The .45 is an excellent caliber for dealing with unfamiliar races. Having never faced a rockadillo before, I wasn’t sure what to aim for, but the .45’s stopping power covers a multitude of sins. I aimed for the leader’s neck and fired twice. Kindness bucked in my hands, and the rockadillo leader stumbled backwards with dark, oily bodily fluid gushing from his wound. He squealed like a pig, and Grunt Number Two drew one of his blades. Unfortunately for him, Kindness was faster. I shot out his wrist, elbow, and shoulder joints in quick succession. The blade fell from his pudgy armored hand, and his arm went limp, dripping oily blood all over the floor.

With the rockadillos more or less neutralized, I risked a quick glance at Jane. She was huddled on the floor behind me, clutching my leg. I turned and stared the aliens down with Kindness pointed squarely at them, but the fight was over. Grunt Number One dragged the unmoving body of their leader away toward the door, while Grunt Number Two staggered after him.

“Ack mar alakzan!” he shouted in my direction just before leaving. My wrist console attempted to translate, but the rockadillo’s native tongue was not in the database. Still, the meaning was clear: I now had a price on my head.

---

Our little pissing match had attracted some unwelcome attention, in particular three large and rather unfriendly looking aliens. Picture the love child of an armadillo and a rock, beaten half to death with the ugly stick. Their tentacle-like tongues flicked in and out of their narrow mouths as they formed a half-circle around us.

“You are hoo-man?” the largest one asked in the local trade language. My wrist console translated for me through my ear-jewel, though I understood well enough to get along without it.

“Yes,” Jane answered before I could say anything. “Though we are not official emissaries, we express our greetings in a spirit of friendship.”

She was a lot better at the trade language than I was, but she had still missed a few non-verbal cues. The two grunts stood with their centers of gravity low and their arm-like upper appendages ready for action, like linebackers just before a play. They all carried dagger-like blades on their belts, with a longer one sheathed on the backs of their knotted shells. It was clear that they weren’t here to establish friendly diplomatic relations.

My hand slipped down to Kindness, the .45 ACP 2011 holstered on my hip.

“You come with us,” the head rockadillo said, its tongue flitting rapidly. “No question. No resist.”

“I’m sorry, but there must be some mistake,” said Jane, frowning at their odd request.

“We no mistake. You hoo-man, you come now. No more talk!”

“Friends, please,” said Ivosh, stepping between them. “There is no need to—”

Without any warning, Grunt Number One lunged forward and threw a punch into Ivosh’s body with a sickening snap, and the empath tumbled over the countertop. Jane screamed, and I bolted into action.

---

“Yes,” said Jane, sighing. “Ivosh, allow me to introduce my friend Sam. Sam, Ivosh.”

“This man is your friend?”

“Yes, he is. We knew each other at Earthfleet Academy.”

Ivosh’s pursed lips quickly turned to a wan smile, and his hair went from red to brown in almost an instant. “Forgive me for the misunderstanding, my good sir. It is truly a pleasure to meet you.”

The David Bowie look must have been an attempt to intimidate me, because Ivosh dropped it almost immediately—or at least fast-forwarded a couple of decades. He offered his hand and probably would have kissed me on the cheek, if I weren’t so careful to keep my distance.

“Sam is something of a mercenary,” Jane explained. “You want someone dead, pay him well enough, and he’ll get the job done. Unless someone else pays him to turn on you.”

“I prefer ‘man of fortune.’ And contrary to what you might think, Jane, I never go back on my word.”

She rolled her eyes, probably because I didn’t deny being a mercenary. At the time, though, I thought it was my honesty she was questioning. That made me a little touchy.

“Name one time that I’ve lied to you, Jane. One time.”

“Are you forgetting that you stood by and let the slavers take me?”

“That’s different. I was working for someone else. He betrayed you, not me.”

“Oh, for the love of—”

---

“So, what happened after the slave auction?”

She sighed. “I was bought by a band of empath shapeshifters. They were kind enough to free me, so long as I signed an employment contract. I’m working for them now.”

“Empath shapeshifters?”

“It’s a race we haven’t catalogued yet. They feed on emotional energy, and can alter their physical form to match most alien races.”

“Sounds like an interesting bunch,” I said, accepting my cocktail from the barkeep. I drizzled some of my home brew into it and handed the flask to Jane. To my dismay, she refused it. Guess her trust only went so far.

“They’ve been treating me all right. Humans are new to them, so they’re eager to learn as much about us as they can. They run a sort of host club for alien races, catering to their emotional needs.”

“A host club?”

“Yeah. They do what they can to pleasure their clients, and feed off of the positive emotions that ensue.”

“So, a brothel, then.”

She stiffened. “I’d rather not call it that. Sex isn’t the only service they offer.”

To my credit, I kept my mouth shut.

“In any case,” she continued, “they offered me a secretarial position and free room and board, with the understanding that I would help them adapt their skills to humans.”

“Sounds like a cushy job,” I said, taking a drink.

“It’s not like that,” she said, her cheeks blushing red. “I swear, most of the time, I just—”

“Is this man bothering you, my dear?”

It’s strange enough to meet another human on the far side of the galaxy, but it’s even stranger to hear an alien speak English. Not that the empath shapeshifter didn’t do a good human impression. He looked a little like a young David Bowie, which is to say that he’d crawled out of the uncanny valley, if just barely. High cheekbones, pursed lips, and eyebrows that looked more than a little metro, with a wild red carrot top.

I looked from him to Jane and back again. “Empath shapeshifter, right?”

---

“Uh, hi,” I said, taking the seat next to her.

“You!” she said. Her eyes fixated on me like a targeting lock, and I could tell I was about to get burned.

“Hey, it wasn’t my fault,” I tried to explain. “In fact, I—”

“More than a thousand men, women, and children are slaves thanks to you. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“It looks like you made out all right, though.”

Her glare only got hotter. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be sold on an auction block? To stand there like a piece of chattel while hundreds of aliens bid on you? It was the most degrading and humiliating experience of my life.”

“If I had been there, I would have bought you myself.”

I meant that if I’d caught up to her in time, I would have spared her the humiliation by buying her off before the auction. But I’ve never been smooth around women, human or otherwise.

“That came out wrong,” I said quickly. “What I meant was—”

“You pig,” she said, her eyes blazing with rage. “You bottom-sucking, piss-drinking, retrograde cretin!”

I took a deep breath and sighed. “Let’s start over, okay? I’m sorry, Jane—really, I am.”

Her glare cooled, but not by much. She folded her arms and narrowed her eyes.

“And what about the other Setarni? The families that were broken up? The children who will probably be slaves for the rest of their lives?”

“I’m sorry, but that wasn’t my fault. The captain sold them out before I could do anything to stop him.”

“Please don’t tell me he’s here with you.”

“He isn’t,” I said quickly. “We got into an altercation with the Zan, and I handed him over before bugging out.”

Jane smirked. “Betrayal for betrayal. I suppose that’s justice.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

---

Realizing that I was stranded, I did the only sensible thing and headed to the nearest bar for a drink.

The fifth planet of Gorinal Prime is the only one in the system that’s habitable, if you’re willing to stretch the definition of the word. G-Prime V is essentially a giant desert, with oceans of sand instead of water. Fortunately, the spaceport is on the planet’s north pole, where the weather is cool enough there to have clouds, rain, and even a couple salty seas. With nowhere else to go, I decided to try what was left of my rapidly deteriorating luck.

Every spaceport in the galaxy has a seedy cantina somewhere nearby. At G-Prime V, that’s a place the locals call the Oasis. Finding humans in the Orion Arm isn’t too hard; xenologists, merchants, vagabonds, and men of fortune like myself are all pretty common in that corner of the galaxy. But the Gorinal Cluster is in the Scutum-Crux Arm, on the far side of the galactic core. Out there, humans are as rare as ice on a neutron star.

So you can imagine my shock when I saw a twenty-something blonde at the bar—one who was definitely not happy to see me.

---

The Gorinal Star Cluster is, in every meaningful sense, the armpit of the galaxy. And it was just my luck to get stranded there when shit hit the fan.

I didn’t know that at the time, of course. My ship, the Star Runner, was in pretty bad shape (Don’t ask.), and except for the fuel in my tank, I was broke. Desperate as I was for work—any kind of work—the lawless Gorinal Cluster was the only real option for a gunslinger like me.

The name’s Sam, by the way. Sam Kletchka, of New Texas. I spent a year at Earthfleet Academy before dropping out on my twenty-first birthday to seek my fortune among the stars.

Back in those days, Earthfleet was mostly just twentieth-century submarines and aircraft carriers, hastily repurposed and barely spaceworthy. Only three decades had passed since first contact with the galactics and we were still in a mad scramble to put as many colonies on the starmap as possible. With all of our resources tied up in the Gliese colonies, there was no boldly going for the class of ’39.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to seek out new life and new civilizations: they came to us. So, after dropping out of the Earthfleet Academy, I signed onto a Hyadean star freighter and never looked back.

---