”Welcome, honored guests, to the Qena-Qel.” Jainema sweeps her arm across the grand scope of the ship’s bridge. It’s built like half of a surgical theater, in terraced banks of screen and console, and staffed by a hodgepodge of sizes—little Taiikari ladies, marines and keepers at the five-foot line, and the towering Eqtoran men and women, all moving between stations with reports and messages and important space ship business that keeps them acting like the guests aren’t there.
There is a membrane of tension in the air. Dylan’s not sure what tells him that—the Eqtorans are hard to read, and of course nobody’s speaking English. But some frisson is telling him that there’s something unplanned afoot.
As Jainema goes down the Qena-Qel’s spec sheet—crew size, complement of guns, some very impressive-sounding distances it can travel—Dylan’s elbow prods Santi. “They named their bigass warship after Kenan & Kel.”
Santi bites his laugh back down his throat. “Shut your ignorant ass up.”
“Dylan,” someone stage-whispers beneath Jainema’s speech. He looks to the voice. Xamika went on ahead of them on the first shuttle; here she is now, at a higher-up terrace, waving enthusiastically his way. Over here, she mouths.
He looks quizzically from her to Jainema’s cheerful prattle and back. She rolls her eyes and beckons him. “Be right back,” he murmurs to his anglophile alliance, and turns from the milky way starscape outside the domed window—seen one, seen ‘em all.
Xamika awaits him at the edge of the bridge. “Forgive me for parting from you. More of my double role business.” She indicates her uniform, which has sprouted additional flourishes since last time he saw her. Piping has appeared along the fasteners on her tunic. The little strip of cloth has become a black half-cape with a crimson epaulette. A slouchy duty cap sits atop her head, which only makes her look even more like that chick from Street Fighter than she did before. “Where’s Booger?”
“They asked me to leave him on the station,” Dylan says. “Guess they have enough off-the-leash weirdos to supervise.”
Her big violet ears droop. “Oh, poor Booger. Next time someone tries to command you like that, come and find me, okay?”
“It was really no big deal,” Dylan says. “He’s a homebody anyway.”
And that’s the truth, more or less—Boog’ll be fine—but her vexation on his behalf puts a tingling lightness in his chest.
“All right,” she says. “But I hope you don’t mind if I pencil myself in for some Booger time once we’re back at base.”
“Of course. What’s got you running around with your Lieutenant hat on?”
“What, this?” She removes it. He wonders why she’s started plaiting her hair so much beneath it. “It has my ship designation on it. Does it look odd to you?”
“I meant more of a metaphorical hat.”
“Aha. Metaphor.” She puts it back on. “I’ll get there.”
He ought’ve told her it looks extremely cute on her, he realizes, but the moment has passed. “You’re doing great,” he says. “I’m just being nosy.”
“It’s just a little piece of unforeseen Navy business,” she explains. “There’s a Pankrillan noncitizen vessel whose path is consistent with an extralane sweep into Qarnaq’s outer orbit. Captain Tennek wants to do a flyby, and he needed me to sign off on it.”
“Is that why some people down there seem so on-edge? The Pankians or whatever?”
“What? Oh, no, the Pankrillans are no big deal. Noncitizens go exo fishing sometimes on planets that don’t belong to them, getting what meager black-market fuel they can. It’s a negligible amount compared to what a single Imperial refining stack can pull, and of course a gas giant isn’t about to run out of supply, but it’s a Naval duty to chase them off regardless.”
“Seems like something of a victimless crime.”
She laughs as if he’s told a joke. “A victimless crime. That’s a very human phrase.”
He isn’t sure about the grin he returns that with. Feels a little like a grimace.
“Anyway, they’ll stay out of the system now that they know there’s a ZKV within rapid response,” she says. “In all likelihood, we won’t even see them. If we do, it’ll be a simple warning broadcast to send them on their way.”
“So if it’s not the Pankrillans, what’s everyone so tense and whispering about?”
“Uh…” Xamika waves an approaching Eqtoran keeper with a stricken expression away. “Where are you seeing that?”
Dylan casts a meaningful look across the bridge to four people in uniform—two Taiikari men and a pair of Eqtorans—gathered around a console. One of the Taiikari is gnawing his own tail with anxiety.
“Oh. That’s—” Xamika steps between Dylan and the whispering ensigns. Her boots have a metallic clunk to them on the polished floor. “That’s nothing, really. Nothing to concern yourself with.”
“Oookay,” Dylan says. “As long as we’re safe. Are we safe?”
“You are entirely safe. I swear. It’s just that they, uh—” Xamika glances at the knot of anxious observers and seems to come to a decision. “This is silly to admit, but there’s a game happening right now, and everyone’s rather invested.”
“A game? Like a football game?”
“It’s sort of the Taiikari version of football. It’s called—let’s see what the translator calls it, actually.” She digs into the sling bag across her chest and pulls out her translation panel. “Zuwai Nakmi.”
Staff Clash, it supplies.
“Hmm.” Xamika tilts her head. “I guess so. It’s less a staff and more a sort of throwing stick that doesn’t have an English equivalent. Sort of a blunted, padded spear.”
“Xam,” calls a sky-colored man Dylan recognizes as another liaison. His next jumble of syllables is translated by the panel as They just penalty flashed Qark.
Xamika utters a barbed triplet of words that comes out as Nectar-addled whore of the abyss. Dylan laughs. Her face goes bright magenta as she snaps a trigger on the translator pane and blanks it out. “Please pardon my outburst, Dylan. I really—that was so unprofessional of me.”
“I’m a Lions fan, girl. Trust me, I get it.” He strains to make out the colorful shapes moving across the watchers’ console. “Or I’d like to, at least.”
“Qark Nuqzami is the star player on the Luavuquni Barracudas, and the Qena-Qel is about eighty percent Barracuda loyalists,” she says. “And he keeps eating penalties and we all think they’re quite unjust because this officiant is a, uh…”
“Hardass?”
“I’m just hearing that one for the first time, but it’s spiritually correct. Qark is the best shuttle in the league right now, without question, and he knows it. It’s the first decacycle that the Eqtoran players are really making an impact, and he’s essentially inventing the Paas metastrategy in realtime every game he plays. He’s just back from a suspension that made everyone just furious when it happened. Some controversial things said about the system commissioner’s relationship with the Imperial board. It’s all ridiculous, of course. Just Taiikari traditionalists upset that there are aliens getting their flippers on the Imperial game. Happens every time, and every time the real fans adapt and have a new variation of the game to enjoy.”
“You really like this game, huh?”
“I, well. It’s silly, it’s just a game, of course, but… The ship I’m on, we have a little intramural league for it. Just a couple of teams, really, but sometimes we play out. There’s actually a bit of contention right now as we decide how much of the Paas rulebook to adopt.”
He’s coaxing her out of her genteel diplomat mode, he can tell. “There’s multiple rulebooks, then?”
“It’s the first year of the Paas league. There’s always a push-pull between the way the game is traditionally played and the strategies each system’s teams eventually adopt as the host species leave their own stamps on the Clash. That’s what makes it such a fascinating game. Every time a new species finds its way into the Empire they make it their own. And Paas Clash is just fantastic.”
“What makes it so good?”
Xamika animates further. “So there are these flex players on both sides’ center triads, they’re called shuttles traditionally because they train to carry one of the offensive compellers, but in Paas Clash they, um…” Her gesticulations halt and her hands return to parade rest. “This isn’t exactly what we’re here for.”
“You’re my liaison, right? You’re meant to do whatever I ask for.”
Color creeps up her cheeks. “Yes. That is… yes.”
“Well, what I’m asking for is I wanna get the Luavuquni Barracudas up on a bigass screen,” Dylan says. “And I want to watch the game with you so you can explain it to me. If that’s okay.”
“I—” She sighs. “I think they’d like us to stay on-program.”
“Okay,” he says. “But what would you like?”
“Um,” she says.
“There’s Qark.” Xamika points past the legs she’s got propped up on the meeting room table to point him out. “You see? With the offensive compellers on his shoulders.”
On the screen they’ve projected across a marblesque blank wall, a burly Eqtoran man in a bright blue, beetle-like helmet—kind of a civilian version of the scary space marine guards—charges down a field criss-crossed by interlinking semicircles. Upon his back, affixed by their tails to handles built into his shoulderpads, crouch two Taiikari women.
“That’s a key difference right there.” Xamika taps her own shoulder. “The Eqtoran shuttles can carry two girls at once without slowing down. Totally changes the pace of the offense. We’ve got stubby little legs, so shuttles are how we control the central compulsion zone.”
They’re seated together, in two spinny chairs, at one end of the long meeting table in this otherwise empty conference chamber. Dylan squints across the table’s span. “That’s the oval thing in the middle?”
“Very good. You step in there while your team’s got staff possession, or it’s out of play, you’re vulnerable.”
As she speaks, one of Qark’s compellers rockets from his shoulder, sailing through the air on a combination of his hurling arm and her catapulting tail. She whips around midair and whacks her tail into an Eqtoran in saffron. The anticomp visor on his helmet clacks open; he takes a knee. A glyphic countdown appears over his head.
“That’s their north flank carrier,” Xamika says. “So if Pokana can get in front of him—”
The blue-helmed Taiikari girl skids to the saffron Eqtoran. Her eyes flash and she barks out a quick command. He stands, turns, and jogs to the edge of the compulsion zone to screen one of his own teammates. A stripe of blue blazons itself across the top of his helmet, scrolling itself backward along it like a reversing progress bar.
Xamika whoops. “Player advantage. Now he’s—aww, konzaf’kai.”
The woman scurrying onto the field is in scarlet, not zebra stripes, but the protest from the crowd is universal. Dylan knows a ref when he sees one.
Qark halts in place and drops the staff he’s recovered. He raises his visor. There’s a look of simmering resentment on his face as the referee raises a flag-tipped spear that sends him stalking to the edge of the field.
“They need to fine this stupid shimhia referee,” Xamika says. “He wasn’t even over the zone line.”
“What’s shimhia?”
“I shouldn’t say.”
“How about konzaf’kai?”
“That one means something like fires of the abyss,” she says. “Hold on to that one. You’ll use it constantly. Especially if you get into Zuwai, because these officials are such hardaxes.”
“Hardasses?”
“Yes.”
“I really think I might,” Dylan says. “I mean I’m totally lost, to be honest, but the airtime those girls get is crazy.”
“That’s the Eqtorans’ influence,” she says. That’s why it’s so fantastic. I’m really—”
She cuts herself off and refocuses on the game.
“You’re really?” he asks.
“Before we contacted you,” she says, “I was very excited to see how humans would play the game. We’ve seen footage of your sports and your physical endurance is just remarkable. I mean—I suppose a human could play corner guard. You don’t flash corner guards.”
“The compulsion, you mean. That’s what’s stopping us.” He watches the game cameras change focus to a herd of Taiikari in Barracuda blue, on their feet screaming for their team. A keeper’s in their midst, a sign aloft in her hands with Qark’s bullet-shaped face next to big block letters in Eqtoran.
“Not from casual play, surely,” she says. “Plenty of times we just tie a flag on and do compulsion that way. It’s just… in the leagues and such. I suppose we won’t end up having one of those for Earth.”
She is close enough that he could put a hand of comfort on her, on her tiny little shoulder. He fidgets with his knuckles in his lap to distract his hands from the notion.
“I think we all have a certain amount of hope that the Eqtorans would serve as something of a bridge for humanity.” Xamika hits a button on the table’s underside console to turn the game down. “Between the Empire and Maek—Earth. That you’ll see the way they have made a life for themselves in the Black Pike sector and you would understand that there’s one waiting here for you, too.”
He understands that she’s speaking of some universal you. But she’s not looking at the universe when she says it; she’s looking at him.
“Well, Santi’s definitely crossing that bridge,” he says, and her giggle emboldens him. “Can I ask…”
The words take his courage away on their departure.
“Anything, Dylan,” Xamika says. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“Why hasn’t there been any Taiikari-human stuff happening?”
“As in sex?”
Dylan ahems the shock out of his throat at her straightforwardness. “I guess so. Yeah.”
“I’ve wondered that, too,” she says.
He feels his ears tingle. He wonders if they’re blushing. “So, like… there’s no orders or anything?”
“No orders. No.” Her breath is audible. He wonders if it’s gotten heavier or if he just hadn’t been listening before. “Santiago surprised us, to be honest. We all sort of thought… I suppose the same thing you thought. That it was a matter of time.”
She’s looking at him like she’s searching for something. An answer, maybe. “On the human side, I mean, I don’t know. I guess there’s a feeling, among the humans, I mean, of, uh, betrayal. Sleeping with the enemy.”
Her ears droop.
“Not me, I mean. Just, y’know. In genpop there’s this perception that the Taiikari are the…” Invaders? “The leaders,” he settles on. “And the Eqtorans are us. Y’know? So there’s something more in common. Even if they’re fish people.”
He’s noticed that whenever Xamika is trying to memorize a new word, her lips purse and he can see the little dimple of her chin. “Genpop? What’s that?”
“General population.”
“I hadn’t heard that one.”
“It’s prison slang, I think,” he says, and immediately regrets it as her ears droop further. Dylan feels like he’s been caught drowning kittens. “Look, it’s just one guy, right? Not exactly much of a sample size.”
“What can I do?” she asks.
"What can you do to what?"
“To make you as happy as you can be,” she says. “I know you’re trapped here. I know my people are… I know we are wicked, by Maekyonite standards.”
He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s… different. I’m trying to figure it out. But it’s not wicked. Not really. It’s honestly sort of surprising how friendly everyone is. Honestly, I was thinking one of you all would be the first to initiate.”
“There’s a certain…” Xamika takes a deep breath. “I guess it’s an anxiety. What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Like romantic anxiety.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s it called when you can’t get hard?”
He lets out an aghast laugh. “Like ED? Erectile dysfunction?”
She has a look of confusion at his reaction. “I know it must seem very frightening or odd to you, the compulsion. But among my people it’s… kind of the way a woman shows her worth to a man. It’s how we make them feel good.”
He settles further into his seat. They are definitely not here to just watch this game anymore. “Like… in bed?”
“You might need to ask a man since I’ve never felt it,” she says, and she’s gotten so quiet he feels the need to lean closer. “But if it is with the right person, it feels… warm, I’ve heard it described as. Warm and cherished. Without it, many of us are a bit, uh. Confused. And at a bit of a loss, despite it all.”
“What’s it all?”
“Just, um. How similar we are. Physiologically. Besides the height difference, which wouldn’t be such a, um.” She shuts her eyes and swallows.
Dylan has the pressing need to rescue her from this awkwardness, but he doesn’t know how. Maybe it’s time to climb into it with her. “So, the Prince told me—he was probably bullshitting.”
Her eyes open again, sharply. “His Majesty doesn’t bullshit.”
“Sure,” Dylan says. “But what he said was… it was something like we look as hot to you as you do to us.”
The soft glow of the game dances across Xamika’s violet face, reflecting inverse in her wide red eyes. “How hot do I look to you?”
Why lie? “Hot,” he says. “Really hot. Like you’re objectively hot.”
“Ob-jec-tive-ly.” She repeats it carefully. The little dimple returns and disappears again. “I know object and objective. What’s the -ly suffix mean?”
“It means, like… like it’s just material fact. Like I can call you hot without feeling weird about saying it.”
She turns in her seat, fully away from the game and toward him. “Why would you feel weird about calling me hot?”
“Well, now I do.”
“You mean hot like attractive, right?”
“Yes,” he says.
They stare at one another. The tinny announcer voice coming from the TV is right next to them, but it feels miles away. And he understands that he can’t un-say what he just said, and that he’s crossed over some boundary of great substance, and now they are both in categorially undiscovered territory.
“Was he right?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “You are hot. If you will allow me to be objective.”
“Listen, uh…” He leans his elbows onto his knees. “Xam. Do the Taiikari date?”
“Do we… you mean date as in go out and share meals?”
“Yeah,” Dylan says. “Or drinks, or coffee, or whatever. And you talk and find out more about each other and… emotionally experiment, sort of.”
“Yes,” she says, slowly. “We date.”
A rushing aaah from the crowd on the screen. Xamika’s tail slips beneath the table and mutes it.
“I think, if we’d met some other way, and if you were human.” Dylan’s hands are clasped tight in his lap. “And I had an idea on how this stuff normally goes, I’d be at an impasse.”
“An impasse,” she repeats, softly.
“An impasse,” he confirms. “Where either we’re really awkward for, like, months, until we both can move on from this conversation, or I would, uh… there’s an English phrase shoot your shot.”
“That has a nice rhythm,” she says. “Shoot your shot.”
“If I were to shoot my shot, I’d say: I’d love to get to know you outside this whole assignment thing, because you’re beautiful and fascinating, and I hope you’ll let me buy you a drink.”
She’s focusing very hard on him again, but not in that word-taking-in way. She’s chewing her lower lip, not pursing it.
“And I’m basically fucking clueless about how it all works with the Taiikari,” he says. “And I don’t have a single cent of Taiikari money, and looking at your face I’m realizing this might be a huge overstep. So if I’m being a dunce right now, don’t spare me.”
“You are not being a dunce.” It’s as though he’s snapped his fingers and dispelled some hypnosis. “You—I, um—this is what our task is, after all. This sort of cultural… um…”
“Immersion?”
“Immersion.” She shuts her eyes and repeats the word to herself. “Immerse-shin.”
“But if I—like if we were just two regular Taiikari, how would I go about asking you out on a date?”
“If we were two regular Taiikari,” she murmurs, “I would probably be the one asking you.”
“Oh.” He clears his throat again. “Kinda the reverse, then.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
“They’re going to be looking for us soon.” She practically whispers it.
His hands close into anxious fists at the hem of his tunic. “Should we get going?”
She sits up and straightens her shoulders out. She puts on her professional liaison voice. “When the ship arrives at Taiqan, we’ll be visiting a satellite arcology called Qalgreq. We’ll have a few hours on shore before we have to bundle back onto the ship. I believe the itinerary involves a tour of the terraforming facility and a hydroponic tower.”
Does this mean their conversation is over? “Sounds fascinating,” he says.
“I’m sure it will be,” she says. “The thing is I’m not exactly a science officer.”
His chest flutters. Not over, then. “Or a gardener?”
“I’ve bought the pots and the soil but everything I plant turns brown and crinkly.”
“I managed to kill a snake plant once,” he says.
“I wonder if the hydroponics might be wasted on us.”
“What are you thinking instead?”
“What I am thinking,” Xamika says, “is that I’d love to get to know you outside this whole assignment thing, because you’re beautiful and fascinating, and I hope you’ll let me buy you a drink.”