Yet deep inside, Khar shivered as if he were facing his worst nightmare.
Which, as it turned out, he was.
The being smiled when they saw him.
"I like the raised gravity. Means I do not have to wear the suit for compensation. Do you think there is a chance we could take it a little higher?"
Khar had found his challenger.
He already knew what to call them.
The Usurper.
Chapter 5
Collision Course: Colleagues
Lily
“Algors are exceptionally agile and intelligent amphibious beings, perfectly adapted to both aquatic and terrestrial life. The more tendrils an individual has, the more attractive they are considered in the single eye of their fellow Algors. Their skin secretes a viscous mucus that allows them to spend extended periods far from their deep-sea spawning grounds, and they are particularly fond of long-range hunts.
Algors belong to the rare category of species whose homeworld once hosted two sapient species at the same time. Strikingly, the other species worshiped them as gods. Although this is history from many IMPERIUM eras ago, Algors still tend to regard themselves as exceptional among star-citizens.”
IMPERIUM Guide to Peaceful Coexistence with Registered Spacefaring Species
A lot had happened to Lily in the past two universal chrono-years.
She had been abducted from her homeworld, overpowered her captor, and walked away with a Herion-6 class starcruiser as her spoils. She had reached a station and finally met aliens who did not try to dissect her alive, although she did not escape being swallowed whole by their bureaucracy.
A pale, spiderlike enforcement officer with smooth skin had registered her and her biometrics, binding Helios’s legal ownership to Lily for good once she was granted refugee status. As Lily learned, it was rare for a sapient whose species couldnot yet manage long-range spaceflight to be integrated into the system, but it happened often enough that the IMPERIUM had protocols ready for exactly this situation.
Lily received a two-chrono-year exemption from taxes. She was given a nano-injection that partially blocked diseases and infections and, of course, an alien translator chip.
The chip surpassed everything she had ever imagined about translation. It did not only render words. It interpreted intent, drastically reducing the risk of cross-species misunderstandings. In Lily’s opinion, it was nothing short of miraculous.
After a long discussion with the officer, she chose the version that anchored to the bone above one eyebrow. When she looked in the mirror after the installation procedure, she felt a little like a futuristic cyborg. Not even the placement robot’s politely amused comment about her “charmingly old-fashioned choice” was enough to wipe the grin from her face.
The officer, who turned out to be a matriarch of her species, also offered her a control chip that could be implanted into her skull and would allow her to operate most tools and ships by thought alone.
Lily refused.
“Are you certain?” the spiderlike being asked. “You only possess two grasping limbs. It would be highly beneficial if you did not have to gesture with them. You would simply think, and the task would be carried out.”
She waved her gnathal parts and rippled her long, knobbly legs, perhaps to demonstrate the advantages of having many appendages.
Lily might have appreciated the concern more if the sight had not made her want to sprint straight back to Helios.
The translator chip was mandatory, but it did not interface with Lily’s nervous system. There was no transmitter in it, only aninternal datastore and a tiny supplementary AI. It could also be swapped out at any time in Helios’s compact med-bay.
The control chip, however, was another story.
Lily did not trust it.
Instead, she continued using Helios’s baseline wrist computer, Herion’s VoidBrace technology.
“A wrist-mounted, quantum-linked module that allows faster-than-light communication. VoidBrace, from Herion Tech,” chirped the advertisement Helios played when Lily snapped the slim, white-and-silver holographic band around her wrist.
On the station, Lily quickly noticed she was smaller and slimmer than the average alien and just as quickly learned not to draw long-term conclusions from that. Physical strength and intelligence had very little to do with what she would have predicted based on appearance. She met hyper-intelligent, physically weak, elephant-sized swimmers, and tiny, lightning-fast insectoids that could barely form words.
