📘The Star Pirate's Folly | 2: Midtown
For many, life on Surface requires overcoming the everyday brutality of neglect.
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Chapter 2: Midtown
In the bathroom, Bee brought her hands to her face and inhaled the fruity scent of the soap she’d used to wash off the jam. Lines of dirt and grime remained in the grooves of her skin and under her nails—that would take some scrubbing—but they smelled clean. She could get used to the Midtown. Easy access to food and a safe, clean place to sleep at night was a welcome relief from the daily grind against hunger.
Find him, Mother said.
“I know,” Bee groaned. “I know, I know.”
Once Mother got going she didn’t stop. Ever since she died, her voice had lingered on, whispering in Bee’s ear to help find the man who killed her, the man with sky-blue eyes. Over the years, Bee had to learn when to ignore her and when to listen—sometimes Mother could be a bit paranoid. But that little voice had saved her more than once.
Kill him.
“I will, Mother.”
Bee tuned Mother’s whispers out while she undressed. Plenty of time to clean up before Hargrove returned. She tapped the control pad for the shower and hot water fell in neat streams to the drain below.
Bee held her hands under the shampoo nozzle and it squirted some fragrant crimson goo onto her palms. As she lathered it in she smelled berries. Something familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She still didn’t truly believe she was taking a hot shower in her own private bathroom. It felt… rich. As she washed, Bee wondered how much the room would have cost her—and how long Hargrove would let her stay.
He’d said two weeks, but if she screwed up she’d be back on the streets. She’d do everything she could to keep her little room. Any kind of work Hargrove gave her she planned to do without complaint. Cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors—whatever he asked of her. Anything was better than the roiling waves of panic she felt every day.
She had no future, only the present. Only her immediate needs. Bee had nobody to look out for her. No one to help when the dusters came looking for fresh bodies. Janey helped her for a while, but that friendship didn’t last long.
Bee swore she’d never live like the slave Janey turned into, her brain rotted from that horrible poisonous dust. It wasn’t Janey’s fault. She couldn’t help herself after the dust took root. Neither could Mother. Nobody could.
Overlookers called the stuff “dust,” even though Bee knew it wasn’t exactly. It was really made using spores from a fungus that grew out in the jungle beyond the city’s dome—she’d seen the public service announcements enough times to remember. In the wild, the fungus would wait until an animal came near them, then puff out a cloud of the spores. The animal would become calm, lie down, and allow itself to be slowly covered and consumed.
In the same way, using the spores on people made them docile and completely willing to follow any command. This was the main draw of the dusting attacks. It was an almost everyday occurrence in Overlook City when Mother got taken. Gangs of these dusters, usually people from the outer colonies or the asteroid belt, manufactured the dust in secret labs out in the jungle. Then they’d smuggle it in and use it to make people do things they’d never do otherwise.
Bee saw news reports detailing the victims’ devotion to following orders while under the influence of the dust. People would empty their bank accounts or steal things for the dusters—even kill other people. And they’d be happy doing it, whatever they were asked.
A common method of infection was for the duster to ask their mark a question, carefully wafting the spores into the victim’s face, forcing them to inhale it. Before the victim even knew what was happening, they were in the grip of “the devil’s dust.”
It caused chaos. Once the spores took root, they did irreversible damage to the brain, even after the infection cleared. Months after being dosed, the victims would still obey any order given to them. Mother was just one more.
Bee lost everything that day. One minute she and Mother were walking through a crowd together, hand in hand. The next, Mother was speaking to a man with sky-blue eyes and dropped Bee’s hand. Left her in the middle of all those people, right then and there.
Bee had never felt terror like that before. She tried to follow them, but quickly got lost in the city. Eventually Bee ran into someone who called the police and they took her back to her home on Overlook Station, the orbital station built decades earlier by the first settlers from Earth.
They found Mother the next day.
Bee was too young at the time to really understand what they did, but she found those details later in the police report. They used Mother all day. For fun. For money. For the hell of it, maybe. Bee didn’t know or care about their motivations. All that mattered to her was they did it to Mother.
Over the course of that day, Mother had made a series of credit transfers to different accounts, which she did seemingly of her own free will. The money to pay for their home on Overlook Station vanished. With space so tight up there, Bee and her mother quickly found themselves booted onto Surface, suddenly homeless like so many others.
Overlook City was packed with folks from beyond the belt looking to escape the constant threat of pirate raids. Overlook was supposed to be one of hundreds of dome cities on Surface, but during the rebellion those plans went up in smoke. Now there were barely twenty domes left on the whole planet—and half those were built after the war. Bee and her mother fell through the cracks like many others.
Mother survived for four months on the city streets before she died filthy and diseased. Her body was accustomed to the comparative safety, comfort, and cleanliness of Overlook Station, and was completely unable to fend for herself and her daughter. Bee was too young to do anything but stay at Mother’s side and cry.
During Mother’s last week of life, she ran a high fever that seemed to burn right through the fog crippling her mind. Mother pulled Bee in close and forced a hoarse command from her ravaged body.
Find him, kill him, Mother said.
After that, the fever must have roasted her brain because she would just mumble and babble—to herself, to nobody. Fantasies of torture and vengeance tumbled from her cracked lips, Bee listening wide-eyed and rapt to every word. Mother's last words set a course for the rest of her young daughter’s life.
And then it was all hunger and survival. Bee tried not to think about the things she’d seen, the things she’d been forced to do to keep on clawing toward another miserable day. It was the fire in her gut that kept her going, stoked by Mother’s last words.
And now she finally had some solid ground to stand on. She would find the man with sky-blue eyes and make him pay.
Shortly after Bee’s shower, Hargrove returned for his promised tour. Three polite raps at the door announced his presence and Bee opened it to find the man holding a folded magenta uniform that matched his own.
“For my newest employee.” He held the uniform out for her. “Go on, I’ll give you some time to change. Meet me out here when you’re finished.”
“Oh, I’m starting now?” Bee asked, surprised. “Uh, be right back.”
After showing her the basic layout of the hotel, Hargrove brought her to the kitchen and left her in the care of the head chef, Gunther—a bald-headed, thickly accented gorilla of a man. She spent the afternoon scrubbing pots and pans in hot soapy water. The guy to her right rinsed them off after Bee cleaned them, and the conveyor belt kept bringing more dishes to clean.
Bee took immense satisfaction in seeing just how pristine the dishes looked after they came in so messy. She wasn’t used to things being clean, so what most of the other employees seemed to consider a chore was a complete novelty to her.
Being in the kitchen thrilled her, even if she was only at the outskirts of things. The clattering of metal and plates, the incomprehensible orders booming from Gunther, and the general chaos of making all the food was exciting and mystifying to her at once.
After a while, Gunther barked something at her and shooed her off the dishwashing line to the kitchen’s exit. Someone else took her place. She stood there confused for a moment, thinking maybe she had done something wrong, when Hargrove appeared.
“Gunther tells me you’ve done well,” he said.
Bee shrugged. “Guess so. I’ve never really done this before. And I couldn’t really understand him, so I’m glad he thought I did okay.”
Hargrove laughed. “Well in any case, your shift is over for the day. As long as you don’t cause me trouble, you’re free to do as you like now. Just come by my office in the lobby tomorrow morning at nine.”
“Thanks, Hargrove.”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean it,” Bee insisted. “You helped me today. Most people wouldn’t have done that. I’ll remember it.”
Hargrove smiled as he turned to leave. “Goodnight child, enjoy your room. Gunther was very impressed with your work today—keep it up and the job is yours again tomorrow.”
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