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Page 6
The cut of his clothing was almost identical to Lazarus’s, so she knew this had come from a Human emergency pack, or been cut to the same, cheap standards. Green pants and jacket in a dark sage almost the color of the sorts of dangerous mold you got if a room got too wet and sealed up for too long. Black leather boots to knee, matching belt, matching holster. White shirt with buttons up the center of the front.
He just stared at her.
“You got a problem, pal?” Aileen snapped at the tall Human, giving the punk her best stinkeye.
The man did something Aileen had never seen before when Eha slithered into the hallway. An honest-to-goodness quadruple take. It was almost like someone was gigging him in the tail with an electric prod, to watch his eyes surge and his shoulders quake.
Their eyes locked and then his fell.
Lazarus had told her that she was morphologically close to a Human female, at least compared to the rest of the crew. They’d be taller, with impossible legs and similar curves through the torso, minus all the fur. But with breasts. Two of them, situated more or less how a Yithadreph did, under her vest and jacket.
Stupid punk was staring at her chest. Like a teenage Yithadreph boy. Although she occasionally caught Lazarus doing the same thing. Must be a male function.
“I’m talking to you,” she growled, causing his eyes to come back up to meet hers with a shock so plain she nearly laughed at him. “Move along.”
She made a rude gesture Lazarus had taught her, and the Human staggered backwards, turning and scampering back towards the nearest bar.
Presumably, whatever entertainment he had back on his ship wasn’t about to match what he expected inside this shopping mall.
She looked up at Lazarus and caught the shrug.
Yeah, he knew. Freaks on parade, at least until everyone understood that there were whole other species out there they’d never heard of.
Eha had gone cold. Aileen could see all of her scales lying flat against her skin right now, but she took a breath and almost smiled at Lazarus.
“Who’s the lucky publican?” she asked.
“Not following that fool,” Aileen gestured at the spacer’s back as he moved.
Lazarus stood in place for a moment, turning his head right to left and then back, up a level.
“Food,” he said. “There’s a dim sum place on two that should be safe for both of you to eat.”
Aileen fell in behind him, one hand just resting on the butt of her pistol on general principle. Anyone staring too long got the stinkeye, but nobody walked any closer or made any sort of threatening moves.
That was good. She might be a little too keyed up right now.
Up the escalator, they turned left and walked almost all the way back to the front of the mall to the front door of a restaurant. A Human behind the tall lectern waited with eyes wider than was probably comfortable, and a jaw hanging slack.
“Three for lunch,” Lazarus said companionably as they got close.
The Human was frozen, like prey trapped in a bright light.
Aileen figured it must be a female, based on descriptions Lazarus had provided. Furless. Weaker bones in the face. Bigger eyes. Skin a burnished gold with hints of yellow underneath. Narrower shoulders and waist flaring out to hips. Legs out of proportion to even Lazarus, as he had said. Breasts.
She wore a black skirt that looked impossible to even walk fast in, let alone do any work. Cream-colored blouse looked pretty enough. Those shoes must be a torture device invented by someone who hated women. Who would voluntarily stand on their toes with six-inch heels all day?
Eventually, the woman’s brain caught up with the day and she grabbed menus. Obviously on autopilot, as she turned with a Right this way and led them into the restaurant.
It would be too much to ask to be put in a quiet corner, and Aileen knew it. Plus, neither she nor Eha would be comfortable in what Lazarus had called booths.
Human morphology architecture assuming stupidly-long legs and no tail.
So they ended up at a table in the middle of the room, like performers on a stage. Lazarus did not appear concerned.
“We’ll need one booster seat and no chairs on that side,” he said calmly.
The woman was clueless, but a Human male in black slacks and apron over a white shirt appeared immediately and got to work, seating them, providing water in clear mugs that also seemed to be made of glass, from the way it thunked under her thumb.
At least the smells in here were appetizing. Everyone else in the place had fallen into the sorts of dread silence you got when somebody farted loudly in a theater.
She could do this. Lazarus had chosen her, because the docks were her expertise.
She could do this.
Thirteen
Lazarus
So far, so good. They had made a splash, pretended it was nothing at all, and made their way into a Chinese restaurant. Not a traditional one, but one of the tourist versions that had conquered all of Earth and then most of Human space after colonizing the North American continent and adapting to non-Chinese palates.
Proper Sino food was much spicier than a place like this would generally serve, and while he rather preferred that, all the extra spices were something of a crapshoot for his two crewmates and friends, and he didn’t need the extra risk that it would entail. Vegetables cooked in fairly bland sauces. Meats breaded or not and served in small communal bowls. Egg rolls.
All things they had tried aboard Ajax from cold stores and been able to eat.
Lazarus was even going to be nice today and not order wine with dinner. Much as he missed it.
The waiter got them settled like he did this every day and returned with a pot of steeping tea and three mugs.
Aileen was on a booster chair that put her up where she could see the room better. Eha was coiled up on herself across the table, more or less in the center of her side where nobody walking by was likely to step on her tail accidentally.
Lazarus had chosen this joint from the Gazetteer because it was part of a chain that spanned big chunks of Human space, even pirate outposts like this one, and served a standard menu from ingredients shipped in freezer pods nearly half the size of the pincke parked outside. The tea would be adequate. The food would be boring but safe.
The chances of a bar fight breaking out were much closer to zero here than at some of the places on the ground floor.
Interestingly, the lady at the front had instinctively grabbed the tourist menus with the pictures next to every dish. Everything was in Interlac, but somethings didn’t translate well out of Romanized Chinese, and neither of the women knew many names of things.
The waiter returned after a few minutes, the star of a show where everyone in here had stopped talking, possibly stopped breathing, and turned to just stare.
Eha rotated her head to look up at the man and blinked calmly as he gulped in nervousness.
“Sweet and sour chicken,” she said simply. “The dinner, and not just the plate. With a shrimp eggroll on the side. Egg drop soup.”
Lazarus kept a scowl of seriousness on his face, but inward laughed as the man twitched once, and then fell back onto his professionalism, writing everything as fast as he could onto a small pad of paper.
“Madam?” he turned to Aileen next, probably guessing based on her shape as much as anything.
“Kung pao chicken, number two spicy, please,” she said in a bright voice that only had a trace of Innruld accent in it. “Won ton soup.”
Again, the gulp. Never dealt with two aliens like these before, and they had apparently eaten Human food enough to order at a restaurant without his help. The waiter turned to him now and Lazarus could see the whites of the man’s eyes.
“I’ll have the Mixed Special Chow Mein,” Lazarus said, unable to pick just one protein today. “Two chicken egg rolls on the side.”
“Very good,” the waiter said, disappearing in the direction of the kitchen like the Devil himself was in pursuit.
Around them, a low rumble of conversation picked up, heavy on shocked whispers. Lazarus turned to scan the whole place, watching people blush and fall silent as he stared at them.
Unlike more civilized places, there were few families in here, even with it being a middle-class kind of restaurant on the surface of a planet. He supposed that the locals had their own places to eat, well away from the starport and the sorts of folks drawn to Yisan.
No, most of the people in here had the look of officers off some vessel, or owner-operators flying tramp freight and making enough that they didn’t have to settle for the noodle shops and pasta joints below.
He wondered who would be the first to try to join them. A restaurant like this didn’t commend itself to someone just walking up and sitting down, and there were no spare chairs unless you brought your own. However, they would retire to the lounge later and enjoy more tea, which was when he expected someone to recognize the beer logo on his back and come to rescue the poor sailor from penury.
Or some similar song and dance.
They waited in companionable silence, broken by low murmurs back and forth but nothing of any great importance.
Soup was first, served with the traditional wide spoons in small bowls. It was a performance, and the women were up for it. Lazarus already knew Eha was a skilled actress, since that was a job requirement for a spy, but Aileen was handling herself quite well.
Food arrived next and the waiter was smart enough to bring forks with him. Lazarus was rather skilled at eating with kuàizi sticks, and he appreciated that the restaurant had elegant, lacquered sticks in black, rather than the simple bamboo rods you broke into two pieces before eating.
Not that Aileen hadn’t tried to learn eating that way, but she grasped the fork today and enjoyed things.
The food was better than a truck stop, to quote his father, but nothing to write home about. Everything came from closer in to the center of the Rio Alliance, delivered in big containers already prepared, to be warmed up and served here.
Lazarus was just fine with middle-class comfort food cooking today. It was about as good as he was used to from his time in the Navy and aboard Ajax, and it would make a safe-enough insertion into Human culture for the women.
He ate, watching eyes around the room and counting the number of folks working up the audacity to come over and introduce themselves. Nothing on his face invited such a conversation, so they kept their distance, many folks waiting well past the time they would have normally left, lingering over tea and rice wine.
Good enough. The interesting bits would come up soon.
Fourteen
Eha
Eha ate daintily. The food was actually rather good, once she got past the novelty of the taste and presentation. Lazarus had prepared them from the food stores on Ajax, and Khyaa'sha had selected the things she and Aileen could eat with the lowest risk of poisoning.
She had still taken things before she left the shuttle. Today’s performance was too important to be sidelined by gastro-intestinal issues.
And it was a performance. Lazarus had warned them, but Eha already knew that she and Aileen would radically alter the balance of things across this whole periphery of space, just by appearing. Two new sentient species? Two?
Merchants and pirates would be drawn like flies to honey.
And she needed to make contacts out here. It wasn’t enough to just talk to the Rio Alliance politicians. They might decide to make common cause with the Innruld to fight Westphalia, forgetting about all the other species under the yolk of the overlords, at least for a time.
She needed the criminals as well. The smugglers and pirates that might decide to make their fortunes in Innruld space, regardless of what the Rio Alliance decided. It wouldn’t take much to break the Innruld hold. There had just never been such an opportunity.
Eha had an eye to the main chance here. And as much as she respected Lazarus, she had her own species and the Species Underground to think about. If the Innruld could be broken, and the Humans prevented from stepping in to replace them, then all species might be free to pursue their own goals.
Churquen could expand to new planets and explore the galaxy. After all, Humans were only neighbors on one side, and that at something of a considerable distance.
What might she find if a Churquen ship went spinward and towards the core, where the stars were older and thicker? Were there other species out there that might help? Or, better, sectors with no higher life forms and planets that could be colonized?
All she had to do was break those chains for a generation, and they might never be replaced. Human technology would help, but she could not allow the Churquen to become reliant upon it.
There were just too many Humans. And they bred at a frighteningly prodigious rate. Eventually, they would probably conquer the galaxy, and perhaps the universe. Better that they be as fragmented in themselves as the servants of the Innruld were today.
But she smiled and kept her scales flexed appropriately as she made eye contact with other Humans around the space.
And a Gnashiiley, but a sub-breed she wasn’t familiar with.
Back home, Gnashiiley generally had red fur on their heads and body, with that white patch around the mouth. Here, the man she was looking at had a darker coloration, gray-brown. He looked heavier, too, only a little shorter than Lazarus, perhaps, and built more rugged than she was used to.
In the shadows, he might pass as a small Human, if you missed the poofy tail and mistook the fur around his cheeks as a beard. And missed the snout.
Lazarus had called them kitsune, after a Human legend of a fox creature that turned into a man in the light of their solitary moon. This one was certainly radically different from the ones she knew. Bigger. Stronger.
Had they evolved fully into separate species, given the apparent isolation? Had these Gnashiiley escaped Innruld space at some distant past and fled into what would eventually be the Human zones, forgetting about the overlords?
Lazarus had not known about the Innruld, even though they had learned Interlac from the Gnashiiley and others.
Complicated. Perhaps the Gnashiiley, the Moah, and the Atomarsk were playing a long game to get Human strength to the point that they could smash the Innruld? If so, Eha supposed that they still felt the need to defeat Westphalia first.
She saw a few Humans around her wearing expressions of obvious disdain. Westphalians, she presumed, or perhaps just Human supremacists who would talk knowingly with the Innruld, were they ever to meet.
Eha found it terribly amusing when the waiter arrived with the check, glancing at each of them carefully before placing it closest to Lazarus. Bizarrely, it was paper, rather than a reader that you touched with your own to transfer funds.
But Eha supposed that there weren’t recognized banks around here, and things would have to be done on either a local bank, which would take time, or the paper currency and notes of Westphalia or the Rio Alliance. They had arrived prepared.
Ajax had a store of such currency in a vault that Lazarus had shown her. Not enough to fund a war, but enough to handle crew needs and maintenance if something came up and they had to pay cash while arranging credit.
She truly was in alien space. Lazarus pulling paper from inside his jacket and handing it to the waiter was the thing that brought it home to her.
They had taken the first steps to their freedom.
Now came the hard part.
Fifteen
Lazarus
Tea time. Or whatever Lazarus wanted to call it. They had moved from the main restaurant to the attached tea room, taking up space in a corner that had been cleared by management when Lazarus told the waiter his next step.
The two women were drinking non-caffeinated teas now, and Lazarus had ordered a small glass of wine for himself as a treat. Aileen had sniffed it carefully and then rolled her eyes at him, but he was expecting that.
Humans were about the only species that drank poisons like alcohol.
It wasn’t a zoo or a circus, but it probably would be by the time they departed to return to the ship, later this afternoon. Certainly, the place was far more full than it probably should have normally been on a Tuesday afternoon.
One gentleman was paying extra attention. He’d been over in the main room eating with what looked like some other captains, but they had not joined him over here. Lazarus watched the man work up a good line to come over and introduce himself.
You would need one, given the circumstances. This wouldn’t be just well-met strangers chatting.
Unless Lazarus chose to see it that way.
Still, the stranger rose. Asked a complicated series of questions with just the way his face moved, looking this direction.
Lazarus smiled ever so slightly in response and nodded. The man wanted to talk, but was willing to hold his patience until later, if necessary. At the same time, he didn’t want someone else getting into whatever deals could be had without him taking a shot first.
Audacious, but polite. Refined even, to look at the man’s clothing. Black slacks over black leather boots of a dressy kind. The dressy boots seemed to be an affectation, compared to the riding boots so many people wore
Instead of a jacket, like everyone else in here, he wore a hooded opera cape, black like his pants and lined with white silk. In contrast, he wore a canary yellow shirt that shimmered like silk. The holster on his thigh was the same polished leather of his belt and boots, but it didn’t look worn and well-used, like some of the folks around here had.
Money. Flashy, but still discreet, managing that fine balancing act that didn’t leave him looking like a clown or a pimp, when either option might have presented itself on a man without the reserves of dignity to pull this off.