THE VAST AND EMPTY SKY
Thrawn B7
Jinbe
9:30 Local Time
3616
Jinbe
9:30 Local Time
3616
It was a universal fact of time and space that all motels located off to the side of a major thoroughfare, usually within walking distance of the exit ramp (or that era's equivalent) were as sleazy and suspicious as a used starship salesman. Not to say that all starship salesmen were sleazy and of questionable moral character, but there was a reason the used starship industry and the hair gel industry were joined at the hip, and there were some in certain sects of the Cyanian Empire that believed that the motel industry was in on it.
One such person was most certainly one Freyran human by the name of Emilia Jorgeir, who thought as much while staring at a flatscreen videocaster on the far wall of her off-brown Speekizi 8th Year motel room, her state of dress and the fan on the ceiling doing little to cool her suffering body in the heat of Jinbe's desert sun. She considered removing the last vestige of decency she was wearing at the moment, but judging by the color of the sheets the only reason she wasn't keeping a hazmat suit and a foot of armor between the bed and her body (let alone her crotch) was because it would poach her alive if the armor didn't grill her buns (so to speak). Fifty degrees in the shade, and the air conditioning was off! She'd wrestle a Panzerian with her bare hands for a bowl of rum chocolate and fried banana cakes with a cold beer on the side.
But such thoughts would have to wait. Today was an important day - the day she would get her next job as a freelance escort pilot. Of cargo ships of course, not of men - she had tried the latter, and all it did was convince her that she'd never work with a Bebbikaxian in any such capacity again. For such a cautious, nonviolent species of testudines they sure had a knack for screwing you over when it came to money.
A quick shower to wake her up a little, then back to the bedroom to watch a bit of television while she dried off - in this heat she'd let herself be cooled by water on her skin for as long as bloody possible. Sadly, the videocaster didn't have many channels - news, news, nature documentary, bad children's programming, an animated series in a language she didn't understand (no subtitles either), shopping channel, shopping channel, Cinemax. She settled on the nature documentary and spent the better part of an hour watching a Panzerian with a convincing (but clearly fake) Australisan accent wrestle wild Deviljhos on Voeddir C, all while talking about how beautiful their coloration was and how it was a a shame their environment was being impeded by development.
When the program finally ended, she headed down to the ground floor to the motel's mini-cafe with her travel pack slung over her back. It served the standard fare for a motel - toast, Oug eggs, oatmeal, Stroq steaks, Danarind juice, and coffee, among other fares. All of it thawed and reheated from a cargo ship that hadn't been cleaned in months no doubt, but it was at least edible by most species, humans included. Not that Emilia would dare put any of that crap in her mouth - all she was here for was the coffee. The Chaqadiddik that ran the motel chain (and the Chaqadiddik that ran this particular establishment) both shared their species' weakness for caffeine, and their coffee was the strongest and best in the quadrant. Which was the only psychoactive chemical the Cousin Itt-looking aliens seemed to have any weakness for - alcohol did nothing, and most other drugs simply got kicked out of their systems by a highly evolved immune system.
Coffee bitter as truth and black as the night in hand, Emilia was halfway out the door before the motel manager made a hem-hem at her. She turned to look at him, curious as to what the hairy alien wanted this time, her glowing green goggle-eyes blinking once in mild confusion.
"Forgetting something, are we?" Wiizer asked in his species' raspy tone of voice. Emilia looked at the coffee in her hand, the wallet she was in the process of shoving into her backpack in her other hand, and shrugged.
"Got everything not with my ship in the hangar on me, why?"
"What about... a shirt?"
Ah yes, shirts. For such a hairy species, Chaqadiddiks were rather fashionable. And traditional, when it came to dress morals.
Emilia looked down at her anti-perspiration bike shorts, then back to Wiizer. "It's fifty degrees outside and only expected to get hotter. I have an interview, and I'd rather not show up soaked in sweat, so I'm getting a tailored suit on the way. Besides, it's not illegal."
Wiizer gave her an are-you-sure-about-that glare, then shrugged the upper two of his six arms. "Fair enough. Just be careful, alright?"
"I'm always careful, Wiizer."
"No you aren't."
She laughed. "No, I'm not, but I ain't dead, either." And with that she continued on out the door. A tricycle taxi that looked remarkably like an upside-down trowel blade took her towards the city center and her destination - the promenade. Because Jinbe was surrounded on three sides by large mesas too small for spacecraft landing strips and prone to dust storms that prevented VTOL pads, its spaceport was in, well, space - connected to the ground by a large space elevator. Surrounding the elevator itself on the ground was a small shopping mall full of inexpensive stores, restaurants, and stalls - the 'luxury' (if one can could anything on Thrawn B7 luxurious) stores were on the space station itself, along with the docks and a large motel for weary travellers who couldn't handle Thrawn B7's atmosphere or just hated certain properties of sand.
Because of the presence of the spaceport, Jinbe was easily the most cosmopolitan city on the moon. Species and animals from all across the quadrant and from all three of the galactic Great Powers could be found here, which was great if you loved food and bad if you had allergies, or preferred your cities with some semblance of architectural continuity. From the station, Jinbe looked like bits of twelve different cities cobbled together, with the most notable stick-out part being the native Thrawnian skyscrapers in the financial district with their bulbous tips.
Mercifully the taxi was AI-driven, and after a simple button press the chatty AI stopped talking about football and started exuding blessed, blessed silence, interrupted only by classical music. Relaxed into a state of calm by the ancient rymes, Emilia saw fit to sink into the pleather seating. Not the most comfortable usually, but there was something about a clean AI taxi that induced you to nap all the way to one's destination, which Emilia did.
The facility was a small seafood restaurant by the name of The Fatty Tail. It was manned by a male Kzarknan by the name of Emikk, a member of a reptilian species under the wing of the Cipaqoaltan Federation. Anywhere but the Void, the idea of a Cipaqoaltan and a human engaging in business, let alone talking or even just not killing each other, would have been seen as bizarre in the extreme outside of the diplomatic field. In the Void, or at least on the edges, it was a Tuesday. Some people were here to hide, some were out for the glorious life of the mercenary (or pirate), some were just antisocial. You didn't ask if you weren't asked in turn, and you rarely were asked in turn unless it was someone's business, or they remembered you from somewhere.
Emilia knew Emikk's story because she had encountered him at The Sunken Norwegian, one of the more popular bars on the space elevator's ground promenade and one of both of their favorite haunts. He had been a colonel in the Cipaqoaltan Federation Army tasked with taking Mike-1. When he failed to take it after a full year's worth of fighting, he had been told he was being 'replaced' by a bitter rival. There was a fight, he was charged with assaulting a high-ranking political officer, and he took a corvette and ran. He was wanted in most of Cipaqoaltan space and had been planning on laying low in the Great Void until it blowed over. Instead, his corvette blew up in orbit of Thrawn and he had been stuck here with a bunch of 'fucking apes and beasts' ever since. As the bartender later informed him, he liked to tell that story whenever he got drunk and there were a lot of Cyanians and ex-Cyanians in the bar, just to remind them that he could kill them all if he wanted to.
After several minutes, Emilia was at the front of the line to this old warrior's stall. She looked down at the paper in her hand, then at the sign next to Emikk's stall. Then back at the paper, then back at the sign, then a few repetitions of this, her expression growing more and more nonplussed. She had no eyelids, but rows of lights on her 'eyes' dimmed to green-black to mimic them closely enough.
Finally, she spoke.
"Emikk, you scaly fuck! FIVE thousand for Merinian black marlin? Last week it was three thousand, and the ads you had published this goddamn morning said they were thirty-five hundred!"
"Hey, fuck you, ape - I gotta make ends meet, too! Not my fault nobody wants seafood on a desert planet!" His voice was more gravelly than hiss-like, an unusual feature of Kzarnakans compared to most reptilian races. Or maybe it was just Emikk. Emilia wasn't sure, she hadn't fought many of them before.
"I do, and I'm your best customer! And don't lie to me, I saw you drive out of the Memphis dealership with a brand new speeder yesterday!"
"Well, I'm running low on it, so I gotta keep the price up until I get another shipment!"
"You got a shipment yesterday you reptile-brained scam artist!"
"It's popular!"
"You just-" She held her hand up as if she was about to really start digging into him, then as if she was about to reach for her pistol (and Emikk seemed about to reach for his), but she let it drop and sighed angrily.
"You know what? Fine. Screw it, I don't have time to argue about this. Gimme a Vaprion crawfish po'boy, extra onions, no ketchup, and a large Coco Loco."
"Two thousand thirty." She forked out the necessary payment from her wallet - lightsheets, of course. Unhackable ones - the lightsheets used for 'paper' money were deliberately made too primitive to be hackable. Emikk grunted in approval that she had actually paid him the correct amount, then waved her off. Emilia was all too happy to comply with the unspoken order, as she had one more stop to make, three blocks away. Even in the heat though she didn't go right away of course - it made no sense to get your suit tailored while holding a crustacean sandwich, so she sat down on a park bench and finished it and the can of Coco Loco off, watching with muted amusement as an advertising blimp attempted to drift by overhead, only to repeatedly get stuck between two high-rises before it simply gave up and flew over them.
Nashwar Brphicru was a large chain of apparel run by the Gamirk Clan, a wealthy family of Guicoje - giant intelligent arachnoid aliens that were surprisingly unhairy and un-evil, though they tended to creep some people out anyway. Like the Chaqadiddiks, they were big in the galactic (or at least Cyanian) fashion industry, but they were much more experimental. Naswhar Brphicru was notable in the industry for doing in-building and on-the-spot tailor work for a few thousand credits more than a regular suit. Which was what Emilia was here for - decades of fitted flight suits made her rather uncomfortable in anything not tailor-made for her proportions.
"Come in, come in," said a green Guicoje in a sing-song voice. "Ah! Emilia, lovely to see you again, just lovely, your dress blues are always such a joy to work with, such agreeable fabric, so well-behaved, I almost wish you got it damaged more often - no offense, of course."
"None taken, but I just need a regular suit this time, Acerev."
"Naturally, natürlich, prirodzene, tōzen! Any preference for color?"
Emilia thought for a minute before shrugging. "You're the tailor." The giant arachnid grinned, as much as an arachnid can grin, and six chopstick-like three fingered 'hands' went to work.
Not fifteen minutes later, Emilia's bank account was thirty thousand lighter but she was decked out in a true blue suit with a single-breasted blazer and golden yellow shirt. Despite all the layers, thanks to Guicojean silk it was light, breathable, and strong - possibly bulletproof, but most wouldn't dare risk damaging a suit of Guicojean silk so. Sure it was hot with it on, but compared to Trerian handsilk, cotton, or wool it was like wearing as little as she had on before. It was comfortable enough that she decided to just walk to her destination on the other side of the promenade, a journey that took a mere twenty minutes. And, bonus, she wasn't even remotely sweaty by the time she got there.
The Ugly Dekling was the name of the facility. Like the Sunken Norwegian, it was a bar, however for a spaceport bar it looked strangely out of place, creepy, and rarely visited. Ironically, this made it a very safe bar to visit, and to hold meetings in. Perhaps it was deliberate. It was also the largest and most expensive bar on the ground, taking up two floors. It was more of a tavern, really, but it had no sleeping quarters so a bar it was.
Emilia pushed open the door to the bar (Swinging wooden saloon doors! What is this, the gunpowder age?) and looked around. The Dekling was dekced out like an ancient hunter's trophy room, except with a lot more alien species. And duck plates. So goddamn many commemorative plates with ducks on 'em. Normally such a plate would look downright cozy, but the sheer out-of-placeness of the Ugly Dekling, the fact that the lighting would regularly just shut down for no reason, and every taxidermied animal having been done slightly wrong dropped it straight into concerning-ness. The bartender, a human by the name of Bruno King (who looked a bit like a Korvash with all the hair) was certainly a weird one. Friendly, but weird.
"Yo, Emilia!"
"Yo, Bruno. So you got any idea what this's about?"
He shrugged. "Some guy from the Empire wants to talk to ya, 'n a buncha others. He's in the loft."
The 'loft' was a half-circle shaped raised platform in the back of the part of the bar open to the public. It had a smaller bar attached to it, it had the biggest, plushest, backless chaise lounges, and it had the fewest tables. It was also invite-only.
After being let up the stairs by one of the bouncers, it didn't take very long at all for the Freyan human to spot who she was supposed to talk to. A male Taurian in a plain black suit. His square bodybuilder frame, dark grey skin, and massive horns made him look almost demonic. He spotted her almost as soon as she spotted him, and waved her over.
"Ah, so you're the person with the job. I-"
"Not yet," he almost grunted out. "Wait for the others."
Emilia opened her mouth to complain, then opted to instead help herself to the plate of tea sandwiches and cheese-crackers on the coffee table that filled the space between the semicircle of chaise lounges nearest the loft guardrail. Prosthetics she may have had, but Taurians were built like dreadnoughts, and she didn't fancy arguing with a species known for responding to insults with fists that could bench press a tank. So she waited.
