by A. A. Ripley
Inan took a couple of deep breaths, the mute horror of her dream abating. Slowly she regained control over her arms and legs. She lifted her hand to her chest and pushed aside the coarse, synthetic blanket in which she was entangled.
‘You can’t sleep either?’ she heard a voice coming from the direction of their miniature dining hall. Alan was sitting there, his knees pulled up all the way to his chest. In the crook of his arms he was nursing a half-empty mug – like a nurse with a sick hatchling.
‘I had this terrible dream again,’ said Inan, trying to remember if humans could dream too. He nodded, keeping his eyes firmly planted in his mug.
‘Where is Hijinks?’
‘In the cockpit – trying to calculate if we could save on fuel. The further we get away from the Napoleon the better.’
Inan sat opposite Alan. He was no longer looking for something interesting in the bottom of his mug. Now he was looking outside towards the drab, grey, flat landscape of hyper-light flight. The stars were all erased, gone beyond the visible spectrum. Their place was taken by this unattractive, microwave background radiation as it shifted to visible spectrum by the power of relativity.
‘That is not exactly how I imagined faster than light travel,’ said Inan, indicating beyond the window. ‘The first time I was so disappointed my brother laughed at me.’
A shadow of a smile passed across Alan’s face, but his brown eyes remained without a spark.
‘Do you dream of her too?’ said Inan.
Alan gave her a quick, dejected look, just like the one she had seen on his face when he had killed that female pirate. Inan instantly regretted that she had said anything. She almost raised both her hands in a gesture of apology, but she stopped, unsure if Alan could understand it.
Me and my big mouth! thought Inan to herself. It was bad enough for her, the face of the dead female dwelling within her dreams, and she wasn’t even the one who had pulled the trigger. It must have been infinitely worse for him.
Hijinks stepped into the room like a purple ghost and sat in the vacant chair.
‘You must both be thinking that I’m just like them,’ said Alan suddenly.
‘What? No, I would never think that!’ said Inan. But then, she had thought he was a traitor just a short while ago. She felt as though her skin had somehow become completely translucent instead of embarrassed green.
‘The female pirate,’ said Hijinks. ‘She knew you well.’
‘Yes,’ he said after a brief pause. ‘Maud – for a long time, she was everything to me. She made sure that I got fed, that no one… touched me. I was her responsibility, her plunder and her pet project. “I’ll make a soldier out of you!” she used to shout while drilling me endlessly. No matter where I hid she would find me eventually. She knew all my tricks. “You’re transparent to me, Alan,” she used to say.’
‘But I thought you were just a servitor.’
‘No able-bodied person is just a servitor or just a technician or just a cook. Not on Napoleon.’
‘That means… that means you too…’ Inan didn’t want to finish that sentence, fearing that if she did there wouldn’t be any way back.
‘No. There was nobody before her,’ he said. ‘But sooner or later there would be another raid or a hijack job and then… I guess Maud was successful after all. I’m just like her – a ruthless killer.’
Inan saw Hijinks placing his hand over Alan’s. She knew this gesture; it was the same that Hijinks used when they had witnessed the disintegration of the liner spaceship. Inan realised that this was a gesture that utilised a simple transfer of body heat, just like touching the loreal pits between izaras’ eyes. A gesture of comfort and closeness.
‘Thank you, Alan,’ said Hijinks simply. ‘Thank you for my freedom. Thank you for Inan’s freedom.’
Careful not to scratch him with her claws, Inan touched Alan’s other palm. He was warmer than she expected. Inan knew that she must feel cool to him, but she hoped that the gesture itself would be enough.
‘Hijinks is right, Alan,’ she said. ‘You bought our freedom. That is how I will always think about you. No matter what.’
*
‘Next place we get to, I’m going to eat a fish even if it means I have to catch it myself,’ said Inan, looking morosely at another synthetic protein steak. She probed it carefully with a fork, half-expecting to find a clasp-bolt in it. Alan had found a set of precision tools in the storage and kept fiddling with his mobile platform, monopolising the table in the process. ‘I’m trying to boost up the ship’s computer with it,’ he had said when Inan queried. He tried to explain, but to Inan he could be speaking human and she’d understand as much. At least there was no purple hair in her food this time. Hijinks kept shedding and having the food hair-free was always a problem when it was his turn to cook.
Alan just shrugged at her statement. He was deep inside his own thoughts, most probably thinking up another way of assembling the electronic components. Hijinks just laughed. ‘Always about food with you.’
After a week of travel, ship-time, Inan was starting to feel a little crowded. Who knew that in deep space the scarcest resource was not oxygen, but privacy? She almost missed the time in captivity. Almost.
Back at home Inan could always retreat to her room if things with Ifonly and Kanst or with her brothers became too hectic. And there were always the cyan-coloured shores of the homeworld’s seas and the complex’s gardens where one could take a walk when craving solitude. Here, the only way would be to go outside; not recommended when travelling faster than light. Not even by the boldest of daredevils.
To feel a little less crowded, Inan decided to rummage among the crates and lockers in the cargo hold. It was a cargo hold in name only, more like a store-it-all. The room was a small area filled with anything that you might need during a spaceflight. There were different emergency lockers, including the hull repair kit and first aid packs. There were three lockers with space suits inside. They were all human models. Foolishly, Inan tried to put its helmet on. It fit but just barely. She found her nose painfully squished against the reinforced boro-silicate faceplate. After that silliness she decided not to put her head anywhere, unless she was sure it would fit with plenty of space.
Some of the larger items in the hold were secured and covered with magnetised metallic foil, so Inan decided to give them a miss for the moment. But there was another cabinet in the corner of the room. It was marked with human script haphazardly stencilled on its door. Inan tried it; it was unlocked, the electromagnetic lock hanging uselessly to one side. Inside there were three boxes. Inan dragged all three into the middle of the floor. She opened one of them and then withdrew her hand fast, as if the box contained a venomous spikebeast. It was full of guns. At this moment, Inan would be happy never to have to see a gun again.
She slammed the box shut and put it back into the locker. The second box contained ammunition: clips and batteries lying inside the soft padding, shining with dull menace. Inan almost resigned from opening the third box, the smallest of the three. Nonetheless she decided to take a quick peek. She lifted the lid and looked inside. A small treasury peeked back at her.
‘Hijinks! Alan! You need to see it!’ called Inan towards the living quarters, while hauling the box through the door.
The three of them sat bent over the small box like three Sages over the first copy of the Codex. Hijinks started to pull things out. Soon there were golden chains crawling across the table, the novapearls shimmering with an oily sheen. Tiny rectangles of mollusc shells, their insides layered with platinum nacre, reflected the light in a thousand colours. There were high-speed transfer chips, their small screens showing the number of available tradeunits. There was even a small amount of astarium sealed in a tiny, airtight pocket, armoured against its radiation.
‘That’s the emergency stash,’ said Alan. ‘You know, for bribes and… supply purch
ases, that kind of thing.’
Inan looked over the unexpected bounty. An old memory resurfaced in her consciousness. Not one memory, a whole series of memories – long tedious hours when she would sit in her appraisal, market and economy lessons. She would sit as though she was a rock formation, while listening to the old female droning on and on. The old teacher was called Mother Tedral, but all her students called her Toad. Inan listened to her dutifully, but her eyes wandered beyond the window, looking at the clouds chasing each other over the lilac sky. Those lessons were one of those things that made her want to claw out her own eyes with boredom sometimes. Inan forgot all about them as soon as she could. Now the memories returned, but transformed into a useful skill.
‘I can’t believe old Toad was right. I was bound to use those skills one day,’ she said finally. ‘Let me see… if there has been no major shift in market trends since I looked last, these chains would be worth around… and the novapearls…’ Inan’s mind was taken over by numbers, sums and approximations. She recollected the charts and trends, bored into her head as if with a tungsten drill. She took each item in her hand, appraising its value. She had no computer or even scratchpad to write up the numbers, so she started to add them up in her mind, one by one.
‘So we should have about one thousand tradeunits more or less, depending on what part of the galaxy we sell them,’ she finished her appraisal. Hijinks and Alan stared at her in silence.
‘What? I’d have to confirm that once we have access to stock uplinks,’ said Inan. ‘And no, Hijinks, novapearls will not get more valuable if you keep squeezing them in your palm.’
‘Pocket money,’ laughed Hijinks. ‘Thank you Cochrane.’
*
Middlelink spaceport was hectic, and they waited a few hours in line before they could dock. Inan couldn’t wait and kept fidgeting in the cockpit until Hijinks threatened to leave her on board if she wouldn’t settle down. At least the uplink to the station’s databases was functional and Inan amused herself with reading and pulling various info on the station’s amenities.
They disembarked through the airlock and took a walk through the concourse towards the main departure hall. Soon they stood in the middle of an area with a huge circular window. Inan looked beyond it, trying to comprehend what she was looking at. In front of her a most unusual landscape filled the circular window. She was looking straight ahead, but at the same time, she was looking down at the spherical dome of translucent, phased metal. The dome extended over the cityscape with its towering buildings reaching towards them. The busy streets of the city were brimming with vehicles that looked like colourful specks of dust from that distance. The city’s terraced gardens were filled with a variety of plants in all shades and shapes and there was even a lake, with its surface shimmering gently in the sunlight. A score of nearly-invisible tethers connected the spaceport with the main station. On those thin shiny lines, transport vessels zoomed to and fro, carrying the cargo and passengers, entering and exiting the dome by multiple docking points.
‘It’s not a space station, it’s a tiny world!’ said Inan, ‘Hijinks…’
But Hijinks wasted no time sightseeing. Instead Inan spotted the marsupial arguing with a wall-mounted vending machine.
‘According to the station’s oxygen supply and regulation act, the current allowance is one cigarette per customer per day.’
The simulated, matter-of-fact voice of the machine brought forth the reality of station living to Inan’s mind. It looked like a tiny world, but it was still an artificial environment. It had to be kept in perfect balance; every molecule of oxygen accounted for, every drop of water recycled and put back into circulation.Hijinks grumbled, but accepted the cigarette and lit it from the in-built lighter.
‘Now,’ said Hijinks between one puff and another, ‘we can go.’
‘It’s a beautiful place, but why did you insist we come here?’ said Inan, trying to wave away the pesky smoke.
‘My family will help us,’ said Hijinks, motioning them towards the transit terminal.
‘You have a family here?’
‘My son’s family,’ explained Hijinks.
That gave Inan something to think about while they travelled towards the station proper. She was finally to see more of Hijinks’ species, others like him. She would never admit to it openly, but she had looked up Hijinks’ species during the wait before docking, finally fulfilling the promise that she made to herself on board the human vessel. They had a name now: ki-jirai. Cochrane was right, they were Lifted species. Frewa were looking to solve their labour shortages and decided to accelerate the development of a small, arboreal species. Such practices became forbidden by tracts and intergalactic laws, but by then ki-jirai were already sentient and a part of the galactic community.
*
When they reached Middlelink proper, Hijinks left them to get directions from the nearby directory. At this point, Inan started to wish she had her head mounted on a swivel, so she could have a perfect panorama of everything around her.
The terrace outside the terminal was busy; this was no tourist destination, with a lazy attitude of relaxed comfort. This was a busy station, its buildings stretching high, joined with sky-bridges and decked with terraces and plazas. Even from here she could see the shopping arcades with bustling multiracial crowds in all shapes and colours. The ao walked about, their spine antennas spread and swaying gently like colourful wings. The tall and spiky frewa featured prominently, as Middlelink was in Core Races’ controlled space. Inan could swear that she even saw a quadruped cani noble accompanied by its biped servitor.
Among the buildings her eyes tried to spot the familiar shape of a trade and exchange market. Any place that deemed itself civilised had one of these or its equivalent. Very often it was the heart of a space trading city, providing mercantile opportunities for businesses as well as trade-minded individuals. Here on Middlelink, the exchange was a large squat building, with the surface black and shiny. Now Inan knew exactly where to turn the pirates’ stash into additional currency.
She turned to Alan to share her finds but Alan’s face bore a strange, tense expression. Inan turned around, trying to see if something was wrong, if something was amiss among the vibrant assembly of beings or in the warm currents of air bringing smells of food from the lower levels. She tried to read his stance – arms together, eyes trying to assess anyone who passed near them, as though he was expecting an attack any minute. Inan realised that, to him, the station looked like a den of enemies. He might not share the zealotry of his captors, but he had been brought up to see the known galaxy as the dominion of his species’ foes. Inan still remembered Cochrane’s parting words to Alan, prophesying betrayal. Inan was almost sure that this was what he was thinking now.
‘He is wrong,’ she said.
‘Is he? I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Alan, his eyes fixated on the undulating crowds.
‘I know it will take getting used to, but I’m sure it will be alright. Look!’ Inan pointed to the transit platform, a few metres below their terrace. On the platform there was a human male reading an information screen. Clinging to his arm there was a human hatchling, looking around with calm curiosity and chomping on a sweet-thread. Alan’s face relaxed a bit.
‘No more talk and gawk. Transport to catch.’ Hijinks came back to them and pointed to the same station where the human and his offspring waited.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Inan.
‘Dockyard.’
*
The dockyard was full of loud mechanical noises, pounding of metal against metal, screeching of high-powered industrial cutters and whirring of robotic servomotors. The air smelled of hot metals and melting thermoplastics. High-powered artificial illumination engulfed the vast halls and was only broken by showers of sparks from the robotic buzz-saws.
After a short while they found the right “dry” berth where a
medium-sized freighter was in the middle of a hull replating. Inan looked up the massive wall of steel at the ki-jirai workers busy with their tasks. There they were – hanging in their safety harnesses, graceful like aerialists, walking up and down the looming side of a serviced spaceship. Little yellow suns of electron-beam welding sprung beneath their hands and illuminated the uneven surface of the shield plating. Inan watched as one of them detached from the carapace of the hull and floated down in a controlled descent, closer and closer, bigger and bigger until the tiny figure became a fully grown ki-jirai; purple fur, sharp face and a notched ear.
The strange marsupial approached them with a quizzical look on his face. But the moment he spotted Hijinks among them, his features softened and he emitted a high-pitched squeal, which Inan knew was an expression of delight.
A moment later both marsupials had their fingers entangled with each other in, Inan assumed, a warm greeting. The stranger started to speak in high-pitched tones, but Hijinks interrupted him in the middle of his oral deluge.
‘Tradespeak, Second Shenanigans Chase,’ said Hijinks, motioning towards Inan and Alan. ‘Our friends should listen.’
Chase emitted a short sigh. ‘Yes, Mother.’
Mother? For a second, Inan thought that she had misunderstood. This single word made Inan miss half the conversation. How could this space-faring, cigarette-smoking, starship-piloting creature be female? Hijinks was unlike any female Inan knew. She was unlike any female she had even heard about. Females weren’t supposed to do that. They were supposed to oversee workers and servitors, to watch over the affairs of the House, not serve aboard ships, risking their precious lives and wasting their intellect. Especially because they weren’t that many of them, so izara females shouldn’t be in a position that would interfere with egg-laying and governing. Inan understood that different races did things differently, but that was much too strange for her. Just when she thought she was starting to understand things around her, the universe revealed something new to rethink.