Return

by Blaze Ward

  The other Human bit his lips as he obviously thought about what his orders must be. Should he ask a superior what to do, or risk making the wrong decision here?

  Lazarus had a communicative face, but she now realized that he didn’t give away much of his inner commentary, to watch this other Human splay his thoughts out for everyone to see.

  The man stared at Eha for a long moment, and then her. And his eyes fell, taking in her shape, her femininity, compared to the coldly alien shape of Eha Dunham.

  Aileen smiled at the man and cocked her ears and whiskers as he thought.

  “Very good, sir,” the doorman announced after a long heartbeat. “Go right in.”

  He did something and Aileen heard the wooden door unlock with a thunk.

  Again, Pryce led. Lazarus slipped to the side to wait, so Aileen ended up second in line.

  Old house, converted perhaps to a museum at some point, before falling into private hands. The floors were hardwoods, stained deep and then scuffed and polished several times. The walls had the look of gypsum board, rather than metal or wood, and were hung with a variety of strange art. Humans, places, plants, and animals.

  Grand staircase up to a second floor, with a velvet rope across the bottom, so apparently private quarters, or something. Pryce turned right anyway and entered into a lounge done in middle-aged wealthy male.

  Aileen would have decorated differently, but she’d see Innruld chambers decorated in a similar manner. The same wooden floors, covered over now with large rugs in places. Wood paneled walls a little darker than Eha’s golden stripes. Big, round table made of a deep brown wood covered over with green cloth in the center of the room, with a wetbar off to one side and chairs and end tables scattered around the walls. It was a big space, so the dozen or so Humans in here still left it feeling empty.

  Aileen could identify the staff by the black they wore. Pants, shirts, aprons. Plus a level of professionalism to their faces as everyone came to a screeching halt and turned to stare at them.

  At her. She was first. Pryce had stepped to one side to let everyone gape at her.

  Aileen smiled and walked over to the bar. It was three and a half feet tall, comfortable for Humans and at the bottom of her neck. The woman behind it was tall and rail thin.

  “I don’t do alcohol,” Aileen announced, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “Do you have any lemonade?”

  One beat. Two. Brain kicked in and hands started to move again.

  “Right away,” she said, grabbing a mug made of glass and filling it with ice.

  Aileen didn’t get the fetish Humans had to put ice in everything, but now was not the time to complicate the poor woman’s mind.

  A clear pitcher came up and the bartender poured.

  “That looks divine,” Eha said a moment later from just to Aileen’s left. “I’ll have the same.”

  Even bigger gawk. Mouth fallen all the way open in utter shock. Several blinks while her body was on autopilot to make a second glass.

  “Whiskey sour, soft, for me,” Lazarus had stepped up on her other side.

  She watched him place a bill on the counter between them. It was far larger than even a private club on Yisan should charge from what he’d told her. About what he had paid for their dinner, but she presumed this was a bonus to the woman for not losing her cool.

  “And you, sir?” the woman asked, whites in her eyes still a little too obvious.

  “I’ll have a glass of the red blend, neat,” Pryce said.

  Aileen took her glass with a smile and sipped it. Good. Lemon juice, simple syrup, and water. Nothing complicated. Nothing potentially poisonous.

  Let the Humans drink alcohol and destroy themselves.

  The gamblers had all risen as she stepped away from the bar. Because she felt like putting her stamp on things, Aileen smiled and gave them all a half-bow, like she would a dear uncle back home.

  Several replied identically, but she could tell it was an automatic thing, and not planned out.

  “Gentlemen, don’t let me interrupt your game,” she cooed at them sweetly as she moved to one of the chairs to the side and picked out a place to sit.

  Human chairs, designed for people with impossible legs. She could see tasking Thadrakho with making her something that would fold up quickly and discreetly. Maybe with telescoping legs so she could sit and then elevate herself to be on a par with the Humans.

  She watched Eha and the men get studied in turn.

  This was going to be so exhausting, but worth it.

  Seventeen

  Eha

  The place had a full kitchen. Eha could tell that by the smells emanating from the door to the rear of the building. The smell of shock, surprise, and maybe a little fear also filled the room a few moments later.

  Lazarus had warned her that some Humans had a psychological aversion to snakes, and would likely be triggered by her arrival, but she hadn’t grasped the significance until now. Most of the men and women at the table were just shocked, but one of the men moved around to the other side of the table, immediately opposite her, eyes wide with fear and breath shallow and raspy.

  Eha nodded severely to the man and moved to a space close to Aileen and coiled herself. A pillow would be nice, even a blanket folded over a few times. She wasn’t in the mood to try to drape her coil comfortably across a wingback chair.

  Probably, she’d end up tipping herself over if she did.

  That Human settled some when she did. The others looked like they wanted to say or do something, but Lazarus and Oluchi Pryce intercepted them. Distracted them, even. That one man continued to mutter angrily under his breath, from the way his mouth moved, but Eha was too far away to hear anything. His body language was negative enough.

  She could see where Pryce had pushed the limits of his invitation, especially by apparently not warning these players what he was going to do tonight. Who he was going to bring. On the one side of the scales, it might engender some hard feelings, and these men and women all looked like they had wealth, and presumably some level of personal power.

  On the other side of the coil, it would also likely disturb these men at a visceral level, at a time when high-stakes poker meant a rather large sum of money could be expected to change hands.

  Eha wondered if Oluchi Pryce had already worn out his welcome, or perhaps stretched these players as far as they would go in losing money to him. Perhaps he was close to burning his standing invitation, and had decided to go out in a blaze of glory?

  Would he try to get himself invited along on the next leg of Lazarus’s trip? Eha supposed many would be quite interested. How much trade did these two alien women represent, when everyone at the table was a merchant of some sort, based on what Pryce had offered earlier?

  She settled next to Aileen with a secret smile they shared and watched the room slowly settle down into something vaguely close what it had been earlier. She could see things well from here, and had a spare chair next to her for a Human who had perhaps tired of the game and wanted to chat.

  Eha studied Oluchi Pryce as he realized that he might be tied up in a game when someone else tried to engage her in conversation. That might balance the scales a bit, giving him a distraction as well.

  He nodded at her in wry acknowledgment of the changed situation and smiled just a hint.

  Yes, she would make a splash. And it would put her in a position to do something about the Innruld, with folks who would be more interested in money than politics, if she was reading the faces and calculations around her correctly.

  Eighteen

  Lazarus

  Lazarus had walked into the building with the faintest bit of nervousness about him. Private events like this could go several ways, especially once he saw the sort of neighborhood they had entered.

  Not the oldest part of the colony.

  No, simply the wealthiest. Provincial, to be sure, this far away from the rest of the so-called civilized galaxy at places like Brasilia, but
the men and women would be the social powers on this planet.

  Lazarus wondered if Pryce had bitten off more than the man could chew.

  The drink in his hand was well-made, in spite of the cold water the women had dunked the bartender into when they ordered. Pryce was playing things like he did this every day, and not just the opportunity of a lifetime for someone with the balls to run with it.

  The women seated, Lazarus followed Pryce to the table. Eight men, four women. Ages roughly thirty-five to nearly dead. He and the women were the only ones with visible weapons, but he had no doubt that the staff could bring out heavy firepower if they needed, and someone was probably calling in a few favors right now to bring more folks around.

  Just in case.

  Lazarus got introduced to everyone, but most had remained standing. One man on the far side of the table had gone white and verged on hyperventilating, but sat now and drank hard from a highball of whiskey.

  One man seemed to dominate things as Lazarus took the temperature of the table.

  Eduardo Martìnez. Tall and portly, with a full head of white hair and muttonchops, dressed in a severe black suit that Lazarus might have seen in his grandfather’s closet when he was young.

  “Lazarus, you say?” Martìnez inquired with narrowed eyes.

  “Indeed, sir,” he replied. “Lazarus of Bethany, if you will. At the time, I was firmly convinced of my impending mortality, so I prayed to God for help and a sign. He offered me His Grace. It has gotten me this close to home, in the company of two of my friends.”

  “Just two?”

  “We’re scouts, as it were,” he offered obliquely. “I was not sure what sort of reception I might get, just with a Churquen and a Yithadreph, let alone Qooph, Vaadwig, Kr’mari, Tarni, Ilount, and others. From here, my goal is Brasilia.”

  Lazarus rather enjoyed the way all those eyes got wide with whites for a second as the implications hit. Not just two aliens, but entire new multi-alien polities, perhaps?

  “Brasilia?” Martìnez asked. “Are you carrying cargo?”

  “We’re currently on Yisan aboard the rough equivalent of a pincke, sir,” Lazarus said. “That limits what I can haul back to the mothership.”

  Again, just dangle things out there. They didn’t need to know that it was a light starcruiser of the Rio Alliance Navy, currently understaffed. Or how desperate certain things were.

  Lazarus’s goal was to present so much larger than he really was, on the hopes that nobody would call his bluff. Mothership suggested something far more dangerous. And against freighters and patrol craft, he had no doubts that even Wybert could handle trouble.

  “But I’m interrupting your game, ladies and gentlemen,” Lazarus smiled and gestured to the poker table. “Pray, continue, and I will join my companions for a time while we watch. They had an interest in learning about Human culture.”

  Lazarus bowed deeply to the group and withdrew to the side. Rather than take the chair next to Eha, he flagged down a waiter.

  “Could you locate a large pillow or perhaps a quilt or two for my friend to rest upon?” he smiled, watching the waiter flinch when he turned and scamper out of the room, no doubt to loot some room upstairs.

  Lazarus smiled and pulled a chair up on Aileen’s side, so she didn’t have to deal with someone wanting to chat. She’d be grace itself if they did, but he also knew how much it would exhaust the woman, to put up such a front with strangers.

  And everyone would want to talk to Eha, anyway, if they could work up the courage.

  Lazarus noted the one man directly across the table, and the sour, angry looks that flashed this way. Should have moved himself ninety degrees, so he didn’t have to watch, but Lazarus supposed he feared someone sneaking up on him.

  He settled down and studied the rest of these folks, trying to identify which might prove to be allies.

  He would need friends.

  Nineteen

  Oluchi

  Well, Oluchi, you’ve put your foot into it this time, haven’t you?

  But he didn’t let any of that appear on his face. Or even in his fingertips.

  Two hands in, and Strav Ardna had folded suddenly, rose in a huff, and stomped right out the room, not even bothering to collect his chips.

  Things had fallen silent for a moment, but all these players had legacies together stretching back decades before Oluchi ever arrived in-system, so when they made no comment, he just smiled vacuously and counted his cards.

  And everyone else’s.

  His plan had been to shim his way in when he introduced the aliens to the money people around here, so he didn’t get cut out of a deal later. If nothing else, most of them would happily drop a finder’s fee on him, knowing he could have split town with the group and offered to guide them to other ports he knew.

  A couple of friendly nods his way right now just reinforced that notion.

  Both Martìnez and Lady Leena Hernández acknowledged some debt. That would be something he could collect on later.

  “If I understand things, and mind you this is all rumor and innuendo,” Leena murmured quietly now, just for players at the table, “Strav has always had a terror of snakes and such.”

  She nodded over Oluchi’s shoulder at where the two alien women sat and watched politely.

  “Pryce, you were such a wicked boy for springing such a surprise on us,” she continued.

  Oluchi pasted a smile on his face and gave a brief nod. Most of these people paid exorbitant fees to find anything interesting. When you had that much money, it became like oxygen, only notable by its sudden absence.

  Your greatest fear wasn’t sudden poverty so much as terminal ennui.

  Leena was a tall, rail thin scarecrow of a woman, both the daughter and widow of major shipping houses in this sector. Her two grown children ran the houses now, leaving this woman free to pursue her strange appetites.

  He had been the flavor of the month with Leena. Even bedded her a time or two, but she hid a dark side that he hadn’t really cottoned to, although he supposed there were men and women she could hire who would make it as rough as she seemed to need to get fully aroused.

  That sort of boudoir brutality usually left him soft and distracted. But she could be quite interesting, once you got her out of the bedroom.

  Not as much fun as Fernanda, seated on Oluchi’s immediate left. Lady Flores was a matronly, grandmotherly type, to look at her, a few pounds heavier than idealized beauty, but way more fun in bed than Leena. And she enjoyed all manner of physical hobbies: hiking, camping, surfing, and skiing, that had seen her kidnap him for long weeks of actual pleasure, both in the bedroom as well as over the dinner table.

  So rare to find a woman who liked to talk as much as she liked to fuck.

  “Should we call a break, or continue playing?” Fernanda asked.

  “Strav’s always throwing a fit over something,” Eduardo Martìnez said from what felt like the head of an otherwise round table. “If he decides to have a snit, we’ll just leave his chips for next week.”

  The others grunted or nodded and play continued, but Oluchi had his concerns. Never good to burn a bridge with someone at this table. Even someone he hadn’t done much business with before.

  Unless it was time for him to try to join the adventurers on their journey. There shouldn’t be any active warrants out for his arrest, once you got close enough to Brasilia, assuming he could get them to skip over a few places closer to Yisan.

  Oluchi concentrated on his cards and his neighbors. He might need a pretty good stake, if he was going to be done with Tershuvi Port for a while.

  Twenty

  Eha

  She suspected that the long break for a communal meal was something this group didn’t normally do, at least not unless they had interesting guests, but Eha was watching the Human players like a herd of galumphs tonight.

  They seemed to feel it, too, as the table apparently had a strange tilt to it tonight, with Oluchi Pryce and Eduardo Martìn
ez seeming to win two of every four hands between them. The elder Human had depths of stability and intellect to him that the others apparently did not. It would be interesting to determine what made him such a formidable player.

  And avoid becoming his prey.

  A waiter had entered and waited close by the table until a hand was completed, and then stepped up and whispered in Martìnez’s ear. The man nodded, the waiter vanished, and he turned his magnanimous gaze on the players, before extending it to the room.

  “I believe the buffet is ready,” he said. “I propose a longer break than normal. What say you?”

  General assent. Eha didn’t think many of the others were able to concentrate on their cards anyway, to their own detriment. Certainly, faces kept drifting over to study her when they should have been on their own cards.

  She rose from her coil now as the Humans did. Beside her, Aileen slipped off the chair and stretched. It had been roughly an hour since the players had recovered from the one Human stomping out angrily and departing without a word.

  The older Human approached in a manner Eha could only classify as gingerly. Slow, measured steps but without any speed or emphasis behind them. Both Lazarus and Oluchi Pryce moved faster under normal circumstances. Both of them were off to one side like a receiving line, but the other man stepped to her, rather than the men.

  “Eduardo Martìnez,” he said as he got close enough to offer her a hand.

  Eha still found the Human custom bizarre, offering your right hand as indication that there wasn’t a weapon in it, but she also understood that it was the courteous way to establish yourself as equals, without the need to measure the depth of a formal bow to a relative stranger.

  “Eha Dunham,” she replied. “Churquen Ambassador.”