Chapter 2
Evie
The ship that goes to the Daktari Quadrant is sleek and new and mostly alien engineered. I have to get a shuttle to the moon and then it’s a short hop to the space station where alien vessels are allowed to dock. There are no aliens on Earth, at least, officially.
I am escorted to a room by an Antari guard. A lot of aliens turned out to have two sets of arms, and this is one of those species. I think it must be incredibly useful, but then I wonder if maybe they sometimes wish they had three sets of arms.
“Here’s a map of the ship,” she says, handing me a folded piece of paper. I open it up to reveal a very complicated diagram.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she replies. “Feel free to relax until dinnertime. Food is provided in the mess hall. You have bathing options in your room.”
I’ve been reading about this trip since I knew I was going to take it. We don’t have a lot of information on the ship yet, because no humans are generally allowed on it, but my employer has paid a great deal to have me accommodated.
The bed is huge, obviously made for a creature at least twice my size. I’m looking forward to getting into it, because when I sit on it, it’s super soft. Oh, my god, I am going to be so cuddled up in this bed soon.
I can’t stop smiling to myself as the guide leaves. I’m doing it. I’m an astronaut. I’m one of the very few humans who is going to get to see space, and come back.
There was a time a lot of humans got abducted and used for either sex, or food, or sometimes both, but all of that is behind us now. We’re respected as sentient creatures, even though we’re not as developed as some of the other species we’ve come in contact with.
I squish down into the bed for a bit, and then I get up, move my bag around. I didn’t bring that much. A couple of changes of clothes, some underwear. A device that can hold encrypted text. I am going to be going so far away that communication won’t be possible, so I don’t need a phone.
The trip covers several hundred lightyears, but only takes a matter of days according to my perception. The technology required to enable this kind of travel remains unknown to humankind. There are many wonders yet for us to discover.
And that is why I get started on my secondary mission almost immediately.
I do have a couple more things in my bag.
One of them is a small screwdriver set. If they asked me why I have it, I’d say I needed it to repair my glasses.
I’ve also got a pair of glasses in my bag. I’ve thought of everything.
I slide onto the very comfortable bed, where I have spotted a panel in the wall. I touch it with my fingers first, see if it will pop open with a light touch. It remains firm, but it has the appearance of something that should open.
I pick up a slim flathead screwdriver and wrangle it into the slot of the panel. If I can start getting material now, before I’m even off the ship…
Someone clears their throat behind me.
“I’m going to have to ask you to stop that.”
I turn around to discover that I am no longer alone in the room.
There is a uniformed officer behind me. He’s an Antari.
He has two frilled antennae on top of his head that are both pointed forward at me now not unlike a horse’s ears.
Two of his arms are on his hips. The other two are holding a pair of human-sized cuffs.
The cuffs bother me more than the bulging red muscles.
“Uh, sorry,” I say. “I thought this was a storage port? I need to charge my phone.”
The one thing you can bank on as a human when dealing with aliens is how much benefit of the doubt they will give you if you just play dumb.
At least, that’s what I’ve heard. I’m actually meeting these aliens for the first time, and it’s interesting how both strange and normal it all feels.
I’ve been questioned by security guards before.
This guy is well over six feet and has four hands and compound eyes, but he’s also got the same vibe as the serious man in the jewelry store that one time.
“The storage lockers are under the bed,” he says. “They are much larger and have handles.”
“Oh! They have handles!” I exclaim. “That’s so much easier than what I was trying to do!”
“Yes,” he says grimly.
I smile at him like a happy fool, and hope that he goes away.
“I’m going to need to confiscate those tools,” he says. “And I’m going to search your bag.”
“But I have lady things in there,” I protest. “Feminine products.”
The feminine products line usually stops men dead in their tracks. God forbid they see a pad. It would ruin their whole entire lives.
But the Antari guard is made of sterner stuff and might not know what feminine products are.
“They’re for when I bleed,” I say. “Menstrually.”
Most men would have physically fled the room by now, but he’s just looking at me with his hundreds of eyes and now he’s extending two of his hands, one silently asking for the screwdriver, the other wanting the bag. I hand over the screwdriver, but I let him get the bag himself.
Then I sit on the bed and I watch as he empties it out onto the dark coverlet.
My underwear is mostly black and comfortable, because I am so tired of things riding up or being too tight.
There are three boxes of tampons, which, again, should repulse him according to all known laws of the universe, but don’t.
He sorts through my things the way a drunk shuffles cards, spreading everything out and running his hands through it over and over again until nothing is where it started.
“Is there anything you’re looking for in particular?” I ask the question in what I hope is a helpful tone. “Maybe I can help find whatever it is you might need?”
“Contraband,” he grunts.
“Oh, I don’t have any of that. Contraband isn’t allowed. It’s illegal.”
He ignores my words and stands back. “Repack your things.”
Okay. Now this conversation is starting to feel outright unpleasant. He’s the one who messed them up. Not that I want him to fold my underwear for me, but god. The lack of respect is palpable right now.
“Is this because I’m human?” I jut my chin as I ask the question.
“This is because you just tried to shove a metal tool into a socket that carries enough charge to instantly fry you straight to a pile of carbon ash,” he says.
When he puts it like that, he does seem reasonable again.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that,” I say humbly, starting to fold my clothes up so I can fit them back into my bag. He doesn’t seem to care about the encrypted cyberdeck, so that’s something. I casually shove that right down to the bottom first so it is completely out of sight.
He steps out of the door, but he leaves it open, and I hear him chittering. It’s probably talking, but in a language I cannot hope to understand. I wonder what he’s saying. I wonder who he is saying it to?
I can’t believe I fucked up this badly so quickly. Westley told me to be careful, and I wasn’t careful at all. I’m lucky I got caught.
I finish packing and zip my bag up again, and I think about slipping out past the Antari, but he’s back almost immediately.
He’s got another one with him. This one is dressed like a maintenance man.
He puts his knee on the bed and puts a hand-held machine to the port, and I scuttle to the other side of the room and watch them. Technically, the guard is watching me.
The service Antari chitters at the guard. The guard chitters back. There’s a conversation that goes for a while longer than I expected. The service guy is gesturing at the port over and over again.
“Is everything okay?” I ask the question in the hopes they tell me yes, but I have a feeling it’s going to be no.
“He’s saying that you’ve damaged the cover and compromised the port. It’s a serious infrastructure issue.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“The repairs are going to have to be charged to your employer.”
That makes my stomach do a flip. I have a very vague idea as to the nature of my employer, but I know that it’s not going to be a good idea to cost them up front before I ever get to work.
“Oh, okay, I understand. I’m sorry. Maybe I can pay for that myself so he doesn’t have to be bothered.”
“The bill for damage of that nature is in the tens of thousands,” he says. “Humans usually travel with a few hundred for,” he pauses again, perhaps trying to remain un-rude, “snacks.”
“It’s that much?” My blood runs cold. I wasn’t thinking about costs. One credit is at least ten thousand dollars. Tens of thousands of credits is… way more money than I will ever see in my life. “Don’t you have insurance? I mean isn’t—”
He uses one of his hands to pull a little comms table out of his vest pocket. I don’t know what he’s typing, but I do know that I’m not going to like it.
There’s a brief pause, in which I try to think of something to say that will make this go away.
He glances up from his device.
“I have informed your employer. He will cover the cost.”
“He will? He knows?”
“Yes. He knows, and he’s agreed to cover the replacement. He did ask that we put you in a more suitable set of accommodations. If you’d like to get your bag and come with me…”
I follow the guard. I don’t really have much choice. The room I was in was small and pretty plain. I wonder what more suitable accommodations means.
We go down several sets of stairs, which doesn’t feel good. The stairs stop being solid and sleek and start being the metal grille thing you can see through to the ground below, which also doesn’t feel like a good thing.
“Am I being put in the brig?” I ask the question nervously, hoping for some kind of reassurance.
“Not quite,” he chuckles in a way I do not find reassuring at all.
“Here we are,” he says, reaching a point of the ship that I would confidently categorize as nowhere at all. It’s literally a hall next to the mesh walkway, and below that is a kind of angular spiderweb of even more walkways going even further down into God knows what.
“Where we are?” I repeat his words with a different question that makes the whole exchange make much less sense.