The Ventinari I was supposed to meet at the bar raised a hand to flag me down as I entered. I hadn't shown him what I looked like, but I didn't fit in with the other clientele.

I was meeting a Signer, the coordinator between me and a contract. He'd chosen the meeting location and said that the client would be there shortly after me. If everything was that easy, it felt petty to complain about his choice of meeting place.

"You the guy?" the Ventinari asked, "good to see ya," he held out his feathered hand and scaled palm. I shook it. "That's how you humans do that, right?"

I nodded.

"Great great, just wanna make you feel comfortable, ya know?" The Signer had stood up to greet me when I walked in and now flopped back down onto a plush leather chair with armrests much too high to be reasonable. "S'why I chose this place."

"Sure." The meeting place he'd chosen was a novelty set up to emulate a sports bar back on Earth. Sure, they had the right idea, but despite their efforts, they'd managed to create the uncanny valley of bars. I'd never personally been to Earth,and even I could tell everything in here was a few degrees wrong.

I was also the only human in here, which was telling.

"Well, uh, client ain't gonna be here for a few so, couple questions," the Signer got up from his chair again to stalk over to the dartboard and pull the darts out. There were three bullseyes.

"You have my resume."

"And it's all true?" He lined up his first throw and almost missed the bottom of the board.

"Yeah, all of the jobs there are official." It was a piss-off that someone this far out in the rim had asked for a vetted hitlist for a position. Half the point of working out on the rim was taking jobs that weren't in the whitepapers.

"Did a lot of sanctioned work for someone out here then," he threw the second dart. Better this time. "Plus, you were the only human who applied, so you're the frontrunner."

"Good to know there was still competition," I mused as I watched him throw the third dart. There was an interesting split in Ventinari. You could tell if someone lived on the homeworld based on how the translator treated them. Their planetary dialect was incredibly formal, but they almost got too relaxed outside of the courts.

A service bot wheeled across the false wooden floors and parked itself in front of me. I waved it off.

"Ah, get one for me and one for the tough guy, will ya?" the Ventinari threw an arm around me. I kept one hand in my jacket pocket to hold it in place. Once the bot had rolled away, the SIgner separated himself from me and dusted off my jacket for good measure. A single one of his mustard feathers drifted toward the ground. "Sorry, felt like you stiffened up there; I'm just a friendly guy."

"Didn't wanna show the bar my Hammerhead," I explained.

The Ventinari took a couple steps forward to pull the darts out of the board. "Hammerhead's a nice gun. Humans make good shit." He threw the first dart. It ended up close to one of the bullseyes. "I always said that humans make good shit."

"Did ya now?"' It was clear that I was about to get an old-fashioned interrogation, so I found the nearest chair that wasn't a plush monstrosity and pulled it over. The cheap wood-grained plastic creaked as I sat.

"Yeah," the Ventinari paused darts for a moment to scratch the front end of his beak. His fingers ended in nasty talons. "Where'd ya get the Hammerhead? Keepsake from a war?"

"No," I answered as he threw another dart. Behind him, the Ovishir bartender started arguing with another Ventinari, her tail lashing out as she began to shout. "Never fought in one," I continued.

"No shit?" the Ventari Signer asked as he closed three of his eyes to focus the last one on his final throw. It was still strange to hear that coming from a Ventari.

"No shit."

"You never fought planet side?" he asked as he threw the dart. It landed just below the bullseye, and his feathers stood on end. We clearly weren't playing any official version of the darts, save for the ruleset of 'killing time.'

I got up out of my creaking chair to collect before he decided that he was taking another turn. "Nope," I pulled all three darts out of the board, "never."

The Ventari took my place in the chair instead of sitting back down in his seat but kept his eyes on me instead of the dart board. "You weren't drafted for the last civil war?"

"Wasn't born." The translator caught it, but he meant the 'last human war'; it was a common line of questioning.

"Thought you were thirty four."

"I am."

The Ventinari at the bar was shouting back at the barkeep now and had been joined by two of their friends, just great. The Ovishir had taken a big step back from all of them, but she was held up by the bar behind her. There wasn't that far for her to go.

"So-"

"Last human civil war was in 2094," I pointed out. At least, that was as close as I remembered from classes. The year itself wouldn't mean anything to a Ventinari, but the translator would again explain it in whatever time scale the birds used.

"Yeah yeah, they SAY that but come on-" he followed the dart as I hit the outer bull. "Nice shot."

"Thanks."

"They say that," he continued, undeterred by me ignoring it, "but you're not telling me that there hasn't been a human war."

"Not against humans," there had been some territorial wars just before I was born in 2254, but those were barely footnotes and against other species.

The Signer didn't answer. He just snorted. He'd say the same things that everyone did. It made no sense that humans had stopped fighting each other so early. Most species had big wars even after finding someone in the stars to punch. Some of them, like the Ventari, still managed to have planetwide wars despite both sides owning planet killers.

A crash at the bar snapped my attention back to the argument there were two glasses shattered and one of the Ventinari had just pulled a knife out of their back pocket.

"That's embarrassing," the Signer sighed. I didn't look back at him, instead I kept my eyes on the knife as the man waved it back and forth just over the bar top. He was clumsy with the thing but a knife was a knife, "So as I was saying," the Signer started back up, but I'd already taken my first steps toward the bar.

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There was probably a suave version of this where I walked up and had a conversation with them, where I was so convincing that they conceded the point and backed off, letting us all meet clients and have a shitty drink in peace.

There was a version like that, but I wasn't about to test my luck against a drunk knife.

The armed Ventinari didn't have time to tense up between me grabbing the back of his head and driving it into the bar top, cracking his beak against the syrup-sticky steel with an unsettling clang. The knife followed a second later, blade clattering against the bar before anyone involved in the argument processed that I'd entered the discussion.

I kept my hand on the back of the Ventinari's head, holding onto his plumage and pressing him down, giving his friends enough time to process what had just happened. They could walk away right now and the only thing injured would be a beak and pride.

The one to my right with blue feathers wound up. Alright then.

I let go of the Ventinari and flinched back away from the punch, letting it hit air as I drove my boot into the back of the still-dazed knife holder's knees. My first victim tumbled from the counter top as the puncher stumbled forward. He steadied himself an inch short of socking his friend as I hopped back. The idle chatter in the bar had cooled, as every single set of eyes fell on me and the two Ventinari that weren't crumpled on the floor.

"That wasn't not very appropriate," the blue one said after he righted himself.

"Tell him not to pull a knife on the bartender then."

"And your response was to assault him?" the final part of the trio picked the dropped knife up off of the counter, I could see the remnants of a spilled drink coating the metal parts of the blade.

"He needed to cool down,and now that we're all talking I'm sure that-" the one Ventinari turned the knife in his hands, swapping from holding to brandishing it, "-that we can all have a nice afternoon..." I trailed off at the end, they weren't about to agree to my offer. I sighed. I was supposed to have been on vacation this entire week, even coming to a bar for this job was pushing it, now I was getting into a fight.

The knife-holder lunged forward and I found a glass on the table behind me and snapped it toward him. It was going to miss, but that didn't matter, the Ventinari instinctively covered his face, turning the knife away from me for a precious moment. I lunged to match him, slamming my shoulder into the middle of his chest.

As I made contact the blue Ventinari threw his body weight at me but I managed to twist just as he would have slammed into me. I threw a foot out as he stumbled past, tripping him as he friend steadied himself from my shoulder slam.

I tore my Hammerhead off my hip and whipped around, the barrel of the gun rocked him where his beak connected to the rest of his face with a sickening crack. Something in his beak shattered and the Ventinari squawked out too much profanity on his way to the floor. The knife dropped again, this time skittering under a table.

By the time my blue friend had turned around to face me again, the Hammerhead was already pointed at his chest. It took his a breath to notice the gun but his hands shot up into the air as soon as he did. I let him stew for a moment before speaking up, "We good?"

"Of course. If you would just allow me to-"

I nodded, "Good choice." I kept the Hammerhead out for a second, leaving it trained on him until he'd bent down to help one of his two buddies off the floor. Once I was sure that he was leaving, I holstered it. Thankfully he had a decent head on his shoulders; I wasn't interested in firing a fucking Hammerhead in the middle of a crowded bar. Fantastic deterrent, messy shot.

The barkeep growled something under her breath as she started to pull some of the glass of the counter with a cloth. She had to be used to shit like this, running a mediocre bar outside the core was more dangerous than running a dive, at least everyone in a dive understood that everyone else was armed.

My Signer came up to me before the Ventinari had payed and cleared out of the place, which was good, I wasn't interested in stepping away from the bar until they were gone, I'd found myself acting as the security guard for a moment here. "Damn," he opened, contrasting from the formal prose of the others straight away, "you're legit."

"Yeah."

"You pick a lot of fights like that?" he put a hand around my shoulders again, "that's good, I like a scrappy guy."

"I try not to," it was technically the truth, I tried to keep my nose out of fights I didn't need to take. After all, everyone ran out of luck eventually. I just had a dumb soft spot that kept getting in the way of that prior philosophy. At least I'd given them an opportunity to tap out before things got messy.

"Well, that was great, because now I can tell our client that I've personally seen you take down three armed guys bare handed."

I rolled my eyes even though I knew the body language wouldn't translate.

"Oh, speaking of-" the Ventinari turned me toward the entrance of the bar to watch as she walked in. Six foot eight, lithe, dressed in a sharp suit with her silver eyes scanning around the bar. The client was a Fotuan, and Fotuans only came to the rim if they needed something heinous done.

Fotuan-human relations had been tense ever since they'd had first contact within years of humans piercing the veil. There were a lot of theories as to why we were always on the edge of war, but by guess was that we looked too similar to each other. They were slimmer and taller; They only had an androgynous monogender, but compared to a bird species we were practically identical. They looked downright human.

More correctly, from a galactic perspective, humans looked like Fotuans.

The Fotuan clocked us from across the room, eyes lingering on me and then flicking to the Signer, who she would have met before this. I couldn't catch an opinion in her gaze, but I could hazard a guess. She strode over and held out a six-fingered hand to the Ventari as he pulled his off my shoulder "Victoria."

That wasn't her name. That was just the closest human one.

"Good to see you," the Ventari held her hand for a brief moment instead of shaking it. "our extranet conversation told me everything I needed to know about the job."

The Fotuan cast a sideways glance at me and then returned her attention to the Signer. "He's your answer?"

I opened my mouth for a second to speak up, but that wasn't the smart thing to do. The Signer was supposed to talk, and she would decide whether she wanted me for the job; that was how it went every time. I'd only wanted to speak up because she was a Fotuan.

You didn't need to see hostility in a gaze to know it was predatory.

"Yes, he-"

"Have you represented him before?"

"Well, he's-" the Ventari started, the Fotuan kept staring, and his sentence shattered into a sputter, "No, but you see, I did just see him-"

"Hm," the Fotuan cut in and stared down the Signer for for another moment before she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. There was no scanning, no once-over; her silver pupils held dead still. "Can you speak for yourself then?"

"His resume is qu-" the Signer began then faded away when speaking up garnered no reaction from Victoria.

Nobody spoke until Victoria nodded up to me a little as if to say, 'well?' Behind her, the three Ventinari stumbled out of the place.

"What do you need me to do?"

The Fotuan tsked and strode over to the dart board. Fotuans never just walked somewhere, did they? She pulled the three darts from the board one by one, but they held them all together in a closed fist. "Cargo detail."

I waited for her to continue, then it became clear that she was waiting for me to respond.

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"Not a very detailed description," that was open ended even for my line of work, and my jobs tended to end with someone getting shot at.

"The Ventari says that you're the right person for the job," the Fotuan looked down to the darts in her hand and then at him, "was he lying?"

"Absolutely not," he cut in despite not being part of the conversation anymore.

"No," I confirmed.

The Fotuan handed the darts to the Ventari and looked back to me, "Then all I need to know is whether you would like the contract."

Was it worth the money? Maybe. It was good money, and I had a rough outline. I knew that the contract was supposed to last a month. Cargo detail translated to smuggling on the rim, after all. Still, a cagey description had gotten a lot of peopl-

"-or are humans as soft as their history suggests?"

I shouldn't accept jobs based on spite, but this wasn't my first time.