The rest of the bar exploded, everyone drunk and itching for a fight.
The butterfly guy, though, took advantage of the distraction and swept all the currency off the table and into a bag.
Another alien staggered back from a blow someone had landed on its face and bumped into me, almost sitting in my lap. I pushed it off me and focused on the two who had started this bar brawl. They were still lunging, but neither had made contact.
This was a setup. They planned it all.
Without stopping to second-guess myself, I ducked and wove through the reeling crowd until I reached the back-entrance butterfly guy had slipped out through.
If my guess was right, I might have just found the crew I’d been looking for.
The exit led to the delivery corridors running throughout the station. Unlike the bars, these were well lit. Also less sticky. The walls and floor were a boring, uniform gray.
I glanced in each direction. To my right, I caught a glimpse of the butterfly guy as he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. Easing the door shut behind me, I moved as quickly and quietly as I could to follow him.
A few minutes later, I came around another corner in time to see an exit to the main concourse as it swung shut. I caught it an inch before it closed, holding the heavy door open enough to watch my quarry slide into a seat at the concourse-facing counter in what I would have called a coffee shop back home. Not that they served anything like coffee.
God, I miss coffee.
I let the thought fade away as I watched. A moment later, the Chilchek warrior lowered his bottom half into a crouch at the counter next to the butterfly guy. And not long afterward, the beautiful human took a seat on the other side.
I couldn’t see them communicating, but I was sure they were about to split their take and go.
“It’s now or never,” I murmured.
“What is?” Blue demanded.
I ignored the ship’s query and pulled the door wide, stepping through with a confidence I didn’t feel.
I never intended to end up on a space station full of aliens in some distant corner of the universe. Hell, before I got sucked through a wormhole and landed in the middle of this godsawful galaxy, I didn’t even know aliens existed.
No. I’d lived happily enough in my own galaxy, where I’d worked in my parents’ space salvage business, scavenging whatever we could find in abandoned asteroid mining camps and old shipwrecks floating in the void. All the flotsam and jetsam humans left behind in their desperate attempt to expand ever outward in the blackness of space.
That’s how I found Blue—officially The Bluebird—back when I was just a teenager. Her crew, a six-man outfit out of the Mars colony, had been drilling for water on a planetoid out in the Öpik–Oort cloud and contracted some virus that had been hiding in the ice for millions of years. They were still on the ship when I entered, their bodies flash-frozen when the AI vented the atmosphere after they all died.
Before they died, though, they set a plague-ship warning to keep other humans away.
They didn’t count on the determination of a teenage space junker looking to bring in a haul.
Blue had been half-crazy by the time I found her, alone in the inky dark for more than sixty years—a virtual eternity in computer time. I’d managed to jettison the bodies and interior items, decon the ship, and take her over. My parents wanted me to sell her, but I refused.
We’d been constant companions ever since.
Then, two months ago, Blue and I had been out past the Öpik–Oort, when we stumbled into an uncharted wormhole. It pulled us in and shot us out not 500 light-years from this hellhole of a space station. Then it closed back up, leaving me stranded.
I’d managed to trade some of the junk I had on board for a translator and a docking berth for Blue. We spent our days out searching for a way home. But I was running low on provisions, fuel, and stuff to trade. It was time to start figuring out how to make a living here.
And to do that, I needed locals. People who knew how the local system worked.
I needed a crew.
And a crew that could con the locals? Perfect for a junker like me.
The concourse was always busy, aliens of all descriptions moving through their daily tasks, hawkers calling out in a multitude of languages, so many that Blue didn’t even try to translate for me. As I stepped out of the hallway and headed toward the not-coffee shop, the Chilchek’s mandibles moved and the human’s head snapped up. As his gaze met mine, his eyes grew wide.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself, picking up my pace.
I came to a stop in front of them as they all three stood as if to leave.
“Wait. Don’t go.” I held my hands in front of me as if to show them I was unarmed—not that it would mean anything to anyone except the human.
He muttered something out of the corner of his mouth, and they all paused.
Even though all four of his lower legs were on the ground, the Chilchek’s horns still brushed the ceiling. He’ll have to crouch just to walk through the corridors of The Bluebird. I brushed the random thought away.
“Well?” the human asked after a long, silent moment.
“I want to hire you,” I blurted out. “I’m looking for a crew. And I want you three.”
2
Alder Regulus
“A crew?” I quirked an eyebrow as the cochlear language translator worked its magic. Not that I needed the implant to tell me what she’d just said; the nobility on my planet was well-versed in the three main ancient Earth languages. English, a variation of which my people typically spoke. Mandarin Chinese. Spanish. I even knew a few phrases in French, though France was culturally absorbed in the twenty-seventh century during
