Randoms (13 page)

I only had to look at the lizard creature in my room to know it wasn't slow. Its athletic build and its tensed posture suggested speed and strength and the ability to strike with deadly precision. It crouched slightly, and I had no doubt it could cross the fifteen feet between us in a single, deadly leap. It looked at me with its blank predator gaze, and its narrow forked tongue tasted the air. My heart thundered in my chest. Did I dare call for help? By the time I moved for my data bracelet, it would be too late. If it launched forward, I would be dead in seconds.

“Afternoon, mate,” it said, moving toward me, its gait rolling and confident. I noticed it had long and flat feet, wider than a human's, and it wore open sandals that revealed its narrow toes. Could it run fast in those? I didn't want to find out. Then I looked up and noticed the number above its head—a six. It was new here. It had to be one of the initiates.

The translator rendered its voice male and, for some reason, in a working-class London accent. As he came closer, the creature tapped his data bracelet, and two holographic images came up, side by side: me and Charles. He looked at the images, then at me, then the images and at me again, as if trying to figure out which one I was. His tongue tasted the air and his yellow eyes squinted slightly. “You're Ezekiel, yeah?”

I swallowed hard. “Zeke, actually,” I managed. My heart was slowing down a little, because, in spite of my alarm, I was starting to think this lizard was maybe a little too social for an alien assassin.

He balled both his hands into celebratory fists. “Right, then. I'm Steve Ku Ri, with the Ish-hi delegation—the random, which makes us mates, I reckon.”

I stared at the cockney lizard, trying to take this all in. I had processed that he wasn't going to kill me, so I was catching up, but maybe not so quickly. “Your name is Steve?”

“That's right. What of it?”

I rubbed my forehead. This was too much, too fast. “Well,” I said, trying to figure out how to explain to a lizard man why I thought his name was funny. “It's a name among my people. Sort of a bland name, actually. It's not really what I'd expect from an, uh, Ish-hi.”

He cocked his head thoughtfully. “It's a fairly ordinary
combination of consonants with a single vowel. There're hundreds of worlds with Steves on them, I should think.”

“Could be,” I agreed, trying to figure out how to avoid offending this alien any further.

“Probably more Steves than Zekes.”

“Probably.” I took a step back.

He flicked his tongue in the air, as if trying to sense something. “Are you all right? You're not a bit slow now, are you? And I'm getting a bit of fear off you. Didn't mean to startle you.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I just wasn't expecting to find anyone in my room.”

“Well, that's understandable, given that they're biometrically sealed against intruders and all that. I'm glad to hear you're not dim. With a random, anything is possible. You could be mental, for all I know. But I heard about you taking care of that Phandic ship, so I figured you knew what you're about.”

I'd made the same mistake with Urch, and here I was doing it with another alien, one who had reached out to me in friendship. I'd assumed that because he looked scary, he must be scary. Steve hadn't done anything to make me afraid of him. Except breaking into my room, but that only meant he was a troublemaker, not a bad guy. It seemed worth noting that in an early draft of
Star Wars
, George Lucas had Han Solo as a lizard man, and there was something of the intergalactic smuggler in this reptile.

“So how
did
you get in here?” I asked, deciding to press the point. Maybe he didn't want to kill me, but I still didn't know how he'd found his way into my locked room.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said, lowering his gaze in apparent embarrassment. “That was Tamret. She doesn't much care
for locks, and she thought it would be good fun to wait for you inside, so she”—he sort of shrugged here—“bypassed it, I guess you'd say. Seems like she's good at that sort of thing. Then she got tired of waiting and headed out to find a place for us to get a bite to eat. Left me here to bring you along when you showed up.”

Was I always going to be one step behind with this guy? “Who's Tamret?”

“She's the random from the Rarel delegation. She's like you.”

“Like me?”

He nodded. Apparently they nodded on his world. That was convenient. “You know—all mammalian and such. Not a particularly patient mammal, either. It's the self-regulating blood temperature, I expect. Makes you twitchy. Anyhow, she'll be waiting for us, so time to get a move on.”

What else was I going to do? Sit around, play some games, and wait for Charles to come home smelling of good times and social aptitude?

“Sure,” I said. “Let's go meet Tamret.”

•   •   •

We took a public train that crossed through one of the plazas toward a busy commercial district. Confederation Central had moved to its night cycle, and I hurried to keep up with Steve as he pushed his way through the crowded and brightly lit streets. The buildings glowed with vibrant colors. Holographic billboards floated in the sky, three-dimensional advertisements for products and places and entertainments. A simple tweak of my HUD allowed me to access audio linked to any of the images, or have more information sent to my data bracelet. I could even use the HUD to make immediate purchases. Clearly,
the Confederation had not moved beyond commercialism.

Buskers churned out music, simple and staggeringly strange. The beings around us wore an endless variety of clothes, some that looked like they could have been from Earth, others that clearly could never have been from anywhere in my solar system. There were beings with mobile tattoos that moved over their bodies, or holographic accessories that flew or hovered or flashed around them. The city was like
Blade Runner
's
Los Angeles, but without the menace or the obvious poverty. We occasionally received odd stares from beings who had never seen our kinds before, but there was no hostility. We saw no homeless, nor anyone who looked poor.

At last we came to what looked like a cold and generic office building, but Steve said there was a restaurant on one of the upper floors that was supposed to be especially accommodating to beings new to the station. We wandered around until we found an elevator, which we had to ourselves.

It was glass, exposed to the outside. The city unfolded all around me, and beyond the dome loomed the mass of the great gas giant. Past that were more stars than I could count, and the brilliant swirl of the stellar gases. It was beautiful.

“I can't believe those gits killed the Ganari,” Steve said, perhaps to break the awkward silence. I had not been very chatty. “That could have been any of us. There's a lot of beings saying you shouldn't have done what you did, but I'm not one of them. You gave them what they were asking for.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He studied me for a long and somewhat uncomfortable moment. His tongue flashed, which I was beginning to see meant he was trying to figure something out. “Look, mate. I can
feel you're a bit hesitant to trust me. The rest of your delegation treats you like a prat, yeah?”

I nodded, not really sure what a prat was, but figuring it wasn't good.

“It was like that before you took care of the Phandic ship, and I expected it doubled up after. I get that you're on your guard, but me and Tamret, we're getting it the same as you. We've been locked out by our delegations. They think if we try to help them, we'll only slow them down, but that's rubbish. So we randoms have to stick together.”

“Yeah,” I said. And I knew he was right. “I'm sorry I'm being so reserved. This is just a lot to take in.” I wasn't really off my game so much as I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Despite having broken into my room, Steve seemed like a pretty decent lizard guy, just like Charles had seemed eager to be friends. I didn't want to get too comfortable before he decided he was better off associating with someone else.

The elevator came to a gentle stop, and the doors slid open. I don't know what I was expecting—maybe some kind of crazy alien dance club with booming galactic house music, like in
Mass Effect
—but this was a low-key place with scattered tables mostly filled with small groups, chatting quietly. A strange sort of music wafted over the speakers—it sounded like someone had recorded a man snoring and then warped the audio, but it was interesting and soothing in a curious way.

Steve looked around. “Maybe you'll pass a few hours with us and you'll decide we're a couple of wankers. That would be fair enough, but don't judge us first. Though the thing is, once you get to know us, you're going to love us. Well, maybe not Tamret, but me for sure.”

“How could I help it?” I offered, making an effort to be friendly.

Steve nodded his lizard head. “You're a quick learner.” He gestured toward the bar. “There she is. That level-seven mammal over there.”

I looked over to where he was pointing, and that's when I saw her. By now I should have been past surprises, past feeling the powerful and staggering blow of the wonderfully impossible, but I wasn't. She was standing near a cluster of high tables, which I imagined were for beings who did not choose to sit, or were not designed to. Tamret was not a tall girl, a few inches shorter than me, but there was no missing her.

She wore a black skirt that went most of the way down her legs and a short-sleeved lavender top. Her clothes could have almost passed as normal in any town in America, but she was clearly not an American. Tamret was covered entirely with cotton-ball white fur, short and dense, like a bulldog's, and so tightly molded to her skin that I could make out every detail in her calf muscles as she stretched out to grab something from her table. From a distance it almost seemed as though she were simply wearing white stockings. Her face was vaguely like a human's but was also undeniably catlike. She had a blunt feline nose, and a sprinkling of stubby, almost clear whiskers. From her head grew long, straight black hair, pulled back in a loose mass with a lavender scarf that matched her shirt and her huge, equally lavender eyes. Sticking up from her hair were two large, triangular, catlike ears, the same white as her fur.

Tamret was a
neko
.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
know plenty of people who never got into anime and manga, and they would have no idea what a neko is.
Nekomusume
—basically “cat girls”—appear all over Japanese popular culture. Sometimes they are just regular girls with cat ears, and sometimes they are more like cat-and-human hybrids. I didn't know much about them except that the idea derived from the
bakeneko
, a supernatural cat from Japanese folklore.

Some people—guys
and
girls—get really into the whole neko thing, decorating their rooms with posters, going in for cosplay, and all that. I'd never been one of those people, or even had an extended conversation with one, so all I knew about neko fandom was that it existed and you could go to cons and sometimes see girls dressed up like cats.

Standing by her table was a guy at least a foot and a half taller than Tamret—and that was without counting his antlers. He wore a kind of sleeveless white robe, belted in the middle, and his own short fur, light brown with dark brown spots, didn't disguise his well-muscled physique. He also had a head like a deer, or sort of like a deer. He was a deer the way Tamret was a cat. Mingling amid the antlers was a number 23, so without going by appearances, I knew he was at least a little older than we were. Maybe a lot older. You can't really tell with deer people.

“Oi!” Steve called. “Tamret!”

She looked over and waved at Steve, and then she saw me.
Her eyes went wide, and then narrowed, and then she looked away and went back to talking to the deer guy.

Steve walked over to an empty table and took a seat facing Tamret's direction. I noticed there were all kinds of chairs available to accommodate a wide variety of body types. Steve opted for something like a bench, and when he sat, he wrapped his tail around the legs so, I assumed, no one would step on it. I grabbed something like an actual chair and sat across from Steve.

Steve looked over at Tamret, and he let out a long sigh. “You big on pheromones?”

“What?” It came out a little shrill.

“Pheromones? You know, scents that give off your mood and such. They're kind of a thing, I reckon, for most mammals?”

“I don't know anything about that,” I told him, searching for the quickest possible way out of this conversation. “And I'm pretty sure I don't give off any smells.”

“You sure?” he asked me. He tasted the air with his tongue. “Because I'm getting something odd from you. Kind of emotional.”

“I am
not
giving off any kind of emotional stink,” I told him.

And because sometimes the universe likes to do this sort of thing, specifically to me, that was the exact moment Tamret appeared at our table.

•   •   •

“Hello, boys,” she said with a broad grin. Most of her teeth were as flat as a human's, but her canines were well developed and sharp, almost like a vampire's. Still, it was a nice smile, if a lightly unnerving and dangerous one. “I'm not interrupting anything, am I? It sounded like it might be personal.”

Rather than say anything stupid, I chose to blush and give my name. “Zeke Reynolds.”

“I'm Tamret.”

“No family names on your world?”

She shrugged. “It's bound up with caste, and kind of complicated for people outside our [
alliance of city-states
]. Tamret is good for now.” She looked away for a moment and then back at me. Another smile. “We're glad you finally made it.” She sat next to Steve and then fussed for a moment with her hair, unbinding it and rebinding it again.

Steve gestured with a lizard thumb toward the bar, no doubt at the deer guy. “You making friends with that bloke?”

“In his dreams,” she said, rolling her big lavender eyes. “Antlers are not my thing.”

I found myself feeling strangely relieved. Right away I thought there was something compelling about Tamret. The fact that she looked like a sci-fi icon, even if it wasn't one of
my
sci-fi icons, didn't hurt, but there was more to it than that. Some people give off a vibe—who knows, maybe it
is
pheromones—that makes you want them to like you. It was as simple as that. I felt a desperate need to get her to like me, but I wasn't much helping my cause, sitting there like a total dud.

“You look confused,” she said to me. “You're not, you know, slow or something, are you?”

“I thought that too,” Steve assured her. “Turns out he's just shy. And maybe a little slow.”

“I'm not shy,” I said, maybe a little too defensively, “or slow. There's just a lot to take in on my first day.”

Tamret grinned with infectious charm. She had already moved on. “Oh, and sorry about breaking into your room. That
wasn't entirely nice of me, I know. It's just that they told me breaking into the rooms was impossible, so I kind of felt the need to tinker with it. I wanted to see what exactly passes for one hundred percent secure around here.”

“Took her three minutes to crack it,” Steve said.

“It was easy,” she told me, looking pleased with herself. Her short whiskers twitched when she smiled. “I didn't go through your things.”

“I wouldn't let her,” Steve said.

“I was curious,” she admitted. “But I restrained myself.”

“Because I wouldn't let her,” Steve said.

“Look, am I going to be punished for every bad thing I think of but don't do?” she asked, clearly enjoying herself. “Because that could take a while.”

“I'm getting that feeling.” Steve turned to me. “We'll have to watch out for her, mate.”

I wanted to say something funny, participate in the banter, but nothing came to mind. I wanted to be one of them, but I felt like a tongue-tied rube.

Tamret gave me a friendly nudge. “Hey, do you know how to order?”

“I have no idea,” I said, but I was thrilled by the idea of her showing me. This was a topic of conversation—just what I needed.

“I love this alien technology. Okay, you tap like this.” She jabbed the pad of one of her white index fingers down on the black surface of the table. The tip of a sharp claw peeked out from her fur when she made contact. Almost instantly, a menu appeared, written in small yellow script.

I tried the same thing, and immediately received a line
of text at the top of the list:
Ezekiel Reynolds. Human. Earth. Omnivore. No allergies. Minor. No stimulants or depressants.

“I'm right peckish,” Steve said.

I was hungry too, but the food was a little intimidating. Did I want [
domesticated bipedal herding animal
] with [
tubular vegetable
] sauce and [
bitter fruit
] garnish? It was, the menu informed me, a specialty of the house. Or, if I was inclined, there was [
fishlike animal
] in [
no available translation
] jelly. Yum. Another temptation was [
grain product
] with [
bulbous, spiny vegetable
], fermented [
seed pods
], and [
yellow mold
]. I admit it sounded good, but I'm a twelve-year-old kid, so in the end I went for the [
pizza
] and hoped for the best. Then I glanced at the list of drinks to make sure I wasn't ordering urine or poop juice or fermented roadkill and picked something I was assured was [
fruity
] and carbonated. I tapped what I wanted, then tapped to confirm, and a message told me that my order had been received, and the new balance of my account scrolled briefly across the screen.

“So,” Tamret said, once the ordering was out of the way. She propped her elbows on the table and her chin on her folded hands. “I get that you're still taking things in, but I'm not going to put up with you being quiet, because you're kind of famous, Zeke. I want to hear about everything that happened.” Her voice was light and friendly and just like a regular human girl's. Several strands of hair had broken loose from their confines, and when she leaned forward, they fell into her eyes. She absently brushed at them with one of her white hands, and when she saw me watching her, she turned away as though embarrassed.

Our drinks came, delivered by a waiter, or possibly waitress,
though I'm not sure it was either. It looked like a walking bush. “Hey, guys. Got some drinks for you,” the bush said. Its tone was mellow, with almost a surfer's inflection. All three glasses were different shapes: mine long and thin, Tamret's more like a bowl, Steve's narrow at the top and tapering toward the bottom. “You're, like, the new initiates, right?”

“That's right,” I said.

“That's so windy,” the bush said. “But don't worry, beings. I won't tell anyone you're here. You can be all private and whatever.”

This bush was freaking me out with its mellow speech. I figured we had maybe thirty seconds before it called me “little dude,” but instead, it wandered off.

Tamret took a sip of her drink, but her eyes were on me, staring. I realized, after a startled instant, that she was looking over my head, and I figured she was checking out my number. “You don't get experience points for destroying an attacking starship?”

“I haven't leveled yet,” I said. “I haven't had the chance to figure out what I want to spend my points on.”

“What level would you be if you cashed in your points?” Steve asked.

I hesitated for a moment before telling them. Then I said it. “Eleven.”

Steve and Tamret looked at each other and burst out laughing. At first I thought they were laughing
at
me, that this was the moment where everything was going to fall apart. Then I realized they were laughing in appreciation.

Steve was now shaking his head. “We're not on the station an hour before the other Ish-hi call me in to tell me I'm meant
to keep my distance. They don't want the random dragging them down. The Rarels pull the same stunt with Tamret. And your kind do it with you, but you're at
eleven
, mate. You broke the bloody record for new initiates, and those pillocks are telling you to shove off.”

I was surprised to see it was a universal gesture, but Tamret raised her glass, and we all clinked.

“Randoms,” she said, and we all repeated it, like it had become a chant or a cheer or motto.

“We're going to make them beg for our help,” Tamret said. Her eyes were sparkling at the thought of competition.

“Let's give those tossers a right run for their money,” Steve said.

Tamret was smiling broadly. “Should be easy. We've got me, and I'm pretty much great at everything. We've got the bane of the Phandic Empire, and”—she gestured toward Steve with her glass—“I guess we'll have to hope you're good for something.”

Steve opened his mouth in what looked like a grin, and I quickly realized it was just that—a good-natured grin, but with razor-sharp teeth. “Keep talking, mammal. It will help to dull the pain of insecurity.”

“I think I have that problem under control,” she said.

“Hadn't noticed, love,” Steve told her.

The bush now returned with our food. My [
pizza
] was an unappealing brown cone filled with a bluish substance streaked with white, all of which gave the general impression of toothpaste. That said, it smelled kind of good. Tamret had ordered a dish of what appeared to be some kind of grain and vegetables. Steve had a goldfish bowl full of yellow-and-brown-spotted rat
like creatures, which scurried around and over one another, squeaking anxiously.

“Brilliant, but can I trouble you for some [
spicy insect
] sauce?” Steve asked the bush.

“Oh sure,” the bush said as it headed away. “My fault. It completely slipped my synaptic bundle.”

I looked at Steve, who was busy examining the panicked contents of the bowl. He flashed his tongue toward the opening. “This looks quite nice,” he said. “Smells all right, too.”

“You're really going to eat those?” I asked.

He held out his hands, palms up. “It's the Ish-hi way.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How does the food production unit make living things?”

“They're not really alive,” the bush waiter said as it returned with a small bowl of brownish liquid with little translucent wings and bits of insect carapace floating on top. “They're chunks of synthesized protein, but your HUD creates the illusion that they're living creatures.”

Steve held one up. It wriggled in his hand as his tongue darted out. “Looks like a [
ratlike creature
] to me.” The chunk of synthesized protein let out an alarmed squeak as Steve dunked it in the [
spicy insect
] sauce and then popped it in his mouth. It cried out one last time, and then all we heard was the crunching of bones.

“I think,” Tamret said, “what you bring to our trio is your ability to gross everyone out.”

“Don't judge other beings,” the bush said as it headed away from the table. “We're all beautiful.”

“These are good,” Steve said, holding up another wriggling, hot sauce–covered animal. “You want one?” The protein clump bared its sharp little teeth and hissed at me.

“It's not the most disgusting thing I've seen someone eat,” I said.

“Have you met any of the poop eaters?' Tamret asked me.

“I've met the poop eaters,” I told her, “but I don't judge other beings.”

“We're all beautiful,” Tamret said, and the three of us laughed. I basked in the sensation of finally having found a group that accepted me. We were all randoms, bound together.

It also turned out that my [
pizza
] was pretty good. The blue part of the toothpaste was something not completely dissimilar to cheese, and the white part was some kind of sauce, entirely unlike tomato, but not bad in itself. The exterior was flaky, more like a pastry, and the whole thing tasted like pizza the way a banana tastes like an apple, but even so, on its own terms, it did the job. And it was alien food, which earned it points.