by Eric Vall
Cy’lass and Slal’ops waved us onward with matching grins, and then we truly entered the lion’s den.
Hundreds of Almort wove in and out of the streets here as they hissed and haggled over goods. We walked passed the metal workers with their ringing hammers, and Slal’ops pulled us off to the side as he gestured to the raw hunks of rock and metal they had displayed on their table.
“This is raw X’ebril that has been freshly mined from the mountains in the northeast,” the chief’s advisor dictated as he picked up a dark gray lump with sharp edges and silver veins. “Craftsmen like these can purify small quantities, but the refinery does it on a much larger scale. They then use the treated metal to make tools or jewelry.” He first pointed to a set of small, shiny ingots that look like tarnished silver, and then to the finished product of what looked like a series of interlocked necklaces. They had no jewels, but they glittered like trapped starlight all the same.
Neka gave a small gasp and leaned forward to poke gently at the silvery chains. Her ears stood at attention on top of her head and her tail danced back and forth behind her. She looked like her usual, happy self.
“Oooh pretty,” my assistant cooed, but Slal’ops was already being dragged away by Akela, who was pointing excitedly to something in the distance, and the cat-girl jogged to catch up.
An idea suddenly struck me, and I acted on it without thinking. “Hold on,” I asked Cy’lass as he went to follow the others. The prince turned to me as I pointed to the set of necklaces on the table. “I don’t know what you use for currency here, so how much would that be? I’d like to purchase it.”
The prince turned to one of the craftsmen and repeated my question in a series of clicks. The Almort set down his tool and moved over to us. His eyes flicked from Cy’lass to the jewelry and then to me. Finally, he reached out, picked up the silver chains, and held them out to me.
When I only blinked at him in confusion, he held his hand out farther, and the shiny metal chimed softly as the chains jostled together.
“Take it,” he hissed and dipped his chin at me.
I held up my hands and shook my head. “No, no I wasn’t asking to take it for free. I want to buy it. Or trade for it.”
The Almort listened to my translator box hiss but clicked his tongue.
“Take it,” he repeated and then grabbed my hand so he could press the cool metal against my fingers. I tried to argue, to give it back, but the male refused.
“It is for my brother,” the Almort clicked and then nodded toward Cy’lass. “He was in the prince’s hunting party. I was told you saved him, starman.”
“I… well, it was actually more of a group effort,” I muttered and rubbed the back of my neck. “But you’re welcome. And thank you for the gift. It’ll make someone very happy.”
The Almort dipped his chin again and went back to his work.
Cy’lass chittered a laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. “Come, CcccT, or I fear Slal’ops will be torn apart.” He pointed to where his companion was being tugged in different directions by my assistant and mechanic. Neka was pointing off to the left where I could see smoke rising from a ring of stalls, and with how ardently she pulled on Slal’ops’ arm, I assumed there was some type of fish involved. I couldn’t see what Akela gestured at, but she was just as passionate. Slal’ops glanced back at Cy’lass and me with a very clear plea for help on his face.
I sighed and shook my head at the antics of my crew, but on the inside, I couldn’t stop smiling. I still had some things to make up to Akela and Neka, but at least it looked like they were actually enjoying themselves. Even if it was just for the moment, I was grateful for the small reprieve.
Cy’lass and I made our way over to the rest of our group, and after a brief democratic vote, we all decided to head in the direction Neka indicated to get some food. Akela pouted only for a moment. By the time we made it to the food stalls, she was already salivating right alongside the cat-girl.
The prince and his advisor ended up treating us to quite the lunch. They brought us to each of the booths and pointed out the different meats and vegetables which, after I had Omni analyze small samples to make sure we could eat them, we gladly piled on our plates.
“That is an alsa,” Slal’ops indicated as he pointed to a turquoise colored tuber. “It is grown in the ground along the river banks.”
He went on like this, cataloging everything and answering all of Akela’s questions about this food and that. Neka was already content with her plate full of seafood, and she purred as she ambled along beside me. I gently touched the cool, metal chains in my pocket and thought that I couldn’t wait to see her face when I gave them to her.
As we walked, I felt someone’s eyes on me, and I looked over to find Cy’lass staring at me intently. I cocked my head at the prince.
“Did you say something?” I asked him. “Sorry, I might have missed it.”
The son of the chief only blinked his two sets of eyelids at me and didn’t respond. Just as I was starting to become unnerved, Cy’lass snapped out of his thoughts, and he gestured at the plate in my hands.
“I was just thinking that I hope the fare is to your liking,” he stated.
I smiled at the prince. “I don’t think you have to worry about that. None of us are picky eaters.”
Neka was happy as long as there was meat involved, and it seemed Akela and I grew up on the same principle: waste not, want not, and never pass up free food.
For a moment, I thought the expression on Cy’lass’ face turned sharp, but he glanced away before I could be sure, and when he spoke again everything seemed normal.
“I wish you could taste a cut of a Malog,” the prince mused. I noted that he had suddenly tucked his fingers in the band of his utility belt and fiddled with the fabric there. It seemed almost… a nervous gesture. I filed that away for later and focused on the Almort speaking.
“It is one of our delicacies,” Cy’lass continued, “like the Opalks, but there hasn’t been any in the market for some time.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The prince clicked and waved his hand. “They are… difficult to kill. They are very fast, good at camouflage, armored along the shoulders and stomach, and always hunt in mated pairs.”
I imagined two Opalks hurtling themselves across the beach and shuddered.
“Are they as big as the Opalks?” I questioned.
Cy’lass glanced over at me. “No. They walk on six legs and are set low to the ground, but if they rear up, they are nearly twice the size of an Almort.”
This time, I pictured a spider-like creature that scuttled across the ground and immediately banished the thought.
“Enough of that,” Slal’ops suddenly said. The other Almort had dropped back from where Akela had been dragging him along in the front. He smiled, but it almost seemed too wide. “Come. Let us sit and eat. We still must stop at the refinery and then go to prepare for the feast.”
He touched Cy’lass on the shoulder, and the two Almort shared a look before the prince nodded. “My advisor is correct,” he hissed. “You must be hungry. I apologize. Let us eat.”
They led us over to a cluster of tables along the perimeter of the market, out of the crush of noise and people. Each table was set in a shallow, sunken hole set a few meters back from the walking path. Around the tables were gathered piles of cushions of silvers and blues and greens for seating. Neka jumped down nimbly and settled on the cushions with a purr of contentment. She didn’t even wait for us to all sit down before she ravenously tucked into her plate of meat. I cautiously sat down beside her, and when the cat-girl glanced up and met my eye, I gave her a tentative smile.
My assistant slurped down a bright purple tentacle… and shyly smiled back. A real, true smile. My heart ached with relief, and I was suddenly starving. Akela and I dug into our plates almost simultaneously.
And for just this moment, this moment full of fine food and friends both old and new, everything was good.
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Chapter 12
“Come onnnnnnn, guys!” Akela called back to us a few hours after we’d finished eating. We were back to exploring the alien city’s sights, and the mechanic was nearly a full city block ahead. She currently stood on her tiptoes to wave at us like we couldn’t see her,even though there was no one between us on this side of the street. She had also dragged poor Slal’ops in her wake and, even if I couldn’t see the Almort’s face, I bet it was also begging for us to hurry the hell up. If only not to be left alone with the silver-haired woman, who really seemed to have come into her second wind.
I lifted a hand halfheartedly in acknowledgement and focused on putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my eyes open.
Cy’lass chittered a laugh beside me. “Your machine-healer seems to be a wealth of energy. Perhaps stolen from you and your assistant,” the prince clicked with a smile as he gestured to the shuffling pace that Neka and I maintained.
I did my best to stifle a yawn and smiled tiredly at the son of the chief. “Sorry. Lunch seems to be weighing us down,” I chuckled and patted my full stomach.
“Mmm-hmm,” Neka hummed in contented agreement, and I glanced over at my assistant. She barely had her eyes open as she stumbled along half a step behind me. The cat-girl had eaten nearly half her weight in seafood, and it looked like she was half a moment away from falling asleep while actually walking.
Just as I thought that, Neka tripped slightly, either on a loose stone or her own two, tired feet, and pitched forward a degree. Not enough to lose her balance or fall down, her cat-like reflexes were... well cat-like, so she barely opened her eyes even a fraction wider.
However, a moment later, I felt the familiar brush of her tail against the outside of my hand, the fur downy soft and silky smooth. She seemed to do it without thinking, reflexively, because there was no hesitation as her tail wound around my wrist and latched on to me. My heart skipped a beat, and I peeked at Neka from the corner of my eye to see if she had noticed.
But the cat-girl just yawned, her mouth stretched wide, and her small fangs glinted in the low-light as she rubbed at her eye with a small, closed fist. She smacked her lips, and I think her eyes were actually closed now as she purred loudly and just let me tug her along.
Even upset with me, Neka gave me her trust implicitly. As I touched the cool metal of the necklace in my pocket, I vowed to be worthy of that trust.
We had finally reached the corner where Akela and Slal’ops waited, and the mechanic was practically vibrating out of her skin. She bounced on the balls of her feet and kept touching at her hair, her nose, her mouth. Her violet eyes sparkled and burned brightly as twin stars, and she looked like she wanted to pick me up bodily and cart me down the street.
It was all kind of adorable. The silver-haired woman, while not guarded, had still been a bit reserved on our journey to Proxima V. It was hard to maintain that aloofness, however, in the face of seeing a new planet and discovering all its wonders, especially for a station kid. I tried to remind myself of that as Akela scowled and tapped her booted toe impatiently at us.
“Could you two be any slower?” Akela directed at Neka and I. Obviously not listening, the cat-girl nodded slowly, and the mechanic sighed up at the bruised and purple sky.
“You could just go on ahead of us, you know,” I suggested as I gestured to the refinery that we could now see, only a block or so to our right, the blue and green glass spires rising above the roofs of the city. “We’ll catch up with you.”
Akela perked up at that and turned to Slal’ops to ask if they could, but Cy’lass suddenly clicked his tongue.
“No,” he said and he must have noticed his tone was a little clipped because he amended, “You and your tribe should experience C’eka together.”
“Yesss,” Slal’ops added with a hiss. “The tour will not last much longer. We will briefly show you the refinery, but then you may all retire together to our guest pods while we prepare for the feast.”
That sounded reasonable. “Alright,” I said and shook my head a little to wake up. Jostled by the movement, Neka blinked her eyes open and squinted around at us, but she didn’t remove her tail from around my wrist. “Lead the way then.”
Cy’lass hissed out an exhale and turned to flash me a sharp smile. “Good. I am glad. The refinery is a very interesting place. You will learn a lot about our people and our home there.”
Maybe I was just food-tired and sleepy, but for just a moment, I could have sworn Cy’lass’ had that intense look on his face again. Something tugged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t fully focus on it because Akela was now tugging on my hand and bodily moving me down the street. Neka just ambled along in my wake.
Slal’ops sighed a hiss in what looked like relief as the three of us stumbled passed him.
The refinery had looked huge from the car when we drove past it earlier. From up close, it was gargantuan, twice the size the marketplace had been. It made the Lacuna Noctis look like a shuttle.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” Akela murmured as we stood before the front doors. The mechanic had her head tilted back with a look of wonder on her beautiful face. She turned to look at me and smiled, bright and true like she couldn’t help the grin from blooming on her face. “Thank you. For bringing me here.”
I knew she wasn’t just talking about the refinery.
I returned her smile. “You’re welcome, but we haven’t even seen anything yet,” I teased and then turned to Slal’ops. “Right?”
The chief’s advisor dipped his chin. “Correct,” he hissed, and his eyes darted to Cy’lass, but the prince wouldn’t look in his direction. I narrowed my eyes at the two Almort but didn’t say a word.
“You have not seen a thing,” Slal’ops finished with a hiss and, with that, he led us into the building with a touch of his webbed hand along the doorframe.
The seams of the door and the scales along Slal’ops’ arm flashed simultaneously at his touch, and the panel slid back with a hiss of hydraulics.
“After you, machine-healer,” Slal’ops said with an incline of his head. Akela practically skipped through the door. The advisor followed on her heels, I followed him with Neka still attached to me, and Cy’lass brought up the rear.
Save for the stripes of blue and green bioluminescent material that ran down the walls on either side of us, the hallway we entered was pretty dimly lit. Akela and Slal’ops were nothing but vague shadows ahead of us.
“Why is it so dark in here?” Akela’s voice floated back to me as if she could hear my thoughts.
Somewhere over my shoulder, I heard Neka yawn again and smack her lips. “It’s not dark in here,” the cat-girl said muzzily. She could probably see perfectly.
“Huh,” I heard Akela muse. “So like the bioluminescence, you’ve evolved a heightened sense of sight due to the low light levels of this star system. Fascinating.”
Even in the gloom, I could just barely make out the mechanic as she paused and ran her fingers across the glowing green streak along the right side of the wall. Unlike the grass from the prairies outside the city or the scales that covered the Almort, this material didn’t seem to flicker on and off with touch, but rather remained constantly lit.
The mechanic’s curiosity seemed to be contagious because I found myself asking, “How does that work, actually? The bioluminescence. Is it by touch?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Akela agreed quickly. “What he said. I really wanna know how it works. It can’t be just touch alone, right? Is it electrical impulses? Chemicals? Pheromones? Can only the Almort or other native species interact with it, or would a species like ours be able to as well?”
Slal’ops had started walking again, but slowly, so we crept along after him in the darkened hall. For a few beats, neither of the Almort answered us.
“It is a little of all those things,” Slal’ops finally hissed in the dark. “The light is a product of the reaction between two livings entities, two life forces.”
“Two electrical nervous systems,” Akela added knowingly. “Hm, so it’s kind of like the synapses in our brains,” the mechanic muttered under her breath as she mused to herself. “Except in this case, the microscopic arcs of energy produce an actual, visible spectrum of light.”
“Totally following you,” I said, only a little sarcastically. The silver-haired woman didn’t seem to hear me.
“So, theoretically, we should be able to interact with the bioluminescence similarly to how the Almort do,” Akela addressed to Slal’ops. Her speech was starting to pick up pace in her excitement again. “Have you ever a witnessed this with any of the other, uh, starmen?”
I heard the chief’s advisor click his tongue. “None of our prior interactions with the starman have been quite so... personal. But, why don’t we test your theory, machine-healer?”
With that, there was a brilliant flicker of lights a few meters ahead. I realized we must have come to the end of the dark hall. Just as the lights flared and faded, another door slid back with a hiss and whirl of machinery, and the light, though not blinding, flooded into the hallway.
Still, we all had to blink as we stepped into the room beyond, which turned out to be some kind of lab, about twenty to forty meters long. Akela gasped as she took in the gray and silver room. It was sparsely furnished, with only a few austere lab tables spread across the expansive floor. Each table was covered in a collection of different equipment, tools, and samples, but it all seemed organized somehow. The wall on the far side of the room, directly across from the door, was made of windows, and as we walked farther into the room, I saw that beyond the glass was a gigantic factory room floor.
Different sections of the floor seemed to involve different parts of the refining process. In one far corner of the floor, I saw a molten hot, orange forge that must have been used for smelting the metallic ore. There was an assembly line and a packaging line, and on the farthest side of the floor, small tunnels led out to the loading docks where the vehicles for transport were docked. Dozens of Almort moved across the floor like ants as they tended to their responsibilities, not a scale or a drop of X’ebril out of place.
