“Your shuttle has arrived,” Elanie repeated unnecessarily.
“Right.” Accepting my fate, I blew a stream of air between my lips, crossed my pod to give Elanie a kiss on her cheek that she promptly wiped away, and then got dressed.
The shuttle pilot,a handsome green-skinned Aquilinian male with impressively broad shoulders, strafed me head to toe with an irritated glare as I ducked through the docking bay fifteen minutes later.
“You must be Sunastara Nex,” he said, a brow sharply arched. “You’re late.”
“My apologies,” I replied, quirking a brow of my own. “But believe me, I’m well worth the wait.”
When he only glowered at my attempt to butter him up, I shrugged. “Can’t win them all, I suppose?—”
“Buckle in,” he snapped. “I’ll need to break some speed records to get us to the CAK on time.”
As the pilot steered the shuttle away fromtheIgnisar, myship gleamed back at me through the flexGlass. I so rarely saw her from the outside, and despite the debauchery that took place inside her, she truly was a marvel. A kilometer long, encased in white titanium and embellished with diamonds and rubies mined from one of LunaCorp’s mega-asteroids, she was a shimmering queen in the blackness of space. A drag queen, but still.
I’d just pressed my hand against the window separating me from my ship when the pilot accelerated away from her, shoving me back into my seat. Dizzy—and still very hungover—I closed my eyes, searched for reality TV shows on my viewChip, and waited for the shuttle’s velocity to level out.
“Shuttle passengers,”the pilot said, interrupting the episode ofKuiper Worm ChasersI’d been watching. “We’re, uhhh, making our final approach on, uhhh, the City of All Knowledge.”
Why did all pilots sound the same? Did they teach pilot-speak in flight school?
“Please return to your seats, buckle in, and, uhhh, prepare for landing.”
Through the shuttle’s viewport, the CAK—a seventy-kilometer-long wonder of high-tech engineering and obscene credit expenditure—hovered. Towering skyscrapers reached into the blackness of space like the sparkling points of Miss Known Universe’s tiara, while countless orbiting satellites created a twinkling veil cast over the city. The CAK was positioned at the border of the wormhole linking Juniper-13 with the Solar System of New Earth, acting as the port of entry and customs for travel between the two. It wasalso the home of LunaCorp’s HQ, and one of my least favorite places to visit.
The shuttle landed with a whisper-softthudthat was completely at odds with the gravity tugging on my shoulders. Stepping onto the tarmac, I winced and shielded my eyes against the garish glow of the red and blue Winter Revel lights strewn across the surrounding trees.
Since the accident, holidays were, to put it mildly, challenging. But considering the countless species theIgnisarcatered to—all with their own unique customs and celebrations—I’d learned to shoulder through them with a grim determination. I had no choice. A full week at the CAK during a holiday, however, was a different story entirely. A week cut off from the comfortable, numbing routine of my work. A week of mandatory fist-bumping, corporate ego stroking, and enthusiastically feigned interest during team-building bullshit. A week spent being bombarded by holiday music everywhere I went… All I knew for certain was that my mini bar had better be fully stocked.
2
The first fewdays of D&R week were, predictably, a boring, tedious slog. The only break in the monotony came from a terrifying and extremely uncomfortable ziplining tour through the LunaCorp Fun Zone—a fifteen-kilometer-long green space in the center of the CAK, fashioned after Old Earth’s Central Park.
Feeling like I’d more than satisfied my team-building quota when I let a freckle-faced Mercurian teenager strap me into a harness and shove me without mercy across the abyss, I was determined to avoid the evening’s ugly sweater contest come hells or high water. Instead, I showered, slid into my favorite little black dress, and staked a claim to a stool at the hotel bar.
These days, I felt most at home in places like this—loud, dark, anonymous. But after I’d spent the last three days fighting so hard not to roll my eyes or groan in boredom that I think I sprained something, even the dim bar couldn’t calm my nerves. I was antsy, out of sorts, unsettled. And there was only one sure-fire cure for that.
After ordering a glass of dry Delphinian red, I openedSquee, my favorite VC dating app. A group of empaths from the ocean planet of Portis developedSqueeusing an algorithm that connected individuals based not on who their perfect partner would be forever, but on who their perfect date would be at that precise moment. Immediate gratification—a heady sensation that evidently made Portisans exclaim,Squee! Hence the name. I, myself, had neverSqueeed after using the app. But I’d definitely had some phenomenal one-nighters. And that was exactly what I needed now.
Taking a sip of my wine, which was surprisingly good, I set my desired search parameters: Age,thirty to fifty. Gender,any and all. Fur,no(allergic). Tentacles,no(shitalwaysgot weird). Horns,hmm, why not. Multiple partners… I considered this briefly, ultimately markingnowhen I realized that at forty, I was too old for that amount of work.
While I tapped my foot against the barstool, the app—reading my biorhythms and hormone fluctuations—lit up my VC with recommendations for a partner within a two-kilometer radius of my hotel. Which came to a whopping total of 4,152 beings. Apparently, I wasn’t the only antsy tourist looking for a little CAK strange.
WhileSqueewas designed to whittle my choices down to a handful of optimal matches for my current mood, occasionally, I liked perusing bios for my own entertainment. For instance, there was Martin, an accountant with a medium build from my home planet of Tranquis. Martin was recently divorced. He loved classical piano and downhill skiing, and he used to perform as a contortionist at the Gala Galaxia Extravaganza.
That might be interesting.
No sooner had the thought crossed my mind thanSqueeflashed a12% match for current moodwarning over Martin’s dimpled chin.Fair enough.
After a few more minutes of being scolded for considering partnersSqueedeemed unsuitable, I allowed the app to find my match. It presented me with three choices: two Venusian men and one stunning Portisan woman, her skin as blue as the oceans of her planet.
I considered sending the Portisan an in-app message, but with the Revel lights twinkling over the bar and the table of Vorpols behind me singing (meowing, more like) their planet’s bizarre, cat-themed holiday music, my mood was far too precarious to share it with an empath.
The Venusians were both handsome, but one of them, Joshua, had piercing gray-blue eyes that reminded me of a thunderstorm. There was no weather ontheIgnisar, and sometimes I missed the rain.
He was funny too. His bio read:Intermittently interesting. Passably presentable. Very Venusian,and that was all. And Joshua was staying in this hotel. Aside from self-deprecating humor, convenience was my second biggest turn-on.
When I askedSqueeto inform Joshua that I was interested, I received anExcellent choice, Sunastaramessage. Inclined to agree, I downed the rest of my wine, tapped the glass for a refill, and awaited Joshua’s response.
