Starcustard { chapters 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 }
Chapter 1
Optional music track: Kelley Stoltz - Mystery
A flock of spacesheep waded through the weightless atmosphere, free and wild.
Gen had her nose pressed against the window. Sometimes she wished that she were a spacesheep. Sad as this may seem, it was a vast improvement on yesterday, when a cargo ship had floated by and she'd wished she were a crate of tinned whatever beans.
She watched the translucent, opalescent and rubber-like bodies of the spacesheep retreat into nothingness, their curious, glowing red eyes looking around and about them, tails trailing behind them like torn sheets of silk.
Gen wanted to slip through the glass and float dreamily after them. But she couldn't. Mostly because she'd die of asphyxiation anyway, but also because she was trapped in this horrible place, her stepparents' ship, with just herself for company. Maybe asphyxiation was a good thing, she thought horribly. Her face slid down the cold glass, making a wet path through the condensation that her warm breath had formed.
Her head now rested upon her bed: a thin, white sheet stretched tightly across a small, hard mattress, with an uncovered, blotchy yellow, dribble-stained pillow in a heap at one end. Her room was a metallic shell: floor, walls and ceiling, all the same. There was one round window through which she gazed out at space. She hated that room.
Once, Gen had spent six hours in her stepparent's bedroom, organizing her stepstepmother's sixty-three pairs of fuzzy slippers, and she had gotten lost. She'd been thinking about how ridiculous her stepstepmother always looked with fuzzy slippers wedged all over into the fat of her chubby tail, and had taken a wrong turn out of the closet. The bed itself was so gigantic that it took Gen fifty-seven steps just to walk from one side to the other while she was straightening the sheets. There was an engraved silver post at each corner, three times as tall as Gen was. She had climbed one, when she was younger, to see what was at the top. Nothing was, except the spotlessly smooth ceiling, but when her stepstepmother had caught her up there little Gen had been told off and then slapped half a dozen times. She didn't dare touch the shiny poles after that, not even to pretend to dust them. Sometimes she daydreamed about what she would do if that soft pink room were hers, and all the fuzzy slippers too. As she lay there on her bed, Gen thought about how difficult it might be to climb bedposts while wearing slippers, and how unfair it was that she would probably never get the chance to try it and see.
* * *
Optional music track: 'The Chemical Brothers - My Elastic Eye.'
Meanwhile, Gen's stepstepmother and stepfather were currently a few rooms away, in a room that was filled with what appeared to be a jungle of fibre optic plants, lights running through their various stems, stalks, leaves and fronds; this room was filled with very little else, other than a few barely visible leather sofas. Gen's stepparents were positioned in what little space there was available near the doorway, which was quite an achievement, considering their immense size.
Gen's stepfather, Mr Gilt Humphrey Nousu, was a large, slug-shaped creature with walrus-like skin that had random tufts of hair protruding in various places covering his whole body, although with a layer of blubber at least thrice as thick as the tusked animal would have, even if it were the biggest chocolate lover of its kind. Gilt’s head was indefinable from the rest of his body mostly due to a lack of neck, and made different from his rear end only by large, shiny orange eyes and a massive, pointy-toothed mouth; often his entire upper half would rear up, revealing his glistening orange belly, so that he could address his slaves to their faces rather than their knees, while at the same time seeming doubly huge and formidable. From the mass that was his upper half protruded small arms which ended in thin, crooked fingers, giving the general appearance of a pair of twigs stuck in either side of a very ugly snowman.
Organza, his most recent wife after a line of many, including Gen's own human mother, was very similar to her counterpart, only slightly bigger and made ten times more scary with the application of make-up and a misplaced, wispy, sand-coloured wig taped to her head so that it didn't fall off.
In her right twig-like hand was a small, cube-shaped electrical device, with a holographic screen projected vertically through a thin slit along the top. It currently displayed a solemn-faced, black haired boy who looked to be in white pyjamas, with various statistics and hieroglyphic symbols surrounding him. It was a slavekid catalogue.
Organza pursed her lips and considered the scrawny boy in restless silence. That his wife was in the same room with him, Gilt instinctively knew, meant that she wanted something. She leaned over his shoulder and said, 'Look at the hologram, husband. He's gorgeous!'
Gilt grunted. 'We have enough slaveboys.'
'I don't think we do, sweetheart.' His wife smiled at him with her large mouth and batted her spiky fake eyelashes.
'We do.'
'Not any like this one,' Organza murmured.
Her husband, glowering, rose up and grabbed the slavekid catalogue out of her hand and threw it. It smashed against the floor and started to spit out irritating electronic hiccups. Organza put on her own high-gloss brand of petulance and made her huge, painted lips into a pinched frown.
Gilt turned away, feigning disgust, and maliciously crushed the contraption under his fat tail. Then he flicked it away as hard as he could, leaving skidmarks on the highly polished floor and scattering bolts and screws and loose wiring all over.
'What a mess,' he commented before shouting for his stepdaughter, 'Hydie!' Elsewhere, in her small bedroom, Gen heard and cringed. She hated them calling her that. 'Hydrogen Lythia Nousu! You worthless kid, where are you?'
His wife tsked. 'What?' he asked her. 'This disgracefully untidy spacelounge needs to be tidied!'
Shaking her head, Organza smiled a hideous smile at her husband and replied, 'You like it disgracefully untidy and you know it.'
He grunted and after a moment, said, 'What is the kid good for, eh?' Gen appeared in the doorway at that moment, standing unhappily, watching her stepparents. 'What is the kid good for,' her stepfather repeated, more loudly, 'if we can't order her pointlessly around? Eh, honey? Water the plants, Hydie. And then mop the ceilings. All of them.'
Gen looked around the room and thought to herself, they are fake plants. As her stepfather and his wife linked arms and waltzed clumsily out of the room, Gen noticed the pieces of wire and plastic strewn across the floor. When the adults were gone and she was sure they were gone, the little girl ran to pick up the pieces.
She pocketed them in her white, slave-style clothing for later, and then turned to face the multicoloured mass that was the fibre optic jungle. She scowled. It was a scowl towards the plants and their pointlessness partly, but mostly for her stepfather and stepstepmother. She loathed them enough as it was anyway, but the fact that they insisted on calling her Hydie only, she felt, made it worse. Such an ugly name from such ugly creatures.
The only reason the Nousus still kept Gen was because it was part of the rules and regulations of a guardianship law that had been put in place. Since her stepfather had married her mother in the knowledge that she had a child, as much as he'd tried to deny it, when her mother disappeared, he was forced to take responsibility for Gen. As a result, he and his wife made her life as miserable as they could. A s for the slavekids, she rarely saw them, let alone spoke to them, because they were always warned to keep out of the way, except for when the slug and his wife had visitors and they wanted to boast the size of their ranks.
Sighing irritably, Gen made to climb through the colourful wilderness. Then, quite suddenly, there was a rumbling scream from outside the room. It seemed to be one of great agony, but Gen did her best to ignore it and avoid going to see what was going on; her curiosity had got her into very painful trouble on various previous occasions. However, as hard as she tried to turn her attention back to the fibre optics, her curiosity got the better of her and she rushed outside into the spacious main hall where the source of all the noise was located instantly.
The main hall was a vast area in the very centre of the ship, occupied largely by two flights of gently curving metallic stairs. Upon the stairs and on the encircling balcony above stood at least a hundred slavekids, a sight which was in itself enough to make Gen wary. Then she saw the struggling mass of her stepfather below.
Optional music track: 'The Chemical Brothers - Out Of Control.'
He was spinning madly around, swinging his great tail dangerously and flailing his pathetic, tiny, useless little arms. Two slaveboys clung to his thick skin, tugging and tearing viciously at it, and at his sticky clumps and clusters of hair, pulling it out. Fluorescent green, viscous liquid oozed from his layered folds of fat. He was bleeding.
The slaveboys looked crazed, insane. Their eyes were wide and bloodshot, their teeth bared. Gen could tell that they were extremely tense just by looking at them: their muscles were stiffened, the veins in their small temples bulged, their hands extended like claws. They must have only just hit adolescence, and yet they suddenly carried so much strength, so much raw anger and desperation. They seemed greatly disturbed, spooked by something. Maybe they'd finally snapped under the pressure of slave work, Gen thought... but nothing like this had ever happened before. Their white clothes were smeared with the bright blood. They were eerily silent. They didn't cry out, just tore and tore and tore...
Then Organza came sliding slimily in, with almost her entire body reared up off the ground, and screaming even louder than her husband. In her wake, dozens of miniature, similarly walrus-skinned slugs slithered in: the monsters' offspring.
'You useless slaves, stop those traitors!' shrieked their mother, slamming her full weight down on the metallic floor and sending heavy vibrations throughout the ship.
But nobody moved; they only stared, deaf to the screaming, in wide-eyed horror.
'Curse you all! Curse you!' Organza, in desperation, flung her entire body accurately at one of her husband's attackers. The boy's body cracked unnaturally upon impact, and he dropped to the metallic floor, his red blood mingling with the green on his clothing; pale, cold and lifeless.
Organza's heavily powdered face distorted its painted features into an expression of smug satisfaction. Even the other boy had stopped to stare in horror, and Gen's stepfather took this opportunity to fling him off; he landed by his friend's dead corpse.
The smaller slugs circled the boys, threatening to engulf the survivor, but their father parted them by slithering up to the boy, his bleeding upper half reared. He winced with pain. His children retreated and watched expectantly.
'This is how I deal with disobedient humans,' he growled. 'I am not sympathetic towards those who defy me!' He cast an irritable glance in Gen's direction, so quick she almost missed it. 'You will all do well to take that into consideration. This insolent creature shall now be shown that such insubordination will not be tolerated!'
What Gen did next was unthinking, and even after she could not explain exactly why she did it. She fled from the platform, and back into the jungle room. She pulled one of the fibre optic plants from the great mass and ran back out into the main hall--
'Remember this,' said her stepfather, levering himself even further back, preparing to issue a fatal strike to the weak, quivering, cowering boy curled up under his shadow.
--and with the electronic plant still in one hand, Gen climbed awkwardly onto the railings and jumped down, smashing the plant into the side of her stepfather's skull a hard, harsh blow as she fell.
Sparks leapt from the plant as the stunned monster toppled sideways, and Gen hit the ground hard, badly twisting her ankle.
Then chaos broke out. Nothing, at that point, could have stopped it.
The offspring advanced towards the boy and Gen, enraged at this injustice, determined to have their revenge and finish them off. Their mother issued another concert of screaming and rushed to her husband's side.
He was dead.
Then, quite unexpectedly to all, the other slavekids ran to the aid of the boy and Gen. One girl, a few years older than Gen, kicked one of the slugs from Gen's face, and pulled her up to her feet. She had a dangerous glint to her eye.
Gen herself chased away a devious slug that tried to approach the girl from behind, but then had to limp bitterly to the side, out of the way as much as she could, as her ankle screamed out in agony.
Organza momentarily glanced and looked pained at the body that had been her husband, and then took up her rage once more and shouted at her children.
'Stop her! Stop her! Kill her!' This last instruction, to be fair, was more the rage speaking than Organza's own mind. Having her stepstepdaughter killed would remove all opportunities for later torturing the girl vengefully, for making little Hydie feel the deepest, most poignant regrets for what she had done. That, and also there were the tax deductions, although her own children were by then so numerous that the loss of Hydrogen's share would mean little. 'Kill her,' Organza squealed with all her rampant hatred. Her offspring struggled to move around, through, and over the mosh of slavekids.
Optional music track: 'Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak.' *
Gen looked at the boy by her side, wanting to ask him what had just happened. 'Faster,' he was saying under his breath. 'Faster, faster, come on...' Gen ran as fast as she could, limping clumsily. As she did so, she regained some sense of herself and began to feel increasingly sharp pains in her ankle. She felt a deep panic seeping closer and closer, perhaps contracted from some of the other children, but before it arrived she was able to speak. 'What are we going to do?' she managed to ask.
The slaveboy looked at her as if she were thick. 'We --' he began, 'we are going to run.'
'But to wh --'
'Just run!'
Gen ran. They all ran. Somewhere behind her Gen could hear the familiar rotational slickness of her stepsiblings' skateboards. The skaterslugs annoyed her to no end. When she had been younger, the slimy creatures had circled her on them, taunting her human form, her thin, dirty blonde hair, her pale eyes and her few freckles. Sometimes in her nightmares the skaterslugs would ride around and around, pulling brilliant tricks they could merely practice clumsily in real life. They even wore little helmets, she recalled, shivering. In those dreams Gen could never hear what they were saying. She would chase after the skateboards, for a reason she never understood, but she could not catch up.
Thinking about her nightmares was upsetting, but it distracted Gen from her ankle, from her guilt, and from the chaos that was chasing her. Could any nightmare really be worse than what was happening right now? The actions of those two boys had caused a massive upheaval, a mini revolution on the ship. The slavekids appeared to be winning, but that's not to say that they didn't have their losses. The casualties were dragged to the sides of the hall and up the stairs out of the way, with those still active doing their best to protect them and each other.
Organza, too mortified and aghast to do anything about it, hurried off to her room, leaving her children to sort things out.
'Look out!' someone shouted. Slavekids rarely spoke, and Gen had never heard any of them shout before. Her companion ducked and pulled her down with him. She turned her head to see one of her stepsiblings trying to skateboard up the curved wall of the corridor, perhaps in an attempt to overtake the rushing slavekids. It wasn't working.
'As long as we stay down in these corridors and keep running,' one of the slavekids said, out of breath and holding his side, 'they can't trap us.'
Gen thought about this. 'But they will just keep chasing us. We can't,' she realised, 'run forever.'
'Then we'll fight.'
'Fight?' The thought frightened her. She knew she stood no chance against her stepsiblings. Multiple humiliations had taught her this.
'Fight!' The other slavekids were shouting it now too. At the corner ahead the crowd of them slammed to a halt and fell over themselves trying to get at an enemy, any enemy. Their fury was unthinking.
Five of the alien slugs had succeeded in heading off the corridor from the other direction. There was a near-nonexistant moment of hesitation, during which the enemy looked menacingly and hard at the slaves, daring them to keep up their frenzied chanting, and the slaves milled anxiously, their chant dying away as they watched the row of mean-looking aliens in front of them. Then one slavekid ran at the figure nearest him, knocked her off her board, and proceeded to punch her in the face.
Many skateboards, not to mention toes and wrists and fingernails, were broken in the crush of bodies. Gen was nearly smothered by all the pushing, fighting slavekids. They shoved and shouted around her, and her only concern became to shove back and not get hurt.
'Gen! Gen,' someone was shouting her name. She couldn't tell who it was until he grabbed her elbow and turned her around to face him. 'Come with me.'
She couldn't help but comply. Anything to get out of here, away from this loud, chaotic horror.
'You killed him,' the boy said to her.
Gen saw his lips move but couldn't hear him. 'What? What are you doing?' She had to shout to hear her own self.
The boy was using his fingers to pry up the tiling of the floor. All the others were too busy tearing at each other, kicking, biting, and otherwise drawing blood, to notice anything else going on. Gen stood nervously, holding the wall, watching this stranger hack into the floor. He had a tattoo on his shoulder of three alien numerals and a letter. The same code was microbioeletronically branded onto the underside of his lip , one of his teeth, and his left patella. If he ever put a single toe outside the boundaries set by his owner, the Slavekid Card Authorities would know about it.
When there was a hole in the floor the right size, he took her hands and lifted her down into it. He climbed in after her and pulled the loose tiles back overhead.
'You killed him,' he repeated. 'That was ... it was brave of you.'
'Who are you? What are we doing? What's going on?'
The boy didn't answer at first, but walked along under the floor, climbing over pipes and around machinery, helping Gen to follow him. When they stopped, he sat down on a fuse box and she sat down next to him.
'Call me Mars. You're Hydrogen, right?'
She nodded. 'Gen,' she said.
'How's your ankle? You can't stay here. Mistress O will kill you, and not just once either.'
'You mean my stepstepmother?' asked Gen, knowing that he did and knowing that he was perfectly right.
'What can I do?'
'Leave.'
Gen had been frightened, with intervals of being very shocked and quite terrified, from the moment she'd looked down and seen her stepfather being attacked, but the way this slaveboy casually suggested that she escape the ship inspired a discomforting combination of immense fear and at the same time, a great unfounded hope which pained her soul more than anything ever had.
'Could I?' she spluttered, looking into his eyes and imagining her dearest dream come close enough to touch. 'How?'
'You can. I can't, but I can show you how. But you need oxygen, and you'll have to steal it. Probably as soon as possible, while that ruckus is still going on up there.'
'Show me what to do.'
'Follow me.'
They continued under the flooring, in the dark, for what felt like miles. Gen's ankle alternated between a chill numbness and a hot, throbbing ache.
'Where am I going?'
'That's up to you. I'll show you how to --'
'You can't come with me?'
'Gen,' he said, 'I'd be -- No. I can't. Not unless I want my skin fried right off my bones.'
Gen tried to think. The starcharts and planet directories, she knew from watching the captain on the spacedeck, were kept in the main data network and copied into both of the back up files. A paper map would have been easier to get her hands on, less likely for anyone to miss, but unfortunately, paper had been nonexistent in Gen's world ever since one of the more intelligent slavekids had somehow smuggled in a whole package of alphabet flashcards. Gilt and Organza had reported the boy to the Slavekid Card Authorities when they found out. All they had done in response was restate the well-known fact that literate slavekids were obvious risks, and that the couple had read and signed all the paperwork necessary to absolve the Authorities of blame.
Gen would have to find a card disk and copy the starcharts herself, if she couldn't get into the backup files. But a thought struck her then, closely followed by another which completely justified it. Well, almost completely.
What if I left without any starcharts?
And: Even if I did make a copydisk of them, what would I read it on?
All the handheld computers were tightly tied up with five or six layered passwords, to keep the slavekids from interfering with the network systems on the ship. The only way into the system would involve either one of her stepparents in an obliging mood, which was never going to happen.
Mars told her to stay under the floor while he checked out an oxygen tank. When he came back for her he had in his hands a space suit that was too big for her and a crowbar. 'Come on,' he said, and they both ran carefully through the corridors, avoiding the crew, keeping quiet. Gen was unsure of where she was. The spaceship was bigger than she knew.
They came to a door, and the boy held the spacesuit out for her. 'They won't recognise you. Just pull the black and green levers; the pod will do the rest. Hurry.'
Gen pulled the suit over her head and tried to roll up the sleeves. 'But where will I go? What will I do?'
'Just get away. Never come back, or you're toast. You'll be fine.’ His face softened into a small smile. ‘Here.'
'What is it?'
'Lucky. Now go.'
Gen gripped the flat triangular pendant in her hand and stared at Mars. 'Go,' he repeated, taking her shoulder and pushing her towards the door. 'Get in, buckle all the straps, and you'll be out of here before you know it.'
'Wait. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what to do--' She grabbed his arm and held it. 'Don't stay. Come with me.'
'It'll be too dangerous.'
She paused, her eyes still locked on his. 'So?'
There was a sudden noise just around the corner. Mars panicked, took Gen's elbow, and they both climbed into the spacepod. Once they were strapped tightly in, the slaveboy pulled the levers and twisted one knob after another. Gen watched him for a moment. Then she put her head back, told herself that she would never see her stepstepmother again, closed her eyes, and cried.
Optional music track: 'Fuel - Falls On Me.'
