Dwarves in Space

by S E Zbasnik

  "There's something in the distance," Segundo's voice was background chatter, little more than one of the tentacled birds cawing for its next meal.

  Dwarf inched closer to human, his bad hand curling in a fist from subconscious signals. He'd never actually hit anyone with it, the damage to it would be far worse financially than anything anyone could do to his face. "Funny thing, before we all fell from the ship I did some poking about in old records. Seems in the past fifty years there was only one human given a Silver Pentagon, Sir."

  She recoiled from the word, glancing at her other crew. Monde only blinked his double eyelids fast trying to work out some bits of sand jammed in between the membranes. Orcs cared little for any other species military ranks, less for the rumors that followed them.

  "Guys, whatever it is, it's getting really close," Segundo reached a high panic as his fingers flapped towards some blur in the onyx road's distance.

  Orn broke from his stare down with Variel just as the blur increased. "Get back, you stupid shit!" was all anyone got out when the road threw up a barrier, launching the stupid shit onto his ass, the red clay oozing into his no longer pristine uniform.

  Sounding like someone tossed a hornet's nest into a trash can and quickly covered the lid, the vehicle soothed to a crawl, its blue lights flashing even in the bright light of day. It was more egg shaped than one expected for something that could reach speeds of "my brain's in my toes!" but orcs required a bit more room than the average human, and had this thing about eggs. It was said that on the day of armistice, negotiations were at a stalemate until the caterers wheeled in a tray full of deviled eggs. The Orc Council gorged themselves so much the treaty was signed in under five minutes.

  A symmetric crack formed in the egg car's shell and a window popped open. Far larger than Monde, an orc head and part of the vast shoulders poked out of the window, "Are you the guys what called for a lift?"

  A greasy set of nose prints remained on the projector screen as the cab egg ground to a near instant halt. Their driver didn't say much to the odd pair in her cab, only asked three times if they had actual currency. After Variel flashed something shiny, she took them onboard. She would peer through her rear viewscreen to watch the human gawping at the familiar landscape whizzing by.

  Segundo felt the need to narrate the trip to himself aloud, causing the other passengers to lapse into silence; even Orn, who got a jolly good time of ribbing Seggy for having almost the exact same uniform as the cabbie, minus the giant shoulder spikes and sash of ammo. But that grew dull as the kid kept hopping out of his lack of restraints to point at another pair of buildings minding their own business and comment on the color of the sky, the shade of the trees and the tentacles of the birds suctioned to lampposts.

  "Central exchange," their cabbie grunted, "That'll be five shiny things."

  Variel dropped some of the coins -- most extracted from ancient dig sites, hand poured as souvenirs, and a few full of chocolate -- into the orc's clawed hand. "Keep the change," she muttered, getting a small glower from their driver, but the door crack began and everyone piled out of the stuffy egg and straight into the heart of some backwater colony's second or third largest town.

  It was impressive as far as colonies went. When most talked about a settlement far flung across the galaxy they pictured mud huts thrown together with the help of the hides off native fauna or occasionally flora. Where large ruminants roamed, you rarely heard a disparaging word, and the skies remained relatively cloudless throughout the arc of the star. Even those who grew up within the sheltered glass and brick walls in a colony still talked as though anyone else struggling upon one was born with a cholera spoon in their mouth.

  New Dawn was of middling size, one of those cities on the grow, supported by a lucrative silicon business, that encouraged younger orcs of a certain go getting nature to come and try their luck at getting swindled in closer proximity to others. The Central Exchange housed most of the public transportation when it wasn't zipping off to claim people; a rail line rattled above their heads, old and in need of repair, while a garage housing the eggs took up the street space below.

  "Okay, Monde, where would we find a copier?" Variel asked, the scent of hot tar and fried klax in the air. The streets were quiet, most people locked away at their upscale jobs.

  "One of the grey markets," he said, his bag pulled closely to his side. "They tend to congregate towards the center of the city." Their resident expert approached one of the children's art projects communities put up to show how proud they are of their future tax payers and ran his finger over it. Bits of clay shuddered down in flecks as a train rattled above them. Variel screwed her hat on tighter while the others shook their hands through their hair.

  "I should have brought my uniform's hat as well," Segundo muttered, putting some of the blame on the more informed and better prepared captain.

  She grinned in disbelief and muttered, "That would be ill advised."

  "Why?"

  "It's one of those cultural things your type pay no heed to," she said, glancing up and down the onyx road. A few orcs, dressed in business casual -- wide strips of midsection leather with pouches, a spiked collar and slightly camouflaged jumpsuit -- walked across the street, carrying a set of cases between them and tipping their hats to anyone that walked past. Cordiality was something it took humans a long time to accept from the people trying to kill them.

  "If we traverse this road until it splits, we should come to the market bazaar," Monde said, his own uncovered head flecked with clay he didn't notice falling. Most got used to it.

  "Lead the way," Variel said, glad to be moving.

  Monde glanced over at the pair of high powered orcs out for a late lunch stroll and shrunk into his coat. "It would be prudent if you took the leadership."

  "All right," she sighed. Together the group stepped away from the Central Exchange just as another egg blue shifted into the city. Her fellow crew members followed behind like ducklings.

  The group of outsiders made it down three blocks before Segundo's background chatter started up again, "Why are all the buildings shaped like that?"

  "Because, if they put them underground the dwarves would sue for copyright infringement," Orn needled.

  "No, see, the T and then the lines running down...It's just silly." Segundo was no master architect, having grown inside a rather serviceable but "not about to win any design awards" pagoda. At least the brothers claimed it was a pagoda. In truth, it was a squat rectangle that survived the ravaging fires that claimed all the other decorative and surprisingly flammable buildings across the church's settlements.

  His mind had trouble wrapping around the twenty or thirty tall T's looming over them, supported by the thick beams on each side with smaller isosceles triangles tucked up next to the T's using the beams for shelter. While the main T was a sheen of glass, with a few decorative letters hanging somewhere around its head, the triangles were mixes of festive colors. Greens and reds merging into purples with yellow doors and a partially raised black window. There was no pattern to the triangles, some had three doors to the front, while others only one. Windows seemed to be fired at it with a shotgun and covered in glass later.

  This provided adequate space for the trains to zip between the buildings, rattling the T's and tossing more dirt onto the heads below, but none of the teetering buildings fell over. Occasionally, a train would pause on the tracks, as if every passenger were waving to whoever dared climb to the top of those treacherous consonants.

  If Monde hadn't been doing his best to keep his eyes down while also watching a cluster of orcs crowding up the walkway, he'd have told the curious human that his people considered life and work to be one and the same. Houses were built right beneath the places of business so members could easily scuttle from their dwellings to their work. And, when that life/work dynamic became too dull, half the office staff would try to scale up the building as part of a team building exercise. The losers would be posthumously fired or poss
ibly fricasseed.

  Instead, the orc shook his head and told the human, "It is complicated."

  "Huh," Segundo slowed, breaking away from their captain who didn't have the time to look out for the idiots behind her. She dashed across the road just as the barrier zipped up for a passing egg car. The three lost ducklings stood at the other side, waiting for the countdown to stop.

  "Hey there, sweetmeat."

  Monde looked down and Orn shifted a bit, but Segundo turned back to find where the growling voice came from. A cluster of orcs, wearing the universal uniform of people who spent their life pushing data streams, crowded around one of the benches scattered about the T fronts. They were large, larger even than their cabbie friend, with shoulders that could burst through most door frames back home, and a series of horns running down the sides of their necks.

  The countdown stopped and Monde coughed, trying to get the human's attention. Segundo turned away from the orcs to the doctor and grinned sheepishly, but his curious stares did not pass unnoticed. One of the group, with sleeves rolled up to display an inking of scratchmarks on the arm, rose from the shared seat and staggered over to the three about to cross the road.

  "Where are you going, sweetheart?" the orc asked, all smiles.

  "To the..." Segundo started helpfully, but Orn stepped hard on his shoe.

  The new orc was eyeing up Monde as if for supper, and inching closer into the doc's personal space. Monde kept his eyes low, focusing on the shoes as he muttered, "Just passing through."

  "Oh, I know something you could pass through," and the Orc laughed loud, earning the approving guffaws of the others eavesdropping.

  "We need to keep an appointment," Monde said, motioning to the rest to keep walking. Orn grabbed the edges of Segundo's uniform jacket and drug him on while Monde took a step forward.

  But this didn't dissuade their new friend, trailing behind them as they crossed the road asking for Monde's address or link up data. Finally the doc screwed up the courage and turned about, "I'm not interested, so leave me alone. Please."

  The orc rose up, clenching muscles that lay hidden beneath the folds of business fabric but stopped short as Variel pushed past her charges to stand in eyesight, her scar plainly visible. The orc deflated at her interceding but called out in one pitiful jab, "You're a fat ball licker, anyway," before sauntering off.

  Variel continued to glare at the orc's retreat but said nothing. She turned back to her lead, acting as if nothing happened. Monde balled up his fists to bury a shaking in his arms.

  "What in the galaxy was that all about?" Segundo asked, the only one still unaware of the danger they'd just passed. "I thought that guy was gonna rip your head off."

  "That wasn't quite what he wanted," Orn said diplomatically, "and that wasn't a guy."

  Scratch scratch scratch.

  Variel paced back to the counter, tapping at the glass as if that would increase the passage of time. Her hat was off-kilter, never really meant to fit her head size. It was discovered by Ferra, hidden in some forlorn corner of the ancient ship's machinery and instantly became an obsession with Orn. Every morning, he'd leave it sitting pristinely on the command console, waiting for the "captain." She tossed the damn thing down the garbage burner, into the back engines, and once out the airlock, but -- like a persistent rash -- it'd still greet her every morning. It was the first time she gave into the dwarf's whims, but nowhere near the last.

  The captain returned to her scattered crew, plopped haphazardly against plastic chairs popping under the load. Monde sat upright, his legs curled to the side, even more on edge than usual. She was gonna owe her doctor a table and a new set of sanitizers after this. The second boy, after paging through the complimentary hard copy media, all in orcish, wandered to the screens and kept flipping through the few available options.

  And Orn, her untrusty companion for near on four years, found a half peeling parts sticker attached to the window. By standing on the chair, he took to removing it with his fingernails. Scratch scratch scratch.

  "Why is there only one program?" Segundo asked, still flipping from the camera view of a pair of gargoyles being pelted with a power washer, to POV of the camera wearer sticking a ceremonial spear into another orc's exposed grey belly, to a series of orc males modeling the latest in highly ineffective armor that failed to cover anything vital, and back again.

  "We are not here to entertain you, human," Monde mumbled. He hated being back in this world, and hated more that he hated it.

  "He means," Variel interceded, not in the mood to watch the two duke or even earl it out, "orcs have a very specific entertainment diet, most of it self-made."

  "Self made?" For Segundo creating something from nothing required the greatest minds a people could procreate, or some kind of super computer that ran on coffee. Creating your own entertainment was more terrifying than being accidentally kidna-stowawayed.

  Variel tapped her hat, "All their hats have a small camera in the brim so they can cut and share any exciting tidbits of their day. The most popular are bumped up the viewing list and suddenly everyone's watching the delivery woman from two towns over slaughter a grell cougar with her bare fists."

  "So if they have those cameras on all the time does that mean there's some," Segundo's voice dropped down as if afraid of spies, "dirty vids?"

  Monde turned a curious shade of blue, and he tried to shift away from the human poking into his people's cherished beliefs, but Variel laughed, "If we wanted to see that we would have headed next door."

  "Oh..."

  "We're not heading next door." She lowered herself onto a chair near her pilot, "We are going to wait." Segundo, mollified of his curiosity for the moment, flipped back to the armor vids, one that was probably supposed to be playing next door. Then again, perhaps not. Looking around at the scattered posters of wrenches dangling over half clothed posteriors, various tools thrust between gaping thighs, and some giant pile of naked orc men mimicking the appearance of a shuttle she wasn't so surprised at how uncomfortable Monde felt. She slogged through enough half sex shops/half mech stores in her early days to hate them all on site. Now she just sent Ferra, who'd rip anything she found particularly disgusting down and dare anyone to challenge her.

  Orn finished his assault on the sticker and tried to unstick the thing from his good hand, but the glue on those metallic backings was one of the strongest substances in the galaxy. His false hand had troubles pinching, the servos never quite articulated enough to sense when they held anything thinner than a millimeter. After several failed pinches he shook his good hand, trying to dislodge the errant sticker about a popular MGC Burner.

  Finally, Variel grabbed his wrist and yanked the sticker off, taking the curse upon her own hand. Orn glared at it, then back to the woman he told himself he wouldn't talk to.

  "You sure do know an awful lot about orcs." His boycott lasted all of two hours, a record for the dwarf.

  "I've visited a few colonies in my day, I pick things up," she said nonchalantly as she tried to slowly work the sticker off onto a ledge.

  "It's all a bit curious, what with you slaughtering them by the millions during your little war."

  Anywhere else in the universe you'd have heard a pin drop as every ear within a mile radius strained to listen to the captain explain herself against this atrocious accusation. But Monde shrugged his narrow shoulders at the dwarf's declaration, Segundo was too engrossed in his programs, and the only other orc -- a secretary who twice told them it'd only be another ten minutes an hour ago -- returned back to his duties paying little heed to the boasting. That was best saved for after work time, when orcs could let their horns loose.

  "All right, Orn. You want to call me out, let's have it." Variel was tired of the dance she'd anticipated with everyone but her pilot.

  "You're a," even surrounded by unconcerned friends and oblivious acquaintances that couldn't leave the planet, Orn still dropped his voice to a whisper and shrieked into her ear, "a fucking Knight
."

  "There was surprisingly little fucking, too much time on the job," she said not smiling.

  "Oh ho ho, so clever, little miss 'I can kill whatever I want whenever I want and who's gonna argue with this army behind me?!'" Orn turned away from her, old thoughts poking through his head, "I knew you had to be some kind of military, ain't no sane person makes their bed each morning, but..."

  She sighed, rubbing her forehead and getting the cursed sticker adhered to her worry lines, "Fine, you caught me. I was a Knight. I trailed about the universe terrorizing villages and eating babies. But I'm not anymore. I haven't been one of those village eaters in five years."

  "Why? You have a change of conscious? Get visited by the ghost of wars past, present, and future?"

  "It's complicated," she said, afraid to open up that can of worms. Orn folded his arms, teetering on the chair that wasn't designed for standing on. He enjoyed being above her for once; it suited the situation.

  "I wasn't always a monster, either. Knights can do good, provide aid, stop criminals, escort diplomats," and other things that no one tells you about until you're deep into training and not about to quit because of a bit of dirt on the hands.

  Orn ran his hand across his bit of face fuzz, it looked even greyer in the harsh light of the shop, "Did you kill people?"

  "Yes," she said, as if responding to a child asking if all the stars were someone's sun.

  "A whole lot of people?"

  She had no idea why this bothered him, surely the dwarf's hands weren't clean. Living out on the edges as they did, falling into a few less than above board jobs to make ends meet, mistakes happen. Clean up is required and it isn't always easy and neat. "Not as many as you'd think, but more than I can remember." That bothered her more than any other bit about her past. It was one thing to stop someone about to cause irreparable damage to her, her fellow soldiers, or civilians, it was another to forget about it. To reach that always wobbling tipping point where one slit throat became a carbon copy of another and another until it was a big pile of unremarkable dead.