Leo sighed and groaned at the same time. “Look, my people came from a planet called ‘Earth,’ and on that planet there was a country called the ‘United States of America.’”
The girl crossed her arms. “That’s not what the Geiko Archives say.”
“I know! The Geiko Archives are nonsense!”
The hostess flicked her ears. “So… you guys don’t eat nachos?”
“Gah! Forget the nachos! That wasn’t even nachos! That was a nightmare cheese crab!”
Leo rubbed his temples. He didn’t know anything about commanding a ship, but he did know about human history. Maybe he could just let Burlock do the heavy lifting on the bridge and he could be more of a cultural ambassador, like Varlowe said. He could use his position as captain to teach the galaxy the true story of the planet Earth.
He held his chin high and puffed out his chest.
“Let me see the menu for my Captain’s Dinner. The chef and I are gonna have a little chat.”
***
An hour later, the formal dining room bustled with passengers in their finest attire. Tuxedos and gowns and ceremonial robes and bedazzled sweatpants. They mingled and laughed among the candy-cane striped tables and garage-sale junk, reveling in what they imagined was the apex of American elegance. At the front of the room was the Captain’s Table.
Actually, it was two tables shoved together to accommodate his large party.
Leo sat at the center of one of the long sides, straddling the seam between tables. Admiral Skardon sat opposite him, flanked by Willijer the nebbishy accountant and Kersa the lady yes-man, all of them in regal Ba’lux formalwear. Sitting alone on his side of the tables, Leo felt like he was being interviewed. Or maybe condemned. He forced an uneasy smile. “So, are you all enjoying the cruise so far?”
“It’s carried on longer than I expected it to,” Skardon said pointedly.
Leo remembered the admiral’s ultimatum and cringed. “My ‘welcome aboard’ speech kinda got away from me a little.”
“Pity,” Skardon snuffed. “If things had gone differently we all could have been home by now.”
Leo’s stomach plunged with regret, but before he could reply a dusty voice croaked just behind him. “Where’s the food? I’m starved.”
A motorized wheelchair rolled up at his left elbow, containing the wrinkled, doughy heap of Madame Skardon. The admiral’s face tightened. “Mother. What are you doing here?”
“Whatsa matter?” the elder said. “Ashamed to be seen with your old mom? Afraid I’m gonna pull out your baby pictures?”
Skardon scowled. “I just didn’t realize you’d been invited.”
“I almost wasn’t.” the old woman said. “Luckily I ran into the Waylade kid and she told me about it.”
“Yes. That is lucky,” Skardon grumbled.
Leo glanced at the empty bentwood chair to his right. “Speaking of which, where is Varlowe?”
Willijer adjusted his glasses and nodded over Leo’s shoulder. “Fashionably late, as usual.”
Leo turned in his seat to see Varlowe gliding across the dining room. For once, her flawed studies of Earth culture had not betrayed her. She wore a black satin gown that hugged her form, complementing her narrow body in exactly the way a department-store vest or coffee apron didn’t. Its sleeveless tailoring highlighted her long, slender arms. Her thin lips were dark and glossy, and her bony eye sockets were airbrushed with a design like black swan wings. Tiny, sparkling white jewels clung to her tiara of horns, making it seem like a… well, like a tiara.
She actually looked, in a Ba’lux kind of way, pretty.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said breathily. “Getting ready took longer than I expected.”
Leo hopped up to pull out her chair. “It was worth the wait.” A prickle of blush warmed Varlowe’s cheeks, and another rose in Leo’s to match it. “Welcome to the Captain’s Dinner, Madame President.”
“Thank you, Captain.” She slid into her seat. “You’re such a charmer.”
Leo sat down just as a tuxedoed Verdaphyte waiter swept up to the table with a broad smile on his leafy face.
“Good evening to our most esteemed guests. Now that you’ve all arrived, we’ll get started with the appetizer.” Three more Verdaphytes swooped in and set down a series of covered silver trays. The head waiter grinned. “It’s an authentic American dish Chef Fiero has prepared exclusively for you. His famous seven-layer nachos!”
The servers whipped the covers off their trays, revealing huge, heaving piles of spiny starfish smothered in cheese and onions. They tumbled and slid over each other, spreading out across the table like a bucket of dumped fish. Leo lurched back in his chair and hissed angrily under his breath. “Damn it, Fiero! I said no nachos!”
“What’s wrong with nachos?” Willijer asked.
“Yeah, these look delicious,” Madame Skardon agreed.
“No, Mother,” the admiral said. “Your doctor has you on a strict diet, and—”
“Ah, stuff it,” the old lady growled. “My doctor’s a tool.”
The head waiter grinned as his team backed away with a bow. “Bon appétit!”
Kersa picked up a long fork with two prongs. “Hmm. Looks surprisingly edible for American food.”
She pulled back and brutally stabbed the fork through a starfish. The appetizer squealed and shot a jet of blood like she’d impaled an artery.
Leo lurched back in his chair. “Ack! You killed it!”
Varlowe snickered. “Killed it. Aww. You’re such a gentle soul.” She grabbed her own fork and plunged it into a starfish like a serial killer slaughtering a babysitter. The creature let out a high, piercing wail as its blood pooled on her bread plate. With a twist of her fork, she pried off a leg and popped it in her mouth. Her pointed teeth made short work of the spiny flesh, and her eyes closed in ecstasy. “Mmm! Oh! That’s so good.”
Leo looked on in horror as the wounded delicacy struggled to escape before she could rip off another limb. Skardon stabbed at his plate, trying and failing to get a fork into one of the scuttling appetizers. Willijer pried his screeching meal apart with a pair of dining forceps, flicking droplets of blood across the tablecloth. Madame Skardon snatched hers off the table with her bare hands and tore into it like it was a bread roll, spilling gore down her wrinkled chin.
“Stop! Stop it!” Leo squealed, reeling back in his chair. “What is the matter with you people?”
Kersa spoke through a full mouth, glancing at the others in confusion. “Why is it so upset?”
“Why am I so…” Leo clutched at his ears. “Can you not hear your dinner screaming?”
Varlowe chuckled. “Leo, they’re not screaming. They’re fruit.”
Leo’s eye twitched. “Fruit?”
“Fruit,” Willijer confirmed. “That noise is their seed pods decompressing.”
He balled his napkin and pressed two fingers against his twitching meal. The edges of its wounds rippled with escaping gas as it seemed to cry out in a whistle of excruciating agony.
“But why do they move?” Leo asked.
“Nutritropism,” Varlowe explained. “They’re not sentient. They crawl until they find somewhere suitable to put down roots.”
Leo waved at the red flecks of carnage dotting the table. “And the blood?”
“That’s blood,” Kersa said condescendingly. “You’ve never seen a fruit that bleeds?”
Varlowe pushed her maimed appetizer toward him. “You really should try it. And be quick about it, they’re no good once they start clotting.”
Leo’s stomach flopped. “No, I’ll pass. But thank you.”
The smile faded from Varlowe’s face. “I don’t understand. Is something wrong? I know Kellybean vetted the menu to make sure it was all genuine American food.”
“Yeah, her idea of what we eat may be a little… flawed.” A weak grin powered its way through Leo’s nausea. “So that’s why I worked with the c
hef to revamp tonight’s dinner. Fiero was stubborn at first, but ultimately I think he was happy with what we came up with.”
Willijer gave him a skeptical look. “Wait, are you saying you planned our dinner?”
Leo’s hesitant smile turned real as he found his confidence.
Force to be reckoned with.
“I sure did. As the captain of the Americano Grande, I am proud to share a down-home meal straight from the kitchens of Eaglehaven.” He nodded to three Nomit waiters hovering near the kitchen. They descended on the table, clearing away the appetizer trays with one set of arms while depositing a new set with the other. Leo spread his hands in a flourish. “I present to you, a true, authentic food of my people.”
The waiters whipped the covers off the trays, revealing plates piled high with food. Leo’s dining companions collectively gasped and lurched away from the table.
“What is that?” Madame Skardon choked.
“Worms!” Kersa roared. “You dare insult us with a meal of worms?”
“Worms and gonads!” Willijer gagged. “Covered in Krubb cerebral fluid!”
Leo’s brows lowered in confusion. “What? No! It’s spaghetti and meatballs!”
Varlowe’s lips contorted around the word. “Spuh-get-tee?”
“Yes! It’s a traditional noodle dish from my ancestral home world,” Leo explained. “As an honorary ambassador of Eaglehaven, I wanted to share it with all of you.”
Skardon sneered as a waiter set a plate in front of him. “But it’s visually appalling.”
Kersa snorted. “And the smell is nauseating.”
“And…” Willijer pointed a fork at his food. “Gonads.”
“Oh stop whining,” Varlowe said. “Our people have been shoving Ba’lux cuisine down the galaxy’s throats for two thousand years. It won’t kill you to try something new.”
She put a warm hand on Leo’s. For once he didn’t pull away.
“Thanks, Varlowe. I know this may be a little weird for you all, but I think you’ll like it once you taste it.”
“Ah, what the hekk,” Madame Skardon said with a limp shrug. “Nobody lives forever.”
“That’s the spirit,” Leo said. “Well, it’s the spirit adjacent.”
The old woman jabbed a fork into the mass of pasta and scooped some into her mouth. All around the table, curiosity beat out skepticism as the Ba’lux gave it a try. Leo took advantage of the uneasy silence to take a mouthful of noodles himself. They tasted surprisingly accurate. Despite the chef’s claims, the kitchen had not at all been stocked for “American-style” cooking. But Leo had worked with him to find acceptable substitutions using the alien ingredients on hand. This wasn’t spaghetti and meatballs like his mother made, but it was the closest any non-human chef had ever come. He swallowed and gave a satisfied nod.
“Hey, that’s pretty good.” He grinned and looked up from his plate. “How is everyone enjoying their bwaaa!”
He recoiled at the sight of the Ba’lux trying and failing to eat spaghetti. Willijer’s jagged teeth were knotted in strands of pasta, the limp ends hanging down and dribbling sauce over his chin. Kersa sputtered and coughed as she tried to pull a clump of mangled noodles out of her throat. Madame Skardon’s dentures were packed full of gray meatball remains. Even Varlowe struggled to slurp down a noodle, carefully working her lips in an attempt to keep it off the blades of her teeth. It was like watching a bulldog eat a garter snake.
Leo sighed. “Maybe this was not the ideal choice of entree.”
“On this we can agree.” Skardon threw his napkin on his uneaten meal. “I refuse to sit here another minute while you desecrate our bodies with this abomination you call dinner. I’m leaving.”
Kersa gagged and spit a wad of pasta onto her plate. “Hear hear! This is the worst meal I’ve ever had on a WTF ship.”
“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “I didn’t know this would be so much trouble. I just thought we could all have a nice home-style dinner together and I could teach you something about my people’s culture.”
“Nobody cares about your stupid culture!” Skardon snapped. He tapped his chest. “Our customs are proudly steeped in millennia of tradition. Yours are an obscure fad, embraced only by fanatics and cultists.”
He thrust an accusing finger at Varlowe. She calmly swallowed her noodle and wiped her mouth, careful not to smudge her lipstick. “As usual, you’re wrong. Wrong and dumb. Always assuming everything Ba’lux is superior to everything human.”
Leo raised a hand. “Look, let’s not fight about… wait, did you say ‘human’?”
Varlowe bit her lip. “Sorry, did I pronounce it wrong?”
“No, that was right, actually. I’m just used to everyone calling us ‘Americans.’”
Kersa huffed. “Because that’s what your stupid race is called!”
Willijer nodded at Varlowe. “She is correct, Madame President. Haven’t you read the Geiko Archives?”
“I have,” Varlowe said smugly. “But apparently none of you have bothered to look at the original source material from the NASA Star Freedom. I dug through some of it this afternoon.”
Leo blinked. “Wow, really?”
“Really.” She smiled. “And I wish I’d done it earlier. Turns out the humans have affected our society more than any of us realize.”
Madame Skardon snuffed. “Like how?”
“Like, before you were even born, the human units of measure became the unifying galactic standard, replacing dozens of other planetary metrics.” Varlowe turned to Leo with the grin of a proud student brownnosing a teacher. “They were that good. Right, Leo?”
Leo frowned. “Technically our system wasn’t adopted, only our words. When the unifying committee created the revised measures they named them after our units because they thought we were too dumb to learn new vocabulary.”
“Ah. I did not know that.” Varlowe winced. “Okay, bad example. But there’s a ton of other stuff galactic-standard Quipp has borrowed from human language.”
“Oh, it has not,” Willijer groused.
“It kinda has, actually.” Leo sat forward in his chair. “Look at idioms like ‘cold turkey’ and ‘couch potato’ and ‘go bananas.’ All of them came from humans.”
“Right? It’s crazy,” Varlowe agreed. “We all say these things, but when you stop and think about it, half of those words are total gibberish. What even is a ‘banana’? Nobody knows.”
“I know, actually,” Leo said. “It was a yellow—”
“This is nonsense,” Kersa snapped. “The purity of galactic language has not been corrupted by the Americans. Speak no more of this vulgarity.”
Varlowe leaned back in her chair with a mischievous grin. “You want to talk vulgarity? Fine. I can go vulgar as huck.”
A collective gasp rose from the diners.
“Excuse me?” Madame Skardon hissed indignantly.
“You know, huck,” Varlowe repeated calmly. “Like, ‘I don’t give a huck,’ or ‘Go huck yourself.’ Or, ‘Everything is abso-hucking-lutely hucked up.’”
Skardon pounded a fist on the table. “Silence! I did not come here to listen to your profanity!”
“It’s not technically profanity.” Varlowe grinned eagerly. “It’s actually kind of a funny story. When the Geiko anthropologists studied the Star Freedom’s databases, they came across an old literary controversy. An author named Mark Twain had written a book that repeatedly used a term the humans considered offensive. But if you review the source material, it’s obvious the vulgar word wasn’t ‘Huck,’ but was in fact—”
“I don’t care!” Skardon roared, launching to his feet. “I will not sit here another minute, being fed disgusting food and forced to listen to obscene conversation.”
“Hear hear!” Kersa snarled, leaping from her chair.
“Wait, I’m sorry,” Leo squeaked. “Look, there’s a lot more to my culture than swearing! Let’s talk about music, or art, or�
��”
“I’ve heard enough,” Madame Skardon croaked. “This is the most indecent, offensive Captain’s Welcome Dinner I’ve ever attended.” She wagged a finger at Leo and Varlowe. “You two should both be ashamed of yourselves.”
The Skardons and Kersa stormed away as Willijer rose to his feet. “I must say I am in agreement. This has been… unpleasant.” He adjusted his collar. “Good night.”
He followed the others through the red-and-white tables of guests and toward the tchotchke-covered exit of WTF Friday’s. Leo slumped back in his seat and raked his hands through his hair, blowing out a long breath. “Well, that could have gone better.”
Varlowe giggled and waved a dismissive hand. “It went fine. If they don’t want to learn the true facts of human history, it’s their loss.”
Leo looked at her, clad in her stunning gown. “You really read the Star Freedom’s files?”
“Yes. Kind of.” Varlowe crossed her hands in her lap. “I admit, I didn’t get through much of them.”
“Well, it’s a lot more than most non-humans ever do.” Leo fidgeted with his fork. “And I want you to know I appreciate the effort.”
Patches of pink warmed Varlowe’s bony orange cheeks. “Well, there was quite a bit I didn’t understand. I could really use a subject matter expert to explain things more clearly.”
Leo smiled. “I think that could be arranged. Maybe we could get together tomorrow morning.”
Varlowe rested a warm hand on his arm. “Or maybe we could just stay together now.”
Leo met her eyes. Before they had been the empty copper glare of an alien. Now they were the affectionate gaze of a friend. He gave her hand a pat.
“Sure, why not?”
Chapter Eight
The stunning blue and gold orb of the planet Halii Bai rose like the morning sun outside the windows. A majestic and dazzling start to the second day of the Americano Grande’s maiden voyage to Ensenada Vega.
Leo watched the spectacle from a private seating nook tucked at the back of a concourse cocktail bar. Since he’d arrived there, the nightlife sounds of glassware clinking and guests chatting had risen and ebbed away. A second wave of noise had taken its place, crew scurrying with vacuums and bus trays. Then it had gone silent except for the soft, ever-present drone of the Fiesta Deck’s tropical background music. Now the lounge was showing signs of life again as the morning crew were beginning to arrive and prepare for the mimosa crowd.
Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage Page 10