Beauty and the Space Beast: A Space Age Fairy Tale (Star-Crossed Tales) Read online

  Torak nodded. “Everyone was due a hefty payday,” he said, depositing the creds in the ship’s safe. After operating costs, the profits would be divvied up based on seniority. More importantly, hopefully now word would get out that Torak was back. And people should be afraid.

  It felt good in a way nothing had for a long time. Seeing the fear take hold in Jaxon’s eyes was like coming home in a way. He’d missed it.

  There was a time when he was younger that that look cut him to the core, scarring him. But now he reveled in it. Relished the tremor of panic that accompanied his presence. If people were going to fear him, it might as well be for his reputation, rather than just his home planet. Sons and daughters of Basniel were known for warmongering and brutality as a whole, but Torak took pride in pushing even those boundaries.

  Inspiring fear was all he’d ever been good at, and feared was all he’d ever be.

  “Who’s next?” he asked, reaching the bridge with new-found inspiration. The Affliction wasn’t going to go under without new jobs. They just needed to go collect on all the jobs they’d already done. And if that happened to fix the other problem? All the better.

  Sande pulled up the ledger for him and Torak perused the entries, settling on one very large account that hadn’t been paid in ages. He’d been too lenient with them up until now. And it needed to end.

  “Here,” he said, tapping the name. Sande’s eyes grew wide in his head.

  “Him, Captain? You’re know their hardships and predicament. That money is for—”

  Torak held up a hand, growing frustrated with how often Sande was questioning him as of late. “I know very well. I do not care. Call them.”

  Sande looked uneasy, like he was considering disobeying, but finally, he sighed and placed the call.

  Chapter Two

  Mara

  Mara looked up from her tablet to the vast inky blackness of space. It stretched on for an eternity, only the faintest pricks of light visible. One of those pricks was her home — a desolate little rock where she and her father lived when they weren’t on these recycling runs. The hum of the ship’s engines pushed to their max was nearly deafening, but they were both eager to be home.

  Why, Mara couldn’t say. Their asteroid, littered with debris and things that might be useful one day wasn’t much better than the run-down sorry excuse for a ship they piloted.

  Still, being cooped up on the small junker for weeks or even months left them both a bit stir-crazy. And the trip seemed to get longer and longer every time as old Bertha chugged along.

  “So what do you think about that one? Should make life easier, huh?” Dad said, but Mara wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He always came up with these grandiose ideas for inventions that would improve their life or make a lot of money. Those inventions rarely panned out, but it never seemed to temper Dad’s enthusiasm.

  Mara nodded, her eyes drifting back to the tablet in hand. “Yeah, sounds like a great idea,” she said, her voice a little distant even to her own ears.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father’s face fall, but before she could even feel guilty about it, the ship listed to one side with a loud thunk, tossing Mara out of her seat.

  Dad hung on with a white-knuckled grip and struggled to right the ship. Before Mara could even pick herself up, the cockpit was thrown into chaos. Lights flashed ominously, buzzers blared, forcing them both to cover their ears, and a calm detached voice made an announcement.

  “Smoke detected in engine four,” Bertha’s diagnostics said.

  By the time Mara pulled herself up off the floor, her father was gone and she took off after him. The acrid tang of smoke mingled with some other chemical smell and soon the hall to the engine room was engulfed in plumes of black and white — smoke and extinguisher.

  Mara coughed, covering her mouth and eyes best she could as she soldiered forward, alarms and warnings making her brain buzz inside her skull.

  “Dad?” she called, unable to see anything through the thick haze.

  Then all at once, the warnings stopped.

  “Engine four inoperable,” Bertha announced coolly.

  From the billows of smoke, Mara’s father emerged, looking worse for wear. His normally ruddy complexion was smudged with smoke and soot settled into the lines of his face making him look older than he was. He coughed for a long minute, his lungs struggling to clear the offending material, before he slapped his knee and sighed.

  “Looks like we’re limping home,” he said. “I won’t be able to get four up and running until we’re home and the others aren’t really reliable enough to pick up the slack.”

  Mara nodded and held in her sigh until Dad was out of earshot. She should be used to things like this. That’s what happened when you tried to cobble together a working ship from corpses of other ships. Dad was a brilliant mechanic and inventor, but even he had his limitations.

  She sank into her seat in the cockpit again, tablet in hand, a whole host of colors assaulting her as she resumed her reading. The Faros Brahmin of the Persei Cluster had one of the most fascinating cultures she’d ever read about and lately she couldn’t get enough. Mara never stopped wondering what it would be like to have a culture of her own. To know where she came from. To have a home that wasn’t some long-forgotten rock in the middle of nowhere.

  Whenever she tried to ask Dad about their ancestors or their home, he’d simply wonder why she wanted to know about a bunch of dead people and a boring old rock.

  She couldn’t blame him, really. The few parts she did know were quite tragic and were somehow connected to her mother’s untimely passing. The only person who’d ever answered any of her questions was Dad’s old surgeon buddy, Uncle Rooney, but Uncle Rooney and Mara’s dad had a big falling out years ago, and he stopped coming by.

  For over a decade it had been just the two of them, their routes, and their unassuming asteroid. She missed her Uncle Rooney, for sure, but more than that, Mara missed her connection to the rest of the galaxy.

  “Whatcha readin’ Pixel?” Dad asked, plopping into the seat next to her, still covered in soot, but looking unconcerned.

  Mara flipped the tablet over, revealing the pictures of people covered in brightly colored pigments, smiling and laughing. There was a video, colorful people linked in a circle, all performing some traditional dance step.

  “This planet orbits a pair of dwarf stars and when the conditions are right, the solar wind over the magnetosphere turns the whole planet rainbow. Doesn’t that sound amazing? They have a huge festival for days to celebrate and pilgrims travel from the far reaches of the galaxy to see it, just once.” Mara ended her excited babble with a wistful sigh, still scrolling through pictures, occasionally flipping the tablet to show her father.

  “Mmm,” said Dad, his expression unreadable beyond disinterest.

  Like someone had just let all the air out of her, Mara sunk and slouched in her chair. No matter how many times she got excited about something like this, it was always the same story with her Dad. She wished it was different. That she could one day see something as magnificent at the Faros Color Festival.

  Maybe in another lifetime, she sneered inwardly. Or maybe if her mother was still around…

  The chirp of an incoming transmission startled her out of her daydream and Mara narrowed her eyes at the communications panel, a hundred questions whizzing through her mind. No one ever called them, who could it be? There wasn’t even a name displayed on the screen, which was highly unusual, but could be chalked up to their failing systems.

  She set the tablet down in her lap and stretched forward to answer the call. Before her fingers could touch the screen, Dad swatted her away.

  Mara frowned, her eyebrows furrowing in confused surprise. “Uh… Dad?”

  Beneath the soot and smoke residue, her father’s face had gone ghostly pale, his eyes wide and panicked like he was backed into a corner, fearful for his life. She’d never seen him look this way.

  “Is
everything okay?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer her question, or look at her. “Mara, why don’t you go check that the cargo bay door is staying shut?”

  Mara hesitated, looking from the control panel to her father’s worried expression. “I just did that earli—”

  “NOW, Mara,” he said with a force that took her by complete surprise. Mara couldn’t recall her father ever raising his voice to her. He occasionally got stern when she pressed for information about her mother or their past, but never outright angry like he seemed now.

  Mara set her jaw and stood from her seat in a quick burst of movement, her fists clenched at her sides. She was not a child anymore, nearly twenty-four standard years now, but still her father insisted on treating her like one.

  As she left the cockpit, something other than anger raced through her conscious thoughts: worry. Dad was clearly concerned and didn’t want her to know why. What could that be about? She hadn’t the faintest clue.

  She skulked out, lingering by the doorway, hoping to overhear some of the mysterious conversation. Even without the engines running at full blast, the machinations of the ship were too noisy for her to make out the words with any clarity. Bits and pieces filtered through the Bertha’s groaning and creaking.

  “...Soon, I promise. No… no need for that. You have my word,” her father said, hushed and terrified.

  But nothing ever seemed to scare her dad. What was he hiding?

  Mara wasn’t used to being suspicious of him. They’d never really kept secrets from each other. Or… she didn’t think they did. He didn’t like to talk about the past, but that wasn’t the same. Those were painful memories he didn’t want brought to light, not actual secrets.

  ...Or were they? Was something about this conversation connected to the past her father didn’t like to talk about?

  Mara rolled her eyes and proceeded down toward the cargo hold. It probably wasn’t anything as serious as she was making it out to be. She was just blowing things out of proportion, trying to find excitement where there was none. She was just bored and wanting adventure — that didn’t mean her father was hiding some big secret from her or there was some conspiracy about her past. Some things could be explained away without dramatics.

  She checked the cargo bay door — known for spontaneously opening and wreaking havoc on the ship’s pressurization — and made sure it was as secure as it could be. She’d done the same thing only a few hours earlier, so now her mind just drifted back to the cockpit and her father’s conversation. What was he hiding?

  The odds of her finding out without him telling her explicitly were slim to none, so Mara decided not to waste more energy on that. Instead, she found her thoughts flitting back to a far-off planet and a rainbow-colored sky. The festival was soon and she’d love to go, but Dad would never allow it. Even if Bertha could make the trip, he’d say there were too many contagions or something.

  That was one of the few clues Mara had about her mother’s demise — a devastating disease swept through their homeworld and Mara and her father were lucky to have escaped. Her mother, less lucky. Ever since, though, Mara’s father avoided crowds and foreigners like the plagues he said they carried.

  Going without him seemed preposterous. They’d always been together. They were all each other had. She couldn’t abandon Dad, he needed her. And, as much as she’d like to deny it, Mara was pretty sure she needed him, too.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed when her father appeared near the cargo hold looking pale and clammy like he’d seen an apparition.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, shaking herself from daydreams about Faros Brahmin. It was a ridiculous question. Clearly, everything was not okay.

  Dad wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, leaving one clean-ish streaky spot on his face.

  “Just tired, Pix,” he said with a nod and a fit of coughing. “These trips are starting to take their toll on this old man.”

  Mara felt a frown tug at her lips and her hands went to her hips on instinct. “I’m not a child anymore and I’m not an imbecile. Mind telling me what’s really happening?” she asked, her blood running hot. He was stressed and it was clearly aggravating his cough, making it difficult for the old man to catch his breath.

  Dad surprised her then. Instead of chiding her for her attitude or getting angry, he stepped forward and wrapped her in a fierce hug. “Nothing you need to worry about Pix,” he murmured into her hair. “Nothing at all.” He kissed the top of her forehead before pulling away.

  Mara still frowned, not at all satisfied with that answer, but she knew when she’d lost the battle and she wasn’t going to get anything more out of him than she already had.

  If she wanted the truth — about the conversation, his worry, her past or any of it — she’d have to find it herself.

  It took about ten times longer than usual for them to complete the final limp home and Mara’s father was still acting remarkably strange.

  They sat at the dinner table, a plate heaped with food in front of each of them, but neither bothered to touch it.

  “Aren’t you going to eat, Pixel?” Dad asked, still using the cutesy childhood name for her. He hadn’t used that nickname in a while and suddenly he’d decided to use it all day long.

  “Aren’t you?” she countered, as he pushed food around his plate aimlessly, his eyes out the window toward the sky. He looked like he was expecting something to come crashing down any moment and Mara didn’t know what to think about it.

  There was no doubt Dad was hiding something, but what? And why? They’d always been so close, just the two of them against the Universe, even if he wouldn’t tell her the truth about where she came from. That never stopped them from being tight-knit. But now… Now Mara didn’t know what to think about this new suspicious behavior.

  He frowned at her, deep in thought, but said nothing as he continued to push food around his plate, distracted.

  A flash of red light from the panel near the door announced an incoming transmission and the accompanying chirp made her father nearly jump out of his skin. Dad looked at the panel with trepidation, beads of sweat collecting on his forehead, his face deathly pale. Mara could even spot the quick staccato of his pulse at the base of his neck. No denying it — her father was scared.

  The chirps continued for a long stretch of minutes, her father still looking at the panel like it was going to suddenly sprout teeth and gnaw his arms off. He didn’t make a move to go near it.

  Clenching her jaw, a tide of angry red washing over her vision, Mara jumped to her feet and slapped her napkin down on the table.

  “Will you tell me what’s going on?” she demanded, her own body feeling flushed and hot with exasperation. She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to will him to tell her the truth.

  Finally, Dad sighed, his head drooping, his eyes screwed up in a wince. “I borrowed money from someone,” he said. “Money I can’t pay back.”

  Mara’s jaw fell slack. Money? This was all over money?

  “Why would you do that? What could you possibly be spending the creds on?” she said, hysteria making her voice shaky and accusatory. She looked around at their ramshackle home, the frozen asteroid they lived on in the middle of the most deserted quadrant in the galaxy. She looked at the scraps they were forced to live off of and thought of the crumbling ancient ship that barely got them home this time.

  “Was it one of your inventions?” she nearly screeched, ready to throttle her sweet optimistic father. Why would he borrow creds he knew they’d never be able to pay back?

  Dad shook his head, unwilling to meet her gaze. “I’m sorry, Mara.”

  She sat down again with a big huff of breath. What a mess. She wondered who he borrowed the money from, and how serious they were about collecting payment.

  The panel still chirped at them, but now they both ignored it.

  “They want their money back and I don’t have it,” Dad said again, hopelessness clouding his ton
e, his eyes sparkling with moisture. He choked back an anguished cry which caused him to cough and cough. Great hacking coughs rattled the walls and he couldn’t seem to stop.

  Mara hurried into the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water and clapped him between the shoulder blades as his coughing finally subsided.

  “That’s getting worse,” she said, hands on her hips.

  Dad waved off her concerns, draining the glass. “Just when I’m stressed. I don’t know what I’m going to do…”

  Mara rolled her eyes. Typical. Thinking he had to solve it all by himself. She frowned. “We’ll just have to work out a payment plan or something. We’ll figure this out,” she promised. Who was she really trying to reassure? Her father had gotten into all kinds of precarious situations, but never seemed as worried as he did now. He never seemed fazed by any of it.