Page 1 of Alien Peacock

1

- Maeve-

“Are we done here?”

The Interspeech words roll off my tongue with some effort. It's an easy language to learn, but the sounds can be tricky. Most aliens in space speak it, and nearly everyone understands it.

The human trafficker counts the credits carefully, inserting the red crystal into a device held in his three-fingered hand and making sure I'm not trying to cheat him.

I don't know which species he's from. His upper half is green jellyfish, and the lower half is more like a pair of moveable cactuses. He has five arms of various lengths, but I’m not even sure if he has a head. With Earth occupied by the Bululg aliens and their various crony species, nothing surprises me about him. I've seen worse.

“What else do you have?” he growls with a strangely squeaky voice. “This is not enough.”

I take a quick glance around. It's a dark, dirty, and narrow corridor on a small space station with a bad reputation and a worse smell. It's sufficiently far from Earth that the Bululg aliens have no influence here, but it's also run by constantly feuding crime syndicates. This guy was the only trafficker the Resistance could get to pick me up from Earth and transport me away. I had no choice about the destination.

“It’s the agreed amount,” I tell him firmly. “Sixty credits for passage from Earth to the Pranst space station.”

He focuses one milky eyestalk on me. “The price went up.”

I let my hand drop to my belt, where I’m carrying a very obvious gun in a holster by my side. The trafficker is clearly trying to get more money for his already extortionate price for getting me off Earth. And he has judged me well. The last thing I want is a fight right now. I don’t want to attract any attention in this run-down space station where no Earth girl like me would have any friends at all. Except maybe one.

I was hoping the very first interaction I had in space wouldn't go sour, but here we are. “The price is thesame. Sixty credits. Take it or leave it.”

The credit crystal vanishes in one of his three-fingered hands, looking like it simply sank into his skin. “I will take this. And then we will takeyou.”

The alien splits in half down his length, and another identical one steps out of the first. The sight makes me want to puke, and I have to avert my eyes to not overwhelm my brain.

I spot movement to the side, too. And I sense someone stepping into the corridor behind me, cutting off my escape to thespaceship hangar I just came from. Yeah, they must have been planning this all along.

Having practiced similar scenarios, I quickly back up into a wall and draw the gun. “I don't think so.”

There's four of them. Two are the split-in-half jellyfish, while the two others are much larger, towering over me. They swell with fat-covered muscles. Hired goons, probably. They have little rat-like heads and bodies like big, hairless chimpanzees. They have long arms, but short fingers that slide along the floor as they waddle closer.

“Stay still,” one of them brays. “Not move.”

The two trafficker twins are quickly putting more distance between them and me as the two others approach from both sides. They stretch their long arms out towards me as if to grab.

I aim my gun at one of them. “Stop!”

He falters as if he hadn't seen the weapon until now.

That gives me the opening I need. Spinning in place, I catch the other one at the knee with a kick that doesn't hit as hard as I want it. But my light, comfortable boots have metal parts on the outside, and the alien gives off a muted scream as his knee bucks under him. He has to support himself with both hands to not fall.

They're not scared of my gun. They must have grasped that it's mostly for show. But not entirely. I press the trigger and shift my grip as the alien-sourced memory-foam turns it to a metal stick as long as I am tall. It's cold in my hand, with a part of its surface crosshatched to provide a good grip. That part changes with where I hold it, by some miraculous alien tech that Earth isstill decades from developing. I always have a good grip on the stick.

The first alien comes at me and swings its arm back, preparing to punch me. I've practiced this, so I pull the stick back and then ram it forwards as hard as I can, so that the massive fist only hits the screwdriver-thin end of it. The alien howls in pain, probably having broken at least one finger.

“You’re lucky it’s only flat and not needle sharp,” I seethe in English as I spin around to whack the other goon. The stick goes heavy in my hands as I swing it, to make the impact harder. It connects with the alien's face with a sickeningsplat. The goon's head whips backwards, and the body slumps against the wall.

The two worst dangers dealt with for now, I focus on the traffickers themselves. They're still pulling away, but they must have been born in a very different gravity and environment, because they move slowly and with ungainly movements that would make me laugh if things hadn't turned so bad.

“Give me my credits back,” I demand as I stride towards the pair, the fighting stick light again.

But it's a mistake — more goons are coming towards me from the hangar area. And I don't need the credits that bad.

“The price went up,” one of the traffickers squeaks in barely understandable Interspeech. “We will catch you and sell you to cover the added cost.” Both of them pull strange weapons out of their belts.

“Still not giving up,” I mutter. “They're out of their minds.”

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