Talis swallowed again, mind racing to find something—anything—to say in a dignified response to the Yu’Nyun captain.
Sophie stepped out from behind Talis, then repeated the gesture they had been shown. Even managed the angle in her elbows. The alien inclined its head slightly at her. No objections.
Bless her five times, Talis thought, and, with some progress being made toward a proper conversation, she found her voice.
“Captain, it is a pleasure to meet you.” Lie. “I am impressed by your grasp of our language.” No lie there. Her formal tone surprised her, but then again, her usual smuggler’s dialect could likely cause offense across cultural barriers. Something about the alien captain’s grasp of the Common Tongue put her on guard, made her careful of her word choice.
“You flatter me,” the alien replied. “It is a challenging language. The sounds are… well, you hear that they are quite different from our language.”
“That’s why I’m quite amazed at how well you manage it.”
“Perhaps one day you will learn our language yourself. I am sure you will exceed my skill if you try.”
“I would certainly give it my best,” she said.
This was the most transparent lie yet. After she helped them complete their mission, they could return to the vacuum beyond Peridot’s outer atmo and she’d gladly give their collective rumps a good smack to see them off.
The captain walked toward the fore of the bridge, the bulkhead of which was dominated by a large window. Talis admired the dizzying view at the top, where no lift balloon impeded their sight. It was after a slight delay that she remembered that the Yu’Nyun ship had no forward viewport. Certainly not of that size. The porthole was, it seemed, an enormous display screen. But unlike the grainy, monochromatic images that passed through the tiny Pre-Cataclysm devices Talis had seen in various temples, precious ’tronics used only to communicate with The Divine Alchemists, the Yu’Nyun ship had one so large and so advanced that they were looking outside the ship as clearly as though they looked through glass.
She had allowed herself to assume they were in the very forward cabin of the starship, but now realized the projection of an outside scene might come to them anywhere within the belly of the silver beast. The whole vessel made about as much sense as ballast on a boulder.
“Peridot is quite fascinating to my people,” the captain said, waving one hand vaguely at the scene displayed. “There are very few fragmented planets that we have come to, and no others are home to life.”
“I hear you’ve gathered a lot of knowledge from across the world,” Talis said, not sure what else to say. “You are likely better educated on the subject than we are.”
The alien made a small scraping noise in its throat, and Talis twitched involuntarily. It said, “It may well be fair to say that, though as you know we still have questions. We do wish to express our utmost appreciation for your cooperation.”
“The contract price is a fair expression of your gratitude.” By which she meant, Let’s not forget about that second payment with all this talk of cooperation.
“Such trivial matters are handled by our Representative of Commerce,” the commander said, almost dismissively.
Talis smiled. “Would that be the individual I met yesterday?”
The alien captain bobbed its head and wiggled its fingers as though pressing keys on an invisible piano. “You will meet that Representative again. Let us not dwell on such banalities. I am excited for the coming travel. Have you prepared our course?”
Sophie hurried to remove the tube that she wore slung over her shoulder.
Talis nodded and gestured to her. “This is Sophie, our engineer and navigator. May we spread our charts out somewhere?”
There was a shuffle of alien bodies across the deck, as several seats were cleared at the workstations along the wall. Sophie unrolled the vellum navigation charts across flat glossy control panels that had gone dark at their approach. She fished lead weights from her pockets and placed them in each corner so they didn’t curl back in.
Talis and the alien captain, joined by two of the bridge crew, gathered around the hand-illustrated charts of Peridot’s skies. There were vellum sheets for both the Cutter and Bone sides of the border that cut through the region, and one chart that was drawn with the current border centered. This last was on top of the pile. Talis smoothed them so that the sheets beneath showed through the top, and adjusted the alignment so they formed one continuous map. Borders from abandoned treaties showed to either side of the latest version. Shipping winds flowed in dotted light gray lines along their fixed dextral courses.
“We can sneak across the border here.” She put an index finger on the point where a storm center was marked near the dashed line that defined the territory’s edge, halfway between two stations indicated on the Cutter side.
“‘Sneak’?” The commander tried the word out, with a heavier accent than the rest of its speech, and looked to her. “This word is new to me.”
“Our territory borders are disputed,” she explained. “There are stations where ships are inspected prior to moving between Cutter and Bone space.”
“And you believe we would be prevented from entering?”
“Not you,” said Talis. “From what’s told on the docks, the authorities give you leave to go where you like. But I’m pretty certain our mutual friend, Captain Hankirk, will have sent out an alert that my crew and my ship are not to be permitted passage out of Cutter space. He will have significantly less ability to pursue us once we cross into another territory. Additionally, there is a member of my crew who might encounter trouble on the Bone side, at their crossing station. Passing at this point—traveling through the storm that forces the two nearest checkpoints farther apart—would let us ‘sneak’ through, as I said, without
