Thanks to the translation bacteria she’d been given back on the Mother Ship, she could understand all the strange, alien languages being spoken around her and it reassured her that she didn’t hear anyone talking about humanoid trafficking or finding new girls to abduct.
Though of course, I doubt they’d talk about that right out in the open, Penny thought to herself. Probably they’d go someplace private to talk about illegal activities. Someplace like that.
Her eyes had fallen on a seedy-looking place on the right side of the market, just past the last stall. Red light was pulsing inside its low entrance and she could hear a soft, hypnotic drumming sound mixed with the shouts of bar patrons calling for drinks. A strong whiff of liquor and some kind of sour, skunky smoke drifted out to assault her nostrils.
Penny wrinkled her nose.
Glad I don’t have to go in th—
Her thought was cut off in the middle by the sight of a small sign posted beside the entrance.
Lucky Lounge…Come on in! the sign proclaimed.
Penny stared at it in disbelief.
Well, crap. It seemed she would have to go in after all.
It was definitely the kind of place she would have avoided at all costs back home on Earth. But here in the Hell’s Gate Spaceport, she had no choice—going into the Lucky Lounge was her only ticket home. So she’d better suck it up and get going.
Penny lifted her chin.
Well, here goes nothing!
Taking a deep breath and clutching the second-hand toupee tightly to her chest, she entered the dim bar.
Thirteen
She stopped just inside the doorway, trying to get used to the ambiance. Once her eyes got used to the reddish glow of the lights, she began to look around. The place was packed both with males of every possible alien variation, and also females, most of whom were dressed provocatively.
One woman, sitting on a hovering barstool pulled up to the long, curving bar, had large dark eyes as big as doorknobs. She was wearing a low-cut purple gown and flirting with a male who was sipping something that fizzed and smoked.
Another woman appeared to have three breasts—all of which were larger than Penny’s two put together. Her bulbous mounds were barely contained by a tiny pink tank-top that matched her hair. She was rubbing all three of them suggestively against the chest of a man with prominent brow ridges and tiny eyes. Penny thought he looked like a Neanderthal.
She picked her way through the crowd, trying to get a look behind the crowded bar. Where was the bartender Granny Two-two had told her to speak to? The bald, silver-skinned guy called Grunge? Where…
And that was when her eyes met the golden gaze of a man so big he could only be a Kindred…or in this case, a Kindred Hybrid.
Oh my God, is that him? Is that the guy Kat was warning me about? Penny asked herself as the Hybrid’s pale gold eyes roamed over her body. The gold and black tattoos seemed to answer her question—he must be V’rex, the pirate Kat and Sylvan had told her about—the one they suspected was responsible for the sudden rash of abductions and disappearances over the past six months.
And he was looking at her.
Oh my God! How had she ended up not only in the exact spaceport she’d been told to avoid, but also in the same room with the exact man she’d been told to stay away from at all costs?
How bad could her luck be?
As the man with the golden eyes stared straight at her, she had a bad feeling that she was about to find out.
Her heart started hammering and she clutched the black and white toupee so tightly her knuckles turned white. Kat’s words about girls being kidnapped and sold as sex slaves, so easily dismissed on the Mother Ship, now came back to haunt her.
She’d thought at the time, that nobody would want to add plus-size Penny to their sexy space harem. But despite the form-fitting warm-skin which clung to her overlarge hips and ass, V’rex—if he really was V’rex—was staring at her like she was a delicious dessert and he was starving to death. His golden eyes half-lidded with desire, he got off his stool, clearly meaning to head in her direction.
Penny felt her entire body clench with fear. She had to get out of here—get away from him before he came for her!
She ducked through the crowd, heading for the back of the bar. Maybe there would be a ladies room back there—or its alien equivalent—that she could hide out in until he left.
As she pushed past bar patrons and obvious prostitutes, Penny looked desperately for a door to duck into—any door would do! A broom closet, a bathroom—just someplace to hide where the huge, menacing V’rex couldn’t find her.
The first one she came to was a swinging silver door with some alien markings on it. Penny didn’t stop to try and puzzle them out, she pushed through the door and found herself in a huge, echoing room…
A room that seemed to be entirely filled with long, purple tentacles.
Fourteen
“What in the world?” Penny gasped, looking around in confusion. She started to back out the way she’d come, but she found a long, thick, purple tentacle was blocking her way. Quickly, she skittered to one side, trying to avoid it, only to find another one reaching for her.
With a little scream, she tried to back away but before she could do anything, the seeking tentacle was grabbing at her. It caught the black and white skunk-looking toupee and ripped it out of her hands.
“Hey, wait—I need that!” Penny blurted.
But it was too late—the tentacle which had taken the precious toupee had already handed it off to another set of tentacles on the other side of the room.
As Penny watched, one of the tentacles took a sharp cleaver and began to dice the toupee into tiny, hairy fragments. A third tentacle swept up some of the black and white hair and sprinkled it like a garnish over a steaming plate filled with black and purple lumps. Then a fourth tentacle pushed the plate through a low window and rang a bell.
Penny heard someone yell, “Order up!” and a set of hands appeared at the window and snatched the plate away.
It was exactly like a restaurant, Penny thought, feeling dazed. Looking around, she saw that the tentacles—there seemed to be about fifty of them in different sizes and lengths—were all engaged in some kind of chopping or cooking or stirring.
To one side of her a tentacle was stirring a huge bubbling pot of bright blue sludge while two other tentacles dumped ingredients into it. Another group of five or six tentacles were working on some kind of grill, turning chunks of green meat or vegetables—Penny really couldn’t tell which—over an open flame. Further on, two muscular tentacles were kneading what appeared to be a huge lump of pink dough.
As she stared at the scene around her, Penny at last began to understand what was going on in this room—it was a kitchen. And somehow the owner of the purple tentacles was the chef.
She looked to the center of the room and saw a purple lump, about as big as a large man. There were three tiny eyes in the middle of the lump, though she didn’t see any nose or mouth. The eyes looked sleepy and stupid, which surprised her, considering all the complicated tasks the purple octopus looking creature was doing at one time with its many tentacles.
Well, this was interesting, but definitely not the right place to hide, Penny decided. She needed to get out of here fast before the same tentacles that had ripped away the toupee and used it as a bizarre hairy garnish decided she was some kind of new ingredient too.
She had been standing there, frozen to the spot while the tentacles flowed all around her. Now, she began to back slowly away. The door was right behind her—all she had to do was push through it and—
But just at that moment, someone opened the door and rang a bell. Then they shoved in a large box of what looked like some kind of fruit or vegetable. Whichever it was, it was about a meter long and it had green and purple vertical stripes running the length of it. Penny almost tripped over the box since it was shoved almost into her calves.
“Oh!” she gasped, barely
keeping herself from falling “ass over teakettle” as her mom would have said. Somehow, she managed to keep her balance.
But it might have been better if she had fallen to the floor. Because the next minute, one of the longer, thicker tentacles had curled around her waist and Penny found herself lifted into the air and swooping towards the chopping block where another long tentacle, which was curled around the sharpest, biggest cleaver she had ever seen, awaited her.
Fifteen
“No!” Penny shrieked, as the second tentacle raised the cleaver and the first one positioned her on the vast chopping block, which still had traces of the black and white toupee on it. “No, please—you’re making a mistake! I’m not food!”
“You will be in a minute if we don’t get you out of here,” a voice from the door said.
Looking around wildly, Penny saw the triple-breasted woman she’d seen when she had first entered the Lucky Lounge, standing just inside the kitchen door.
“Bubba!” the woman shouted, clearly talking to the bulbous octopus being in the center of the vast room. “Hey, Bubba—stop!”
But her words didn’t seem to have any effect. The cleaver was rising over Penny’s neck and in the next minute, she was going to be decapitated. As it came whistling down, Penny’s thoughts were a blur.
Oh God, don’t let it end this way! Please—I don’t want to die!
But the triple-breasted woman wasn’t giving up. She grabbed a huge frying pan from a rack on the wall and threw it with all her might at the purple octopus chef.
The three little eyes, which had been half-lidded in a sleepy stupor, suddenly popped open. Even better, all of the tentacles froze in mid-motion. Penny swallowed hard—the clever was bare inches from her throat.
That’s a girl you’ve got there, not a new ingredient,” the triple-breasted woman bawled at the octo-chef. “Put her down, you big idiot!”
She pointed at Penny, who was still frozen in place with the thick, muscular tentacle wrapped around her arms and waist and the cleaver hovering right above her throat.
The octo-chef stared stupidly at her for a moment, then the tentacle holding the cleaver retreated and the one wrapped around her waist lifted Penny and deposited her beside the triple-breasted woman with a thump.
“Oh thank God! Thank God!” Penny babbled, clutching at the woman. She felt weak with relief—so weak she thought she might faint. “Please, I have to get out of here!”
“Take it easy, little sister.” The woman looped an arm around her waist and helped Penny out of the kitchen. “Sorry about that,” she said, once they were in the hallway again. “Bubba’s actually really smart—well, for a multi-pod, anyway. But most of his smarts are in his arms.”
“They are?” Penny asked. She still felt dazed.
“Well, sure. Everybody knows seventy-five percent of a multi-pod’s intelligence is located in the arms,” the woman said. “They all have little brains of their own—located in the base of each arm, you know?”
“Uh, sure.” Penny nodded. “Sorry, I’ve never seen a, uh, multi-pod before,” she added.
“Well, now you have,” the woman smiled cheerfully. “Thank goodness I heard you screaming in there or it would have been the last thing you saw, too!” She shook her head, her long pink hair swishing against her bare shoulders. “You’d think that big dumb idiot would learn a lesson after he diced up our best pot boy last week and put him in the nardik stew.”
“He did? So I’m not the first one that happened to?” Penny was aghast.
“Honey, you’re not even the fifth person it’s happened to,” the woman confided. “Why do you think the sous chefs just ring the bell and push the ingredients into the kitchen instead of going in themselves? Nobody wants to be next to get made into varda pie or whatever the special of the day is. I’m Shurla, by the way,” she added.
“Oh, I’m Penelope. But my friends call me Penny,” Penny said automatically.
“Well, Penny, I’m glad I happened to come along when I did.” Shurla gave her a friendly smile. “Did you come in here looking for a job? ‘Cause I have to tell you, from one joy-girl to another, you’re doing it wrong. I mean, don’t mistake my meaning—that skin-tight suit you’ve got on is mighty sweet. But if you really want to tempt the males and get the most out of them, you’ve got to show a little skin—you know? She nodded down at her own ample, triple cleavage and winked broadly at Penny.
“I didn’t come looking for a…a job,” Penny protested, when she realized what Shurla meant.
“You didn’t?” Shurla frowned. “What possible other reason would you come in a dump like this, honey?”
“I…I just…” Penny’s throat worked and suddenly her whole story just came pouring out.
“I just wanted to trade a rare brantha hair toupee for an interstellar call back home. See, my ship got parked at the wrong end of the station and my shipmates got stuck in a time-suck—a temporal anomaly, I mean—and then an old lady with two heads led me here and gave me the toupee and told me to trade it for the call but the octo-chef—the multi-pod, I mean—grabbed it and chopped it up and now I don’t have any way to call home or ever get out of here,” she finished.
And burst into tears.
Sixteen
It wasn’t like Penny to cry in front of someone she’d just met—or in front of anyone, for that matter. She preferred to keep her emotional outbursts to herself.
But so much had happened to her that day, from nearly getting caught in the slow-time bubble to almost getting eaten by the Keeper to her strange encounter with Granny Two-two and then the menacing Hybrid V’rex coming after her, that she just felt overwhelmed.
Being grabbed by the purple tentacles of the multi-pod and nearly getting chopped up for stew meat was the final straw—that and realizing that she’d lost her one and only chance of ever getting home.
It was all just too much and Penny couldn’t help breaking down. Luckily, her new friend was understanding.
“Oh, you poor thing!” Shurla exclaimed, putting a comforting arm around Penny’s shaking shoulders. “Come on—let’s go into the ladies room for a minute.”
“Th-that’s what I was t-trying to find when I wound up in the k-k-kitchen,” Penny sobbed, trying to get hold of herself.
“It’s right down here,” Shurla told her. She led Penny past the kitchen, further down the hallway, and they went through another doorway to a room filled with sinks and stalls.
It looked a lot like a public restroom back on Earth, Penny thought. Well, except for the fact that the stall doors were all translucent so you could see right into them. She wondered why they bothered to have stalls at all if they were just going to make them see-through? Also, the toilets inside the stalls looked distinctly strange. They seemed to have spouts sticking out of them, which was weird…
But she was too upset to care much about the strange alien bathroom. She was still too devastated about losing her only way to call home.
“It’s okay—just let it out, honey. Just let it out.” Shurla rubbed her shoulders comfortingly and let Penny cry until at last she began to feel better. Well, if not exactly better, then at least all cried out.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with the thin, silky pink tissue Shurla handed her. “It’s just that I don’t know what I’m going to do now. The people back home don’t have any idea where I am and what’s happened to me and my shipmates, so I don’t see how I’ll ever get out of here!”
“And you just need to make a call?” Shurla asked, raising her eyebrows, which were a vivid pink that matched her hair.
Penny nodded.
“Only I don’t know how much it costs. But it really doesn’t matter because I don’t have any money or anything to trade to make the call.”
“Well, you just leave that to me.” Shurla patted her shoulder. “I’m good friends with the owner of the Lucky Lounge. I’m sure if we explain your story he’ll see his way clear to letting you make a qui
ck call.”
“Really?” Penny looked at the other woman hopefully. “Oh, that would be wonderful.”
“I’ll just tell him you were nearly made into stew by Bubba,” Shurla said, grinning at her. “He’ll let you make a call rather than risk letting people know he almost had another kitchen casualty around here.”
“Thank you.” Penny nodded gratefully. “If you really think that would work…”
“Oh, I know it will.” Shurla arched an eyebrow at her. “Bubba’s the fasted cook on the station so of course old Tuber—that’s the owner’s name—doesn’t want to get rid of him. But folks have started complaining—especially the ones that have religious views on cannibalism, don’t you know. Several Beejan monks were here when our poor pot boy got made into stew.” She shook her head. “They were pretty upset when one of them found a finger in his lunch.”
“Oh, uh…I can see how that would be.” Penny nodded. “I’d be upset too.”
“Well, now that we’ve got that all settled, just excuse me a minute, hon,” Shurla said. She made a face. “I started down the hall in the first place ‘cause I had to use the ladies and now I’m just about to burst!”
“Of course.” Penny nodded and started to turn her head as the triple-breasted woman entered one of the stalls. She was prepared to look away and give Shurla privacy, but it turned out there was no need. The minute the stall door closed, it went from transparent to completely opaque.
Oh, so that was how it worked! It occurred to Penny that she really had to go too. It had been hours since she’d been to the bathroom and even though she hadn’t had anything to drink during her long, weary trek, she still had to pee.
Going into a stall a few doors down from Shurla’s, she closed the door firmly, waited until it became opaque, and then began trying to figure out how to use the alien toilet.
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