He grinned at me. “I’m glad you approve. I enjoy waking up this way.”
Betra showered in my quarters and took his leave, smiling and happy. I’m glad. I’ve also calmed from my momentary panic, knowing things are as they should be. All I have to do is remember not to fall in love until the right clan comes along. I’m an adult and I can be mature about the way things are. Come on, how hard can that be?
February 7
Woohoo, shore leave, here I come!
Oses won’t be able to meet up with me today. He has to work the shift, so I don’t have my big, bad Nobek to keep me safe. However, Betra is accompanying our group to Xniktix, so I’m feeling great about things. He told Candy, Katrina, and me he’d escort us to the dance club. He has stated flatly that he does not dance.
“Let me maintain some dignity, ladies,” he begged when we tried to talk him into shaking that fine butt with us. “Other Kalquorians from this ship will go to the club, because we enjoy watching the women there. We do not dance, however, except in demonstration of some ancient tribal rituals. I’ll never hear the end of it if I join you on the floor.”
Katrina fixed him with a steely stare. “You would bow to peer pressure, Betra? Are you that insecure about how others see you?” She lectured him as if she were his mom.
He shrugged. “Yes.”
With that, he refused to discuss the issue any further. Betra won’t dance with us. Period.
As a joke, I brought it up to Oses that maybe he could show off some moves. The weapons commander gazed at me as if I’d suggested he pull out his cocks and wave them around in public. He didn’t say a word, just stared. Well, excuse me.
Wallflower Kalquorians aside, we are looking forward to trying out some of the moves we’ve learned by watching the feeds from the dance club. Candy is astounding. She’s sex incarnate when she dances. The Plasians, who have the steps we emulate most, are going to be blown away by her. Katrina is not bad either, though she is self-conscious.
“I’m not exactly a young woman,” she grouched. “I feel as if I’m trying to pass myself off as such. I don’t want to be ridiculous.”
“Stop worrying,” I advised. “It’s about having fun. So have fun and to hell with what anyone else thinks. Besides, how many of these people would you come across again?”
“Only all the Kalquorians on our ship,” she snorted, but she did relax after that. After all the carrying on she’s done with our alien fellas, I can’t understand what Katrina is worried about.
They tell me I’m excellent at dancing too, not that I care. Dancing as the aliens do is a blast. You sway to the beat for the most part, doing what makes you feel happy and sexy. I’ve learned a few moves that translated as darned fierce when it comes to naughty play. Betra sure didn’t complain the other night.
I’m ready, and the first shuttle scheduled to go to the station leaves in half an hour. All our group will be on it...I think. Katrina commed me to say Candy was freaking out over what to wear.
“Avoid her. That’s what I’m doing,” Katrina advised. “Otherwise, she’ll rope us in to go over her outfit choices and we’ll never get out of here.”
She’s right. Candy gets crazy over this kind of stuff. She’s been trying to decide what to wear since we found out about our field trip.
For now, I’ve kept it simple with a short-sleeved blouse and a knee-length skirt. They’re pretty, a black-and-emerald ensemble, but the outfit isn’t as racy as what the majority of the club-goers wear. In fact, I’m overdressed, though it’s the most salacious clothing I possess. The plan is that we’ll check if the market has clothes for sale suitable for Earthers so we blend in with the crowd. Yep, I’m happy to spend some of my Kalquorian allowance. I can’t imagine that I’ll wear as little as what some do – the Plasians in particular might as well be running around naked in some cases – but I do want something that says not-repressed-Earther. I don’t want to appear as if I’m ringing the dinner bell either. Can somebody be modest and sexy at the same time?
This is so exciting! I feel like a young girl going to her first circus.
February 8
Oh my gosh. I am so sore. My everything hurts after yesterday and last night. Between dancing and other stuff, I can barely move. It was such fun that I can’t complain. Besides, pain inhibitors will fix me once I drag my poor carcass to Dr. Tep.
Lots to tell. Obviously, the dance club was awesome. The shopping was amazing. Other parts of shore leave...not so much. There was some weird in there.
Candy barely made it to the shuttle our group took to the space station, having hemmed and hawed over her outfit as we feared she would. In fact, the hatch was closing when we heard her yelling, “Wait for me! Please wait! I want to go with my friends!”
Betra called to the Imdiko tending the passengers. “That’s one of mine. Can she board?”
The Imdiko attendant was good-natured about her tardy arrival, getting the hatch open to let a flustered Candy on the shuttle.
“Oh thank you, thank you,” she babbled at him. “You’re such a sweetheart. Aren’t you cute! What’s your name?”
Betra, sitting across the aisle from me, snickered. “Sit down, Matara Candy. You’re holding up take-off.”
“Oops, sorry. Gee, thanks for waiting up for me, Betra.” She stuck her tongue out at him as she joined me and Katrina. “You knew I planned to go.”
“The shuttles are running on a schedule. I couldn’t keep us grounded for one young lady who can’t figure out which dress to wear.”
Candy collapsed in the seat beside me and gave him an insulted glare. “Betra! This is a huge deal for us Earthers. I’ve never been to an alien space station before. I want to represent my people appropriately.” She smoothed out the skirt of her dress, a cute ruffled thing that made her adorable and sexy all at once. I wish I could pull off a look like that.
Betra grinned at her. “A lovelier ambassador has never been seen, Matara.”
Candy’s pique with him vanished. “Oh, you are too nice. Do I really look okay?”
“Beautiful.”
I could hear the laughter in his voice. Candy amuses Betra to no end, and he forgives a lot of her quirks because there is no ugliness to her. Of us all, she gets away with the most when it comes to being late to consultations, training, or anything. Even Oses lets it slide when she dashes into blaster training a couple minutes late. If I showed up five seconds late, he’d put me over his knee.
Hmm. Note to self: show up at blaster training late from now on.
The Imdiko attendant put up a vid of the outside view as we left the transport’s bay. Katrina, Candy, and I had researched the station, but we murmured with the others as it showed up on the wall projection.
“It’s big,” Katrina said. “That’s a long haul from the dock to the marketplace.”
“It has those travel tubes,” I reminded her. “Pneumatic? It goes fast, from what I understand.”
“So fast that it has g-force stabilization buffers,” Candy confirmed. “Otherwise, we’d show up with our cheeks meeting at the backs of our heads.”
It’s easy to forget that as bubbly and giddy as Candy acts, she has a good head on her shoulders. She usually knows more details of what we’re up to than I do, and I have Betra and Oses keeping me informed.
By the time we docked at the space station, we were bouncing in our seats. Even though our group got off before Betra, we waiting in a small knot for him to disembark while others dashed off to the waiting tubes. He smiled at our overwhelmed excitement.
“All right, ladies. You each have a communicator?”
We nodded, automatically checking our pockets or belt pouches to reassure ourselves we hadn’t forgotten our coms. I was sure every woman had Betra’s frequency keyed in so we could talk to him with a single click. We were thrilled to have an adventure, but we also were cautious. None of us had been off Earth before and had little to no experience interacting with aliens other than the Kalquorians.
> “Good. I’ll send you off in the tubes. They’ll take you straight to the market and trade area. I’m only a shout away, so have fun.” He encouraged us as a parent sending his children off to their first sleepover might.
We approached the clear tubes behind Betra, letting him lead us on this initial step to our eagerly-awaited shore leave. A sort of car waited for a passenger at the open end of the tube. It was shiny silver, with a reclined seat within it. The seat appeared made of padded black plastic, with a cushion obviously meant for a head.
“Holy shit,” one of the other women said. “It’s a bullet-shaped coffin.”
It had that look. Nobody was particularly inclined to get into it.
“Who’s my bravest Matara?” Betra asked.
No volunteers. Then Katrina took a deep breath. “I’m the oldest and therefore the most expendable. I’ll give it a shot.”
Betra laughed at how she moved forward, as if going to her execution. “Katrina, this is perfectly safe. You’ll be fine, my sweet.”
She grimaced, not convinced in the least. “Candy and Shalia, you’d better be right behind me. I’ll need you to hold my hair at the other end, so I can barf if I survive this nightmare.”
Betra helped her into the car. Katrina lay down in it. The padded lounge closed in on her, cushioning her like a Ming vase. Only her face remained visible, and she appeared more uncertain than ever.
“Hey, hold it—” she started to say.
“You’ll be climbing out in five seconds,” Betra assured her. Then a hatch slid over Katrina’s body, hiding her from view. The next second, the car disappeared in a streak of silver down the tube.
“Next?” Betra smiled at me.
I scrambled for an excuse. “Um, you do remember I’m pregnant? Has this been tested on expectant Earther girls?”
He patted my back and pushed me towards the next coffin-car, which was in position and awaiting its victim. “I checked with Dr. Tep to make sure you could use the tube. He said you and the baby will be fine.”
I stepped in reluctantly, but it occurred to me that as protective as the Kalquorians are of women...to the point of being damned ridiculous...they wouldn’t let us take this mode of transportation if it had any risk. That did little to ease my mind, however. I didn’t want to be inside this bullet that traveled at the speed of one.
I lay down, trying to figure out an excuse why I shouldn’t be doing this without being a wimp. The padding was soft. I managed not to scream when it closed around me as it had Katrina.
“See you soon,” Betra said cheerfully.
The hatch closed, shutting me in perfect darkness. I tensed and waited for the rush of movement, of feeling my stomach jolt into my throat, of...I don’t know what. The seconds ticked by as I clutched my hands into fists.
Then the hatch opened and the padding retreated, leaving me free to move. I blinked at the featureless ceiling overhead.
“Betra? Is something wrong?” I warbled in the most pitifully scared voice you ever heard.
“Need a hand up?” It was Katrina who appeared to stand above me. She grinned. “Nothing to it, was there?”
“Holy shit, I never felt it move.” I let her help me up and out of my capsule. As soon as I stepped out, it zoomed forward and around a curve, disappearing from sight.
“No wonder Betra had his ‘I’m laughing at you on the inside but trying not to show it’ face on,” Katrina snorted. “What a bunch of babies we are.”
There was a whisper of sound, reminding me of a breeze through pine trees. Another car arrived. It opened to show Candy, her face squished up, her eyes shut tight.
“And here’s the third of our merry trio,” I announced.
“What? I’m here? Are you kidding me?”
We helped her out, letting her have a few seconds to exclaim over how ridiculously easy the ride had been. You would have thought we were pissed off that we hadn’t been tortured and come near death during our rides.
There was a short tunnel-like corridor that led from the tube. It was white and featureless. We headed down to discover what was at the brightly lit end.
We gasped as we came to the station’s main concourse. Think of a round football field times one hundred. Okay, so it wasn’t that big, but damn, it was huge. We couldn’t see the other side of the market area. Plus, it was fifty levels high.
I have to borrow from the vids we’d viewed to describe it. There’s the main floor, which is where Candy, Katrina, and I came in. This is where the main trade area is. Exporters and importers from various systems do their business there, buying and selling goods in bulk.
Below this level are about five others, which are the command center, engineering, maintenance...you know, the guts of this station. We saw nothing of that part since they aren’t visible from the public part of the station, where we were. The floor of the main trade area covers that up.
The levels above us were arranged in golden circular tiers, with balconies hanging over the main floor we were on. The lowest five levels consisted of stores from all over the cosmos, where we planned to do our shopping. The next ten levels were the entertainment section, where we would find our dance club. Further up was dining for every palate and budget except ‘free’. At the very tippy top of all those levels were alien versions of hotel rooms, where those not bunking on the ships they came in on could catch some sleep.
Arching overhead was a clear dome. It showed space of the most unfathomable blackness, with only pinpricks of stars and distant planets to interrupt its vast expanse.
Katrina spoke with awe. “If you’ve never felt tiny and insignificant before, this should do it.”
Candy and I nodded in agreement. It was an immense, wide-open structure.
It was Candy, our effervescent gal of adventure and fun, who got us moving. “Come on. Let’s do some shopping.”
That’s right; we were brave and didn’t wait for Betra. You go, bold girls. Our liaison was taking too long and we were too excited. We decided he could track us down via the coms.
We could tell the station wasn’t used to an Earther presence. Of all the signs in so many different languages, none were in ours. We wandered for a while at the edge of the trade floor before we discovered the in-house transport. We crowded onto it with aliens of nearly every stripe once we made sure there were no Tragooms or Bi’isils in it.
Our riding companions spoke in their various tongues, telling the transport where to let them off. Since we three didn’t have much of a clue about where to direct the car, we stood amongst the rest and waited, hoping to be dropped off at a good spot. We disembarked at the very first opportunity, since the shops were on the lowest tiers. It seemed reasonable to believe we’d get where we wanted to go that way.
We found ourselves on the second level in a wonderland of treasures more amazing than could be imagined. Multicolored lights in various languages dazzled us over the holo and vid windows of each store. Clothing and jewelry and furnishings and art beguiled, luring us to each exhibition with siren songs of visual beauty. Personal shuttles and hovercraft could be bought here, some even spaceworthy. The three of us wandered the concourse, stumbling as if we were drunks, gaping in wonder.
Back on Earth, only the rich enjoyed such luxuries. The poorest neighborhoods had secondhand shops and grocery stores not even half full. People like me, middle-income, ordered our goods from warehouses that delivered to our doorsteps. It was those with money that went to stores where clothing was custom fitted and people waited on them, ready to fulfill their whims.
“I bet we can’t afford any of this stuff,” I told the others.
“No, but we can look,” Katrina replied.
“And note down what our future clans should buy us,” Candy giggled. “Wow, get a load of that dress!”
She rushed over to a window display that had several holograms of dresses rotating so we could view them from all angles. The featured gown was a slinky transparent number that would be too long for me, the
tallest of us three. It was cut for someone with elongated, slender proportions. Meant for a Plasian, was my guess. It was gorgeous, dark blue and filmy with a splash of glitter. It was as delicate as a butterfly’s wing.
The moment Candy dashed up and stood before the window, it and all the other dresses changed. They shrank in size and filled out, curving as if filled by a human’s body. The holograms adjusted for Candy’s stature and figure.
“Wow.” It was the smartest word I could come up with.
Katrina and I joined our friend. The dresses again shifted, showing us how they would fit each of us in turn. Katrina’s more solid figure appeared, then mine, then again to our curvy Candy. They continued to alter between the three of us as we stood there.
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