Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Author:Mur Lafferty [Lafferty, Mur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

THE DOCTORS IN the medbay wore bright blue fabric to indicate their rank. Gurudevs wore full robes while the species that shunned clothing, like the Gneiss and Phantasmagore, wore armbands of the same color. Nurses were in red, and lab techs wore white. It was a nurse who took over and easily sedated the blonde woman and treated the scratches on her face. Mallory and Xan checked on the others and introduced themselves.

Phineas found it hysterical that Mallory was on the station. “Hell yeah, I remember you. That bartender! You saved my life.”

“Not exactly,” she said. “Just suggested you head out of town at the right time.”

“So what are you doing here with him?” he jutted his chin toward Xan.

“ ‘With’ him? I wouldn’t call it that,” she said, looking at Xan as if he were a manikin who wasn’t listening to them. “But why I’m here, it’s a long story. But essentially, I’m here as hopefully a permanent guest of the station. Xan is, too. The other human here, the ambassador, is . . . otherwise occupied—”

“Yeah, he fucked off, we don’t know if we’ll see him again,” Xan said. He was loud enough that several of the other survivors looked his way, startled. His own grandma would have slapped him for talking like that in front of his elders, but the old lady didn’t seem to care at all. “So you get me and Mallory as your welcome wagon.”

Mallory nodded and addressed the rest of the group as well. “I’m Mallory Viridian, and I’m here to welcome you, as it were, to Station Eternity. You haven’t had a great welcome so far, and I’m sorry to say it may get worse before it gets better.”

“You always this positive?” Phineas asked.

Mallory colored. “There’s not a lot of time to sugarcoat things, unfortunately. You arrived here and were immediately attacked, and then were brought on board a station that is not the most stable place right now. For now, we need to find out what happened during the shuttle attack.”

“You don’t know who attacked us?” the young Black woman asked, incredulity creasing her brow.

“We don’t know all the details,” Mallory said. “There’s a lot going on that we think may be linked to your arrival. Actually, we know they’re linked; we’re just not sure how.”

Both the young Black woman and the young Asian woman had helped the old woman out of her pod. She stood, dripping on the medbay floor, still looking like she could sternly chastise young men with the best of them.

All of the folks who had climbed out of their pods stood in torn and ripped clothing, looking weak but overall uninjured. The young Black woman was flexing her left hand in wonder, examining the stump of her pinky.

“What exactly happened with our shuttle?” the old woman asked Xan.

“Your shuttle was attacked as it approached the station,” Xan said carefully. “There was a breach—”

“Obviously. But who attacked it?” she asked, interrupting with a no-nonsense tone to her voice.

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