Married to the Last Starborn

The evacuation notice gave Naomi Shaw seventeen minutes to leave the colony.

She needed twenty to cross the medical ward alone.

“That’s generous,” she told the orange letters flashing above the dispensary door. “Usually corporate management gives us five.”

The screen did not appreciate the joke.

COLONY SEVENTEEN — MANDATORY DEPARTURE. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO DOCK NINE.

Naomi sealed a container of antibiotics and slipped it into her bag. The room smelled of disinfectant and hot metal. A warning tremor ran through the floor, followed by another, stronger enough to rattle every glass vial in the cabinet.

Outside the ward windows, the mining colony’s artificial sky was turning the ugly violet color that meant the magnetic storm had shifted closer than predicted. In the mining company briefings, storms were clean colored arrows on a screen. In real life, they made the air taste like a battery and caused the lights to flicker in rooms where people were already afraid.

Naomi had treated radiation burns for eight days. She had asked for extra shield fabric, fresh saline, and permission to move the youngest workers into the lower habitat. The administrator had approved an inspirational message about resilience.

Now the administrator was gone.

She knew because his personal luggage transport had rolled past her window an hour earlier, accompanied by three security officers and a case of expensive blue liquor.

“Naomi!”

Seli Venn appeared in the doorway, wearing a dockmaster’s orange vest over a pressure suit. Her hair was braided so tightly it seemed to express personal disappointment.

“If I have to come back for you,” Seli said, “I’m charging a retrieval fee.”

“Put it on my account.”

“Your account has forty-three credits.”

“Then make it a very inexpensive rescue.”

Seli glanced at the medical cases. “You’ve got too much.”

“I have what I need.”

“You have medicine for people who aren’t staying.”

“I don’t know who’s staying.”

For a moment Seli said nothing. Then she grabbed two cases and headed for the service lift.

Naomi followed, swallowing the ache in her throat. She had worked on Colony Seventeen for four years, long enough to stop counting days until her contract ended and start recognizing the sound of every corridor after midnight. She hated the place. She knew its failures intimately. Leaving should have felt like relief.

Instead the corridors looked suddenly like rooms in a house where someone had died.

The service lift opened onto Dock Nine. Hundreds of people stood in lines beneath yellow floodlights. Children cried. A maintenance robot struggled to pull a crate with one broken wheel. Above them, a transport shuttle waited with its ramp down and engines glowing blue.

Seli checked her wrist terminal.

“Boarding closes in six minutes.”

“There are still people in line.”

“Yes,” Seli said. “I can see that.”

Naomi looked toward the front. Security guards were scanning identification chips and waving passengers past. Workers in gray uniforms moved forward. Those wearing the faded green badges of contract laborers were being sent toward a second, much shorter queue that led to a closed gate.

“What’s that?” Naomi asked.

Seli’s expression hardened.

“Priority classification. They’re saying auxiliary staff may be transferred on a later shuttle.”

“There’s another shuttle?”

“Not one I’ve got on my schedule.”

Naomi left her cases beside Seli and pushed toward the closed gate.

“Excuse me,” she called to the nearest guard. “I’m the ward medtech. Those workers are exposed. They need to board.”

He barely looked at her. “Follow your assigned queue.”

“Your queue is wrong.”

“Ma’am, move along.”

A little girl with a green badge on her collar watched Naomi from behind her father. The child’s lips were blue with cold. Naomi recognized her: a respiratory patient from the lower habitat, still recovering from a filter failure. Her father recognized Naomi too.

“They said we weren’t on the list,” he told her.

Naomi felt something inside her go still.

She had spent four years filling out medical forms designed to make preventable injuries look like unavoidable accidents. She understood the language of a list. She understood how easily a person disappeared from one.

“Come with me,” she said.

The guard stepped forward. “I said—”

“Her oxygen levels are falling. If she collapses on the dock, you’ll have a medical emergency on the boarding ramp. Do you want that in your report?”

The guard looked from Naomi to the child, then toward his supervisor.

He opened the gate far enough for the girl and her father to pass.

Naomi caught his sleeve as he started to close it. “The others need to board too.”

“One emergency exception,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”

The ramp alarm sounded three times.

Seli appeared at Naomi’s shoulder, breathless. “They’re sealing early.”

“They can’t. We’ve still got—”

“Naomi.”

There was something in Seli’s voice Naomi had never heard before. Not fear, exactly. Grief without time to become grief.

The shuttle’s ramp began to rise.

Seli shoved Naomi’s bag into her hands. “Run.”

Naomi ran. She made it halfway down the marked corridor before someone screamed behind her. A loader had tipped onto a maintenance worker. The man’s leg was pinned beneath its frame, and coolant was spilling from a ruptured tank.

Naomi stopped.

Ahead of her, Seli was shouting. People on the ramp were waving her forward.

The worker beneath the loader looked directly at her.

She turned back.

It took less than a minute to fit the hydraulic brace around the worker’s knee and release the loader’s weight. It took another thirty seconds to drag him clear before the coolant reached a live cable. Naomi cut the suit around his leg, packed the wound, and shouted for someone to help lift him.

By the time two mechanics reached them, the shuttle had taken off.

The sound rolled over the dock like a door slamming on the whole world.

Seli stood at the boarding line staring up after it. Her orange vest was streaked with sweat and dust. She had stayed.

“I told you to run,” she said when Naomi reached her.

“You didn’t.”

“I came back because somebody had to keep you from getting killed.”

“That sounds like a terrible career choice.”

Seli looked away. The shuttle was already a bright point against the violet sky.

An announcement crackled through the speakers. All authorized evacuation vehicles have departed. Remain in shelter until further instruction.

“Further instruction,” Seli repeated. “From whom?”

Naomi had no answer.

The storm reached the outer docking ring twenty minutes later. Power failed in the upper habitat, leaving the ward running on a generator that coughed every few seconds. Naomi and Seli moved thirty-seven people into the old cargo shelter. There was water for three days, emergency rations for two, and enough oxygen for perhaps forty hours if no one panicked.

People panicked anyway.

Naomi treated a broken wrist, a fever, and a man who insisted that his chest pain was only indigestion. She sent Seli to check the filtration plant and sat with the child from the dock until the little girl fell asleep.

Then someone knocked on the shelter’s outer hatch.

Three knocks. Slow and deliberate.

Nobody should have been outside. The air was thick with charged particles, and the emergency seals were already down. Naomi reached for a med scanner and approached the narrow observation panel.

A figure stood on the other side of the glass.

It was taller than any human she had ever met, dressed in a dark environmental cloak that rippled strangely against the static. Its exposed hands were silver-gray, with bands of pale light moving beneath the skin. The face was nearly human in its arrangement and utterly unfamiliar in its stillness: high cheekbones, dark eyes with a luminous ring around each iris, and lines of light along the neck that pulsed out of rhythm with the colony’s warning lamps.

The figure lifted one hand toward the glass.

Then collapsed.

Naomi swore, pulled on her protective suit, and cycled the emergency hatch before anyone could stop her.

The stranger was heavier than he looked. She dragged him inside, sealed the outer door, and rolled him onto a clean stretch of floor. The light beneath his skin flickered. His breathing came in a pattern she didn’t recognize: two shallow inhalations, a pause, then one long exhale.

Naomi pressed two fingers to his throat.

Nothing.

She tried the wrist.

Still nothing.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Tell me where to look.”

She ran the scanner over his chest. The display filled with structures her medical training had never named. Not one heart, but three synchronized muscular chambers arranged around a network of silver vessels. One was beating far too fast. Another had nearly stopped.

The third glowed a brilliant, furious white.

Her scanner began to overheat.

Naomi shut it off and opened her medical case. She didn’t know what species he was. She didn’t know whether standard oxygen would help or harm him. All she knew was that he had dragged himself through a killing storm to knock on a shelter door full of strangers, and now he was dying in front of her.

“All right,” she said. “We start with what we can see.”

She found a wound beneath his left shoulder. Something had torn through the cloak and scored his skin, leaving a ragged line of metallic blue blood. She applied a sterile compression patch, adjusted the pressure until the bleeding slowed, and listened to the pulse with the mechanical stethoscope she kept because electronics could not always be trusted.

One chamber steadied.

Then another.

The stranger’s eyes opened.

He stared at her, not frightened, not grateful. Astonished.

“Human,” he said. His voice sounded like stone singing inside a bell. “You should not be here.”

“I was about to say the same thing.”

His gaze moved to her medical bag and then to the sealed doors beyond which the storm battered the colony.

“The ships left you,” he said.

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and the light in his neck dimmed.

“Then,” he said, “they left you to die.”

Naomi wanted to tell him to save his strength. She wanted to ask his name, how he had reached the colony, and why his blood looked like starlight.

Instead she looked at the sleeping workers around them.

“Can you get these people out?” she asked.

The stranger opened his eyes again.

For the first time, something warmer than astonishment entered his face.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But the only ship still listening to me has been asleep for a thousand years.”