Chapter Four Sadie #2
She indicated another floating platter. This pizza had a green glaze drizzled over the red sauce, and I wondered what it was made out of. Most UrDail foods were fruits and vegetables and weren’t harmful to the rest of us.
Alanik, still eyeing the cheese with distaste, murmured, “Thank you for your consideration.”
“Can I try a piece of yours?” I asked Alanik. She considered me with a frosty stare. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked…but I did want to know what it tasted like.
“Of course,” she said. “I will…decline to try yours, though I hope you enjoy it.”
She didn’t sound incredibly hopeful.
Gilaf shrugged beside her. “I’d try a piece of the cheese.”
Alanik looked at him like that was the most disgusting thing she’d ever heard.
“What?” he said. “I’ll try anything once.”
“Is there anything special we should do before we eat?” Arturo asked Suki.
“It was a ritual of ancient humans to speak words of gratitude before consuming a meal together,” Suki said.
“Allow me to say that I never expected to know such honorable and welcoming humans, and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn of your contemporary culture and get to know you as friends.”
That was a nice way to say that she had expected us to conquer her people, like our ancestors had done with basically every species they encountered in the galaxy.
One of the kitsen rode a tiny bicycle with sawblade wheels over the pizza, cutting it into slices—small ones for the kitsen, and larger ones for us—and we all crowded around the table, dishing it onto our plates.
Dasha and Katri served algae strips and mushrooms for the slugs, and we settled around the large round table with the slugs munching in the middle.
Suki joined us, her disk hovering at Arturo’s shoulder with her tiny plate of pizza in front of her.
“By the North Star,” Nedd said with his mouth full. “This is delicious.”
He was right. The cheese was squishier than it looked, but the tangy red sauce complemented it nicely.
It sure tasted better than anything made out of algae, which was the easiest thing to grow in the caverns beneath Detritus.
Even the UrDail pizza was good—the green sauce tasted nutty with a little tang to it, different than anything I’d ever had, but in a good way.
“How’s the cheese, Gilaf?” I asked.
Gilaf had a slice of cheese pizza partway in his mouth, and he chewed thoughtfully.
“Not bad,” he said in English. He had a heavy accent, and didn’t know very many words.
He and Alanik both spoke fluent Mandarin, but I only knew a few words of that from back home, not enough to communicate.
I’d grown up speaking Yeongian primarily, but unfortunately no one else in the flight spoke it.
A tall figure in a white uniform stepped into the room, and we all turned. The admiral—Jorgen Weight, our former flightleader—with Boomslug perched on his shoulder.
Stars, I hadn’t realized the admiral would be here. I used to fly under his command, so I shouldn’t be intimidated by him, but let’s be honest, I had been intimidated by him even then. We all stood, and Arturo, as commander of our mission, saluted.
Jorgen surveyed us for a moment. “At ease,” he said.
We all took our seats again. There was something strange about the admiral’s expression, like he was trying not to laugh, and his voice was stuffy and strangely pitched, like a woman with a bad cold.
“Um, sir,” Arturo said. “We weren’t expecting you. You…feeling okay?”
“Feeling okay!” the slug on his shoulder said, though its voice was also pitched wrong. Boomslugs had the deepest voices of all the taynix, but this one was midrange.
“Great!” Jorgen said, more chipper than I’d ever heard him, and his voice now sounded like a woman whose cold was starting to improve.
“All right,” Arturo said. “What’s going on?”
Jorgen giggled, his voice as high-pitched as it was disconcerting. Arturo and Nedd both stood again, facing Jorgen as if he might be an enemy wearing a holographic disguise, but scud, we didn’t even have an enemy anymore, did we? Jorgen held up his hands in surrender, still laughing.
“Wait, I can explain,” he said, his voice now sounding perfectly healthy, and definitely not male. In fact, I recognized that voice.
“FM?” I asked.
“Drop illusion,” Jorgen said, and suddenly his body shifted as well, revealing FM, one of my former wingmates who now headed the DDF’s department of diplomacy.
She had short blond hair, fair skin, and was roughly as tall as Jorgen.
The slug on her shoulder changed too, swapping Boomslug’s black stripes for a rainbow of colored spines that cascaded down the back of its ivory body.
“Your Jorgen impression is terrible,” Arturo said.
“Yeah,” FM said. “I should have worked on the voice more. But I wanted to demonstrate the results of our latest taynix research. In the most ridiculous way possible, apparently.”
I blinked at the slug. “The taynix did that?”
“Yep!” FM said. “Show them again, Hoid. Illusion up!”
“Hoid!” the slug fluted, and suddenly FM looked like Jorgen again.
Now that I knew it was fake, I had to admire how realistic it looked. The image of Jorgen’s skin and features moved realistically with FM’s facial expressions. She looked like Jorgen doing an FM impression—though if I hadn’t known them both, I wouldn’t have picked up on the differences.
“It’s a hologram slug?” Arturo asked.
The DDF had encountered holographic technology that could disguise full bodies, but our engineers hadn’t figured out how to replicate a hologram that advanced, so its use was limited to the couple of devices we had that worked.
If the rainbow taynix could do the same job, though, we could use illusions all over the place.