The station looked even more impressive from the inside. Agrarian people lived all over the inner surface in round burrows and anchored nests covered by vegetation. No taxicab nor any traffic for that matter. One could only take comfort from the birds’ singing and the whirling of the wind turbines ensuring the air’s good flow. This piece of cosmic heaven and the foul shipyard of yesteryear were poles apart.

  We secured the Kitty in one of the few pods owned by a Lilliputian, whose broad shoulders might have made her seem like a dwarf from ancient tales—if only her beard had been bushier. She presented us with a massive, yet entirely justified, bill. Vanity had utterly wrecked our only means of transport.

  My beautiful Swallow…

  “Gotta round some extra cash with a small gig!” Ali had confessed to me while I dissected one by one the expenses on the receipt printed on a recycled bark.

  “A job? Yggdrasil is a humble commune. I doubt we’ll unearth an interesting contract under its thick foliage.”

  The following days did give me reason. Work could be found on Yggdrasil, yet no one wanted to entrust it to two marauding hunters from the Outer Worlds. Like most stations and towns in the Inner System. The Alliance wasn’t a respected institution. Auxiliaries were as despised as the F musical note.

  “Scratch over, I spotted something in the green smear!” Ali ordered me. This time, she had refused to dive to the bottom of a reeking dumpster herself. I had to submit to the search for out-of-date nutrigel residues floating in the hazardous gravity.

  “There’s nothing, Ali! We’ll microwave moss again!”

  I came up to find her crouched in the grass, munching a hairy caterpillar. The opaline bryophyte and its fauna were set to be our evening meal once more until a young boy landed barefoot in our organic banquet. “Can I ask what ye, scummy corsairs, are doing?” he questioned us as he snapped one of the multicolored slap bracelets on his skinny arms.

  This troublemaker with a torn-up Vicky the Viking t-shirt introduced himself under the name of Benàn. He was the son of Yggdrasil’s main gardener whom we met shortly afterwards when the pitying teenager reluctantly invited us to his remote house for a real dinner. His family lived in a gigantic sclerotic tinder mushroom against the asteroid’s inner facade. We accessed it thanks to a spiral ramp made of pine wood and blue polypropylene ropes.

  “May ye forgive the folks here,” his father, Alàn, apologized with the same Nordic accent as his son. “Seclusion has made them bitter and abundance stingy!” A little man with a wide neck and sparkling yet tired eyes, his mustache and braided coppery beard jumped at every word. Very jovial, he didn’t mind that we worked for the Alliance. Despite his wife’s efforts to wash him, his face remained stained with brown mud. “Hold op, Diligua! Would ye want to stop?” he cried.

  Diligua scolded him in Danish, unhappy with her husband’s marshy appearance in front of her guests. Benàn’s mother was her husband opposite: tall, fine and elegant. And without clods of dirt in her blond hair with icy tones. She was wearing them twisted and braided in a bun on the back of her head, as expected to be in a micro-g environment.

  First reluctant, Alàn decided to entrust us with simple work in exchange for a roof and a hot daily meal. As for our invoice, Diligua agreed to negotiate with the techie of the hangar to obtain an amendment. Not a long ago, she became the chief engineer in charge of the wind turbines and often had spare parts to trade for services.

  “Decent people for a Smurf village,” Ali said to me at the end of the day, while setting up in our private room in the giant mushroom’s attic.

  “For a change…” I replied. Humans were heterogeneous. Heterogeneously evil, mostly.

  The next days on Yggdrasil felt far more pleasant. We took on a succession of odd jobs, from draining the irrigation system to pruning flowering shrubs; all in a most bucolic scenery, the antithesis of the sordid orbital stations to which the Alliance has been sending us.

  “God morgen! Are you, mærkelig fellows, ready for some physical drudgery?” Yggdrasil’s gardener had woken us at dawn—what Ali called the middle of the night.

  “Always up for honest work!” I commented as I stretched.

  “Ass-licker…” my partner mumbled from under her pillow. Perhaps she was still lost in her usual erotic dreams.

  Alàn turned on the light, eliciting a muffled cry from Ali. “Come on! It’ll be fun.” He revolved to give my associate time to dress up. He then handed her a bowl of warm slime-milk, which she shared with me, and a loaf of cereal bread—which she swallowed without leaving me a single crumb.

  Alàn led us away from his house to a recess in the metal wall of the asteroid. There, fluorescent mosses bathed a small clearing in their light. At its center, a gnarled beech with black leaves truncated a bed of yellow-flowered shrubs.

  “What’s this tree about?” Ali asked, pointing her newly acquired steel shovel at the curious tree. “It’s carved with demonic stuff.”

  Alàn laughed. “Those are Nordic runes!”

  “What do they say then?” my partner inquired with a hint of disappointment.

  “I ignore it. Unlike my family, their meaning didn’t survive the atomic bombs that fell on the Sjaelland. But we carried on. I believe this part tells the tales of my ancestors. How they boarded West German spaceships. How they found this place. How they made it a home…” His broad finger drew a circle near the loftiest branches, then down to the middle of the moss-stripped trunk. “There, that’s my own story—less glorious, they’d say. But above this root, one day, my son’s.”

  Ali brushes the dry bark, scaring off a horde of shield bugs. They disappeared into the tall grass. “Cool beans…”

  “Legacy seems important to humans,” I noted. “Mostly a burden, I’d argue.”

  Alàn planted his pitchfork in a recalcitrant clump of pink dandelions. “We do agree on that point, Lee,” he concluded, before we set to work in earnest.

  The company of Alàn and Diligua proved to be quite enjoyable, as did Benàn’s. Their son, an energetic teenager, couldn’t stop talking about his dreams of escape and space conquest. He had grown tired of living in what he called his aquarium, but his father had always forbidden him from leaving too soon.

  “Me dad promised to book me a round trip to Ceres-stad when I was twelve years old. He also promised to let me apply to the Marine Academy once I come of age,” he told us once we were chilling under the shade of a giant, amber-colored daisy. “But he keeps reneging on his word! He believes I’m not ready!” Furious, he closed his record player and threw away the last root beer from our picnic. The can slowly swirled near a rotten log.

  Surprise hit me when he mentioned the Academy. “I thought you wanted to be a pirate. Why would you join the Marine Corps?”

  “To learn how to handle weapons! My pa refuses to let me use his. And the armor he hides under his workbench.”

  “Armor?”

  “Yeah. I don’t even know how to wield a revolver!”

  Without a word, Ali nonchalantly passed him her gun, barrel in hand. I didn’t even realize she was listening. Dozing off mid-conversation was one of her habits.

  The boy feigned hesitation, but the sparks in his eyes betrayed his excitement. My human didn’t need to insist more, because seconds later he already had the gun well in hand. “It’s so fracking heavy,” he said. “It’s different in virtual reality.”

  “Try it out,” Ali suggested as she put the needle back on the first track after reopening the portable turntable. From her chin, she then pointed to the soda can Benàn had thrown a few minutes earlier.

  Together, they practiced while listening to music all afternoon. The yardman’s son had almost exhausted Ali’s ammunition when Diligua picked us up for dinner on her flying Solex equipped with black sails.

  This appeared to be our daily routine for the next two weeks: working in the morning, hanging out in the afternoon.

  Ali and Benàn bonded over stories about buccaneers and space adventurers. Freebooters from the Silver Age of Jupiter’s colonies fascinated the young boy: King Xiao and the Lost Triads, Grace Bunny the Traveler, Osborn the Freak or Marcellàn Iron Fists and his famous hand-to-hand fights. The latter sounded to be Benàn’s favorite. He would talk about him for hours. Our amateur raconteur wasn’t holding back his ardor. He knew hundreds of pirate stories.

  “The Sun King—Goldsun’s vessel. She shines like a star. Forstår du? And that is how she camouflages herself in the celestial firmament!” Benàn exclaimed, showing Lady Goldsun the privateer, the respect she deserved—although she sided with Mars on the recent conquest of Pluto. “Her fleet is so frackin’ fast that even the Marine’s Interceptors can’t compete at pure speed!”

  Like everybody in Solaris, we already knew some of these tales. In fact, so many existed we couldn’t distinguish the truth from the myth. Most of these criminals and adventurers had only occurred in pulp fictions like Captain Future.

  Our productivity reached such a level that Alàn no longer required our help to maintain the station. In all fairness, I suspected he had dismissed us because of Ali’s meager gardening skills. Apparently, she had two left hands with no green thumb.

  And still, the truest jest lay ahead.

  “What’s happening to me?” she sobbed one night as the thermometer was going up.

  “Unbelievable!” Alàn answered at her bedside. “You’re without doubt allergic to real vegetables! Nobody’s allergic to real vegetables! What kind of human being are you?”

  Actually, quite an interesting question.

  “Just gimme waffles, you poisoners…” muttered my feverish nutrigel-raised partner, white as the giant tree’s leaves.

  On a frosty morning, Benàn finally introduced us to his secret spaceship hidden in the old external dockyard. He had begun to assemble her by repairing worn parts from the deserted hangar with his mother’s tools. Her name, the Arcadia, stood as a testament to his ambitions.

  I had to acknowledge our dynamic rascal as a skillful mechanic. However, he needed my expertise to set up the control computer and program the post-nuclear engine’s out-of-gravity draining. Meanwhile, with an Eggo between her teeth, my partner improved a rare Soviet jetpack the young boy had stolen from a highway trooper who stopped by a couple of months before.

  The vacation shortly ended as the Kitty only missed a few coats of paint. Alàn boasted every night that he would soon have one last job for us. Yet, I suspected him of monopolizing the floor so that his son would no longer broach the subject of his emancipation. Which he did almost daily. A theory confirmed in the following twilight.

  “Wait! Both of you. I gotta talk to ye.” Alàn looked at Benàn, who had grabbed his virtual reality console before storming outside. “Erik—the station’s storekeeper—told me that ye’ve emptied his entire soda supply,” he continued, clearing the remains of his nattmal. “Along with .50 AE ammunition. The kind of bullets we used to hunt hvaler—whales. Or cosmodons!”

  “Sorry. We shouldn’t have hidden this from you,” Ali apologized. “We just wanted to teach the kid how to shoot.”

  I saw Alàn smiling shyly through his beard. “No harm, rest assured,” he spoke after a short silence. “I just yearn for this pirate story to get outta his head…”

  “That’s what I meant when I said legacy could be a burden…” I opined. “He’s a descendant of the first settlers… of course sharing their taste for adventure.”

  Our host’s eyes brimmed with nostalgia. “Ja! I know. ’was like him…”

  “You wish…” said his wife, busy fixing a modulator in a corner of the room. “This child has more potential than the whole clan put together. He has passed the age to play with his Spirograph.”

  “Again. I know. ’saw the boy handling the absurd blaster Ali uses,” Alàn admitted. “And for sure, he’s also undoubtedly smarter than me.”

  “Why not let him go?” my human asked.

  Alàn sighed. “There was an age when I craved to see what was happening in the solar mines of Mercury and the colonies of the Outer Worlds.” The gardener then showed us his right leg by putting it on the table. His calf was studded with scars and burns. The same wounds slept under the dry earth that permanently covered his hands. “T’was a beautiful time of freedom that was already coming to an end,” he spoke as he readjusted his gray pants to hide this pink topographic map of Mars. “What will he find now? Cyberpsychos on the run? Irradiated moons enslaved by corpo-kingdoms? This durn Martian Technocracy and its ruthless Marine, both corrupted by Lunapolis? Nej. Nothing for him out there. This is the sad reality: the dream has faded.”

  “The armor was from the time you served?” I asked, alluding to Benàn’s words about the power exoskeleton.

  “Served? I’ve never served anyone but the giant plants of Yggdrasil.” Alàn scratched his beard; his gaze was lost in time. When he spoke to us again, we promised to stop fueling his son’s fanciful pipe dreams. Afterwards, he drifted off to the greenhouse on the second floor.

  “How can we tell him that he’s living in his own illusion?” Diligua asked rhetorically. She had finished repairing the modulator but threw it anyway; the day after, Benàn would secretly retrieve it to improve his radar system. She ultimately left the room after wishing us a good evening. Sadness could be seen on her face.

  On our quiet last day, Diligua and the station’s technicians activated the wind turbines. This ingenious system dispensed a fine mist inside Yggdrasil. The fog invaded the large windows separating the pastoral commune from the vacuum.

  With the humidity, Ali’s haircut had doubled in volume. She looked like Bob Ross. Benàn and I reveled seeing her like this before she threw her iron cup at us. Despite the lack of gravity, it almost tore off my right ear.

  “The mist will only last a few days. It’s good for the skin,” Alàn preached while finishing cooking tofu on the gas stove. “Just like mud and—”

  “Alàn—” Diligua cut him off before a knock on the giant mushroom’s door interrupted her reprimand.

  Strange. Since the beginning of our stay, nobody had come to visit Benàn and his family. From the yardman’s expression, it didn’t bode well.

  “Enter!” Diligua shouted as she slid off the oaken table to face the unexpected outlander.

  The wooden door opened slowly before an individual in a beige raincoat rushed inside. Water was dripping from the edges of his round hat and long pointed nose. He wiped his blond mustache from the back of his sleeve before diving his gold nano-circled gray eyes into each of ours. When he met Alàn’s gaze, he gasped, astounded. “What a shock! What they say is true!” he shouted with a thick English accent, hands on his hips. “Marcellàn Iron Fists dwells on this moldy stone!”

  Marcellàn? Was he referring to the pirate? Marcellàn Iron Fists who pulverized his opponents with the strength of his knuckles? That Marcellàn would be Alàn? Nonsense!

  Ali didn’t seem to make the connection. She was too focused on devouring her meaty dagmal, the bottom of the bowl nearly glued to her forehead.

  “I don’t know what ye’re talking ’bout,” coldly said our host.

  “Cut the crap, old fibber!” the visitor laughed. “I’m responsible for some scars on your back.” He opened his coat, revealing an Alliance badge and the stock of a rifle with a scope hanging from his shoulder.

  I recognized him. We were looking at Nigel Hemingwest, a third-generation bounty hunter. Obnoxiously famous for his gross blunders from which he had always come out as white as snow.

  “Marcellàn who fought bare hands in his shiny red titanium armor relegated as a petty gardener! This is beyond prodigious!” Hemingwest continued, stepping towards the table.

  Diligua stopped him, a screwdriver ready: “If you’re not here for any Yggdrasil-related business, I wish you’d get the hell out!”

  Hemingwest stumbled backward, hands up, but visibly delighted by the situation. “Lovely wife!” But his smile faded as he looked at Ali who had now put her bowl back on the table. His eyes lingered for a moment on her badge. “Anyway, I see that the bounty’s already coveted…”

  My partner wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand before granting her unexpected opinion on the issue: “We ain’t give a shit about the dollar-credits. Alàn has offered us shelter and mildly poisonous bio-food. No harm will come to him from us. Why don’t you go on and fuckin’ skedaddle, alright?”

  Hemingwest widened his eyes. It must have been a while since he’d been so blatantly disrespected, but that was Ali’s signature move. To make matters worse, my associate indicated she wouldn’t fulfill a contract, something rare for an auxiliary—and a breach that could result in a harsh reprimand if the higher-ups found out about it.

  “Is that so, lassie?” Hemingwest squeaked before turning to Benàn’s father. “I’m no fool, Alàn the florist. I’ll be waiting for Marcellàn and his armor at the foot of the Big Tree for a duel tonight. A legend like him can’t refuse, even if he has pissed calcium for twenty years by living in low gravity, innit? Otherwise, the whole system will learn where his pitiful family hole up—rightly or wrongly!”

  And Hemingwest left by slamming the door.

  “Well, that explains all the praise for Marcellàn coming from Benàn!” I said to Ali, breaking the awkward silence.

  “No way I could accept this cursed challenge,” Alàn grumbled while sitting.

  In front of him, Benàn had risen, red with anger: “Ye’re going to let him humiliate you like that?”

  “Can’t you see that your father has moved on?” his mother spoke.

  We didn’t say a word. Ali grabbed me by the paw before leaving the table. She had judged that the rest of the conversation had nothing to do with us. But when we arrived at the front door, Benàn passed us and withdrew first, visibly furious at Diligua’s answer.

  “This Hemingwest klaphat hasn’t turned over a new leaf. I know him. He won’t let go,” Alàn grunted with his palms compressed against his eyes.

  “We ignore if he has any evidence. But if he does, I’d bet he has nothing solid and he’s attempting to bluff us…” Diligua said, trying to reassure her husband before we closed the door.