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It was always the ones you'd like to think were your friend, wasn't it? Oh, certainly, Sirad had always had a fairy oily air about him, clear to Vanadi even though his smiles and good cheer. And he'd never have trusted the Carrcian with his life savings (which may not have been saying much, as his life savings did not currently exist), but he'd really thought they'd had an understanding.
Maybe they had. Maybe this was just a universal constant, no matter where in the stars one happened to be -- eat or be eaten.
It was the head chef that had been given the task of speaking with Vanadi, and she did it with an apologetic air. Vanad believed she did not really trust the evidence brought against him, but it was a matter in which all four of her hands were metaphorically tied. He understood. The evidence was really quite damning.
The stash of contraband had been discovered in his belongings, she explained -- a rather brutal mood and performance altering strand of hallucinogen, already responsible for a good deal of mayhem aboard the ship. And then there was the matter of the footage, that he had been recorded entering the port infamous for such substances, and returning to the ship with a bag he hadn’t left with. Vanadi remembered the bag. Vegetables, gifted to him by Sirad while they’d been in port together. He’d been impressed and a little bit touched by the generosity at the time. And so it was a rather simple and straightforward matter, no question who had brought it aboard and harbored it.
It wasn't his, of course. His body wouldn't process anything of the sort, and he shuddered to think how it woul rebel if he were ever to brave a sampling. But this was no note in his defense, even if he opted to explain. Such substances could be sold for a neat sum, and so anyone in possession of them would have clear motivation. The evidence had all been artfully arranged by the oily Carrcian, leaving Vanadi no hope of shifting the blame. It bore the markings of habit, and he was quite certain this wasn't Sirad's first convenient excising of dangerous stock. The head chef seemed to be aware of this, and when he asked who had made the report against him, she stirred nervously and folded and re-folded two of her hands on the counter before her.
“It would be against protocol to say,” she said. Vanadi was about to agree, because honestly the who of it all didn’t seem to matter overly much, but she wasn’t done. “And usually that would stop me, but I’ve noticed you getting close, and I suppose you deserve to know – Sirad made the report.”
He’d made a bit more than just the report, Vanadi had immediately understood. Doubtless something had gone wrong, and the Carrcian needed a quick way to unload the contraband and pin its distribution on someon else. How lucky of Vanadi to be that someone else.
Orders from the captain had been predetermined: he would be put off at the next port. The captain hadn't deigned to deliver the sentence herself, but Vanadi could hardly fault that. He was only a ship chef, one of three, and relatively new aboard at that. He'd not even been employed for four full cycles yet. Still, though, he'd been employed long enough to gain Sirad's rather dubious favor. He stood from the kitchen stool and took his leave of the head chef with a quick nod, and did not look back to see if she watched him leave.
Vanadi didn't have much to pack. He'd left his planet with very little of his own -- most of his belongings there had not really been his at all, but owned by indulgent parents. He'd left it all behind as he'd left them and the rest of the planet.
His current worldly possessions fit into one moderately sized bag, slung easily over a shoulder. A few changes of clothes, a scanning rod for cleaning those he wasn't currently wearing, an expanding canteen, nearly half a dozen cheap phones coded for various systems... With this job he'd hoped to save for one universal model so he could sell off the collection, but now it looked like that goal would have to be postponed.
Vanadi was still neatly folding the last of his shirts when the cabin door chimed to announce a visitor -- and Vanadi recognized the chime. He'd appreciated that sound not even a day ago, and had not yet had the presence of mind to revoke the automatic access it granted.
The Carrcian in question strode in, and the friendly smile over his broad, scaled face set Vanadi's teeth to gritting. He'd liked that smile, too. He'd thought it charming.
Sirad was tall, much taller than Vanadi, and solidly built. He was the most common assortment of limbs, the same two legs and arms that Vanadi’s people had come with, but his frame was strong and muscular in a way Vanadi had immediately appreciated when they’d first met. As ship security, it was Sirad's job to look intimidating and competent, and Vanadi had always thought he pulled it off admirably. The smile, however, no longer looked charming to him.
"Vanadi!" Sirad greeted him, his wide green eyes already filled with concern at the sight of Vanadi's bag. In light of the head chef’s insight, Vanadi thought he could see straight through that concern today. In fact, he found it irritatingly jovial.
"What's all this?" Sirad cried, sounding dismayed. Vanadi straightened, a smile of his own pulling smoothly into place. He'd had quite a bit of experience making nice with those he loathed, although anyone who had known him more deeply than in passing would see a hard edge on that smile. He wondered if Sirad did.
"It seems it's my time to move on," Vanadi said, and added the sort of wistful sigh one comes across in plays of the forlorn and starcrossed. "Perhaps it's for the best. The company aboard this ship has always been... well, you know. A bit lacking."
A bit deceptive, a bit manipulative, a bit two faced. But really, was that news to Vanadi? It was more rare to run into anything else, since leaving Wayland three years ago. It hadn't exactly been uncommon there, either.
"That's just what I've been telling you! The cooks, aside from you they're dry as the Junpaan deserts. Should have spent more time with security," Sirad said, and Vanadi realized the Carrcian had no idea Vanadi was perfectly aware of who was to blame for his displacement. It made his visit here all the more distasteful, didn't it? He was here for nothing other than to privately revel in a con well played.
"I really think I've seen quite enough," Vanadi said through his smile, now strained.
"You'll come and visit, won't you?" Sirad asked. "If you're ever headed our way, you know the crew would be happy to have you on again. I'd be happy to have you again, even if it's just for a flight."
Vanadi used to have the patience for this kind of thing, he thought. He would dance in verbal circles for as long as anyone wanted him to, perhaps slowly build up some devastating tower of lies to eventually pull the rug out from under Sirad in a beautiful gotcha, I knew all along moment, and be satisfied with his reveal, pleased to leave on a grimly triumphant note.
But at the moment, all Vanadi wanted to do was ball a fist and hit that smug smile off of that handsome face.
He did no such thing, of course. He didn’t even say any of the cold and cutting words that flitted through his mind, in the mood for none of them. He shouldered his packed bag and pushed indelicately past Sirad, leaving him the run of the closet-sized, cleared out room. Their affair was quite over, their business concluded, and Vanadi would be once again on his way. That was all it came down to, and no punches or gotcha moments would change any of it.
Sirad didn't follow, perhaps finding himself in doubt of the confidence that his con had been pulled off with Vanadi left unawares, and Vanadi was glad for it. He was quite sure he wouldn't be able to convince himself twice in a row that one good punch wasn't the answer. He hoped that Sirad would have enough shame in that tall frame of his to steer clear of Vanadi for the rest of his time aboard, until they came to the port where Vanadi would take his leave. A week suddenly sounded like a lifetime to him. But there was no rushing space travel, and the cosmic real estate they were currently passing through was about as empty and uninhabited as space ever got. He would wait out his week, unpaid, in the passenger quarter, as per the captain's orders. It was a small mercy that she was at least not charging him for the lodging.
It was a midsize ship, and Vanadi's trudge down the hall took him past three crew he recognized, and one he didn't. All of them were aliens to his eyes. Everyone he met out here was an alien to his eyes, considering that he was so far the only one from Wayland who had opted to leave the planet and see what the greater universe had to offer once they had made contact.
Thus far, it had all been disappointingly familiar. Oh, true, the people and the places he ran into looked vastly different, but he was quickly learning it was only surface level. Everyone had a bit of Sirad to them, blatantly or otherwise. And really, after what he'd seen of his own planet, Sirad was only a minor bit of scum, hardly worthy of note. At least the Carrcian had known how to handle himself in a bunk; Vanadi was beginning to wonder if that was really the best that could be asked for.
Vanadi spotted one more crew as he neared the passenger quarters -- he recognized this crewmember, but he was not quite sure what to make of him. Of it? He wasn't sure of that much either. The being in question was what was referred to as an artificial lifeform, a name which seemed to Vanadi to be an oxymoron. How could something be both artificial, and alive? He had heard them referred to as robots as a sort of abbreviation, though he wasn't sure where it had come from.
This AL was built in a fairly standard arrangement, two legs and two arms, one head, a short hanging tail for balance. It stood balanced high on its toes -- on what would be toes, that is, if it had toes. It was most likely built by some species which had evolved from long distance runners and had kept the digitigrade legs, and opted to see them reflected in their creations as well. It was constructed of a glossy black material, some kind of metal, but wore clothing on top of that. Vanadi wondered briefly if the clothing was meant to help it fit in better, or for modesty's sake. Who knew what the creators of ALs chose to equip them with?
The AL turned its sleek black face toward him, and Vanadi thought it looked rather like a muzzle. Two large approximations of ears sat on top of its head, and turned toward him along with the rest of its face. Bright golden lenses grew a little brighter as it took him in. Then it opened its mouth, and Vanadi had to wonder what species could possibly have considered it a good idea to build a machine with a mouth with teeth -- much less teeth like that. His own best friend on Wayland had had rather an impressive mouth and set of teeth, kept usually discretely behind a veil, but those teeth had been suited to her diet of fish. Vanadi himself had sharper teeth than some, though he liked to think they were small and quite manageable, ideal for breaking into the tough husks of his ancestor's favorite fruits. He could think of no reason a robot would need a set of large, pointed teeth like that.
"Hello," it said in a pleasantly deep voice, and Vanadi wondered if perhaps he were correct for it after all. Not all species followed easy gender cues like the pitch of a voice, and indeed not all species had just the two options -- but Vanadi's did, and his thoughts tended to default along those lines.
"Good afternoon," Vanadi answered, with the sort of nod that promises the exchange will end at hello. Vanadi was not in a particularly social mood at the moment. He was briefly concerned an AL may not understand the cue, and try to engage him in conversation, but it didn't. It only watched him with those bright golden eyes, head and long metal muzzle swiveling to watch him go. A bit unsettling, but Vanadi found most ALs unsettling. Not their fault, he supposed. He'd found the last metal creature he'd run into to be unsettling too, and that one was properly alive.
Vanadi risked a glance back at the AL over his shoulder before he rounded the corner, expecting that it would still be watching him. It wasn't, though. It had continued walking, bare metal clawed feet clicking sedately with each step.
His new room, when he made it to it, was nearly exactly the same as his crew room. Closet-sized, large enough for a one-person bed, a storage unit, and little else. There was one benefit to his tightly budgeted travels, though. The agreed upon universal standard was for a frame quite a bit larger than Vanadi's -- if nothing else, he was rarely cramped.
He sat himself down at the edge of the thin bed, slung his bag to the side, and dropped his hands to his legs with a sigh. The left hand landed on his thigh with a dull thud of metal on metal, with just the fabric of a pants leg and glove between them. The metal that had replaced three out of four of his limbs wasn't nearly so nice as that the AL had been built with, a dull silver no matter how much he polished it, and he was sure a mechanic would find the design inferior too. In fact, one of the first things Vanadi had learned upon escaping his planet for the stars was that his augmentations were severely and a little tragically outdated. But upgrades took money, and money wasn't particularly easy to come by when you were starting at zero. Another thing to be put off a little longer. He swept his other hand, flesh but gloved nonetheless, through his silvered hair. It had been long once, thick and black, but these days found it recovering from a shear down to the scalp and grown prematurely gray. Vanadi didn’t care for it, but one made do with what one had.
His thoughts turned with a slow inevitability toward what he would do with his emptied out week. He would be avoiding Sirad, that much was certain. Aside from that, though, he found himself at a loss. Fortunately he was spared putting too much thought to the dreary idea, because not ten seconds after he'd taken his seat, the ship began to violently shudder under his feet.
Maybe they had. Maybe this was just a universal constant, no matter where in the stars one happened to be -- eat or be eaten.
It was the head chef that had been given the task of speaking with Vanadi, and she did it with an apologetic air. Vanad believed she did not really trust the evidence brought against him, but it was a matter in which all four of her hands were metaphorically tied. He understood. The evidence was really quite damning.
The stash of contraband had been discovered in his belongings, she explained -- a rather brutal mood and performance altering strand of hallucinogen, already responsible for a good deal of mayhem aboard the ship. And then there was the matter of the footage, that he had been recorded entering the port infamous for such substances, and returning to the ship with a bag he hadn’t left with. Vanadi remembered the bag. Vegetables, gifted to him by Sirad while they’d been in port together. He’d been impressed and a little bit touched by the generosity at the time. And so it was a rather simple and straightforward matter, no question who had brought it aboard and harbored it.
It wasn't his, of course. His body wouldn't process anything of the sort, and he shuddered to think how it woul rebel if he were ever to brave a sampling. But this was no note in his defense, even if he opted to explain. Such substances could be sold for a neat sum, and so anyone in possession of them would have clear motivation. The evidence had all been artfully arranged by the oily Carrcian, leaving Vanadi no hope of shifting the blame. It bore the markings of habit, and he was quite certain this wasn't Sirad's first convenient excising of dangerous stock. The head chef seemed to be aware of this, and when he asked who had made the report against him, she stirred nervously and folded and re-folded two of her hands on the counter before her.
“It would be against protocol to say,” she said. Vanadi was about to agree, because honestly the who of it all didn’t seem to matter overly much, but she wasn’t done. “And usually that would stop me, but I’ve noticed you getting close, and I suppose you deserve to know – Sirad made the report.”
He’d made a bit more than just the report, Vanadi had immediately understood. Doubtless something had gone wrong, and the Carrcian needed a quick way to unload the contraband and pin its distribution on someon else. How lucky of Vanadi to be that someone else.
Orders from the captain had been predetermined: he would be put off at the next port. The captain hadn't deigned to deliver the sentence herself, but Vanadi could hardly fault that. He was only a ship chef, one of three, and relatively new aboard at that. He'd not even been employed for four full cycles yet. Still, though, he'd been employed long enough to gain Sirad's rather dubious favor. He stood from the kitchen stool and took his leave of the head chef with a quick nod, and did not look back to see if she watched him leave.
Vanadi didn't have much to pack. He'd left his planet with very little of his own -- most of his belongings there had not really been his at all, but owned by indulgent parents. He'd left it all behind as he'd left them and the rest of the planet.
His current worldly possessions fit into one moderately sized bag, slung easily over a shoulder. A few changes of clothes, a scanning rod for cleaning those he wasn't currently wearing, an expanding canteen, nearly half a dozen cheap phones coded for various systems... With this job he'd hoped to save for one universal model so he could sell off the collection, but now it looked like that goal would have to be postponed.
Vanadi was still neatly folding the last of his shirts when the cabin door chimed to announce a visitor -- and Vanadi recognized the chime. He'd appreciated that sound not even a day ago, and had not yet had the presence of mind to revoke the automatic access it granted.
The Carrcian in question strode in, and the friendly smile over his broad, scaled face set Vanadi's teeth to gritting. He'd liked that smile, too. He'd thought it charming.
Sirad was tall, much taller than Vanadi, and solidly built. He was the most common assortment of limbs, the same two legs and arms that Vanadi’s people had come with, but his frame was strong and muscular in a way Vanadi had immediately appreciated when they’d first met. As ship security, it was Sirad's job to look intimidating and competent, and Vanadi had always thought he pulled it off admirably. The smile, however, no longer looked charming to him.
"Vanadi!" Sirad greeted him, his wide green eyes already filled with concern at the sight of Vanadi's bag. In light of the head chef’s insight, Vanadi thought he could see straight through that concern today. In fact, he found it irritatingly jovial.
"What's all this?" Sirad cried, sounding dismayed. Vanadi straightened, a smile of his own pulling smoothly into place. He'd had quite a bit of experience making nice with those he loathed, although anyone who had known him more deeply than in passing would see a hard edge on that smile. He wondered if Sirad did.
"It seems it's my time to move on," Vanadi said, and added the sort of wistful sigh one comes across in plays of the forlorn and starcrossed. "Perhaps it's for the best. The company aboard this ship has always been... well, you know. A bit lacking."
A bit deceptive, a bit manipulative, a bit two faced. But really, was that news to Vanadi? It was more rare to run into anything else, since leaving Wayland three years ago. It hadn't exactly been uncommon there, either.
"That's just what I've been telling you! The cooks, aside from you they're dry as the Junpaan deserts. Should have spent more time with security," Sirad said, and Vanadi realized the Carrcian had no idea Vanadi was perfectly aware of who was to blame for his displacement. It made his visit here all the more distasteful, didn't it? He was here for nothing other than to privately revel in a con well played.
"I really think I've seen quite enough," Vanadi said through his smile, now strained.
"You'll come and visit, won't you?" Sirad asked. "If you're ever headed our way, you know the crew would be happy to have you on again. I'd be happy to have you again, even if it's just for a flight."
Vanadi used to have the patience for this kind of thing, he thought. He would dance in verbal circles for as long as anyone wanted him to, perhaps slowly build up some devastating tower of lies to eventually pull the rug out from under Sirad in a beautiful gotcha, I knew all along moment, and be satisfied with his reveal, pleased to leave on a grimly triumphant note.
But at the moment, all Vanadi wanted to do was ball a fist and hit that smug smile off of that handsome face.
He did no such thing, of course. He didn’t even say any of the cold and cutting words that flitted through his mind, in the mood for none of them. He shouldered his packed bag and pushed indelicately past Sirad, leaving him the run of the closet-sized, cleared out room. Their affair was quite over, their business concluded, and Vanadi would be once again on his way. That was all it came down to, and no punches or gotcha moments would change any of it.
Sirad didn't follow, perhaps finding himself in doubt of the confidence that his con had been pulled off with Vanadi left unawares, and Vanadi was glad for it. He was quite sure he wouldn't be able to convince himself twice in a row that one good punch wasn't the answer. He hoped that Sirad would have enough shame in that tall frame of his to steer clear of Vanadi for the rest of his time aboard, until they came to the port where Vanadi would take his leave. A week suddenly sounded like a lifetime to him. But there was no rushing space travel, and the cosmic real estate they were currently passing through was about as empty and uninhabited as space ever got. He would wait out his week, unpaid, in the passenger quarter, as per the captain's orders. It was a small mercy that she was at least not charging him for the lodging.
It was a midsize ship, and Vanadi's trudge down the hall took him past three crew he recognized, and one he didn't. All of them were aliens to his eyes. Everyone he met out here was an alien to his eyes, considering that he was so far the only one from Wayland who had opted to leave the planet and see what the greater universe had to offer once they had made contact.
Thus far, it had all been disappointingly familiar. Oh, true, the people and the places he ran into looked vastly different, but he was quickly learning it was only surface level. Everyone had a bit of Sirad to them, blatantly or otherwise. And really, after what he'd seen of his own planet, Sirad was only a minor bit of scum, hardly worthy of note. At least the Carrcian had known how to handle himself in a bunk; Vanadi was beginning to wonder if that was really the best that could be asked for.
Vanadi spotted one more crew as he neared the passenger quarters -- he recognized this crewmember, but he was not quite sure what to make of him. Of it? He wasn't sure of that much either. The being in question was what was referred to as an artificial lifeform, a name which seemed to Vanadi to be an oxymoron. How could something be both artificial, and alive? He had heard them referred to as robots as a sort of abbreviation, though he wasn't sure where it had come from.
This AL was built in a fairly standard arrangement, two legs and two arms, one head, a short hanging tail for balance. It stood balanced high on its toes -- on what would be toes, that is, if it had toes. It was most likely built by some species which had evolved from long distance runners and had kept the digitigrade legs, and opted to see them reflected in their creations as well. It was constructed of a glossy black material, some kind of metal, but wore clothing on top of that. Vanadi wondered briefly if the clothing was meant to help it fit in better, or for modesty's sake. Who knew what the creators of ALs chose to equip them with?
The AL turned its sleek black face toward him, and Vanadi thought it looked rather like a muzzle. Two large approximations of ears sat on top of its head, and turned toward him along with the rest of its face. Bright golden lenses grew a little brighter as it took him in. Then it opened its mouth, and Vanadi had to wonder what species could possibly have considered it a good idea to build a machine with a mouth with teeth -- much less teeth like that. His own best friend on Wayland had had rather an impressive mouth and set of teeth, kept usually discretely behind a veil, but those teeth had been suited to her diet of fish. Vanadi himself had sharper teeth than some, though he liked to think they were small and quite manageable, ideal for breaking into the tough husks of his ancestor's favorite fruits. He could think of no reason a robot would need a set of large, pointed teeth like that.
"Hello," it said in a pleasantly deep voice, and Vanadi wondered if perhaps he were correct for it after all. Not all species followed easy gender cues like the pitch of a voice, and indeed not all species had just the two options -- but Vanadi's did, and his thoughts tended to default along those lines.
"Good afternoon," Vanadi answered, with the sort of nod that promises the exchange will end at hello. Vanadi was not in a particularly social mood at the moment. He was briefly concerned an AL may not understand the cue, and try to engage him in conversation, but it didn't. It only watched him with those bright golden eyes, head and long metal muzzle swiveling to watch him go. A bit unsettling, but Vanadi found most ALs unsettling. Not their fault, he supposed. He'd found the last metal creature he'd run into to be unsettling too, and that one was properly alive.
Vanadi risked a glance back at the AL over his shoulder before he rounded the corner, expecting that it would still be watching him. It wasn't, though. It had continued walking, bare metal clawed feet clicking sedately with each step.
His new room, when he made it to it, was nearly exactly the same as his crew room. Closet-sized, large enough for a one-person bed, a storage unit, and little else. There was one benefit to his tightly budgeted travels, though. The agreed upon universal standard was for a frame quite a bit larger than Vanadi's -- if nothing else, he was rarely cramped.
He sat himself down at the edge of the thin bed, slung his bag to the side, and dropped his hands to his legs with a sigh. The left hand landed on his thigh with a dull thud of metal on metal, with just the fabric of a pants leg and glove between them. The metal that had replaced three out of four of his limbs wasn't nearly so nice as that the AL had been built with, a dull silver no matter how much he polished it, and he was sure a mechanic would find the design inferior too. In fact, one of the first things Vanadi had learned upon escaping his planet for the stars was that his augmentations were severely and a little tragically outdated. But upgrades took money, and money wasn't particularly easy to come by when you were starting at zero. Another thing to be put off a little longer. He swept his other hand, flesh but gloved nonetheless, through his silvered hair. It had been long once, thick and black, but these days found it recovering from a shear down to the scalp and grown prematurely gray. Vanadi didn’t care for it, but one made do with what one had.
His thoughts turned with a slow inevitability toward what he would do with his emptied out week. He would be avoiding Sirad, that much was certain. Aside from that, though, he found himself at a loss. Fortunately he was spared putting too much thought to the dreary idea, because not ten seconds after he'd taken his seat, the ship began to violently shudder under his feet.