“You’re a ghost, right?”
The question hangs in air like dust throughout the desolate remains of the ruined space station. I readjust my mask, momentarily hiding what little is visible of my face.
“I’m from Yol.”
Vug crawls below me, seemingly unaffected by the lack of gravity, just as its presence never affects me. With his large grey-brown body, it would have been easy to mistake him for just more rubble. At least until that lumpy stone that makes up his head cracks open to reveal a rowless mass of amethyst teeth like the inside of geode every time he chomps down on the surrounding debris. Two long crystals sprout out of his back that flash a seizure warning’s worth of colors. Almost immediately the translator tied to them pipes up. “That means you’re a ghost, right Helka?”
“That’s uh…a matter of debate.” I say, before flying up to collect more meteorites. I tag each one with a small sticker and press a button on the grav-stick. Gravity instantly connects and they fall to the ground with a clamor.
“Watch it!”
I apologize quickly hoping to put the whole thing behind me but before I can even reascend to grab the next batch, Vug’s crystals flash again. “I don’t care what scientists are debatin’. Why debate when we have a real life living breathing Yolian here that ain’t living or breathing.”
“You don’t breathe either,” I point out gently.
“Of course I don’t, what do ya think they’re paying us for?” Vug says before biting into the next hunk of debris. “Sit on our asses and suffocate?”
“To revitalize an abandoned station?”
“I was bein’ rhetorical. So how’d ya do it?”
“Do what?”
“It.”
“What?”
“You know,” Vug says looking up from his meteor. At least I think he’s looking up. I’m not actually sure if that Quarrians even have eyes. I’ve always been too afraid to ask. “How’d ya come back from the dead?”
I tag another couple meteors, moving between them as slowly as possible. Vug’s not aggressive; if I just tell him to stop asking he might comply. But if he did get angry, well I wouldn’t want a two ton Quarrian on me. “I don’t know. The scientists are still debating.”
“What a load of-“ Vug’s crystals turn an ugly shade of red that his translators decide not to pick up. “Ya just wanna keep the secret of immortality ta ya-self.”
Immortality? He really thinks this is immortality? What a sick joke. He has no idea what’ it’s like to be haunted by words. To have ‘lived’ on that sorry excuse for a planet. If I told him any of that he would not envy this half-life.
I say nothing.
Vug flashes red again and crunches into the meteor. With each snap, the debris breaks into pebbles falling between his amethyst teeth. Even those pebbles he scoops up and chew again until nothing’s left. That’s why Phoenix Corp. loves him. “If you’re such a specimen of study, then how’d ya escape the Galliance’s welcome wagon and end up here?”
I smile and say, “Just a bit of luck” and desperate pleading.
Vug’s crystals flashed red. “You ain’t gonna tell me anything, are ya?”
“Oh leave Helka alone.” Came a voice from high above. I look up to see a metal cylinder blowing a light stream out of their four bottom jets, in order to descend. The top has four more jets, currently all pointed to the sides, one of which is also on to push their body horizontally closer. The cylinder has two long arms, one of which serves as a basic grasping claw. The other ends in a smaller blowtorch. The cylinder itself had a sound area, similar to Vug’s translators set below a camera lens that serves as the robot’s eye.
“Hi, Viola” I say, happy for the interruption.
V.101A turns their bottom jets onto a low buzz to hover next to me. “Is this clod bothering you?”
“I was just askin’ a question.” Comes the half muttered sound of Vug’s translators.
“Oh it’s nothing. But what are you doing down here? I thought they had you on the last couple cracks.”
“I just finished,” says the robot. “I am currently 0.846 percent of my way through double checking to make sure the site is completely airtight but so far it holds up.”
I nearly drop my grav-stick. “But that means-“
V.101A can’t smile. They took this job to save up for an emoticon attachment but so far no luck. Still their voice goes up an octave as they say, “The organics will be joining us soon.”
“Great” Says Vug’s back as his head’s leg-deep in a meteor, “Now they can chuck all these perfectly good rocks into space, and all for what? The sector’s biggest casino?”
“They’re not going to turn Titan into a casino” I say without realizing I’m speaking out loud. “It’s going to be a colony, like the original builders used it for.”
“That’s improbable. There are not nearly enough floors for this to have been a colony, however,” V.101A’s flexible blow torch arm springs out of her side and creates a bubble of oxygen before lighting it. The tiny fire ball floats up, illuminating the recently sealed grey walls and hundreds of floating meteors and metal wreckage. Soon it becomes just a dot of light in an otherwise dark sky until it extinguishes itself against the ceiling. The sky was once again starless. “Whoever the original builders were, they must’ve been gigantic.”
“Or they were just full of as much hot air as you two” Vug looks up, amethyst smile radiating on his lumpy face.
V.101A sends another fireball at him. It didn’t hurt his exoskeleton at all but that caused another 0.1 clocks of whining how it almost hit his translators and how horrible that would’ve been.
Finally after another .02 clocks of groaning and silent work Vug’s crystals light up again, “You know it doesn’t even matter who built Titan or what for. It’s a hunk of space garbage now, owned by Phoenix Corp. And once they’re done with it they’re gonna sell it and all those relics we keep finding to the highest bidder for 20 times what they paid us to make it all pretty.”
“Are you implying that you do not enjoy the benefits?” V.101A gestures her claw at last bite left of what was once a meteorite.”
“It’s not that,” Vug’s back flashes as his head chews into it. “It’s just the same with all those humanoids, ya know? They don’t- Eww what the-” red flash “-is in my mouth?”
Vug spits out meteor-chunk, grav-stick still intact. V.101A raises her arm to torch the half-dissolved mass but I get in her way. There’s something shining inside the lougie. I run my thin fingers into the grey-brown gunk to pull out the glowing white back of a flat rectangle. We’ve found ripped pieces of them before, usually with smudged half visible images on them that we’re told to just chuck out into space, but when I unfold this one I find a stunningly well preserved image of a female. She’s not of any species I can name but was definitely humanoid. Her fur’s white. Countless tails meandered behind her and framed her vulpine head caught mid-laugh. I turned the card and the image changes into text. V.101A’s saying something about an ancient form of Galingo she can’t decipher but to me it was much clearer than any of the scratches the Galliance calls a writing system. It meant Kahle. Her name was Kahle.