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ONE
cypra
“It’s Star Season, shei,” said the man in front of me. He spoke Common with a drawl that seemed to be indicative of the local accent on this planet. The planet itself wasn’t populated enough for there to be more than one accent. Ohkk was a planet in the Ohker System, just below the asteroid belt, and it was far too close to its sun to seemingly support life, except for the fact that a large swath of it was covered in a heavy atmosphere that blocked out the sun, keeping temperatures cool enough for life to survive. It was still extremely hot, though, in my opinion. Extremely.
“Yes, I’ve heard this,” I said to him. “From every other guide I’ve spoken to, all of whom told me they wouldn’t be caught dead going up there. When I asked them if there was anyone who would, your name kept coming up.”
He chuckled. “Did it?” He was one of two native sentient species on this planet. He was a donen. The other species were greeicx. Both of them were species that vaguely resembled my own species—which was human. However, this didn’t mean much. Almost all sentient life in the galaxy seemed to resemble each other. No one knew whether this meant we had a common ancestor or whether life just took a predictable pattern.
He had antlers, tall horns rising up out of his forehead, just in front of his ears, and he was furry. Furry all over, but mostly furry on the bottom from his hips down to the bottom of his legs, which were hooved, not like the feet and digits I had.
He was also naked. They were all naked. They were just furry between their legs, these aliens, and I guessed they were the sort of species whose genitalia had to be coaxed out, which meant I didn’t have to stare at their cocks, so I guessed they technically didn’tneedclothes, but it was still a little disconcerting. Their chests were all bare, and only as furry as a human man’s might be, so there was alotof bare skin.
Ohkk was a technologically developed planet, not classified as primitive, but there was a good bit of undeveloped land out here, the people who lived on the planet spread out, reliant on a primarily agrarian society to sustain them. If there was a backwoods planet to the galaxy, it was Ohkk.
“But you’re saying no, too?” I said.
“Shei,” he said. This was not my name. Near as I could gather, it was some local form of endearment for women, something like sweetheart, which I didn’t much care for, but I was trying to get this guy to help me, so it didn’t make sense to antagonize him. “I’d have to be stupid to go up there during Star Season.”
“Or brave,” I said. “Which is what the others said about you. ‘Only person brave enough to go up to the pole during Star Season I can think of is Halston Effers.’”
He raised his eyebrows under his antlers. “That what they said?” He was amused by me, and I didn’t like it.
“Yes,” I said. Actually, what they’d said was that he was the only personstupidenough to go up there, but… like I said… not trying to antagonize him.
“Huh,” he said, noncommittally. He leaned back in his chair. We were sitting in an open-air bar at a table for two. Everything out here was open air because it was so hot all the time. There was a thatched roof overhead giving shade and fans overhead chugging away, making the air less sweltering. He had a tall glass of whatever the local ale was in these parts. He took a drink of it.
“But you’re saying no?” I said again, lifting my chin. “You can’t handle it, after all?”
He laughed softly. “What do you want to go up there for, anyway?”
“It’s, um, important,” I said. “There’s a ship that went down. No communication from it, even though we can trace it. We think… they could have survived.”
“This is a rescue mission, shei?” He eyed me, the humor going out of his eyes. Now, he looked shrewd, as if he was trying to figure me out, as if he could read truth in my expression.
I wanted to break eye contact. I didn’t. “It’s… there are things on the ship that we need.”
“Who’s we?”
“The people I work with,” I said.
“Which is?”
“We’re a shipping company,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Atabong Shipping Ltd. We move all sorts of things back and forth across the galaxy.” I did have a manifest and some official-looking paperwork that I could pull out if I needed to verify my story. It should past muster, even with the Toth, who were basically the evil alien overlords who subjugated the galaxy.
You know, the government.
Out here, though, this was kind of the wild. The Toth presence wasn’t pronounced, and they shouldn’t be poking into anything.
“Shipping company.” He nodded. He didn’t believe me.
Shit. I squared my shoulders and glared at him. I wondered what he thought of me. Whatever he was thinking, it probably wasn’t that I worked for the resistance, and that there were very important tactical schematics for a dangerous weapon on that ship, and that I had to get it if we were going to have a chance at making a stand against the Toth.
“Because if it were a rescue mission, I’m thinking you would have led with that,” he said. “So, this is a business problem. That’s the ‘emergency.’ You got some rich client who’s angry about his cargo stuck out on a nowhere planet, and now your company is making you risk your life and asking you to hire someone to risk his life just for something on the ship?”
Oh, okay, hedidbelieve me. “It’s, um…”
“If you got a rich client, though, why aren’t you offering more credits for this little walkabout you want to do, straight through the vvoln-infested forests? Why didn’t he set you down right on that wreckage, let you go straight down and look for survivors and get his cargo? Too much of a cheapskate to spring for that kind of a mission?”
