Chapter 1

Mikarik

The thrum of the ship as it skidded along the surface of subspace would have chased most into their stasis pods for the duration of the journey. For Mikarik, it was the sound of home, of a reprieve from responsibilities or the unforeseen twists that life had such an unpleasant habit of delivering. It was the pause between the times when choices needed to be made and when decisions mattered.

He never understood those who crawled into their pod the moment they came aboard, and went into an empty sleep that terminated days, weeks and sometimes months later, after the ship had already safely docked at the end of the journey. Granted, they banked some of that time, it being generally believed that one ages at only one-third the regular rate while in stasis, but were a few meager years at the end of one’s life really worth the wasted opportunities?

Mikarik slept only when he was tired, retiring for his usual fourteen-hour sleep cycle, without any regard for how his biological clock would end up needing to be calibrated when he arrived. The destination always had its own rhythms. Its own time and length of day, its own peak of activity whether it was high noon or the dead of night or the temperate spaces of dawn and dusk where it neither threatened to freeze you nor boil you alive.

And in between the inconveniences of having to replenish his energy, he ate, and read and wandered whichever sections of the ship where not closed to the public. Encounters with others were usually scarce, as most preferred the get-it-over-with option of submitting to near-death.

Sometimes he spent days without interacting with a single sentient, but he was rarely alone for long. Though few shared his appetite for an entirely solitary and wakeful journey, others often woke up along the way and depending entirely on their personality and Mikarik’s moods, provided welcome company.

The long-haul passenger cruiser he currently found himself on, and likely the penultimate trip he would ever undertake, had left Vaparozh three months prior, and would be docking in orbit above Earth in less than a week. It was one of the longest voyages Mikarik had undertaken, and even he felt as though he was on the verge of going stir crazy. Like all ships built on Vaparozh, it was structured to accommodate their strictly gender-segregated yet somehow austerely egalitarian culture, with one dining hall for the males, one for the females, and a small and run-down hall, where Mikarik spent most of his days, for those passengers that came from barbaric cultures that allowed their genders to co-mingle during such holy rites as eating and sleeping.

He had been largely alone for over a week, as even restless travelers preferred to catch up on sleep just prior to their destination, which left him plenty of time to aggressively tap his pen against a blank page in his notebook and summon words that refused to do his bidding. He thought he was being amusing when he chose posing as a poet as his cover for the trip. Instead, he unwittingly subjected himself to a frustration he hadn’t felt since spending weeks pretending to be helpless and adrift in orbits of rocky moons waiting for pirates to strike.

He expected no more company for the remainder of the flight when a very groggy and disheveled Mraboran female entered the hall and appeared either startled or confused to find him there.

“Good morning. Please, don’t mind me,” Mikarik said in Trade Thorian as the Mraboran ran her hand through the tangled fur on her forehead, clearing it out of her golden eyes.

“I didn’t expect anyone else to be up.” She responded in fluent Thorian that betrayed the barest hint of an accent.

“Neither did I, but here we both are.” He switched to his own native tongue and watched her through the bottom of his glass of water. She walked over to the food dispenser, which served slim pickings after a long-haul flight where most passengers were expected to forgo eating in favour of stasis, and poured hot water into a cup of something fragrant. Nothing Mraboran as far as he could tell, a floral scent he couldn’t identify.

She must have caught him sniffing. “Chamomile.” And after this elicited no reaction added, “It’s from Earth.”

“Ah.” He’d encountered humans before and was vaguely familiar with them, but they weren’t so eclectic that he would have any exposure to their cuisine.

Between the fluent Thorian and the human tea, this Mraboran seemed to go out of her way to show him how cosmopolitan she was. He scratched a couple of words in his notebook, as she took a seat across from him and watched him over her mug, inhaling its vapours.

To the untrained eye, there was no discernible difference between Mraboran males and females. Both were covered with the same short sleek fur that ranged from dusty blonde to a shimmering copper, and both had the same sonorant voices with the slightest hint of a hiss. And while females were marginally more partial to using belts to strap their tails to their body, their clothing was generally unisex. But Mikarik had worked and lived among enough Mraborans to know that the key lay in the eyes. Males looked at you with a round dumb expression that was perpetually surprised. The females’ eyes were narrow and calculating and constantly sized you up as potential prey. Even hundreds of light-years from home there was no getting away from evolutionary biology.

“You should try it, helps you get back to sleep when you’re knocked out,” she suggested after taking a long sip from her mug of chamomile tea.

“I don’t get knocked out,” Mikarik responded without lifting his eyes off the page.

“How’s that?”

“Can’t get knocked out if you never go in.”

She put her mug down then and drew out a long “Really?” Doesn’t matter how fluent they are, they fall back into purring whenever they encounter the throaty “r” of the Thorian language, one of the reasons why it’s dropped in Trade Thorian. “Sounds tedious.”

“Pretty quiet, actually.” He put his pen down and his eyes met hers. He was at an advantage there, with his mostly shaded by his implanted glasses. The Vaparozh sun was a scorching ball of yellow flame even brighter than most of the suns of the habitable worlds, a stark contrast to the dim red glow on the Thorian homeworld of Kai Thori. He spent the first week of the journey trying to find a way to dim the lights and eventually gave up, ending most of his days with a headache.