Nai
Ceres, as a rule, never stayed the same for long.
The Independent Fleet cycled out its personnel regularly, so the faces one saw were rarely familiar. But the asteroid itself changed, too. 15 years ago, when the Fleet was little more than a band of mercenaries, Ceres had been a radically different place. Nowadays, you couldn’t go three blocks without coming across a Fleet office or hangout for Fleet crew. Even in Ernutet, the largest city on the planetoid, the presence of the Fleet was unavoidable.
A decade and a half, though, was a lot of time for any place to change, especially Ceres. The asteroid had once been a place where outcasts and criminals gathered, the lack of any real government making a sort of modern day Nassau. What were now Fleet offices and spacer bars were then brothels and safehouses for some of the most egregious criminals in the entire system.
Nai had been born just a few months after the Fleet came to Ceres. Her mother had been a barkeep and a prostitute, and she had never known her father. Her mother had died when she was 5, 8 years ago, and she had been more or less left to fend for herself ever since.
Right now, she was running.
She leapt over an air duct, clutching her payload tight against her chest, as the shopkeeper she had… acquired it from chased after her. The man lumbered after her, around the air duct, and she dashed away down the street. She was small and agile, but he was tall, and his long legs let him almost match pace with her. Almost.
She also had the benefit of having lived here in Ernutet for her entire life. She knew these streets like the back of her own hand, and, maybe more importantly, she knew how to take advantage of the lower gravity.
Ernutet was a hab-dome, like many of the larger settlements in the Solar System. Essentially a gigantic spinning top, the dome spun for most of the day to create artificial gravity for the residents. In recent years, it had been stabilized by the new alien tech that had been found. Nai didn’t understand the technology at all but what she did know was that Ernutet had only about seven-tenths the gravity of Earth and most of the other major hab-domes, and most people weren’t quite sure how to handle that.
But Nai had been running around these streets for her entire life, and the practice let her practically fly through the streets. She dashed down the road, vaulting over a parked shuttle and simultaneously pushing herself off of it with her hands, coasting much farther than it seemed like she would be able to. As she landed, she rolled, tucking her body in and tumbling through the gap in an unoccupied market stall. She sprang to her feet and weaved her way through the other stalls on the road. When she reached the corner, she didn’t even slow down, instead looping her arm around a streetlight and using it to turn her to the side and bounded down the next road.
She slowed down and glanced behind her. No sign of her pursuer. She grinned, breathing heavily, her chin-length brown hair sticking to her face with sweat. Time to offload her spoils.
Nai took back off, dashing down the street towards Nando’s. She knew the way more than well enough, and she was there within just a few minutes. She burst in the door, beaming.
“Ah, shit, here’s trouble,” Nando said from behind the counter. He was a large man, in every sense of the word, bald and boisterous. “Whaddya got for me today, kid?”
Nai strutted up to Nando’s counter, confident. She carefully placed her prize on the counter. The small model sat on the counter. It was of a Fleet ship, the Kindred Spirit. Nai recognized it, of course. The ship had been a key player in the Fleet’s Crisis a few years ago. More importantly to Nai, it had been the ship that Sergeant Avery Takenada had been stationed on during the Crisis.
Nando looked absently at the model. “What am I looking at here?” he asked, and Nai sighed, exasperated.
“It’s a scale model of the Kindred Spirit, duh!” At Nando’s blank expression, she sighed again. “The centerpiece of the Pallas Manuever? The ship that Sergeant Takenada served on during the Crisis? Zheng’s Big Bang?”
Nando shrugged. “6 credits.”
“Six?” Nai cried, incredulous. “This is a collector’s model! It’s worth ten times that in poor condition, and this one is mint! It’s practically in box!”
“And I’d be lucky to sell it for 10 creds. Not a whole lot of collectors on Ceres, kid.”
Nai grumbled and took the model off of the counter. “I’ll just keep it for myself. Here,” she dug in her pockets and pulled out a handful of credits. “That’s what I managed to swipe today.”
Nando counted out the credits. “Only 13?” He sighed. “You’re never gonna pay it off at this rate, kid.”
Nai bristled visibly. “I’m working on it. You try robbing these Fleet goons. Their pockets are so tight and neat it’s impossible to get my fingers in there.”
“Could always go back to begging.”
She shot him a glare, and he raised his hands defensively.
Nai had robbed Nando about two years ago. She’d taken a particularly valuable set of jewelry that he had acquired, and she’d planned to sell it off to anyone who would buy it. Well, unfortunately, she had accidentally sold it back to one of Nando’s associates, who had immediately ratted on her. Nando had agreed to not turn her into the Fleet, on the condition that she “work off” her debt. The form that took for Nai was giving him whatever extra money she managed to pickpocket off of people, and that anything she stole she would pawn off to him, and that would tick down her debt. Nando had placed her debt at 10,000 credits. She was down to 8,752 after that thirteen she had just given him.
Nai grumbled again and spun around. As she walked out the door, Nando called out “See you tomorrow, kid.” She flipped him off as she walked out.
Almost as soon as she was out the door, Nai was running. She dashed off down the road, weaving between obstacles like she was born to it. In a way, she had been. In minutes, she had found her way to what she liked to call her hideout. She came across the familiar row of vents in the wall of the hab-dome. She counted out loud under her breath: “one, two, three, four, five…” she reached under the fifth vent and pulled away a panel of the wall just wide enough for her to fit through. She squeezed in and dropped down into a dark room. She scrabbled at the wall for a second before finding the switch for the strings of lights she had put up.
She flicked on the lights and immediately felt more comfortable as the familiar cool lighting illuminated her hideout. In one corner was her “bed,” really just a pile of blankets half as tall as she was that she more nested in than anything. She had a small fridge next to it and a small electric stove, probably once used by a Fleet member. The entire far wall was covered in her trophies: the pilfered and found things she had found that she had grown attached to. She slinked over and found some room for her new ship model. She placed it right next to a little solar system diorama that she had lifted from a trash heap a few months ago. She thought it fit nicely.
Nai sighed and made her way over to her nest, stopping to grab a can of fruit on the way. It had been a frustrating day, if not a particularly difficult one. She climbed into the pile of blankets and cracked open the can, drinking the sweet syrup and grabbing pieces of fruit with her fingers. She tossed the empty can aside and curled up, grabbing the little pink plush cat she slept with, creatively named “Pink.” She pulled Pink in close, and closed her eyes. Maybe tomorrow would bring her some more luck.
Nai snapped awake, her heart racing. She’d had a dream again. She already couldn’t remember if it was one of her usual nightmares or a new one entirely. It didn’t really matter.
Nai wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was 13, after all, and had lived in a hab dome all her life. The dark was a common occurrence. She wasn’t afraid of much of anything, really. She’d been on her own for so long that most realistic things didn’t scare her anymore. She knew how to take care of herself.
That didn’t stop the nightmares, though.
As the adrenaline faded from her veins, Nai felt herself began to shake. She felt tears well up in her eyes and tried to fight them back, to no avail. Damn it, Nai, she chastised herself. You’re too old to cry. She clutched Pink close to her and curled up even tighter into her nest.
After what felt like hours, Nai finally managed to stop the tears and the shaking. She wiped her face with her sleeve and crawled out from under her blanket pile. A few deep breaths later, she was headed to her fridge and pulling a bottle of water out. She drained half of the bottle in a few large gulps and set the rest of the bottle on the floor next to her nest. What time is it? She thought. There was still gravity, meaning the dome was currently spinning, so it was either before 3 AM or after 6 AM. Between those hours, the spinning of the dome was slowed and stopped so that maintenance could be done and bigger shipments loaded and unloaded.
Just as she thought that, she heard the engines. With the engines on most of the time, she had gotten really good at tuning them out, and the silence was a bit eerie. The dome itself also started to rotate: the habitation section was a series of giant rotating rings, divided into sections, and when the dome stopped spinning the sections rotated, first in the direction of the ring’s slowing to add a little gravity, and then downwards so that the miniscule gravity of Ceres could at least provide a sense of direction.
Nai sighed. There was no way she was going to get back to sleep now. Low-g always made it harder to get comfortable. She half-walked, half-jumped her way over to the “door” of her hideout and wriggled her way out into the main ring again. Might as well go for a run, she thought. See if anyone dropped anything valuable. Most things left loose would be floating up into the air as the gravity gradually reduced.
Something about the low-g nights had always been strangely comforting to Nai. As the ring slowed to a stop and her body got lighter, she quickly found herself flying through the streets even faster than she normally did. In spite of the earlier feelings, she felt a grin creep across her face as she bounded through the mostly empty streets of Ernutet.
It only took Nai a few minutes to reach the end of the section of the city that her hideout was in. The sections were disconnected when the engines stopped and the segments started rotating, but the spots where they normally connected had giant windows, and the view out of those windows were the best in the city once the hab-dome came to rest. Nai looped her arm around a nearby streetlight and watched out the window as the city slowed.
She felt herself growing more weightless as Ernutet’s spinning slowed to a crawl, and she watched as the entire universe stopped spinning. When the dome finally stopped, Nai found herself staring at the landscape of Ceres.
To most people, it would have been a mostly featureless landscape of grey, rocky ice. To Nai, it brought a lot of complicated emotions. To a part of her, it was home. Her entire life had been in this city, and watching the rocky landscape of the planetoid was the closest she had ever been to leaving. Another part of her resented the sight for that exact reason. The rock and ice was a prison, keeping her trapped here. She wanted to leave, explore the system and fly ships, like Sergeant Takenada. But she felt down to her bones that she would never be able to. She was just another orphan on Ceres, tied down by her debt and the fact that she just had nowhere else to go.
Nai sighed and unlooped her arm from the streetlight. She pushed herself off and floated a few feet away, slowly sinking towards the ground. Ceres wasn’t quite zero-g, and the little bit of gravity that the dwarf planet had was still enough to pull you towards the ground, albeit much more slowly than when the hab-dome was spinning. She felt her feet settle lightly on the ground, still staring out at the bleak landscape of the planetoid she called home.
Her staring was interrupted by a ship floating past the window and docking at the hab-dome.
Nai started. Even though the nightly stops were supposed to be for ships to dock, she barely ever actually saw one, even on the nights when she stared across the landscape like this. She pressed her face up against the glass of the window to get a better view, and her eyes grew wide when she saw the symbol of the Independent Fleet blazoned across the side of the ship.
She pushed herself away from the window and began her half-run, half-glide around the ring of the hab-dome to where the ship had docked. A few minutes later, she arrived at the dock, sweaty and panting, just in time to see the passengers exiting the airlock. At the sight, Nai felt her heart stop in her chest.
Here, in her city, was Sergeant Avery Takenada.
Nai had looked up to Sergeant Takenada for… pretty much her entire life. She had grown up hearing the stories about the Crisis, watching the news casts whenever she could find a screen, and reading every scrap of information about the new ships and maneuvers and strategies the Fleet was using. Her fascination with starships and space flight had begun as early as she was able to understand what it meant, and Avery Takenada inspired an even greater wonder in her. If someone like them could become a pilot and fly through the Solar System, then why couldn’t she?
Nai shook herself out of her stupor and set to observing. On Sergeant Takenada’s right was a tall woman with heels and a labcoat and large, round glasses, with dark, curly hair, and on their left one of the largest men Nai had ever seen. The man was talking animatedly to Sergeant Takenada, who seemed somewhat distracted, and to the woman, who, based on her unfocused stare into the middle distance, seemed to be absorbed in her implants. Nai pushed herself a bit closer to try and eavesdrop on what he was saying.
“-but the Fleet presence here in Ernutet has never been the same since.” Nai’s first thought about this man had been to marvel at his size, but her second was that he talked far too much and far too loud. “But anyway, there are lots of personnel still stationed here, and more importantly, it has a drydock that has been empty for years. We can use that as a staging ground, and it should be big enough for the House’s shuttles, right Dr. Radikiss?”
“Hm?” the woman’s eyes refocused as her attention shifted from her implants. “Oh, yes, it’s the perfect size for the new shuttles I designed. I actually designed them with Ceresian drydocks in mind.”
The conversation continued, and Nai kept following and listening. She picked up details about the new ship, the House of Hope, and something about a mission to a whole other star system! Nai could barely contain her excitement, and there was only one thought on her mind by this point.
She was going to get on that ship.
To be continued…
Cambria's Corner 
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