She frowned. It disappointed her to be so weak that a petty personal concern could interrupt her prayers. Claire kissed the crucifix on her rosary, then rose from the floor of her cabin, allowing herself a smile. She came up from her cross-legged position without using her hands, which was not easy. The pod containing her cabin ran at slightly higher than Terran gravity for the benefit of the Haxadis ambassador, consort, and entourage.
She picked a piece of white lint from the shoulder of her black jacket, then pulled the garment on. With the flick of her right hand she tugged her hair free of the jacket collar and made a mental note to get her hair cut back again. She deposited her rosary into the jacket pocket, then slipped from her cabin. The door hissed shut behind her, clicking reassuringly, freeing her to make her way outward to the pod lounge.
Qian starships were known to many humans as wasps because of their look. The cockpit formed the head and the hyperspace drive was built into the thorax. The abdomen, which could get quite long on the powerful ships, was made up of pods fixed around a central core. Gravity could be adjusted in each pod, and each pod itself could be configured for anything from hauling cargo to a medical facility, machine shop, or passenger compartment.
The pod to which Claire had been assigned had slightly more luxurious appointments than most passenger pods, but that was only because of the Haxadis contingent. Claire had expected to occupy a small cabin like the ones she’d been in throughout her journey, but when the Haxadissi had learned she was a Catholic priest, they insisted she take one of the empty cabins in their pod.
Claire knew that “insisted” was far too strong a word. A Qian officer had extended the offer to Claire on behalf of the Haxadissi, but from the way the Haxadissi treated her when they ran across each other, she suspected the aliens had been pressured into making room for her. The Qian clearly wanted her in that pod for mysterious reasons, and the Haxadissi had complied for reasons known only to them.
An offer of passage from some other aliens would have made perfect sense, since the Catholic Church had forged significant alliances with a number of xenotheological sects.
All of them shared a basic agreement on gradual revelation and the direct intervention of God in history, always in the person of a savior sent to redeem the preeminent species on that world. Most included a baptism of sorts, many with water, so that common ground was easy to find.
The Haxadis did have a religion, Lyshara, that involved gradual revelation and even the intervention of a god in the affairs of mortals, but there the similarities ended. Instead of dealing with Good and Evil, the Haxadis had a trio of figures that covered Good, Evil, and Justice. Justice most often came as a trickster or arbiter, serving to chasten the other two divine aspects. It often insulated mortals from divine wrath, but just as easily turned and punished mortals for their iniquity.
While at seminary Claire studied a paper that analyzed the Haxadis religion and tried to tie it more directly to Christianity. The author equated Justice with aspects of the Old Testament God, which was a far more persuasive argument than early missionaries had made in equating the Haxadis trinity to the Christian Trinity. Regardless, Claire had found the comparison grossly flawed, largely because it ignored the superstitious trappings that attended all other aspects of Lyshara. Her deconstruction and demolition of that paper had earned her high marks and even a kind word from Cardinal Winters.
The corridors of the Haxadis pod were roughly triangular in shape, being broader at the floor to accommodate their physiology. This actually made it easier for Claire to move through, since she could steady herself with her hands on the narrowed upper walls. She reached the lounge and found it unoccupied, which she did not mind. Crossing the open floor, she perched herself on a padded cylinder jutting from the wall, hooking her knees around it, and watched out the viewport as reversion melted reality.
Reversion communicated many things to many people, imparting to some visions, to others nightmares. Psychologists had suggested it was because the transition from extra-dimensional existence back into the real universe was so beyond the ability of minds to comprehend, that people instinctively sought reassuring or fundamental images. For Claire, a black cylinder streaked with rainbow stripes both narrow and thick simply melted into a greater darkness stippled with light and grandly splashed with color where the system’s planets orbited. The fundamental vision she sought was neither ecstatic nor terrifying, just reality.
“Thank you, God, for the safety of our journey.”
Though she had kept her prayer a whisper, a hiss from the doorway suggested she had been overheard. She turned slowly, doing her best to stifle a shiver. To shiver would have been quite rude, and might have even toppled her from her Haxadis version of a chair.
But for a Terran, stifling a shiver would take superhuman effort.
The Haxadis ambassador, her abdomen swollen with child, slithered her way into the lounge. Light glistened golden from her scaled flesh, highlighting the bands of yellow, red, and black marking her from head to toe. The pattern continued on her arms and fingers, the narrow band of yellow contrasting with the thicker bands of red and black.
The scales of her abdomen were similarly colored, though slightly bleached over her breasts and belly. Her face did jut into a muzzle, complete with a lipless mouth. Claire saw no hint of fangs, though she knew enough to know they were retractable and seldom seen.
Claire slowly stood, then bowed her head. “Peace be with you, Ambassador Soluvinum.”
The female Haxadis spared her only the slightest of glances. Her dark eyes had no warmth in them at all, and her manner remained quite cool. She slithered off to the lounge’s far corner and her consort, a male, moved with her. Seated, the Haxadissi were as tall as Claire, but their serpentine tails easily measured three times the length of her legs. As they sat, they wrapped their tails around the cylindrical post from which jutted the branch where they sat.
A smaller Haxadis undulated over to Claire. It had black scales with two red stripes running down the length of its body and ivory abdominal scales. It massed three quarters of what the ambassador or her consort did, and Claire knew it to be of a caste below that of the nobility. When the Haxadissi had interacted directly with Claire, it had been this creature that had been saddled with the task of buffering its masters from her.
“My mistress bids you welcome, Priest.”
Claire smiled. At the start, the creature had referred to her as “priestess,” which had annoyed her because of its inaccuracy. “I appreciate being shown your hospitality on the last leg of this journey. I am certain the station will be dull in comparison to this pod.”
The little Haxadis cocked its head to the right. “You have not been here before?”
“No.”
“We have, on our outbound journey. This system is positioned such that it allows for a swifter, more direct route to our home than picking our way from star to star.” The little creature clasped dark stubby-fingered hands across its ivory abdomen. “The station was very nice…”
A sharp hiss by the ambassador snapped the aide’s head around, narrowing its nostril slits. The aide bowed its head without looking back again at Claire. “My mistress…”
“Of course.” Claire smiled, again suppressing a shudder as the Haxadis sinuously sped off. She turned and looked out the viewport as the Qian station came into view. It had an official designation, but to all humans sent out here, it was known as Purgatory Station.
Purgatory Station existed out at the fringes of the Qian Commonwealth. A little over a century and a half previous the Qian had come to Terra and told mankind that while humans had not yet expanded beyond their own solar system, they were close to discovering the secret of hyperspace travel. The Qian offered to make Terra a protected world and integrate it into the Commonwealth, and humanity had accepted the offer.
Qian technology, as it turned out, surpassed human invention on many fronts, and the station had been built using it to its utmost. Massive gravity generators had been focused on an asteroid and had compressed it until it became molten rock, perhaps even plasma.
Computers then manipulated the gravity to shape it, tunnel it, and recreate it into the shell they wanted. Factory ships arrived and began producing the parts needed to build it out. Before long—an eye blink in Qian terms, and less than a decade in human reckoned time—the station had come on-line and the Catholic Church had assigned chaplains to it.
Another warning tone sounded as the ship slipped into orbit around the rocky station.
The Haxadis pod shook, then lifted away from the Ghoqomak. This surprised Claire.
She’d been told that she’d have to transfer to one of the cargo pods to make her way to the station, since the starship was set for the quick resumption of the long run to Haxad once it had dropped the pods meant for Purgatory Station.
