Free Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci

atmospheres or gravities. The sheer abundance of sections hinted at the vastness of the number of Minor Species. I felt that despite how many aliens I had seen during my time on the Yertina Feray, I had barely interacted with the galaxy at all.
    Heckleck and I crawled in crawl spaces to scoot around high above the closed off sectors, likely used when maintenance was necessary in those places, but now quite forgotten. We had a bird’s-eye view of everything.
    One space we stumbled into was a warehouse full of machines that looked like insects.
    “What are they?” I asked.
    “Miners,” Heckleck said.
    They were frightening—rows and rows of faceless mining robots.
    We walked, picking our way between them, these miners from a forgotten past that had ravaged and depleted the world below.
    “Do they work?” I asked.
    Heckleck picked up one of their heads from the ground.
    “No.”
    “They sort of look like you,” I said.
    “My dear girl, just because they are insect-like does not mean that we are similar.”
    But they did look like the Hort: the way their legs and arms were folded in an insect-like way, the coppery color of their metal, their pinched faces and the large eyes. The only thing they were missing was tiny vestigial wings on their backs.
    “They don’t even have faces,” Heckleck said.
    “I don’t mean to insult you,” I said.
    Heckleck began to flip switches and slide his appendage on the panel of a computer terminal. But nothing happened. The rows of robots remained still.
    “See. Useless,” he said. “We can sell the metal, bit by bit. Galactic expansion always needs metal.”
    But I heard a hum to my right.
    “Do you hear that?” I asked. I followed the sound, weaving through the rows of robots until I was standing in front of one robot with its lights on, but nothing else.
    Heckleck turned the power off and the lights on the robot went dim.
    “Not this one,” I said. I took a marking device from my pocket and I drew a face on the one that had lit up. “This one is mine.”
    “Suit yourself,” Heckleck said. “You do attach yourself to such strange things.”
    We had a good haul from the closed up places we’d discovered. It was useless now, with barely anyone to barter with, but would come in handy bit by bit later. It wasn’t looting if you took items that had been abandoned for over a century. That was fair game. It surprised me what valuables people had left behind in the sections that had been closed for years.
    “Why haven’t you ever gone for this stuff before?” I asked.
    “Because there were always eyes watching everything. Now, the station is blind. For these few months, we are free.”
    When we were back in the underguts with our finds, Heckleck offered me the last of the maggot-like delicacies of his planet that he’d recently procured. I ate them with relish. I had developed a taste for them. They tasted like life to me.
    “It’s strange, all these things we’ve taken from those who are likely long dead,” I said.
    “The dead are useful to our business,” Heckleck said.
    “They are not useful at all,” I said. “They are dead.”
    “That is what you think. But the dead, they have ghosts. Ghosts are very useful for haunting. Never forget the dead, Tula. They have their function. They sometimes speak at the most useful or inopportune times.”
    I thought about my mother and sister. I could not imagine that they would be useful for anything. They were dead. Nothing that they had to say could ever help me from beyond the grave now. Their time for helpful words was done.
    It was when I thought of them that the parts inside of me that used to feel hardened the most.
    “I miss my family,” I said. “I wish Brother Blue had died with the colonists.”
    When I thought of my mother and her trust in Brother Blue, I became angry. I was angry at him, but I was angrier at her. Why did she trust me with him? Why couldn’t she see that he was dangerous? Why did she