The rest of Zheng He’s crew on Dzamglin gathered together in a wide plaza that normally served as a market in this section of the capital city, but had been marked out for personnel transfer during Zheng He’s time in orbit. Most everyone looked a little haggard, a little hung over, and little disappointed that their liberty was up. A few looked energized and a few bored. Williams felt amazingly conspicuous, but aside from a few buddies he bumped into, no one paid him any undue attention.
Including the robed men with knives.
They wore bright orange, with some sort of headdress that was part turban, part shemagh. They looked a little Buddhist, but while Williams hadn’t had too much interaction with Buddhists in his life, he didn’t think all the ornaments these guys wore on their robes were really in keeping with the Buddhist aesthetic. But then things had gotten all muddled up out here during the Diaspora. I mean, look at what had passed for Scriptures back on Capella IV….
The blood, too. The robes were stained with blood, and while the kila that they wore on their hips had been sheathed every time he’d seen them, Williams would have bet there was blood on them, chicken’s blood, knives too hastily sheathed when his chicken had escaped too soon to be cleaned properly.
He couldn’t have articulated why, exactly, that filled him with horror, not when he’d killed his fair share of chickens and eaten more than his fair share of hot wings, but the chicken’s big eyes seemed to fill his mind as the men prowled around the outskirts of Zheng He’s gathered crew.
Ahead, in the space that had been marked off with vibrant but temporary spray paint, the short-range wormhole manifested in a cascade of vibrant energy and a noticeable discontinuity. Transit could just be glimpsed through the wormhole, a sterile room of dark metal and the comfortably-dim lighting common to the Terran Merchant Fleet.
The men craned their heads this way and that, peering into the crowd.
The spacers began to file through.
Williams sweated bullets. His palms were wet, and the chest threatened to slip from his hands.
The chicken remained mercifully silent.
And they were through.
“Hey! You! Spacer!”
Williams froze, grumpy crewmen pushing past him.
“Yeah, you,” the woman repeated. Williams looked up to see a beautiful, dark haired woman standing behind an instrument console and motioning him over. He couldn’t read her name tape or see the stripes on her shoulders through the crowd of inbound spacers, but Zheng He wasn’t so big that he hadn’t seen her from time to time. Spacer First Class Menendez, comma something he’d never been able to find out. “What’s in that box? Sensors are reading something screwy in there.” She tapped her console and then beckoned him over again.
Williams swallowed nervously and tightened his grip, but obediently cut across the stream of people to her workstation. “Just souvenirs, ma’am.”
“Well, open it up and let’s see.”
“It’s just some holos and stuff…”
“Something you don’t want me to find, Williams?” she asked, peering at his name tape.
“No, ma’am. It’s just—”
“Open it up, Spacer.”
Williams swallowed and shot a silent apology to the chicken. Then he set the chest down and opened it up. The holos had been left on and blazed into life as soon as the chest opened. Menendez blushed, Williams blushed, and the chicken stuck its head out between the thighs of the exotic and holographic beauty. Williams began to stutter out an explanation, but Menendez’s eyes seemed to focus on something distant and invisible to Williams. “Well,” she mumbled, closing the lid, “everyone has their vices. Must be energy discharge from the active holos.”
“Captain,” the comm officer called, “Incoming hail from Dzamglin Planetary Central. Coded urgent.”
“On screen,” he sighed, praying fervently to the God he didn’t believe in. Fifteen minutes. Fujiwara had been given all of fifteen minutes without the emotional weight of Williams’ presence on the planet weighing him down. And, sure, maybe it wasn’t about Williams, about some faux pas the otherwise excellent young spacer had committed— but if it wasn’t, he’d give up his hard-fought atheism and go have a chat with Father Cahill about joining his church. Because that would be the only way he’d be convinced that there was a God.
In the weeks that they’d been here, Dzamglin’s official communications with the Zheng He had been laconic. Taciturn, even. But now a man whose face largely was obscured by a brightly colored headdress was pacing impatiently in front of the screen as if oblivious to the situation. Suddenly, he stopped and spun to face the screen. “Oh perfidious thieves,” he railed, words filtered through Zheng He’s translation matrix. “Foul wanders! Purloining vagrants! Would you spirit away our children as well?”
“Excuse me?” Fujiwara said mildly.
The man threw up “Feign ignorance if you must, but return our—” And here the translator’s approximation of the voice faltered. The man shouted for another second before the matrix offered, in clearly artificial tones, “our [haruspex/sacrifice/auger/warrior/aphrodisiac]!”
Someone giggled nervously in the silence.
Fujiwara frowned. “Come again, Minister?”
The man repeated the word. Ramirez, Zheng He’s XO, mumbled, “There has to be a translation error, Captain. I thought the linguistics had the Dzamglin matrix pretty well hammered out, but…”
“I’m afraid, Minister, that I’m unfamiliar with that… item.”
The minister froze in mid-tirade and slowly dropped the hand with which he'd been gesturing wildly. “Inanimate object it is not. Rather a fowl, vital and proud, eight hands plus a half, black as galactic night and bright as flame. Gone, now, from our city, and in the company of your honored crew.” His head tilted, as though listening to someone offscreen speak. “Mayhap a discussion best conducted in the flesh. May we board your ship of wonders?”
That there had been an interstellar society of some sort before the Diaspora was evident and easily verifiable; there were humans and human-derivative cultures everywhere the Merchant Scout fleet went. But the actual records of that society were at best, muddled with myth and fable. There was one account in particular that suggested that pre-Diaspora Transit was less a gateway to be stepped through and more a legitimate teleportation. Fujiwara often pined for that reality, not so much because the short range wormhole was somehow inconvenient— shuttles were inconvenient— but because those same records suggested that the ancients could analyze the data streams in that teleportation system and recognize hazardous or unauthorized materials and either store them safely away as digitized patterns, or else leave them behind altogether. Those ancients, if they were real, would have known about the chicken and left it planetside. And they certainly wouldn’t have had the flood of men armed with primitive assault rifles that had suddenly come through the wormhole rather than the expected government dignitaries.
It wasn’t that Zheng He couldn’t deal with the boarders, Fujiwara reflected as a masked man in a brightly colored uniform pushed him to his knees, it was that dealing with the boarding action without worsening the political landscape of Dzamglin was tricky. The room could be flooded with gas, given a wide-dispersal stun pause, or, in a really bad situation, local control of the Transit room overridden and a wormhole opened to space.
Clearly, that last option would remain that, a final option. Used in case of an existential threat to the ship or the Terran Republic. But the others had to remain final options for now, too, as long as Zheng He bore the burden of guilt for—
For what? Theft? Chicken-napping?
Fujiwara watched from the corner of his eye as a soldier forced Father Cahill to his knees. The translation matrix was still iffy when it came to Dzamglin, but the problem appeared to be religious in nature. The white-robed Dominican was the expert there, for obvious reasons, but Fujiwara was feeling a pang of guilt for asking him to join him now—as if he’d known they’d be boarded. He
stifled a sigh and settled in for whatever was going to come next.
The encounter with Menendez had left Williams with the hope that he might actually be able to pull this thing off, and after managing to hump the chest all the way through the ship to his quarters without incident, he was feeling pretty good about the next few months. Even Vance’s clear irritation with the enormous chest couldn’t dent his growing good mood. His bunkmate groused predictably about the space it would require, and in response Williams produced his gifts: cakes, knife, and finally, erotic holos. The chicken he kept covered under his jacket, frantically slamming the lid closed and sitting on it to muffle a curious “cluck?”
Vance eyed him skeptically. Williams found himself unwilling to address the elephantine fowl in the room, and that was the first chip in his mood. The second came in the form of a blasted “Security Alert in Transit Three” over the ship’s address.
And that last, fatal blow to his edifice of goodwill was the very special chirping that came from the communicator woven into his sleeve. The chirp that meant that Zheng He Actual, either Ol’ Fujiwara himself, or whoever he’d pass the conn to, was calling you directly. Enlisted men fresh from shore leave rarely got happy voices behind that chirp.
Williams buried his face in his hands and moaned. A muffled and sympathetic cluck answered him.
The minister— or at least a man dressed in identical garb to the minister— approached Fujiwara. He had a bare knife thrust through his belt, with blood dried on the blade and staining the robe. “The fowl,” he said, accentuating the word, “has embarked this ship of wonders. I feel it. It feels me. On Dzamglin, it was— and then was gone. Now, anew, I feel it.”
Fujiwara traded a glance with Cahill. The priest gave as much of a shrug as he could manage with his hands behind his head.
“You do not know our ways,” the man continued. “This I understand. But for one who has consumed the flesh of the of the fowl’s kind, there is kinship with the living fowl. It knows us. We know it.”
“And it is a… sacrifice?” Father Cahill prompted, testing the word. “An act of worship for some deity?”
Half-glimpsed brows furrowed. “O crass superstition! Nothing so vain. In consuming its flesh, communion with the eternal! In reading its entrails, a glance behind heaven’s curtains, the stage-setting of the universal play!”
Fujiwara shot Father Cahill a glance. The priest shook his head a little and managed to work his hands a little closer together to surreptitiously depress the spot in the cuff of his sleeve that would disable the translation matrix as he spoke. “Plenty to study, Al. Doubt it’ll help right now.”
“Last seen, our fowl, with a man tall and tawny. The keeper of his hostel declared him pleasing to the eye, but empty of head,” the minister said, oblivious to the priest’s aside. “Return it posthaste, and no more will we say, but rather, depart immediately for our own earthy globe.”
“Williams,” Father Cahill sighed.
“Williams,” Fujiwara agreed.
Williams unnecessarily pressed his cuff to his ear—he’d seen it done in a holovid at a formative age and never broken the habit. “Go for Williams, Actual.”
“Spacer Williams,” Ramirez’s voice came in an almost resigned sigh, “Do you have this stupid bird?”
“Commander?” Williams asked, as innocently as he could manage while sitting atop an ornate and clucking chest while his bunkmate glared daggers at him.
“Mr. Williams,” the XO began again, “You are an excellent spacer, but why the captain continues to allow you shore leave is beyond me. It’s a disaster every time you go ashore. Fifteen minutes after you returned from shore leave, Dzamglin Central is calling us looking for some sort of sacrifice that disappeared during the shore leave rotation. Ten minutes after that, a dozen men are holding the captain and chaplain hostage in Transit Three, looking for a bird last seen in the company of a man matching your description.
“Now, Mr. Williams, because you’re a good and honorable if somewhat stupid spacer, I am offering you two choices. You can bring whatever animal you brought with you— in defiance of the clearly stated Lister Protocols— to Transit Three, or I can come to your quarters with a security detachment and we will have our own little looksee.”
Williams bit his lip and shot Vance a pleading look.
“Don’t look at me. All I know is that you’ve dragged some box in here and now it’s clucking,” the other man snapped. He raised his voice. “Commander Ramirez, I don’t know anything about any of this. Williams just—”
“I know, Spacer. Williams?”
The bird clucked.
“Alright, Commander. I… I’ll bring the chicken. Can I have a minute?”
“Two,” Ramirez said. “Security will meet you in two minutes. Ramirez out.”
Vance hopped into his bunk to allow Williams room to manhandle the chest, but when the spacer instead opened the chest, complained, “Oh come on, we still have to keep that thing?”
Williams ignored him. The chicken stuck its head out, turning its headfirst this way and then that way to meet Williams’ gaze. “I’m sorry,” he told the bird. “If I don’t take you, security will.”
The chicken clucked in a way that Williams could only call soothing.
“I saw their knives,” he protested. “They’re going to kill you.”
“It’s a bird, man. You put away a dozen chicken wings every time the galley serves them. That’s like six chickens.”
“It’s different,” Williams murmured, unsure of how or why he knew that it was different. Unsure of why he’d done any of this, just that he knew, somehow, that it was different. The chicken clucked, still side-eyeing Williams. The spacer leaned in, drawn into the creature’s shimmering, oversized eye. It was almost as if he could see stars—
And the chicken pecked him, hard, in between the eyes.
Five minutes and change later, Williams was standing outside Transit Three clutching the chicken in his arms, flanked by the security detachment and Commander Ramirez. His forehead still throbbed, but the physical sting took some of the emotional sting out of the situation. Maybe it was just a dumb animal after all.
The doors hissed open. The captain and chaplain knelt with the beautiful Spacer Menendez and the other members of Transit Three’s staff. All had their hands clasped behind their heads. All had primitive rifles pointed at them by men in bright military uniforms.
“Awful lot of mess for a bird,” Williams muttered.
One of the security guys grunted. Ramirez just gestured impatiently.
Williams swallowed and stepped into the Transit room. The short-range wormhole back to the planet’s surface shimmered on the far wall, the city plaza he’d just left half an hour ago just visible beyond. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he couldn’t have been sure who he was saying it to—the brightly clad men, Fujiwara and Cahill, even maybe the chicken again.
One man wore robes and the face-covering headdress he’d seen on the planet. He couldn’t say if it was the same man or another, but the man— a priest of some sort, Williams supposed— stepped towards him, arms reaching for the bird.
The chicken took that as a sign to run like hell. It thrashed in Williams’ arms, and the spacer fought to hold on to it. He almost managed it, too, until he felt a searing, jagged pain in his leg. He dropped the bird reflexively and clutched at the wound. Blood streamed from between his fingers.
Spurs. The stupid bird had opened his leg with a spur, sharper and more vicious than any Terran chicken’s spurs he’d run afoul of; instead of a puncture wound, he had a long, bleeding gash. With his luck, this big-eyed, alien maybe-chicken would have venom like a platypus.
Afoul. Heh.
A man with a gun to Menendez’s back dropped it and let it swing from the shoulder strap as he dove for the chicken. The bird squawked and flapped its wings, backpedaling from the man, who promptly tripped over Menendez’s legs. The two went down in a tangled heap as the chicken bolted in the oppos
ite direction.
The air was full of feathers. Pressure differential between the planet and the ship resulted in a faint breeze that carried the feathers towards the wormhole, but the absolute pandemonium erupting stirred everything into a swirling storm of black and red. Dzamglin soldiers ignored the Zheng He crew as they tried to corral the bird. The robed man screamed words at them that the translation matrix didn’t know or refused to translate, but Williams assumed it was a lot like the words Ramirez would have for him later at the captain’s mast. Fujiwara was helping Cahill to his feet and a member of the Transit room staff was pulling Menendez out from underneath the fallen soldier.
The chicken paused at the edge of the wormhole, uttered a single, taunting cluck, and ran through. The chaos began to separate as the Dzamglin soldiers half-retreated, half-pursued the chicken through the wormhole, and the Zheng He’s spacers made for the safety of a place outside the Transit room. Someone jostled Williams as he pushed past into the corridor and he realized, with a start, that the pain from the wound had vanished. Great. Absolutely some kind of poison in the spurs— an analgesic to keep the victim from fighting, maybe? Probably an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing. Maybe the chicken fed on blood, like a vampire bat.
But when he pulled his hands away, he found his leg was fine. His pants were whole. He couldn’t even find dirt under his fingernails when he held them up to the light. Williams muttered a perplexed curse, as the last soldier vanished and someone killed the wormhole.
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 7
