The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

  “Maybe she just didn’t want to,” Kizzy said. “Maybe she liked it better out here.”

  “No,” Sissix said. “It’s because she can’t socialize well.”

  “She’s shy?” Rosemary asked.

  “She’s a rashek. There’s not a word for it in Klip. She’s got a disorder that makes it difficult for her to interact with others. She has trouble understanding other people’s intentions. And she speaks oddly, that much was obvious when I first approached her. I offered to couple with her, but she couldn’t quite bring herself around to that. So, yes, she’s shy, but she also has a hard time figuring other people out. It makes her act a little…well, for lack of a better word, weird.”

  “Why snuggle with a weirdo?” Kizzy asked.

  “Being weird doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve companionship. The fact that she’s running a shop instead of living on a farm somewhere means that she has no house family. And yeah, there are elders who choose not to have house families, but she doesn’t even have a feather family. And that’s…” Sissix shivered. “Stars, I can’t imagine anything worse than that.”

  Rosemary looked at Sissix. The familial terms were lost on her, but something clicked anyway. “You were comforting her. That’s all it was. You just wanted to her to know that someone cared.”

  “Nobody should be alone,” Sissix said. “Being alone and untouched…there’s no punishment worse than that. And she’s done nothing wrong. She’s just different.”

  “There are lots of other Aandrisks here. Why don’t they do anything for her?”

  “Because they don’t want to,” Sissix said, her voice growing fierce. “Did you see the two Aandrisks walk by while I was with her? Locals, I’m sure. They knew her, I could tell by the look in their eyes. They can’t be bothered with her. She’s an inconvenience.” Sissix’s feathers had puffed up. Her sharp teeth flashed as she spoke.

  “Don’t be fooled by all the warm fuzzy talk and snuggles,” Kizzy said to Rosemary. “Aandrisks can be assholes, too.”

  “Oh, we’ve certainly got our share,” Sissix said. “Anyway. Sorry to keep you waiting. I hope I didn’t make you feel awkward. I know Humans can be — ”

  “No,” Rosemary said. “No, it was a very kind thing to do.” She watched the Aandrisk woman as she walked beside her. Her body was strange, her ways were strange, and yet, Rosemary found herself in deep admiration.

  “Yes, awesome, go Sissix,” Kizzy said. “But I am now starving. What sounds good? Noodles? Skewers? Ice cream? We’re grownups, we can have ice cream for lunch if we want.”

  “Let’s not,” Sissix said.

  “Right. I forgot,” Kizzy said, and laughed. “Ice cream makes her mouth go slack.”

  Sissix flicked her tongue with disapproval. “Why anyone would make freezing cold food is beyond me.”

  “Ooh! What about hoppers?” Kizzy said. “I could seriously go for a hopper. Mmm, spicy peppers and crunchy onions and a big toasty bun…” She looked at Rosemary with eager eyes.

  “I can’t remember the last time I had a hopper,” Rosemary said. It was a lie. She’d never had one. Grasshopper burgers were street food, and that wasn’t a realm of cuisine she’d ever been privy to. She imagined how her mother would react to her chowing down a bug sandwich wrapped in greasy paper while sharing a table with modders and smugglers and arm-hacking patch thieves. She grinned. “Sounds great.”

  ●

  Ashby ran his palm down the bare torso pressing against his own. He’d had his share of lovers before her. He’d felt plenty of skin. But none like hers. She was covered in tiny scales — not thickly layered, like Sissix’s, but seamless, interlocking. She was silvery, almost reflective, like a fish in a river. Despite all the time he’d spent looking at her, despite how comfortable he was in her company, there were still moments when the sight of her made his words stick in his throat.

  It was pure chance, of course, that Aeluons so often managed to check all the boxes on the list of Things That Humans Generally Find Attractive. On a galactic scale, beauty was a relative concept. All Humans could agree that Harmagians were hideous (a sentiment the Harmagians heartily returned). Aandrisks — well, that depended on who you talked to. Some people liked the feathers; others couldn’t get past their teeth and claws. The Rosk, with their skittery legs and jagged mandibles, would still be the stuff of nightmares even if they weren’t in the habit of carpetbombing border colonies. But Aeluons, by some weird fluke of evolution, had a look that made most Humans drop their jaws, hold up their palms, and say, “Okay, you are a superior species.” Aeluons’ long limbs and digits were alien, no question, but they moved with fascinating grace. Their eyes were large, but not too large. Their mouths were small, but not too small. In Ashby’s experience, it was hard to find a Human who couldn’t appreciate an Aeluon, even if only in the most objective aesthetic terms. Aeluon women didn’t have breasts, but after meeting Pei, Ashby had found that he could do without. His teenage self would’ve been horrified.

  Lying beside her, Ashby felt like a hairy, gangly mess. But given what they’d been up to for the better part of the last two hours, he figured he couldn’t be that repulsive. Or maybe she just didn’t care about the whole hairy, gangly thing. That worked, too.

  “You hungry?” Pei said, though her mouth did not move. Like all Aeluons, her “voice” was a computerized sound that came from a talkbox embedded in the base of her throat. She controlled the talkbox neurally, a process she likened to thinking up words while typing. Aeluons lacked a natural sense of hearing, and had no need for a spoken language of their own. Among themselves, they communicated through color — specifically, iridescent patches on their cheeks that shimmered and shifted like the skin of a bubble. Once they began interacting with other species, however, verbal communication became a necessity, and so, talkboxes came to be.

  “I’m starving,” Ashby said. He knew that as he spoke, the sounds coming from his mouth were collected by the jewelry-like implant set in her forehead. As her brain did not have any means for processing sound, the implant translated his words into neural input that she could understand. He didn’t quite grasp how it worked, but he could say the same for most tech. It worked. That was all he needed to know. “Your room or mine?” he asked. That was another part of their standard operating procedure: Make sure only one person was in the room when room service arrived.

  “Let’s see what they’ve got, first.” She reached over the edge of the bed and pulled the menu from a nearby table. “What are our odds?”

  This was an old joke between them, the question of how likely it would be that each of them would find something they liked on the room service menu. Multispecies menus meant well, but they were always hit or miss. “Seventy-thirty,” he said. “Your favor.”

  “How come?”

  He pointed at the menu. “Because they’ve got a whole section dedicated to roe.”

  “Ooh, so they do.”

  He let his eyes slide down her body as she perused the selection of fish eggs. He saw something peeking up over her hip — the edge of a scar, thick and milky white. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, but then, he’d been a little distracted. “This one’s new.”

  “What?” She craned her neck up to look. “Oh, that. Yeah.” She went back to the menu.

  Ashby sighed, a familiar weight growing in his stomach. Pei had many scars — corded stripes across her back, healed bullet holes on her legs and chest, a warped patch leftover from the business end of a pulse rifle. Her body was a tapestry of violence. Ashby had no illusions about the risks a cargo runner faced, but somehow her neat clothes, her polished gray ship, her quick wit and smooth voice made it all seem very civilized. It wasn’t until he saw physical proof that someone had hurt her that he remembered how dangerous her life was. The life he couldn’t share.

  “Should I ask?” Ashby said, running his finger over the dull flesh. The way she was reclining prevented him from seeing the extent of it, but it trailed all the way to
her back, widening as it went. “Shit, Pei, this is huge.”

  Pei laid the menu across her chest and looked at him. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to tell you if it’s going to make you worry more.”

  “Who said I was worried?”

  She stroked the creases between his eyebrows with a fingertip. “You’re sweet, but you’re a terrible liar.” She rolled over, bringing her face to his. “There was an…incident at a drop site.”

  “An incident.”

  Her second pair of eyelids fluttered, and her cheeks went pale yellow with flecks of red. The intricacies of her color language were something Ashby would never be able to learn, but he was familiar enough with it to distinguish emotions. This one, for example, was somewhere between exasperated and embarrassed. “It’s going to sound so much worse than it actually was.”

  Ashby drummed his fingers against her hip, waiting.

  “Oh, fine. We got jumped by a small — very small, I might add — Rosk strike team. They were after the base, not us, but we got a little mixed up in it. Long, messy story short, I ended up on top of one of their heads — ”

  “You what?” Rosk soldiers were built for combat right down to their genes. Three times the size of an average Human. A fast, raging mass of legs and spikes and keratin plating. Given the opportunity, he didn’t think he could prevent himself from running away from a charging Rosk soldier, let alone climb up on her head.

  “I told you this was going to sound bad. Anyway, the second-to-last thing she ever did was buck me off into a stack of crates. As I went crashing down, she took the opportunity to grab me in her mouth. I’ve got good protective gear, but Rosk jaws — ” She shook her head. “What you see there on my hip is the result of one of her mandibles slicing through. But it ended up working out well for me, actually. Being in her mouth gave me a nice, soft place to shoot.”

  Ashby swallowed. “So you…?”

  “No, that wasn’t enough to kill her. My pilot’s second shot was, though.” She cocked her head, second eyelids sliding in sideways. “You’re bothered.”

  “It’s hard not to be.”

  “Ashby.” She reached out to touch his cheek. “You shouldn’t ask.”

  He pressed his palm against the small of her back, pulling her in close. “I really want this war to be over.”

  “You know most of this” — she took his hand and guided it over her scars — “happened in GC space. This one’s from an Akarak who tried to board my ship. This one’s from a smuggler who didn’t want me to call the authorities on his phony bots. And this one’s from a genetweak headcase who was just having a bad day. Nobody protects me when I’m in uncontested space. Nobody but me. With military work, I get escorts when I’m out in the open, and armed guards when I’m unloading down planetside. In a lot of ways, military work is safer. Pays better, too. And it’s not as if they send me into heavy combat. Soon as I drop my goods, I turn right around and come back home.”

  “Do…incidents happen often?”

  “No.” She studied his face. “Are you more bothered that I was attacked, or that I shot someone?”

  Ashby was quiet for a moment. “The former. I don’t care about you shooting that Rosk.”

  She stretched out a leg and hooked it around one of his. “That’s an odd thing for an Exodan to say.” Pei, like everybody else in the GC, knew that Exodans were pacifists. Before they had left Earth for the open, the refugees had known that the only way they were going to survive was to band together. As far as they were concerned, their species’ bloody, war-torn history ended with them.

  “I don’t know if I can explain this,” Ashby said. “I wish war didn’t happen, but I don’t judge other species for taking part in it. What you’re doing out there, I mean, I can’t find fault in what you do. The Rosk are killing innocent people in territories that don’t belong to them, and they won’t be reasoned with. I hate saying it, but in this case, I think violence is the only option.”

  Pei’s cheeks went a somber orange. “It is. I’m only on the edges of it, and from what I’ve seen…trust me, Ashby, this is a war that needs to be fought.” She exhaled in thought. “Do you think badly of me for — I don’t know, for accepting business from soldiers?”

  “No. You’re not a mercenary. All you do is get supplies to people. There’s no fault in that.”

  “What about me shooting the Rosk, though? The one that had me in her mouth? You know that’s not the first time I’ve had to…defend myself.”

  “I know. But you’re a good woman. The things you have to do don’t change that. And your species — you know how to end a war. Truly end it. It doesn’t get in your blood. You do what needs doing and leave it at that.”

  “Not always,” Pei said. “We have as many dark patches in our history as any.”

  “Maybe, but not like us. Humans can’t handle war. Everything I know about our history shows that it brings out the worst in us. We’re just not…mature enough for it, or something. Once we start, we can’t stop. And I’ve felt that in me, you know, that inclination toward acting out in anger. Nothing like what you’ve seen. I don’t pretend to know what war is like. But Humans, we’ve got something dangerous in us. We almost destroyed ourselves because of it.”

  Pei ran her long fingers around his coiled hair. “But you didn’t. And you learned from it. You’re trying to evolve. I think the rest of the galaxy underestimates what that says about you.” She paused. “Well, about the Exodans, at least,” she said, her cheeks a sly green. “The Solans’ motives are a bit more questionable.”

  He laughed. “Not that you’re biased or anything.”

  “It’s your fault if I am.” She propped herself up on the pillow. “Don’t change the subject. You haven’t finished your original thought.”

  “Which one?”

  “What it is that actually bothers you.”

  “Ah, right.” He sighed. Who was he to talk to her about war? What did he know about it at all, aside from news feeds and reference files? War was nothing more than a story to him, something that happened to people he didn’t know in places he’d never been to. It felt insulting to tell her how he felt about it.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “The Rosk that bit you. She’s dead.”

  “Yes.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. No remorse, no pride.

  Ashby nodded. “That’s what bothers me.”

  “That…a Rosk died?”

  “No.” He tapped his chest. “This. This feeling in here. That’s what bothers me. I hear that you shot someone, and I’m glad of it. I’m glad that you stopped her before she could hurt you more. I’m glad that she’s dead, because that means you’re still here. What does that say about me? What does it say about me, being relieved that you can do the thing I condemn my own species for?”

  Pei looked at him a long time. She pressed close to him. “It means,” she said, her forehead against his, her lithe limbs wrapped around his body, “that you understand more about violence than you think.” She pressed her fingers against his cheek, a touch of worry crossing her face. “And that’s good, considering where you’re headed.”

  “We’re not going into a combat zone. The Board says the situation there is perfectly stable.”

  “Uh huh,” she said flatly. “I’ve never looked a Toremi in the eye, but they do not sound stable to me. That species was sending our explorers back in pieces before you guys even knew the rest of us were out here. I don’t buy this alliance, and I don’t like the idea of you going out there.”

  Ashby laughed. “This coming from you.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “Really.”

  Her eyes shifted, displeased. “Yes, really. I know which end of a gun to point at someone. You won’t even pick one up.” She exhaled, her cheeks turning a pale orange. “That’s not fair, I’m sorry. All I mean is, I know you. I know you’ve probably thought this out long and hard. But I d
on’t know the Toremi. I only know what I hear, and — just, please, Ashby, be careful.”

  He kissed her forehead. “And now you know how I feel every time you leave.”

  “It’s an awful way to feel,” she said with a smirk. “And I wish you didn’t feel it either. But I suppose it’s good, in a way. It means that you care for me as much as I care for you.” She placed his hand on her hip. “I like that.”

  They put off room service for another hour.

  Day 180, GC Standard 306

  THE WANE

  Seated safely behind the window in their quarters, Ohan gazed into the black hole. With some effort, they could remember how the galaxy had looked during their Host’s childhood, before infection. Flat. Vacant. Blank. So much of existence was lost to a mind untouched by the Whisperer. Their alien companions had such minds. Ohan pitied them.

  Looking only with their eyes, Ohan’s view of the activity taking place along the edges of the black hole’s accretion disk was no different than the way the rest of the crew saw it. A flock of unmanned skimmer drones sailed close as they could safely get to the event horizon, just on the edge of gravity’s embrace. They drifted through the swirling silt, and to the ordinary observer, they would appear to be doing nothing but drawing dust trails with their comb-like arms. But if Ohan looked with their mind, mapped it all out with the right numbers and notions, the space outside became a majestic, violent place. Around the skimmers’ arms, raw energy tumbled and boiled, like a thrashing sea churning up flotsam. Tendrils of the stuff curled up around the combs, arching and writhing as they were coaxed into the collection hoppers. Or so Ohan imagined. They pressed close to the window, in awe of the storm that lay beyond sight. And again, they thought of what their crewmates would see: an empty patch of space, blacker than black, and little skimmers collecting invisible cargo.

  How still the universe must look to their eyes, Ohan thought. How silent.

  That invisible cargo was what their captain had come to purchase. Ashby was probably haggling over the price of ambi cells at that very moment. Raw ambi — the stuff Ohan envisioned torquing around the skimmer combs — was difficult to gather. Ambi could be found everywhere and in everything, but the way that it wove itself around ordinary matter made extracting it a troublesome task. With the right technology, it could be wrenched apart, but the process was so tedious and reaped such small rewards that it wasn’t worth the effort. It was far easier to gather ambi somewhere where matter was already being ripped apart by forces greater than anything any sapient could build — like a black hole. Black holes were always surrounded by turbulent seas of free-floating ambi, but getting close enough to gather it posed an obvious risk. For ambi traders, the risk was worth it, especially since it allowed them to charge a premium. As expensive as ambi cells were, they were the only thing that could power the Wayfarer’s interspatial bore. It was a necessary expense for a ship such as theirs, but one that always left Ashby looking a little gray afterward. Ohan had read of ships powered entirely by ambi cells, but they had trouble conceiving of a life in which such an extravagance was affordable.