• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“The crew lift is—?”

She turned her back to me. “Smik! Show this ground-hog where the crew lift is!”

One of the people rushing around checking telltales and doing engineering stuff broke off and dashed up to me. He had four arms and blue skin, an alien type I couldn’t place. I thought we only had contact with Skikka and two other alien races, but I’m not always up on the news. He had kind of a lump for a head, with eye spots all the way around it. “Come,” he said in a mushy voice—his mouth was in the center of his naked blue chest—and he trundled out of the engine room, using his lower two arms along with his two legs to locomote. He was hard to keep up with.

He rolled right through a hidden door that led to narrow gray halls toward the ship’s core. What do you know, there were three lifts back there. He tapped a button to summon one and didn’t wait around to see me get into it.

I played with Fern in the cabin until we were underway, and then Johanson called down and said she was sending someone to take me to the damage sites for inspection, and would I please take off my damned suit?

Since she put it in the form of a question, I decided not to, but I didn’t tell her that. Someone else was going to show me around. Maybe Johanson would never find out.

I hung my sampling case off my shoulder and slapped a cloth patch across my Delaney Pest Control logo. Sometimes you want to advertise, and sometimes anonymity is better. The door guard pinged, and I opened it to discover Smik. He looked past me at Fern. “You brought your young?” he asked.

Fern stared at him and screamed. The calmers had worn off, for sure. “That’s not the way I raised you, young lady. You be quiet now,” I said. It didn’t work. She hid her head against the hardshell over my chest and screamed and sobbed.

“Mr. Smik, could you wait outside? I’ll be with you in a minute,” I said.

“She is perfect,” he said.

I couldn’t disagree with him more.

The door snicked shut and Fern stopped crying. She pushed away from me and stared into my eyes.

“I have to go to work now,” I told her, “and you have to do your job, which is being a little kid. In the care cage.”

“Okay,” she said. I locked her in and she rolled around on the floor of the cage, smashing into the bars, which were cushioned and gave. “You should get a cage, Mama,” she said.

“I’ve got one that walks.” I tapped my chest and went out to Smik.

“We must go to passenger territory,” Smik said. He had more liquid in his mouth than humans usually did. Some of his words bubbled. “The suit is disturbing.”

“We can just tell ’em it’s a costume for the ball tomorrow night.” Fern had accessed the ship schedule of passenger activities, which had amused both of us. Now I knew what kinds of things rich folks did for fun. “How do they react to you?” I asked Smik.

Smik shook his head lump, and parts of his anatomy between his eyes and mouth swelled up a little. I sure didn’t know how to read that.

We took a crew elevator up to the promenade deck. Smik stopped at a storage space and took out a pale robe, which he dropped over himself. It had a maintenance crew patch on the front. It covered the extra arms, and the high collar concealed the fact that he had no neck. The ring of eyes and the smooth blue surface of his headbump were quite odd- looking. He pulled something else out of storage and dropped it on his headbump, and I shuddered. He’d just put what looked like a human head on top of his, complete with short, dark hair. He tapped the collar of the robe, and the new head adhered to it.

“How can you see?” I asked.

“Eye holes,” he mushed. The words came from his chest. All right, nobody wanted him talking to the passengers. The upside was that his blue hands looked like gloves, if you didn’t look too close and realize his fingers were thin and stick- like and there were a lot of them, kind of clustered.

“Lead on,” said I, and followed this spooky-looking dude out into the sacred passenger space.

The decor