Exploring Unity
When Alwen and Gato left the Astaroth, a trio of lean bug-like aliens began to tail them. The SS had set up a small station of officers to watch the Astaroth and send officers out to follow anyone who left. She and Gato gave them an appraising look and decided they looked sufficiently squishy under their Chitinous exoskeleton. The only non-deathworlders Alwen had killed were the Egh’ahds, but after training with the Terrans, fighting beneath the titanic feet of Aunviry, and dealing with the cybernetically enhanced soldiers of the Draxori, Alwen felt she was more than able to handle a few squishy xenos.
Strange how much her mind had changed on killing in just a year. She wouldn’t kill for sick pleasure, but self defense was a whole different can of worms.
The trio of officers had quickly fallen behind their relaxed walking pace, and Alwen wondered why they had even bothered when an annoying buzzing sound came from above. It sounded like a drone or miniature helicopter, but when she looked up she saw the dark shadows of the SS officers flying high above them on gossamer thin wings.
“That’s going to get annoying fast.” Alwen muttered.
Gato’s ear twitched. “Voral, over sized mosquitoes. Follow me, Limey told me about an pedestrian tunnel we can use to lose them.”
“Won’t that get us in trouble?”
“Last I checked it wasn’t a crime to lose a tail, even if they are Union SS.” He gave her a wry grin as he quickly stepped into a side alley.
Alwen laughed and raced after him. In a matter of minutes the buzzing sound was gone and the two of them were on one of the stations crowded trains.
Unity, despite being a wildly impractical megastructure, had one of the most impressive public transport systems Alwen had ever seen. All they had to do was select their desired location and kiosk sent them a detailed map of all the trains they had to take, as well as a tight schedule for when they needed to get there. In some of Torwen’s largest cities a journey not even a tenth as long as their current one would have taken twice as long. In each station where they needed to change trains a miniature intra-station train took them to the next platform I minutes, and moving sidewalks made sure they reached their platform in only a minute or two of walking. Each train-change they arrived well ahead of their scheduled time and Alwen realized that the map and schedule they had received took the average persons walking speed and didn’t account for Deathworlder physiology. They could have shaved a whole half hour off their journey by taking earlier trains if the system had accounted for that.
Once again Alwen saw the Union’s one size fits all philosophy at play in something so simple as public transport. Not only had the system not accounted for their Deathworlder physiology, but even the seats in the trains were far too large for her and Gato. They comfortably sat side by side on a single seat instead of two, but no one took advantage of each space next to them despite the crowded rides. Alwen knew that she had been heavily influenced by the Hellworlder’s biases when it came to the Union, but it wasn’t hard to imagine eventually coming to the same conclusions after a while. Torwen would never have a place amongst the Union that didn’t make them second class citizens just for being who they were.
Most of the tracks ran underground, or under-surface. The tunnels were dimly lit, and weren’t really worth looking at. But when their train burst out of the dark tunnels and into the open air of Unity Alwen gasped in awe. She hadn’t seen the station when the ship was flying in, she had simply looked out the window one day and noticed the ship had docked without her notice. Sure there was a whole city suspended confusing above and around here, but that was a distant wonder. But now the that the train had risen to a track suspended high above the industrial platform Alwen could truly appreciate the scale of this place.
Strange alien factories and refineries stretched far into the distance. Bulky freighters landed in the recessed docking bays, their massive hulk disappearing into the floor of the station. Small shuttle craft and long flat ferries zoomed above her in lines of controlled traffic. A bell chimed over the trains PA system and a bizarre sign began to blink. Before Alwen could question the sign she felt a shift in gravity as the train moved over to the nearby habitation section. She felt sick to her stomach as the force of gravity seemed to shift around her, like being on a roller coaster without knowing you were on a roller coaster.
She blinked several times as she shifted her chair. “Woah, that’s so weird.”
“Yup, never get used to that ‘gravity in two places’ feeling.” Gato agreed.
“Isn’t this your first time here as well?”
“Well yeah, but in preparation for altered gravity environments the Vet base in Austin set up an artificial training environment with grav-plating. You ever tried to jump across a room where the downward force of gravity was shifting between the floor and ceiling?”
Alwen tried to imagine it. no matter how clever she thought she was her whole perspective of physics was based on things falling down. With the short exception of falling through Femeri’s hanger bay Alwen had never even experience zero-gravity. “must have sucked.”
“Yup, three weeks of falling on my head. Worth it though.”
An alien who was standing near glanced at them and snorted. “If you can’t speak common then don’t leave your Hellworld.” It grumbled in common.
Alwen blinked in disbelief, she felt herself rising to her feet but Gato’s lightning quick grip held her back. She glared at him and he slowly shook his head, “not worth it” his eyes said. She ground her jaw, but sat back into her seat.
She held her tongue until they were off the train with the rude grey skinned alien, but the moment they were off she wheeled on him “Why’d you stop me?”
“Because it wasn’t worth the effort.”
“Oh come on, did you here what it said?”
“I did, what about it?” he growled.
“What about it, it was insulting us right to our faces.”
He turned on her and growled in his throat, “So what. What were you going to do about it?”
Her eyes locked with his and she crossed her arms “Set it straight for one.”
“And then what?” he shot back, his face scrunching up with anger. They scowled at each other, neither willing to back down. And then, like a balloon with the air let out, Gato deflated. “You and Alice are too alike” he murmured before letting out a sigh. “Look, bigots like that are cowards through and through. The moment you fought back it would have shrunk back and cowered from the angry deathworld female. Then what would we have, we would have a scene that looked like a deathworlder harassing an innocent civilian. I’m sure everyone on that train would have told the SS that you started it, and our date would have been over like that.”
Alwen heard the logic in his words and knew that he was speaking from experience. But she still wasn’t willing to let it slide, “So I’m just supposed to hear those insults and ignore them?”
“Yes!” he growled. “We’re not here to start trouble, we’re here to have a date. We can’t waste our time on stupid people like that Flexen on the train.
Alwen then felt herself deflate. Not because of what he said, but because she saw how frustrated it made him as well. He had been dealing with shit like this since his time on Earth while Alwen got to be the sheltered daughter of an ambassador. That sort of treatment was new to her and a painfully common constant for him no matter where he went.
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“Alright” she said softly, “Lets just put it behind us and try not to let it ruin our day.”
He nodded, and they walked in silence for a while. As they were walking a thought occurred to her. “What did you mean when you said Alice and I were the same?”
He glanced her way and smiled “she wasn’t the type to let that shit slide either. She’d fight a fence post if she thought it was looking down on her.”
“That’s not what I meant, the way you said it made it seem like you had already been comparing us in other ways.”
He glanced away, “Its something Gabe and Limey pointed out on…” he paused, he had been about to say on Pandemonium but they weren’t allowed to mention it while off ship. “It was something they said over drinks.” he finished.
“When did you guys go out for drinks?” she couldn’t remember hearing about this.
“Whenever I told you I was gonna be out late.” He said sounding ashamed at not telling her the truth. “It was a guys night thing, I didn’t want to tell you so that you wouldn’t feel left out. And you didn’t seem bothered by the late nights, you said it gave you more time to work with Bachir.”
“Oh” she had in fact said that, and meant it too. She had stayed up so late that when she got home Gato was already back and passed out. She must have been too tired to smell the booze.
“Limey was trying to hit on some Amazonian women who was nearly a foot taller than him, and we were making fun of his taste in women.”
“How long is a foot again?”
“About thirty centimeters, also not the point. He said that I wasn’t one to talk since I’ve basically dated the same girl twice. Just one had fur, and this ones purple and shorter than Napoleon.”
Alwen made a mental note to pay Limey back for that shorter than Napoleon comment. “But we’re not the same.” She complained.
He glanced at her side long, “You’re a lot more alike than you think. Both of you would have made a scene on that train, and both of you would have chewed me out for holding you back.”
“That doesn’t make us the same.”
“Theres other things too. A lot of the things I love about you I also loved in Alice. There’s a reason you get along so well. Your both brave, strong, and fierce as a viper.”
“I’m definitely not fierce.” Alwen muttered.
“Oh, yeah. Tell me you just didn’t add Limey to your shit list for calling you short and I’ll believe you.”
“Not my fault you Terrans are so damn tall.” Alwen said grouchily.
Gato laughed. “Its not a bad thing, you and Alice are some of the most amazing people I know. But it also means you share her flaws.”
“Is it a flaw if I don’t see it as one?”
“I think that makes it a fatal one since your completely blind to it.”
She grumbled incoherently to herself and he laughed.
After that the air between them became a little warmer and they walked a little closer than before.
The unimaginatively named City Section-9 was the densest urban environment Alwen had ever seen. Just as chaotic as New Mombasa, but with a whole different kind of frenetic energy. Like everyone around them had some place to be and they were already late. She kept expecting to look into the dark alleys in between buildings and see the typical urban detritus she had seen in every city she’d been to. But instead she saw clean little shop fronts and colorful little plants that were like rainbow colored shrubbery. Even on a station like Unity space was still at a premium and couldn’t be wasted on things like dirty alleys or seedy bars. It made Alwen wonder what happened to the homeless, as she was walking around she couldn’t see any. The Union must have a good solution to homelessness on big stations like this, even Torwen wasn’t this clean.
As they walked Alwen saw more alien species than she had ever thought was possible. She had tried to learn as many as she could in her off time, but at some point her eyes had glazed over. But now that it was all in front of her she felt parts of her brain come alive as it tried to make sense of what she was seeing. There were the races she recognized like Carrick, Cék’ek, and Zxx’thi , but then there were the races she had only seen on the Union data net. Creatures she could only vaguely relate to the native life on her home world or Earth. Big lumbering aliens like elephants but twice as long, several different species of Avian sapients, a few that were vaguely primate-like to her senses, and some she couldn’t relate to anything she had seen on Earth, Torwen, or Pandemonium. Species from planets that took a vastly different path than most.
She had also at one point noticed what looked like a four meter tall crystal regolith that slowly ambled on four leg like protrusions. A Lithoid. They were exceedingly rare amongst the life forms of the galaxy, with only three species compared to the hundreds of organics in the galaxy. “How does it move?” Alwen asked out loud.
“Slowly obviously.” Gato said as they waited for it to pass.
“That’s not what I meant. Its just a big rock.” She exclaimed.
“So are you.” he pointed out bluntly. She glared at him and he sighed “I don’t know the science of it all, but they’re some sort of silicon based lifeform instead of carbon. The rocky exterior is some sort of soft quarts, don’t ask me how. But its like an exoskeleton to them that protects their delicate gooey insides, gooier than our own insides.”
“What do they eat, rocks?”
“Sometimes, I think they can dissolve flint or chalk. I heard they also eat wood and slowly leach the energy out of the that. Apparently cinnamon is some sort of crazy drug for them, and can keep them high for weeks. Had to fight one once, blunted the shit out of my sword.”
“You cut a living rock?” Alwen said amusedly as the Lithoid moved out of their way and they continued walking.
“I tried to, didn’t work. Eventually we just beat it with fire extinguishers until it broke open. Its blood tasted like mud.” He made a face and Alwen laughed.
“I assume it had it coming? And you weren’t just bored.” She said wryly.
“Yup, Captain Redstone. Famous for pummeling his victims into a pulp with the efficiency of a grinding mill. You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving, anything good nearby?”
He sniffed the air. Most mammaloids had a better developed sense of smell than humans or Torweni, and she had seen him sniff out a café ten blocks away. but the dense crowd of foreign smells seemed to give him some trouble. “I think I smell some sort of grilled fish, or maybe it’s a mushroom. Hard to tell.”
Alwen shrugged “Worth a look.”
They made their way across the busy park area nestled in between the huge milky white buildings. Alwen had trouble identifying what they had used here instead of grass for the fields, it sort of seemed like a blue moss but fluffier if that made sense. Apparently most non-deathworlds didn’t develop an analogue for grass in a way she would recognize, which she found incredibly bizarre. It had something to do with the very different environmental factors and a lack of competitivity in native flora. In the park’s center there were some huge white stems of tree sized mushrooms clustered together with some shrubs below. Another thing that set deathworlds apart was some sort of unseen threshold that gave birth to two different types of fungi. The decomposers of deathworlds, and the producers of non-deathworlds. Somehow absorbing heat and CO2 to perform their own photosynthesis. The scientific community of Alwen’s world would say that made them not a fungus but a different organism entirely, but the cellular structures of both variants were exactly the same so the Union called both Fungi.
They walked around the park until they found an alley with tons of little food stalls lined down its winding path. There was food from all across the galaxy on display, some of which Alwen had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to properly digest half the things on display. Her stomach wasn’t as adaptive as a human’s, she couldn’t do dairy or certain types of cheese, something about fiber rich foods hurt her stomach in unpleasant ways, and she personally didn’t like salty foods.
Some of the stalls were serving what looked like ice cream, but was actually frozen balls of mold. The smell alone repelled her and Gato. A few grilled fruit like things had looked enticing, but Gato knew the fruits in question and had told her they tasted like soap to most humans. Some of the grilled meats on display were way too large for her, a full meal’s worth on one stick. Also Gato said the meat was entirely unseasoned. It made sense since most aliens couldn’t handle any seasonings. Eventually they smelled something like roasting peppers and found themselves in an obscure and hidden stall in the food market.
There they saw several kebabs of meat and pepper roasting over a low fire grill. The set up was little more than a small round grill and an ice chest, and the lack of business should have a been a warning to stay away. but the smell of the grilling meat and roasting peppers drew them in regardless of the shadiness. They couldn’t make out the person grilling meat, but as they stepped closer a triangular head rose on a long prehensile neck.
Alwen looked into the slitted eyes of the Egh’ahd and stepped back while reaching for the sword at hip.
To her shock the Egh’ahd also backed away, a slightly sharp smell emitting from its direction as it looked very afraid. “I don’t want any trouble.” It said quickly in its gurglely voice.
Gato looked to Alwen amused “Don’t forget, you’re the deathworlder here. Your scarier the scary one right now.” He said in common. A slight flexing of his muscles told Alwen that if it tried anything it would be dead in one punch.
Alwen blinked, “Right, sorry. I’ve, uh, had some bad encounters with your kind.” She said lamely.
“My kind?” it asked.
Gato looked at the Egh’ahd vendor “We were on a station when Egh’ahd pirates attacked. We lost some friends.” He explained.
The Egh’ahd dipped its head “Oh, Femeri right. We heard about that here, a thameful dig-play.”
“Uh, yes” Alwen said. She was about to back out of the stall when Gato stepped towards the grilling meat.
“What’chyu cooking.” He asked while eyeing up the meat.
“Org’al.” the vendor replied.
“I mean what’s in it? Need to know if its edible.”
“Ah, jutht meat, thould be fine.”
“What about the peppers?” he asked.
“The canam?”
“Yeah, what are they.”
It made flicked its tongue in a gesture Alwen couldn’t decipher. Her experience with Egh’ahds had always been in the midst of combat. The most she could tell about his body language was that he wasn’t threatening. She of course didn’t relax.
“Not edible, they’re for flavor.”
“Mind if I try a quick bite to see if its edible.”
A clear film crossed its eyes from the side. “Edible? Eth poigon!”
“Deathworlder” Gato pointed out “it might be edible for us. It smells good at least.”
“You Terrang are weird.” It said as it used a pair of tongs to pull of a piece of pepper.
“One Terran, one Torweni.” Gato corrected as he popped it into his mouth. “It’s a like a pepper, but blander.
“Torweni?” the Egh’ahd asked out loud. “Never heard of thoge.”
Alwen found her voice and stepped forward. “We’re new. Not even members of the Union.”
“Great, more weirdog.” It muttered.
Gato turned to Alwen “What do you think? Outside of Terran food I think this is as close to edible it gets.”
Alwen looked to the vendor who was now flipping the kababs. “Any Terran food around?”
“Not in thig part of the thity. You’d need to find some were theedy for that.” It answered.
“We’ll take two each then, with the cannam.”
“Fine, don’t come crying to me if you poigoned.” The Egh’ahd grumbled.
He passed two to Alwen and two to Gato, the meat was a little too tender in all the wrong ways and lacked a certain richness she was used to in meat. And it was in fact very under seasoned, but the cannam helped a bit.
While Gato was distracted with his food Alwen turned to the vendor. “We just arrived in this station, know anything fun to do around here?”
He looked up at her and fixed her with his crocodilian gaze. “Touritht huh, try Chion park.”
“What’s at Chion park?”
“Big green thpayth thurounded by art and hithtory mutheumg.”
Alwen frowned, “Was that last word history museums?”
The Egh’ahd gurgled unhappily “Yeth, common ig hard for ug. We don’t have the natural gift for thound you Terrang have.”
“Again not Terran.” Alwen corrected.
“Terran enough for it to not matter.” He grumbled.
Gato finished his food and bought another three skewers “How far is Chion?” he asked as he was handed his food.
“Thort train ride, might be ethier for you deathworlderg to walk. Thee that big maroon tower?”
Gato and Alwen looked and caught a glimpse of maroon through the gaps in the building. “Yes.”
“Go there. The tower sit’g above the park.”
Gato inhaled the last of his food and nodded. “Thank you, we’ll check it out.”
“Tho long as you don’t thuccumb to poigon.” The Egh’ahd grumbled as they left.