"What is this?" the SwARTzin entity cried, sliming up the floor as it slithered toward Wottol. "What creature is this!" The entity picked up a big swatter of organic mesh from a hanging on the wall and made a swipe at Wottol.
Wottol ducked and danced about the house, spewing nonsensical clicks and whistles.
The great SwARTzin oozed after it, swatting its mighty swatter, but Wottol was nimble and quick. It leapt out the door. The entity came after it, sliming into the yard. Wottol ran back into the stands of rama trees and whooped and hollered until it came across a small pack of jobbers. The frenzied pack, startled but not frightened, streaked out from the cover of the trees and, seeing the shiny colored bands on the SwARTzin's arms, leapt at it with increased vigor.
The SwARTzin, too late, realized its error and turned to slime back into the house. By that time, the jobbers were on it, chewing off the armbands and the appendages with them.
Wottol quickly jumped up to the house. It shut the door and went to work cleaning the inside of the house, making the interior suitable to Blurbal tastes. By the time it finished, the jobbers had reduced the SwARTzin to a pile of gelatinous ooze.
Wottol scraped up the ooze and shoved it underneath the blue-gray spread of a low-lying terga bush just as the Empress's carrier landed with a whiiish-whiiish sound on the landing pad out past the greenish water of the fountain at the end of the garden walk.
As the Empress, her pod mate, and Glottal oozed up the front walk, Wottol waved its tentacles at them and said, "Welcome, Empress, to the home of the Ruler of the Mittocc system!"
After drinking a particularly fine concoction of flavored slime at the center of Glottal's superb new organic house inherited from the dead SwARTzin, the Empress's pod mate said, "My dear Glottal, you own a lovely house, mining operations, and are obviously a Blurbal of great personal integrity. Tell me, are you married?"
"Why, no," Glottal sputtered, "but, certainly I would like to find a pod mate of my own, to – ah – share this fine house."
Wottol pinched its cheeks, and Glottal flushed a similar color, thinking, what a wonderful gift my mother has given me!
And so it came to pass that Glottal married the youngest female of Occtollotal's brood and brought her to live in her fine organic house at the edge of the Mittocc system. With the riches forwarded to her by the asteroid creatures, who - without a SwARTzin lord - she took as her own, Glottal bought a fine array of performance art pieces which spluttered and splashed in their individual niches, creating a world of new light and imagery with every contortion of their liquid forms.
One night, sitting out on her porch, which was suitably fenced off from the nasty jobbers, Glottal heard Wottol stride up behind her.
The little creature waved its tentacles.
"Certainly," Glottal said, "after all you have done to make me happy, there must be some way to reward you. Is there a particular dish you like to eat?"
And Wottol, who had been waiting for just such a moment, said, "Why, mistress, I am particularly fond of freedom."
"Freedom?" Glottal burbled. "I have never heard of such a thing." For, in fact, Glottal had never kept a pet before, and did not know all the words other blurbals used when caring for them.
"It is something the Empress speaks of often," Wottol said, "but she said you must be unfamiliar with the word, for you had not given freedom to me in return for my endeavors."
"Well, then, how is it I go about giving you this thing?"
"You must say, in front of your pod mate, that you have given me freedom, and at such time, I will go and acquire it for myself."
Glottal, who did not want the Empress to think heran inhumane mistress, summoned her pod mate and told her that she was giving her human freedom. She waved her eyes at Glottal and said, "Are you certain of this thing, Glottal?"
"Of course," Glottal said.
"Then I will record this for my mother," her pod mate said, and slithered back into the house, wondering at the sudden burst of goodwill her pod mate displayed.
Wottol, now officially free in the eyes of the Blurbalian government, hopped into the ancient faster-than-light and set a course that would take it far from the Crab Nebula and blurbal kind in general, for it knew that it was, itself, much more valuable than an organic house or a wealth of performance art pieces.
So you see, my blurbalian children, you must always be nice to your pets. One never knows if one may find them to be useful in the attainment of a wealthy pod mate, the desiccation of a SwARTzin entity, or the removal of your outdated faster-than-light.
And always, my children, always: give them everything they ask for, as their fortune is your fortune, too.
END
Monsters Do Not Die Quietly
“It is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts.” – Quran, 22:46
Nyx had left the entirety of her squad blown to pieces at the front, so it was a surprise when one of them shambled into her office offering her a job.
“You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem?” he said, leaning heavily on a crutch made of bone and bug secretions. “I’m in sore need of your expertise.” One of his legs was larger than the other, as if swollen or recently replaced. Burns marred the left side of his face; a shiny green hunk of organic shielding covered a hole at the back of his head. His voice was familiar, though, and his eyes; a green-hazel common to those brought up along the southern border with Ras Tieg.
Nyx leaned back in her chair and tried to think up a reasonable response.
“Want a drink?” she said, pulling a bottle of whisky from her desk drawer.
“No thank you.”
“I do,” she said, and took a swig.
“You knew my brother,” he said, and she let out her breath at that, and choked on some of the whisky. Thank fuck, she wasn’t losing what was left of her damn mind.
“Your brother… Shaku al Buthayna?” she said, the name bubbling up without much effort - because of the eyes, maybe. She had tried to forget everything about the day she fucked up and lost her squad. But their names… as hard as she tried, she would be able to recite all their names until the liquor stole the memory of it from her poor whisky-soaked synapses. She had been trying to help that process along the last few years, without much luck.
“Yes,” he said. “I am his brother, Dabir. I was called to the front the same year.” He still leaned awkwardly in the doorway.
“Sit, go on,” she said, realizing he was waiting for her permission. Most men remained at the level of grunt throughout their entire military careers. Even she outranked him.
Dabir lowered himself into one of the chairs opposite her and laid the crutch across his lap. This close it was clearer he was not Shaku. The bend to the nose, the lines around the eyes… but then, maybe if Shaku had lived, he’d have aged the same way. He and Shaku would be the same age, called up the same year. The prefix in their surname told her Dabir, like Shaku, had been raised by the state at the breeding compounds. They would have all been born at the same time, like Nyx and her four siblings. Multiple births were mandatory; most women wanted to get their tithe of childbearing over with all in one go. So far successful multiple births were limited to five or six. Above that and survival rates went down. For now. People like her sister continued working on that system to perfect it. If they couldn’t beat the enemy with technical superiority, they would outbreed them.
Nyx leaned back in her chair, and took the bottle with her. “What do you have more me? I’m not cheap.”
Dabir dug into the interior of his burnous and pulled out six notes. He laid them on the table. “I’m sorry it isn’t more,” he said. “That’s my disability pay for the last month. Been saving it. I know you can do a good job. I know you’re honorable. That’s what Shaku said. Once you made a promise, once you swore it, you stood by it. Even if things changed. Even if sticking with it was stupid.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Nyx said, sweeping up the bills.
She tucked them into the front of her dhoti. “Sure you don’t want a drink? It helps get us straight to business.”
“No,” I’m fine.” His throat bobbed; his gaze darted to either side of her. The stuccoed walls inside had rotten away in places, revealing ancient mud brick beneath. Above the makeshift bar at her left was her certificate of discharge, a flexible piece of paper slathered in bug secretions to preserve it. She didn’t keep it up there for the clients, but for the inspectors. Some local order keepers and even a few young bel dames who came sniffing around hadn’t always heard of her. The cert sent them on their way.
“When do you go back to the front?” she said. She wasn’t good at small talk, and her hospitality ended with a seat and a whisky.
His gaze found her again, flicked away. He stared into his calloused hands. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I put this off as long as I could. I know you’re busy. I...”
Nyx sighed. She picked a dusty cup from her drawer and blew it out. Poured the whisky. Pushed it over to him.
“Thank you,” he said. His fingers trembled as he took it. He downed it, winced.
She went to pour another, but he put his hand over the cup. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Nyx sipped her drink.
He squirmed a little longer. Finally, said, “Shaku and I had four sisters. Three dead at the front. Our last, the youngest, she served her two years and went home to have a family. She left the boys at the compound and took her two girls home to live with her in Shatoo. You know, in the south?”
“I don’t know it, but go ahead.”
“Maybe because sometimes it’s ours and sometimes it’s Ras Tieg’s. There was a border skirmish there two years back. It became Nasheenian. My sister, Fatimah, and her kids moved out there because the government was just giving away land.”
“I bet,” Nyx said.
“Fatimah set up a homestead down there. I got letters, some bug transmissions. Then, six weeks ago, she goes dark. Nothing. The Ras Tiegans took back the city for nearly a month. When Nasheen liberated it... I still couldn’t reach her. I’ve been in no shape to travel, and now... now they’re sending me back to the front. I just want to know she’s alive. I want... if not that, I want to know what happened to her.”
“What she do down there?”
“Homesteading, that’s all. She’s a farmer.”
“Where she’d learn farming?”
“Our mother. We had a place in Mushirah.”
“That right? Shaku never mentioned that.” Nyx had grown up in Mushirah, a shitty little farming community on the interior. It was small enough that she thought it pretty unlikely she never met Shaku and his family before the war.
“It was ten years ago,” Dabir said. “My mom and her wives bought a place.”
“After my time there then,” she said. She hadn’t been back to Mushirah since she left at sixteen. That was thirteen years ago. “You have a likeness of her? A description? Last address?”
Dabir pulled a green paper letter from his burnous and handed it over.
The street was listed on the return address line, but the city and quarter code were smeared out. There was nothing inside the envelope.
“Only one I still have,” he said. “It’s in Shatoo, though, the central quarter. Or, it was. Oh, and here.” He offered her a beetle in a transparent casing, all wound with filament. “Her image is on here, and some recordings she sent me of herself and the children. That should help.”
“Thanks,” Nyx said, “I’ll give that to my com tech. Anything else? How do you want me to reach you with news?”
“My call pattern is on that data casing as well,” he said. “It goes to central reception for the military, though. You can leave them a message and they’ll get it to me wherever I’m stationed.”
Nyx sipped her drink again. “I can do it for six notes,” she said, “but only because it’s a favor for Shaku. That’s only going to cover expenses for a small team.”
“You shouldn’t need many,” he said. “Nasheen is in control of the city again. I’m hoping... I’m hoping maybe it isn’t too dangerous.”
“Huh,” Nyx said. “Easy jobs always bite me in the ass. We’ll see. I’ll do it, get back to you in a few days. We’re between big jobs.”
He let out his breath. “Oh, thank you! I appreciate this so much, you don’t even know.”
“Whatever, it’s fine. Favor to Shaku.” She stood. “You know your way out?”
“Oh? Yes, of course.” He got up and gave her a little nod, which certainly made her feel more comfortable than a salute.
She followed him out and locked the door behind him. Walk-ins were what she ended up with when Taite forgot to lock the goddamn door behind him.
Nyx turned, called, “Taite!”
“Yeah!” Muffled, from the back of the keg.
Nyx went through the foyer and entered the workroom and living area they called the keg. Work benches piled high with various bits of gear, dirty dishes, jars of dried bugs, take-out curry containers, seventeen different kinds of hand-tooled ammunition, and boxes of cast-offs from twenty-odd kinds of bursts, mines, and projectiles ringed the room. Taite sat at the back, at the com, fiddling with the pheromone releases that directed the bugs carrying local and regional messages. He had put on ear muffs to help him concentrate; one hung off his left ear now, and he pushed it away further as he turned to her.
Lean and pock-marked, Taite was the youngest on her crew, maybe nineteen if a day. If he’d have been Nasheenian, he would have been conscripted to go to the front three years before. But he was a half-breed Ras Tiegan, and only Nasheenian men were required to serve until forty, or until they were dead, whichever came first. Usually, death.
“You need to screen who walks in the door better,” she said.
“Oh sorry,” he said, facing her properly, yanking off his ridiculous ear muffs. Sweat beaded his forehead. “Didn’t hear her. Did she just walk into your office? Were you sober?”
“He, and - yes, I was sober, goddammit,” she said, which was only partly true now, but it had been more true at the time. “You heard of a town down south, near Ras Tieg, called Shatoo?”
Taite knit his brows. “Ohhhh, Chatou,” he said. “Sure, it’s right on the border. Big black market there, flesh dealers, gene pirates. One of those places my mother would use to threaten us. Be good or I’ll sell you to a flesh dealer in Chatou! It’s a bit like here, really.”
“Know anyone there?”
“It might shock you, but I was good kid before I came here. So, no.”
“Know any Ras Tiegan ex-pats who might? May need some local support on this job.”
“A job in Chatou? Shit, I hope it pays well.”
“It’s for a friend. Friend of a friend, anyway.”
“I thought all your friends were dead.”
“Don’t have to be dead to be a friend, of a friend, right?”
“Oh, right. Well, sure, I can look some people up. But... what do they need to specialize in? Just know the language, general merc skills, or -“
“I need someone good at being nice to people.”
“That’s... huh.”
“You know, bartering and shit. People skills.”
“Don’t you just ask people what they want at gun point?”
“That’s what I’m saying. I need somebody softer.”
“Huh.”
Nyx folded her arms. “What, you don’t know any nice Ras Tiegan girls?”
“It’s a quick job, right?”
“Just finding a lost woman. We don’t even need to haul her back.”
“I’m just saying... Nyx, people we team up with end up dead a lot.”
“It’s a rough world. Being next to me has nothing to do with it.”
He gave her the side-eye.
“What?” she said.
“I know someone,” he said. “A shifter named Silvi, a little older tha
n me. I can see if she’s interested.”
“I can do that. We’ll both go.”
“I don’t want to scare her off right away, Nyx.”
“If I scare her off, she’s not much good to the team, is she?”
“Point,” he said.
#
Silvi worked in a curry shop three kilometers away. Taite ordered a cheese and chips roti and asked her to take a break and sit with him and Nyx.
The woman was maybe twenty, mostly Ras Tiegan, but her dark hair and bold nose made Nyx think there was some Nasheenian in there somewhere. It made a difference, in border towns like this, how people perceived where you were from.
“Taite says you have a job,” Silvi said, crossing her lean legs beneath her kaftan. She had a slight Ras Tiegan accent, just enough for Nyx to suspect she had immigrated before she was in her teens.
“This your shop?” Nyx asked.
“My parents,” she said. “You an order keeper?”
Nyx laughed. “You think I’ll check your papers? Right. Order keepers have better things to do than run around after people crossing the border, unless you’re a Chenjan. You a secret Chenjan?”
“Just a shapeshifter,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Fox.”
“No shit? I haven’t met a fox shifter. Pretty rare.”
“Only four kinds: parrots, ravens, dogs, and yes, foxes. It suits me.” She shrugged.
“Good. You’re hired.”
“Just like that?
“You haven’t run screaming. I have low standards.”
Taite raised his brows.
They finished their food and agreed to meet her outside the storefront at dawn prayer. Taite waited until they got outside before rounding on Nyx, “What was that? You didn’t ask her anything at all.”
“Didn’t have to. I saw enough.”
“What, that she’s young and works at a curry shop?”
“That’s enough.”
Taite threw up his hands. “I sure hope the way you recruited everyone else wasn’t like this.”
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