He turns and walks away, giving me the choice to follow or not. I suppose I have to follow. The screaming and general aggression behind us is escalating, and any fear I have of leaving my wrecked shuttle and going off with an alien stranger is quickly overshadowed by my fear of staying with the screaming fuck-trolls and turning into food or mate, or maybe and horrifically, some combination of both.
“What is your name, sir? I’m Ava.”
“Everybody calls me Zed,” he says, patting down his harness in the same manner a man might pat down his flight suit pockets. I have no idea what he could possibly be looking for. There’s nowhere to hide anything there.
“Ah. Here it is.”
He pulls out what looks like a button from just over where his nipple presumably is. Just a button. Not attached to anything in particular. It looks like a spare for a machine that might actually do something. I watch, stunned, as he places the button in the middle of his palm and presses it.
A rocket ship manifests in front of us as though it had always been there and it was a bit embarrassed for us for not having seen it. It is about twenty feet tall, bright green, and shaped in a friendly sort of way, round and smooth with a big window at the bridge and little round portholes, many of which are decorated with hanging flowers. It does not look like the sort of craft that Zed would choose for himself.
“Is this your mother’s ship?”
“I suppose it was somebody’s mother’s ship at some point,” he says cheerfully. “It’s mine for the moment, until I trade it in.”
“Is that what you are, a trader?”
“You could call me that.”
Evasive is what I could call him. I feel a certain amount of hesitation as he opens the door and makes a welcoming gesture. This alien has no reason to help me. I don’t get the feeling he is taking mercy on me. He has that used-spaceship dealer kind of feel about him, which means if he’s helping me, there’s a reason.
He sees my hesitation and smiles more broadly. He is handsome when he smiles, with an easy charm. I imagine he is the sort of creature who manages to get away with absolutely anything. I’ve known guys like him before. They’re usually Authority Academy dropouts because they have issues with authority.
But beggars, as people used to say, cannot be choosers.
“Are you able to return me to Authority space?”
“If you want to go back there; doesn’t seem like you were too keen on following Authority rules given your current location and situation. What does Authority do to couriers who break protocol, fly outside sanctioned air space, and crash multi-trillion credit ships?”
He’s right. I hadn’t really thought about all the potential consequences of my actions, which include, but are not limited to a lifetime of crippling debt. I am going to owe the Authority every paycheck from now until eternity for what I just smashed into the dirt.
I groan inwardly as I step into the ship, which feels like a very cozy living room generated a very long time ago. The walls are covered in floral print in lime-green tones, and there is a soft gold carpet across the floor.
“I have never seen carpet on the floor of a spaceship,” I note.
“This is a comfy class shuttle,” he says. “Fully customizable. No feature is too much trouble. The elderly of our species like to sell their homes, buy one of these, and spend their declining years piloting them about the system until they either collide into something or, well, usually collide into something.”
“And so you traded this?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” he observes with that sexy smile designed to wipe a woman’s brain completely clean. I don’t know what kind of alien he is, but if they’re all built like him, I can understand why the Authority doesn’t want us having any contact with them.
“I don’t usually get into strangers’ spaceships. It’s pretty high up the list of things not to do, according to Authority regulations.”
“Right after crash landing on alien planets outside designated…”
“Yes. I know. I fucked up.”
He smirks and gives me a muscular shrug. “It really doesn’t matter, you know. There’s no way to get through this or any life without doing something the Authority wouldn’t like. You may as well enjoy whatever happens next. I think it’s time for a drink.”
A drinks trolley emerges from inside a wall, wheels itself over to us, and proceeds to make a couple of drinks in some tall plastic cups decorated with green and orange pictures of oranges and limes. It slides one over to me, and the other over to the alien who has rescued me. Drinks on a spaceship beat getting ripped to pieces by aliens who can’t work out what part of me to fuck.