by M. D. Cooper
“I don’t get it,” Jessica frowned. “What are those?”
“Not sure…oh! I know,” Cheeky laughed and placed them on Jessica’s chest. “Star boobs!”
Jessica laughed as the half-stars lit up with a holographic display of solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
“Those are soup bowls,” the store owner said as he walked past, carrying something to the front of the curiosity shop.
“You sure?” Cheeky asked. “I bet you’d sell a lot more if you marketed them as protective boob covers.”
Jessica snorted and handed the half stars back to Cheeky who continued down the aisle.
“We’re just putting some extra mystery in the curiosity shop,” Cheeky countered.
A laugh burst from Jessica’s throat and Cheeky giggled, rolling with the double entendre. “No, but I really should. I bet Finaeus would love to see what’s in there.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe that you two are still together.” Jessica said as she picked up an object that was either a pleasure device, or some sort of mixer. Or maybe both. “I expected you to flame out in some amazing explosion long ago.”
Cheeky shrugged and walked further down the aisle. “You know how it is, you meet the right guy and things just click.”
“I have this distinct memory of you telling me that being monogamous is the same thing as being celibate,” Jessica countered.
“Jessica!” Cheeky turned, a wounded expression on her face. “I am not monogamous. You take that back! I have a reputation to uphold. Seriously, that’s just mean!”
“Yeah, but you haven’t been having escapades at any recent stops. If you had you’d’ve told me. You can’t help describing the local flavors.”
Cheeky rolled her eyes and picked up a pair of mirrored glasses from the shelf. “We’ve just had a lot of brief stops. You know I don’t like to go far from the ship either.”
“Sure thing, Cheeks,” Jessica replied.
“Don’t make me douse you with pheromones,” Cheeky warned with a wink as she put the glasses on. “What do you think of these? Weird, right? How backward is this place if they need glasses for eye protection.”
“You know, they look really good on you,” Jessica said. “Fluff your hair out, it got all matted from that weird bubble hat.”
Cheeky complied, and posed for Jessica. “Hot enough for you to fuck?”
“Cheeky, you’ve always been hot enough for me to fuck. Timing just never worked out. And now we’re both celibate.”
“Monogamous,” Cheeky replied, pulling down her glasses and winking at Jessica.
“You should buy those,” Jessica said.
Cheeky walked to a mirror and looked herself over. “You know, I think I will. I rock this look.”
Jessica laughed. “You rock every look. You pay, I’m going to wait outside, I need to bathe in more of the delicious starlight they have here.”
“Just don’t walk out into traffic or anything,” Cheeky warned.
“That was just one time, years ago.”
Cheeky’s only response was a laugh, and Jessica walked out of the small shop and into Sullus’s noon blaze. The moment it struck her skin, she felt a surge of energy flood through her body, a delicious tingle of power and vitality.
“Oh, stars,” she moaned as her skin began to glow brightly.
A few passersby glanced at her, some stopping to stare as Jessica walked to the edge of the sidewalk so she wasn’t standing in the middle of the foot traffic.
Jessica continued to slowly turn, basking in the light when suddenly half the free nano drifting around her suddenly shut down, killed off in an EM wave that passed down the street.
Jessica opened her eyes to see a dozen people standing o on the sidewalk gazing at her.
“Did you pick that up?” she asked, looking them over.
“Why do you glow?” a woman asked.
“Preference,” Jessica replied quickly. “There was an EM pulse, did any of you pick it up?”
Heads wagged, and Jessica frowned. Of course. None of these people would have had any probes out, nano or micro. The EM wave hadn’t been strong enough to affect any tech inside their bodies, so there was no way the locals would have noticed.
No response came over the Link and Jessica pushed past the crowd into the curiosity shop.
“Cheeky!” She called out, looking down the aisles as she rushed to the sales counter where the proprietor was slowly rising, rubbing his head.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
“Cheeky? Where did she go?” Jessica asked the man.
“What? Who?” he asked clearly confused.
Jessica grabbed shirt collar, locking his eyes on to hers. “The blond woman who was with me. Where is she?”
“She was paying for the glasses…then there was a flash and you were rushing in.”
Jessica looked down and stared at the glasses sitting beside a credit chit.
“Shit!” she swore. “You have a back door?”
“Yeah, it’s in the back…. What’s going on?”
Jessica rushed down the aisles toward the rear of the store, not bothering to answer the man as she reached out to the team.
* * * * *
“Do you have any grass-fed beef?” Finaeus asked the woman at the deli counter. “You know, like only grass?”
“I’m sorry, what?” the tall orange-haired woman asked. “You want beef that was grown off grass? Like vat stuff?”
“What? No. I mean beef from cows that only ate grass. Too many places feed cows all sorts of stuff—including other cows. I just want to make sure we get the good stuff. Certified.”
The woman—Betty according to her name tag—shook her head. “That sounds like crazy talk. No one on Ferra would do that. We have a billion hectares of grass out there. Why would we feed our cattle anything else?”
A grin split Finaeus’ face. “Betty, you’re my kinda woman, singing my tune, as it were.”
“Uh, sure…you going to place an order? You’re holding up the line.”
“Yeah, of course, sorry, just reveling in the fact that I’m having this exchange with a human, not a machine.”
“Why would you talk to a machine about meat?” Betty asked. “They don’t eat meat, they shouldn’t sell meat.”
“Betty, if I wasn’t already with the most beautiful woman in the universe, I’d take you right here. Now, for my order, I need ten round roasts, thirty-two ribeye steaks—make sure they’re tender—ten kilos of bone-in short ribs, twenty of your Ferra strip cuts, four turkeys, and thirty-two whole chickens.”
Betty shook her head as she noted the items on her holodisplay. “For someone uncertain about whether or not machines eat meat, you certainly know your cuts. Gonna take about twenty minutes to package all that up. You’re order number 321.”
“Three twenty-one. Got it,” Finaeus said and moved out of the way for the next person in line to advise the carnivorous Betty of their desires.
“Fin, check this out,” Misha said from the far side of a large cooler filled with fish. “These fish have two tails.”
Finaeus
peered into the cooler and shook his head. “I guess the In Future Light terraformed this world. They always did like making agrarian biomes.”
“How does agrarian biomes tie into two-tailed fish?” Misha asked.
“Well, first off, that’s not a two-tailed fish, that’s a one-headed fishes.”
Misha shook his head. “I can never tell if you’re messing with me when you say things like that, Finaeus.”
“And you’ll never be able to, either. But in this case I’m not. The In Future Light, didn’t have much in the way of ocean life specialists, but they did have ol’ Scorry. That man loved to tweak things just so. Every world he ever did had a species of one-headed fishes.”
“Why?” Misha asked.
Finaeus shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I never got to ask him.”
“You terraformers were one strange breed,” Misha said with a grin as he pulled several of the fish out of the cooler and wrapped them in a film before putting them in his cart.
“Well yeah, normal people don’t decide to become homeless home-builders for the rest of their lives. We were always weirdos.”
Once finished in the deli area, Finaeus and Misha split up, each covering half the large market building, gathering the supplies they needed into the carts floating behind them.
It wasn’t every stop that they got to hand-select their food, and even less often that they got to do it planet-side where the food was grown.
Ferra was a rare pleasure.
They had a full week down on the dirt while they waited for their outbound shipment to be completed and delivered. More than enough time to really enjoy the local cuisine and culture.
The world of Ferra was what Finaeus liked to call mid-tech, the most common kind in Orion Freedom Alliance space. They were agrarian, largely self-sustaining, but they didn’t possess advanced nano or technology that would make them a post-scarcity society.
That meant food and energy were their two main concerns, which—to his mind—gave their culture a certain flavor that translated into their food.
Post scarcity civilizations tended toward bland. They believed they’d solved everything and ceased challenging themselves. It was no surprise to him that the state of a civilization was most evident in their food.
Or you just like food too much, old man.
Finaeus was sometimes amused by his fascination with eating. Thousands of years of living, and a good meal was still one of his favorite things. Maybe it was because he could always count on a delicious new dish to excite him—even though he’d probably already eaten some variation of it on the far side of human space—or an old favorite that brought back fond memories.
Stars, that was half the fun, trying to find the similarities that caused people with nothing else in common to make the same foods.
Though his young companion didn’t have the breadth of experience, Misha had the same appreciation for a great spread. Over the last nine years, Finaeus had managed to craft the man into a half-decent cook.
“Serving 321!” a voice called out, and Finaeus smiled.
“Perfect timing.”
He turned toward the deli counter just as a call came into his mind from Jessica.
THE MISSING
STELLAR DATE: 03.10.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Outskirts of Parda City, Ferra, Sullus System
REGION: Midway Cluster, Orion Freedom Alliance Space
There had been no sign of Cheeky in the alley running behind the buildings and when Jessica came back in to check on the store owner and ask him if he recalled anything more, a police officer had been waiting.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s just off having a good time,” Jessica said to the police officer for the third time. “She’s a party girl, and if someone said there was a party going on, she’d follow in a heartbeat.”
Jessica was losing precious minutes talking to the man, but running off would just raise the wrong type of suspicion and hamper her own search for Cheeky and Piya.
“It’s the middle of the day,” Dan, the Parda City officer replied. “What sort of party could be going on right now?”
“Oh, who knows,” Jessica shrugged. “It could be a mediocre game of snark in a seedy bar. She’s not picky. I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”
Jessica stood just inside the curiosity shop, glad to be out of the sun and not glowing—as much—for a change. It was one thing to bask in it for fun. It was another to draw a crowd of onlookers while on the lookout for an enemy.
Jessica knew that all too well. The thought also begged the question, who could even take those two down on this backwater world? The EMP hadn’t been strong enough to fry any of Cheeky’s internal mods, and the woman was a scrappy fighter—plus she had a pulse pistol strapped to her thigh. If there’d been a struggle, the shop would have evidence of it.
But it was as though she’d never even been there.
“What about you?” the cop asked, looking Jessica up and down. “You a party girl too?”
“Nope,” Jessica shook her head. “Happily married. My party days are long behind me.”
Dan raised an eyebrow as she took in her soft glow. “So what’s with the getup?”
“What getup?” Jessica asked.
“The purple, the glowing, walking around your underwear in the middle of the city—”
“It’s a bathing suit.”
“There’s no beach anywhere near here. And that doesn’t answer why you glow.”
“Well, firstly,” Jessica replied. “Where I come from everyone is purple, and we all glow.”
“Oh yeah?” Dan asked. “Where’s that?”
“Athabasca.”
“Never heard of it.”
Jessica shrugged. “There’s a lot of stars out there, it’s out past the Orion Nebula, in the arm, near the border.”
“Really?” Dan asked, his eyes widening. “You’re from near the border with the Transcend? I hear they don’t follow purity out there.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot more lax.” Jessica nodded. “I can’t help how I was born, things are just different near the border. But either way, my friend will be fine. You can check in with me in a day if you want. We’re on the—”
“Verdant Stamen,” Dan completed the sentence for her. “It came up when I scanned you.”
“Great!” Jessica exclaimed and placed a hand on his shoulder, giving him her warmest smile. “And I know how to reach out to you too, just in case she doesn’t show.”
“OK,” Dan said. “I guess there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing there. I pulled the feeds, she certainly wasn’t hiding an EMP anywhere, so whoever set that off was elsewhere.”
“Right,” Jessica nodded. “Just a weird coincidence.”
Dan shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
Jessica knew where he was coming from. Any cop worth his salt wouldn’t buy a coincidence like that. The word alone would give him hives. Still, with no evidence to go on, and Cheeky only being ‘missing’ for twenty minutes, he had no other option than to wait.
“OK, you’re free to go,” Dan said, and waved Jessica off.
“Thanks, Dan.” She walked out of the shop and spotted Trevor and Cargo across the street. She waite
d for a break in the hovercar traffic and then crossed to meet them.
“Where’s Nance?” she asked the men as she approached.
“In the shop,” Cargo jerked his head to the bakery behind them, “thought it might look weird if we all clustered around waiting for you.”
“So what’s going on?” Trevor asked. “Cop give you any trouble?”
Jessica turned to look down the long boulevard and its multitude of shops, wondering where Cheeky’s abductor—and Cheeky, of course—could be by now. “No…just the usual. But I imagine if I don’t let him know that we found her before long, he’ll become more curious.”
Cargo snorted. “Or he’ll just stick it in his backlog and forget about it.”
“Not sure about that,” Jessica replied, moving into the building’s shade. “He seemed to genuinely care.”
Jessica put a hand to her forehead.
Jessica leaned against Trevor and sighed trying to fight off an impending sense of panic.
Nance took a bite of her donut and nodded slowly.
