I slip into the bar as quietly as possible. There’s a trick when it comes to espionage. You want to fit in. You want to be the averagest average person that ever averaged. I got really good at that on Earth. It was easier there, because I didn’t stand out among other people. I always made sure my hair was dyed a nondescript dirty blonde so dark it looked brown. I didn’t wear makeup, an act that on its own made me fade into the wallpaper in a lot of men’s eyes.
When I step into this bar, I make sure to do so in the wake of a much larger alien. I know I might stand out just by being a human female, so I just try to keep out of sight. The lights are a lot lower in the bar, and I make for the shadows immediately.
If anybody has noticed me, I haven’t noticed them noticing me. A lot of the languages being spoken here are completely unintelligible to me. That could be a problem. Humans who live on the floating cities all speak the same language, but it’s not galactic.
Fortunately, during the course of my espionage training I was taught a smattering of galactic language, and there are some aliens who are speaking that here. So I just need to listen in for the ones who are clearly interested in conversing outside their species.
I overhear some very strange conversations. They can’t be real. They have to be fucking with me. Or with each other.
“Unicorn infestations are getting out of hand. They’re going to do another cull.” An ethereal-looking alien man with a crown on his head is talking in a slightly slurred tone.
“What do youmean?” His companion responds with an exclamation of absolute shock that pretty much mimics my own response.
“Unicorns are heavy grazers. They can strip an entire ecosystem in a matter of days sometimes. Their numbers have to be kept down.”
“And then there’s the virgins.”
“Virgins?”
“Oh, yeah. The virgins are spreading like wildfire.”
“Hello, human.” Someone addresses me directly, and I am mentally dragged away from the conversation I am overhearing.
“Excuse me?”
A fuzzy yellow creature with a big smile and big round eyes set in a smooth, almost plastic seeming face fringed by fuzz approaches me in the shadows. There’s something unsettling about the alien, who I think is male, though with aliens those terms often don’t apply—except when it comes to the ones interested in and drawn to human females.
“You’re human,” he says in slow, clear galactic.
I’m so relieved to have someone speak to me intelligibly I almost don’t think about how dangerous it is to be recognized. Besides, he doesn’t really look all that dangerous. He’s not wearing clothes so much as he is completely covered in a soft yellow down that makes him look a little like a children’s toy turned into real life.
“No,” I say. “I just play one.”
I lie reflexively at this point. My job has trained me to always keep something secret. Being known is dangerous. If I’d had the sense to maintain a secret home base, then I wouldn’t have almost gotten shot in my own lounge, for instance. My life so far has been a series of events teaching me to keep others at a mental and emotional distance. I’m not going to forget this because the creature I’m talking to looks like a popular Earth toy.
“Oh,” the alien says. “That’s smart. Really smart. You look so real.”
“Thanks,” I say in my own tongue. “I’m actually a six-foot razor beast stuffed into a human suit.”
The joke ruins it. Damnit. I got cocky. I know the second the creature tips its head to the side just enough to indicate disbelief.Apparently some gestures are pretty much universal. Theyou’re full of itone certainly seems to be.
“You speak a human dialect without an accent.”
“I’m smart,” I say, directly after doing the most stupid thing possible. To be fair, I did not expect him to be able to understand human anything. We’re a small species in the grand scheme of things. There are only three billion of us total after the events that required the floating cities to be built. Most aliens will never encounter a human in their lives, or even believe that one exists.
The alien smiles at me. “I think you’re human, and I think you’re going to need help to get off this station without being turned into someone’s slave.”
“Is that right?”
I’m feeling the tingles of discomfort that often come before something very bad happening. This thing has my number and I would bet good money he plans the creature turning me into a slave will be him. Can’t let it happen. Won’t let it happen.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“No, thank you, I drank earlier,” I say.
He smiles at me and looks me up and down. “You should let me buy you a drink. You never know what could happen to you if you don’t have the protection of a good male.”
Oh, god. I’ve traveled lightyears to another galaxy and the very first thing I’ve done is run into a self-proclaimed nice guy.
