We finally dropped out of the hyperstream in the Fade Bjatri system, where all of the other Collective naval ships and other bigwigs had agreed to rendezvous. Apparently Arana’s presence meant that we counted as bigwigs. Of course, it didn’t particularly matter, given that there was nobody else there except for a couple of stray cruisers. It made sense; once we were out of range of the Order’s sensors, there had been no reason not to use Dr. Erobosh’s modifications to give us a speed boost. The downside was that we were going to have to wait; and Fade Bjatri was just about the worst system one could find oneself having to wait in. 

Fade Bjatri was a shitty, pathetic red dwarf star, and the only reason anyone lived there at all was that it was placed in the exact right place for a refueling depot. Half of the system’s population consisted of people who stopped at that wheel-shaped space station orbiting around the outermost gas giant, and were gone within a day or two. The remainder were either people who provided goods and services for the transients, or a small group of Pioneers fleeing ethnic persecution on some backwater, who enjoyed the isolation of setting up a domed colony on a Mars-sized frozen rock in the middle of absolutely nowhere, but also enjoyed the convenience of at least having a Q-com somewhere within the same solar system. Besides that? No life, no planets with a breathable atmosphere, no interesting exotic minerals or oddities of physics, nothing. It was space, in its purest and most bland form. 

We docked with the station, of course. Not that there was anything wrong with escaping from your oppressors to a cold, lonely ice rock. We chose better accommodations over a lesson in cultural appreciation. 

All in all, it was a similar procedure to docking with the spaceport above New Malagasy. The same sudden loss of gravity, the same achingly slow series of maneuvers as we locked into the edge of the wheel, and the same awkward waiting period while the traffic controllers decided how likely we were to start something. The only difference was that none of the back and forth banter between Dr. Erobosh and the station happened in English, like it had in Collective territory. 

Having only been stuck on the Helium Glider for a few days, there was little pressure to leave, even once the umbilicus doors were open. Still, more space is better, and like scents wafting through a room we slowly drifted out into the open spaces of the Fade Terminal. At first glance, it wasn’t a pretty sight; at second glance, it was downright unpleasant. The floors and walls of the passageways made the interior of Fade Terminal feel somewhat like a gigantic mall, married to a fallout bunker. It was all tile and cold steel, kept spotlessly clean by an army of tiny helpers that absolutely could not disguise the rust and decay that had taken hold once every twenty feet or so. The air was warm and dry, and there was something wrong with the filtration system that made the entire place smell like old sweat. 

The people were on the odd side of things as well. They moved quickly through the corridors, always glancing over their shoulders and looking at our group with mixed suspicion and pity. To be fair to them, we did stand out, a group that moved in a tight knot amongst a crowd of loose-knit parties and lone travelers. I wasn’t quite sure what that said about Fade Terminal, but whatever it said wasn’t good. 

Dr. Erobosh had apparently regained Stellina and Arana’s trust after the Nahoroth incident, enough so that they openly suggested he take Miri and Quinn so we could have “family time.” That scared me right away; from the gleam in Arana’s eye, she had a plan. Alas, I wasn’t feeling quite up to the task of protesting, and Miri seemed to enjoy the idea of being away from me, so there was little I could do. My parents apparently knew something about how to navigate this kind of terminal, and so avoided the dreaded “family of tourists bumbling around the city looking for something interesting” syndrome. Instead, they quickly snapped onto the local network, and after a few minutes of quiet discussion, made a beeline for something about a third of the way around the main public ring. 

With the foreknowledge that my parents had a plan, I had a bit of an expectation about where we might have been heading. A park, maybe, or a public library; if Stephanie had been planning it, possibly a sports stadium of some kind. But no, because my adoptive parents still had some surprises in store for me, even after eighteen years. It was a tavern. 

Okay, maybe the word “tavern” undersells it; the place was huge. But the low lighting, the multiple bars, and the constant din of conversation made it not classy enough to call a restaurant, and the only other word that comes to mind is “nightclub”, which implies much more cocaine and lasers than wherever this was. Maybe you could get away with calling it a “pub”, if pubs had two floors. Either way, if Stellina had told me that we were there to meet her friend Strider and pick up some side quests, I would have believed her.

We settled around a small table in the middle of the lower room. Stellina scanned the area, and Arana looked faintly nervous, but neither said anything. The sacred duty of breaking the silence fell to me.

“You know, I didn’t really expect that you two would be the kinds of parents to do the ‘you’re eighteen, it’s time for your first drink’ thing. Just so you know, the handbook said that Emissaries have, just, the worst alcohol tolerance.”

Stellina cracked a half-smile. “This isn’t what this is about,” she said, “though I’m glad you remembered that part for later.”

“Then… what is this about?” I asked. “If you’re trying to give me the talk, you’re about five… well, it’s probably been closer to six months by now—”

“Not that either!” Stellina said hurriedly.

“Cathy…” Arana sighed, and her shoulders sagged, and she suddenly looked a lot older. “With what just happened on New Malagasy, there’s going to be a war. A war against a group of people whose entire purpose so far has been to kill people like you. And someday you’re going to head off on your own, and we won’t be able to protect you any longer.”

“We had a conversation about this, and we decided that we should teach you what we had to know about surviving in dangerous places.”

I’ll admit, I laughed at that idea. Quinn could teach me; Xara could teach me; even Miri could teach me because she knows how to kick people really well. But those two? “I really don’t see what you could teach me about surviving,” I said in between chuckles. 

“Kiddo, do you know what we did before we retired to raise you?”

“Uh, you were in the navy or something, right? The Tigress of Telemachus Cloud.”

“Oh how I hate that name,” Arana said, rolling her eyes. “But yes. And it wasn’t a political commission; I rose through the ranks, and I saw quite a few dangerous situations while I did it.”

“Of course, she always had a battalion at her back. I was a free trader. Nothing to get me out of trouble but my own wits and a small collection of close companions.”

Arana chuckled nostalgically. “Dearest, there’s nobody around, you don’t have to keep calling yourself a free trader. She was a smuggler, a con woman, a pirate, and a half a dozen other things that can get you in trouble with the Architects.”

“It’s all semantics,” Stellina said, making a disgustingly wholesome facial expression toward my other mom. “The point is, we’ve learned how to survive in dangerous places, and we want to pass that learning down to you as best as we can.”

My immediate reaction, as usual, would be to make a dumb joke about it. To be fair, it was a fairly absurd idea. Other kids got family heirlooms, old books, grandpa’s ashes; I got hand-me-down survival skills. Which, I guess, was just about the most badass thing that a parent could give a child. “Fuck aesthetics, here’s how to keep yourself alive.”

“I… alright. What do you have to share?”

Arana sprang into action, taking a printed sheet of paper from out of her bag and sliding it across the table. “So the first thing you need to know is some of the basic symbols of the enemy.”

The sheet was indeed covered in about a dozen various symbols, printed in black ink. About half of them were variants on the same design: a series of concentric circles, the outermost of which radiated five downward-pointing arrows. The other half was a bewildering array of symbols of various sizes, shapes, and levels of detail. 

“I’m guessing this circles-and-arrows thing is the space swastika or whatever?”

“The pale star,” Stellina said. “As in the Order of the Pale Star. So, essentially, yes. Anyone who uses that, has it on their body, anything, is someone you cannot trust.”

Arana leaned forward. “These two are lesser-known symbols that the Order also uses sometimes. They have other uses, though. More something to be careful about than a definite red flag.”

She pointed to two of the symbols on the bottom half of the paper. One was instantly recognizable as the fasces, a stylized drawing of a bundle of sticks with an axe blade sticking out of one end. The other was more mysterious: at first I thought it was just a figure-eight, but upon a closer inspection I realized it was a snake coiled into the figure-eight, with its tail in its mouth. 

“Okay, sure. What about all those other ones?”

Arana sighed. “Smaller groups of racists and bigots. The Architect Social Unity Party, the Sons of Avejor, that sort of thing. Some of them are aligned with the Order directly, others aligned in spirit.”

“You’ll especially want to watch out for this one,” Stellina said. She pointed to one of the other symbols, a weird series of vertical lines interrupted by diagonals, tiny circles, and odd wedge-shapes. “That’s the Dominators brand symbol. The Dominators haven’t been a big player for a while, but you still see people using it every so often.”

“So, like, the iron cross to the pale star’s swastika?”

Stellina stopped, mouth half-open, for a second. “Um. Sort of?”

“How do you know so much about hate symbols?” said Arana.

How she didn’t instantly know the answer to her own question, I’ll never know. I looked her dead in the eyes and said, “My best friend is gay, my girlfriend is Jewish and Asian, and apparently I’ve been wrestling with being some flavor of nonbinary for most of my life. I picked it up.”

Both of my parents made a sound like they’d gotten punched in the gut.

“Alright, moving on…” Stellina briefly scanned the surrounding tables, “do you see the Pioneer over there?”

I turned, following her eyes, to see that there was indeed a small, reedy Pioneer a few tables over, clutching a frosted glass full of something and absentmindedly scraping their claws across the floor. “What about them?”

“They’re concealing a weapon. Probably a small blaster if I had to guess.”

“What?!” I said, my wings fluttering in alarm. 

“Shhh!” Stellina held out an arm. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. Lots of people carry a weapon, especially on a station like this. That doesn’t necessarily mean they plan to use it; it’s just something that you have to be careful about.”

I twisted around at the waist to get a better look at the Pioneer, maybe to see where they were hiding the blaster. 

“Don’t stare, either.”

I turned back to face Stellina. “How do you know they have a weapon?”

“A few different ways. One of them is just their mood; a person carrying a weapon will generally look a hell of a lot more confident than someone unarmed. But I don’t think you’ll be able to tell that, being autistic and all. The way that I think will work better for you is to learn the ways that people tend to hide weapons, and identify when someone is using one of them.”

I looked back at the Pioneer again, this time for no more than a second or two. They were wearing typical Pioneer clothes, or more precisely the typical Pioneer pouches and belts. Either way, nothing that would indicate the presence of a hidden weapon. 

“I really don’t see it.”

“That’s alright. You’ve never had to practice this skill before, whereas I’ve been doing it since I was ten. Do you want me to tell you?”

I paused, then gave the Pioneer one last glance. “Sorry, did you say ten?”

“Yeah, I did,” said Stellina. “I’ll… tell you about where I grew up some later time. Do you want me to tell you?”

I nodded.

She leaned in, and I did the same. “Look by the right hip, just above the frontmost leg. That pouch has reinforced walls and a quick-release catch. Plus it’s designed to fit with the leg joint to make it look smaller than it is. Plain as day.”

As soon as she was done talking, I did a double take. The hidden blaster suddenly looked blatantly obvious. “Well. I’ve learned my lesson. Never get into a fight in a tavern.”

“If that Pioneer happened to think that Lucifer ‘had some good ideas’, you might not have a choice. This is important, kiddo.”

I sagged. “I know.”

“Okay, let me make it easy for you,” said Stellina. “I have three weapons on me right now. Your mother has one that I know of. Try to figure out where they are. You can take as long as you want.”

That was when the server arrived. I really, really hoped that they didn’t hear any of that conversation. It didn’t look like they had; though, from what I knew of the service industry, they probably would have been able to maintain the same blankly pleasant smile even if they had. I had to hurry to open up the menu and order something, because I was too busy thinking about the challenge.

I mean, it was stupid. Part of me thought that there was no way that my parents, my freaking parents, would actually have concealed weapons on them, and this was probably some corny lesson about paranoia and confirmation bias or something. The other part of me really wanted to prove myself. 

“Try not to stare,” Stellina said gently. “Best to avoid making that a habit now, rather than later.”

So I didn’t stare. Or, at the very least, I pretended to look off into the distance, and confined my staring to no more than a second or two at a time. Stellina’s outfit was completely normal for her: a short jean-jacket that she’d brought all the way from Earth, fancy plastic space jeans with lots of pockets, a plain t-shirt. No obvious spots for any kind of weapon. Arana looked even less like she was concealing anything, in a sweater and baggy pants. In other words, despite everything, they still looked like two fifty-year-old moms.

I tapped my fingers against the table and got really, intensely focused. If I was going to get this right, which felt very important for some reason, I was going to have to use all of my senses. Listening for hidden weapons was generally a non-starter. I came up with a backup plan for if I couldn’t find anything before we were finished eating, wherein I gave both of my adoptive parents very tight thank-you hugs as we left, but that was better as a plan B. 

Weirdly, the more I tried to focus, the more I ended up thinking about my sense of smell. It made sense; my sense of smell had grown at least an order of magnitude stronger after my transformation. But the more I really focused on it, focused on the subtle notes of fragrance in the air, the more I realized just how much information I could pick up that way. The scents didn’t blend together, like they would have before. Rather, like a sound, they layered over one another while still remaining distinct. In fact, if I twitched my antennae around, I could even sense which direction a smell was coming from. 

I could tell that the Liberate couple three tables over were having a lot of liquor and something greasy without even looking, while that Pioneer behind me was having something starchy and choked with spice. There was someone smoking a drug I didn’t recognize at about ten o’clock. The nearest air vent was working just fine, but there was something rusty in the one to our right, and the metallic smell permeated the air. 

My total distraction only lasted for a minute or so before I remembered that I was supposed to be doing something. Out of curiosity, before I continued my search, I turned my antennae in my adoptive parents’ direction. They smelled like humans, which was good, but they also smelled very distinctly like themselves. Arana definitely used perfume, or maybe just some kind of scented lotion; either way it had undertones of flowers. Stellina, meanwhile, smelled like machine oil and electrical components from working on the Helium Glider, as well as soap from a recent shower. Obviously, neither one of them smelled particularly like concealed weapons, which was really rather disappointing. 

Once I was very, very sure that I could not smell the concealed weapon (not that it would have told me where on the body it was hidden, even if I could), I went back to the old strategy of just looking. About a minute later, I did notice something very slightly off, on Stellina’s left side, just at the bottom of her rib. It looked almost like a weird bulge under the jacket, or maybe just a wrinkle. If nothing else, I didn’t want to look bad by making a wrong guess, so I would alternate between a few seconds looking in a completely random direction, then a couple of seconds looking at that spot and trying to figure if it was really a concealed weapon.

Suddenly, something changed, something so subtle that it took me a few seconds to even figure out what had changed, even though the change was instantly obvious. Then it hit me: something subtle had changed in the way Stellina smelled. One of the dozens of micro-scents that made up the generic smell of “human” suddenly became stronger, making her overall scent more… intense, slightly salty-sweet with a tinge of red-green-lavender and the slightest scent of spiny-silk. It was a change of smell that’s difficult to put into English, but which Emissarine languages tended to have entire dictionaries for. 

“You have something on your middle left, diaphragm height,” I said, pointing vaguely in that direction. 

Stellina grinned. “Very good! Yes, that’s where I keep my monomolecular blade. Now, what told you that it was there?”

“When I focused on it, your smell changed. It was like you were… excited, or nervous, or anticipating something?”

Stellina looked faintly confused, raising one eyebrow in my direction with a faint “hm?”

A second later, Arana absolutely lost her composure and laughed so hard that she started crying. She slapped her hand against the table, leaned against her wife, doubled over, entire body shaking with peals of laughter. It was a little unsettling for her to start laughing with no clear reason, but at the same time I couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit myself. 

Eventually, as she calmed down, Stellina asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Our child really is an Emissary,” she said wistfully to her, then to me added, “That is absolutely the most Emissary way of finding a hidden weapon that I have ever seen. It’s incredible.”

“What do you mean?” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure if I was offended by stereotyping or intrigued by the idea of my own ancestry. 

“Well, before and during the Order war, I served alongside a lot of Emissaries,” Arana said. “And they would always be noticing things about how you smelled. ‘Oh, Commander Karus, your pheromones are off-balance, are you alright?’ or ‘Ma’am, you are totally exhausted, I can smell the lactic acid on you, take a rest,’ things like that. Half the time they were just smelling whatever brand of coffee I’d been drinking, and it was really annoying how nosy they were, but… I guess you reminded me of that. Not that you’re annoying, of course.”

“Thank… you?”

“I think that’s enough about concealed weapons,” said Stellina. “And definitely enough about what pet peeves you had with our adopted child’s species. What were the other lessons you wanted to get to?”

Arana nodded and looked around the tavern again. “Do you see that person, over there?”

I followed her pointing finger to a slightly more distant table, which had an alien entirely coiled around it, not even using a chair because their twenty-foot tail was more than enough support. Their scales were milky white, and there was something slightly inhuman about their arms holding onto the menu. “The Unseen? Yeah.”

“That’s the lesson; that person isn’t an Unseen.”

My head snapped back to her. “They aren’t?”

“The species is called the Penitent,” said Stellina. “Or a Defiant, but either way, mistaking one for an Unseen or vice versa is a damn good way to get yourself punched in the face.”

“Or worse,” Arana added.

“Or worse,” she echoed.

“How do you tell?” I asked.

“Right, there’s a few key differences,” said Arana. “The hands, for one thing; Unseen have human hands, Penitents do not. Note the different number of fingers, the thicker scales, and so on. The head shape is different as well, with Penitents having a more smooth transition from head to body, whereas Unseen have a more pronounced shoulder area. Generally that’s the rule of thumb: Unseen are descended from humans, and will have more human traits, whereas Penitents aren’t.”

I glanced back over my shoulder at the Penitent, remembering Stellina’s advice about staring. “Why do they look so similar, then?”

Stellina sighed. “Because an Unseen is what happens when you genetically engineer a human, using some borrowed DNA from Earth’s snakes, to look as similar to a Penitent or Defiant as possible.”

“Why?”

Both of my parents suddenly cringed. “That doesn’t really matter right now,” Arana said, achingly slowly.

“And try not to bring it up, ever, unless the Unseen in question is a very close friend.”

I felt like I’d made a mistake somewhere along the line, there. But, looking back, I had made a series of perfectly normal decisions. 

“Let’s move on. How much do you know about taking care of living plastic clothes, kiddo?”

The rest of the afternoon went a lot like that. While food was served, my parents handed down whatever tidbits of wisdom they knew, ranging from tips on how to tell if someone needed help in a crowded bar to a crash course on Ariel etiquette. I tried to soak it up as best as I could, though I’d doubtless forget most of it. While our plates were getting bused away, my parents admitted that most people would be easy on faux pas; in a huge multicultural galaxy, there wasn’t much room for strictness outside of very formal situations. The most important parts were the ones about safety.

After everything was squared away, about two hours later, we got up from our table and I started to wonder where the others had gone off to during this family expedition. As we were walking out, Arana whispered something to my other parent, and they both slowed down.

“There was one other thing we wanted to tell you,” Stellina said. “Later, when we’re with the rest of the fleet, or some other time… we’ve decided that we want to teach you how to fight properly.”

“I can teach you to use a monomolecular sword,” said Arana.

“And I can show you how to use your fists, and I think I know enough about knife-fighting to give you a few tips about using those claws as well.”

Arana nodded. “It might also be somewhat more safe for you to learn how to use a blaster, though the training facilities will be somewhat more difficult to find.”

“All of this assuming that you want to learn, of course,” said Stellina, suddenly looking down at her shoes. “But given how many fights you’ve already been in over the last few weeks…”

“Maybe when my arm has healed,” I said, weakly lifting the limb in question. It was still in a cast, and the slight movement stung. 

“Of course, of course.”

“But then… I’ll think about it,” I said. Maybe my adoptive parents weren’t completely useless after all. They were at least taking more proactive steps toward ensuring my safety, rather than just trying to keep me swaddled up and safe like a freaking baby. We started the long walk back to the ship.

SaffronDragon

So, when I showed the previous chapter to one of my beta readers, they pointed out that we'd essentially been having nonstop action and tension for the last fifty pages or so, and suggested that the pacing could use a break. So I did what any reasonable author would do and deleted seven chapters worth of outline and completely re-wrote the plot of that portion in order to create a three-chapter lull in the action. Welcome to the fluff chapters! And if you want to see more fluff, you can always click the link below and join my Patreon, where you can read the next two chapters early for only $3 a month. My Patreon has just recently undergone some renovations, shifting around benefits to give certain tiers a better value, so even if you've taken a look before and decided it isn't for you, why not give it another chance? Either way, I'll see you all in two weeks for Chapter 29: Creator and Machine