get the fuck off my planet.”

  The attorney went pale, returned to his ship, and flew away at full speed.

  But the message was clear.

  They had no standing to sue.

  Eddie had never trusted Macalestern. But from then on, he really didn’t trust them.

  And now a pioneer ship lay in front of him, a reminder of that not-so-distant memory.

  Did it belong to Macalestern?

  Probably not.

  But he wanted to cash it in.

  Any money he could scrape off the ship would help the family in the long run.

  He inspected the ship’s bay door, which was folded up like an accordion. He grabbed an edge and pulled as hard as he could, peeling it back.

  He climbed onboard.

  The interior stunk like human refuse.

  The septic tank had probably ruptured.

  He was used to smelling garbage—so much that he didn’t mind the terrible smells, even when he was next to a pile of really nasty trash—but the smell of human waste always hit his nostrils hard. It had a particular stench that no garbage man liked. Especially when you had it on you.

  He pulled out his flashlight and stepped carefully through the darkness.

  The ship’s airlock was tiny compared to the garbage ship’s. Several hooks that would have normally housed spacesuits were empty.

  He stepped in a puddle of water.

  Above, an exposed pipe leaked from the ceiling. Eddie wiped a drip of water from his forehead, smelled his hand.

  Just water.

  Thank God.

  He moved farther into the dark airlock, trying to illuminate as much as he could. The walls were covered with screens, all dark.

  He came to a skywalk that was still intact. But the glass was broken.

  A sign hung from the ceiling. It had an arrow that pointed forward and read Specimen Room.

  Specimen?

  The last time he’d heard that word was in high school. His biology teacher, a lanky man with a dopy voice that could have put an insomniac to sleep, would repeat it over and over as he talked about extraterrestrial biology.

  “Now that pig specimen is an interesting find… imagine this specimen’s cells in a Petri dish. You’d see them multiply, and divide, and multiply again into new specimens…”

  Even though it was a memory, Eddie found himself yawning.

  He was tired. He could have used a long nap right now, put the ship on autopilot and slept in his quarters until he got home…

  But he had to keep exploring. He couldn’t just leave the ship alone. What if an alien was hiding inside?

  He felt his hips.

  No handcoil.

  He’d left it in the cockpit. He’d never been on a voyage yet where he needed it.

  A knot formed in his throat.

  He should have turned back.

  But his body carried him forward. To a steel door with rounded corners.

  He pushed the door open and entered the Specimen Room—a mobile laboratory. It was a wide-open space with several tables holding microscopes and computer panels. Surprisingly, the equipment was not damaged, for it was bolted to the tables.

  The walls were caved in and he had to crouch to make it past them.

  The computers were all dead.

  “What’s the story here,” he whispered.

  He stopped at what used to be a floor-to-ceiling observation window. It had completely shattered, with teeth-like shards sticking out from the edges.

  He sniffed. No evidence of fire.

  Eddie himself had to constantly monitor the garbage ship for fires. If a fire broke out in space and you didn’t catch it in time, you were screwed.

  But there was no sign of fire. No burning anywhere.

  His boots crunched on broken wires from a panel in the floor.

  He knelt to inspect it.

  The wires had been pulled out of the floor in a haphazard manner, as if someone had ripped them out, looking for something.

  The wires were dead.

  Thank God.

  He grabbed a bundle of wires and fingered them, then let them flop to the metal floor.

  Then he made his way across the observation floor toward a stairwell that looked like it led up to the second level of the room.

  His hands began to quiver(tremble), but he started up the stairs.

  He swept the flashlight up the stairway, and its white light illuminated the blue walls and carpeted steps.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but a squeaky voice came out.

  “Hello?”

  His voice broke, so he said it again.

  “Hello? Anybody up there?”

  The steps creaked under his feet.

  He was halfway up the stairs when he saw it.

  Streamed on the walls.

  Reddish-brown like mud. An intensely metallic smell that stung his nostrils.

  He covered his nose.

  “Dios mio,” he said, crossing himself.

  He reached the top of the steps. The second level of the Specimen Room looked like the first, except there was blood everywhere. Old blood.

  And on the back wall, there were metal tubes with broken glass, and walls inside of the tubes that looked like torture racks. They gave Eddie a bad vibe.

  “If anybody’s in there, speak up now,” he said, growing in confidence. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll blow you away.”

  Silence.

  Across the room he spotted the second-floor observation window. Miraculously, some of the glass was still intact, but it was puckered up, blue like water.

  He breathed in deeply. He sniffed and got a whiff of a stale, pungent odor.

  Something rotten.

  It grew on him the closer he walked to the window.

  The instrument panels were dark.

  The desks around the room were empty.

  Eddie shrugged.

  “Talk about weird.”

  He turned to exit the room when he tripped over something.

  A hand.

  He screamed. Jumped back. Almost fell out of the observation window.

  He raised his fist to punch, but quickly realized he didn’t need to.

  A male corpse in a gray suit was lying on the floor.

  Chapter 3

  Eddie nearly ran screaming at the sigh
t of the corpse.

  The room smelled of urine, blood, and fecal matter.

  He stumbled and fell on his back, scrambling away. He screamed.

  But the corpse lay unmoving, staring up at him with ballooning eyes and a somber grin.

  The man looked like a scientist. He wore a gray suit with gold sunglasses. Blood caked around his mouth. His body was still intact. His stomach was swarming with maggots. Flies buzzed in the air around the room.

  On the man’s chest was a name plate: T. Miloschenko. Next to the man’s hand was a golden pendant on a silver chain. The pendant had a teal front made of smooth gemstone. Eddie picked it up, turned it around—something was engraved on it. Numbers. Some sort of passcode.

  He opened the pendant. Inside was a picture of a woman. Dark-skinned. Black, flowing hair.

  Must have been his wife.

  Maybe she’d like to have this pendant. As a remembrance. He slid it into his pocket, and then his eyes drifted back to the man’s disemboweled guts and the maggots feeding on them.

  Eddie didn’t need to see any more. He crawled out of the Specimen Room, slammed the door, and fought the urge to vomit.

  What was a dead body doing here?

  Why was there only one? From what he’d seen, it took several people to run a ship like this: a pilot, a few crew members, and an observation team.

  Where was everyone else?

  This guy was unlucky.

  Really unlucky.

  A spaceship just didn’t end up in the trash. Not a fully functional spaceship. Eddie had often been to ship junkyards, but the ships there were always scrapped first, or flattened. Never completely intact.

  And then the realization came to Eddie that this man could have been murdered.

  His heart pumped faster..

  Was the killer onboard? Couldn’t be.

  Probably left the man to die on the ship. Probably intended for the man to die along with the ship.

  He gulped as he tried to remember where he might have picked up the busted pioneer ship.

  He couldn’t remember. There were so many planets on his route.

  God, he’d never seen a dead body before!

  He backed out of the ship at first, then ran. He found himself nearly diving out of the airlock. The fresh air was a welcome change after the stuffiness in the pioneer ship.

  He breathed in deeply. His heart was still racing.

  The pioneer ship would be a crime scene now.

  He couldn’t get the image of the dead man’s face out of his head. How the lips pulled into a snarl. How the mouth was white with maggots.

  He crossed himself as he staggered through the airlock. Climbing the stairs to the cockpit, he uttered a prayer for the dead man—something, anything to take his mind off what he’d just seen.

  ***

  Upon returning to the garbage ship’s cockpit, Eddie’s first impulse was to call the police.

  But the radiation was too strong and the screens on his instrument panel stared at him dumbly and his headphones hissed static.

  He grabbed the joystick and pulled up in a jerky motion. The ship hovered in the air, wobbling like a saucer on a stick. Then he rocketed out of the Upper Arm Transfer Station.

  The ship traveled so much faster now that he had jettisoned the trash. He left the transfer station far behind, and it was a glimmer in the rearview cameras when he realized he didn’t have his seatbelt on. He clicked it on and sighed.

  The star map, glittering green and gold, showed the garbage ship in a three-dimensional grid among blinking stars.

  Tracing a path with his fingers, he manipulated the map and zoomed out. A red dot appeared at the edge where the map began to curve upon itself: Refugio.

  He did a quick mental calculation.

  Fifteen light-years. Full tank of fuel.

  Eight hours…

  He pulled at his hair. Eight hours with a dead body in his airlock.

  It was unlucky. Unclean. Unholy. His mother would have a heart attack if she knew Eddie had found un muerto.

  “Why didn’t you release the ship into space?” she would ask. “You’re going to bring bad spirits to Refugio.”

  He’d always believed in the spiritual, of God and ancestors and a strange world just out of kilter with our dimension that you couldn’t see but could always feel if you opened your heart to it. Sometimes, like his mom said, and his abuelita before her, some things were better left to God.

  His finger hovered over the airlock button.

  He had to let the ship go. Maybe when he got home, he could pray, take the ship to his pastor and they could exorcise the thing. He’d already done the unthinkable in exploring it.

  He touched the button.

  It didn’t depress.

  He hadn’t hit it hard enough.

  And then he thought of the corpse again…that man, whoever he was, had to have had a family.

  What if he had kids?

  That made Eddie nauseous and want to run to the bathroom—how would he be able to look the man’s kids in the eye and tell them that he jettisoned their dad into space because he could have been harboring an evil spirit?

  How the hell was a kid supposed to take that? A wife who loved him and committed her life to him? A mom?

  What if Eddie were the dead guy, and some lone traveler came to Refugio one day and said to his wife “Señora, I’m sorry, but I had to cast your husband into space to save my own soul…”

  Ay! The tears! The drama! Mama Tonia, her cholesterol would finally take her. Alma would go insane with sorrow. His kids would have to grow up in a split second like he did, when Papa Ito stood up against the Zachary Empire and the family had to flee for their lives.

  He took his finger off the warm red button.

  He couldn’t do it.

  Instead, he pressed the hyperspace button.

  “Are you sure you wish to enter hyperspace?” the computer asked.

  Eddie consented, and the space around the ship turned purple as it roared forward.

  Chapter 4

  Eddie flew along in hyperspace, its vast swirling column of purple twisting and turning in front of the garbage ship.

  He gripped the joystick hard even though the ship was on autopilot and he could have relaxed.

  But he couldn’t decompress, couldn’t get the image of the dead man out of his mind. He’d have to go to church and pray extra long and hard to exorcise his soul.

  He was glad to be in hyperspace, barreling away from the Garbage Star’s dangerous radiation.

  But he didn’t know what was next.

  What if the police suspected him of murder?

  Eddie had a clean criminal record. Back home, on his old planet, in high school, he’d been sent to detention for speaking Spanish in school. Once, in the hallway, he’d asked his cousin Rafi in Spanish what time he was coming over to do homework. The assistant principal heard it and it was all she needed to hear.

  But that was years ago. Otherwise, he never caused any trouble.

  He thought back to all the detective television shows he’d ever seen.

  Lone man in space.

  Body found.

  Lone man is only one around for miles.

  Lone man is suspect.

  Lone man is brown like Eddie. La raza.

  Because lone man is brown and because lone man can’t afford a good attorney, he goes to jail.

  Sometime when the man is in his seventies, a new DNA test proves his innocence.

  Oh boy…

  Eddie ran a hand through his hair.

  He checked the star map again. He was out of the danger zone.

  “Finally!” he said.

  He hit the hyperspace button again and the ship slowed down. Purple warp space dissolved into black.

  Nothing around for light-years. Just glittering stars.

  He glanced at his radio. He twisted a knob on his instrument panel and it crackled to life, a blanket of white noise in his ear.

  His fingers
scrambled as he twisted the dial toward the right station and adjusted the frequency.

  He had to call the police.

  They could meet him when he arrived home.

  He wouldn’t sleep until the dead body was taken off his ship.

  Already it seemed like ages since he’d found it.

  He hadn’t even noticed himself. He was sweating. His forehead. His palms. His chest.

  He loosened his spacesuit. Now that he was out of radiation’s way, he didn’t need it. A cooling sensation overtook his body as he tossed the suit aside.

  He panted as he reached for the radio.

  No…

  He couldn’t call the police panting. They’d be suspicious. It would sound like Eddie had murdered the man.

  He programmed a course for Refugio and put the ship on autopilot. He slipped out of the cockpit, down into the living quarters. He raided the cabinets until he found a white paper bag filled with pan dulce—Mexican sweet bread with sugar crusted on the surface.

  He pulled a soda out of the refrigerator and surprised himself how thirsty he was when he downed it in a few seconds.

  “Aaah…”

  He turned on the television. Soccer.

  His favorite team was playing. Santa Juana del Bosque. He knew the purple and gold uniforms anywhere. They had the lead, and were kicking the soccer ball furiously across fake turf as the crowd cheered.

  And then..

  “¡Gol!”

  “Yes!” Eddie cheered, raising the can of soda above his head. A small arc of soda spilled across the carpet.

  Santa Juana led 4-2.

  He loved those kind of odds.

  The team had hired a couple of college kids from the north—lot of good potential. Fast. Could run for hours. Good intuition about where the ball would go. The team had a great chance of winning La estrella de la vida Cup this season.

  His dream growing up, like that of every kid in la raza, was to be a pro soccer player. But like all dreams, that ended suddenly in high school when he broke his ankle during practice.

  That killed all of his pro soccer dreams.

  Plus, family was more important.

  Eddie was wearing a purple and gold rugby himself, with a logo of an owl on the front. He wished he could have been at the game, in the stands, cheering on his favorite team.