Captain Shishab of the pirate starship Quick Sliver (yes, it was a misspelling, but it had grown on him, so he was keeping it) was circling the edge of the Canteron war fleet like the scavenger he was.
At that moment, several hundred light years away, a human on earth was methodically screenshotting and saving images of a social media thread, but Shishab didn’t even know what Twitter was, let alone anything about human communication. Nor did he have any idea that the pictures would be sent in an electronic communication to a member of his crew in the near future.
What Shishab did know was that he fucking loved humans. Oh, they were annoying and petty and some of their behaviors drove the rest of the crew literally up the walls, but they were also the best workers he’d ever had. They were tireless and dedicated, and if they liked doing something, they kept on doing it until they physically couldn’t anymore. He’d made a bit of a gamble when he hired them three years ago on Earth, but he’d always had a good eye for people, no matter what form they took, and these ones had been a good investment.
In total, he had ten humans in his crew. Seven of them had been a package deal: a squad of former ‘ROTC kids’ who had decided that they’d rather go to space than fight in petty human wars. The remaining three had been hired to balance out the crew. They’d ended up with an even split of humans and Lorak, who had been there since the beginning.
It had been touch and go while the humans learned Galactic Common and the Lorak picked up words in the human languages, but there were more than a few fast friendships among them now.
Shishab could still remember the way they had rushed to the windows, their eyes so big that they looked more like newborn babes than adult creatures. They had watched their planet grow small, then their sun, then their whole solar system as the warp drive dragged them through spacetime like an insane earthworm. And they seemed happy about it. Months later, when they had learned enough of each other’s languages to communicate, Marcus told him, “I always wanted to leave that place. It’s a nasty world. It’s better up here.” That was a sentiment everyone on the Quick Sliver could get behind.
Today, though, the humans were agitated. They were lounging around the cargo bay and crew quarters, reading or bouncing balls, all of them waiting and watching the warships out their windows. They didn’t look worked up, but Shishab knew they were hungry for action.
All it would take was for one ship to fall out of formation, and the swarm of pirate vessels would fall on it. It would be first come, first serve. And Shishab was good at his job: they would be the first to arrive. But the chances of that were slim: the Canteron had a diligent and steadfast military. And most of the ships were flown by computers anyway.
The pirate vessels were there on principle: someone needed to hold the Canteron responsible for occupying a solar system that didn’t belong to them, and they were happy to do it. If they made so much as a single misstep, they would be set upon from all sides by rogues.
The Human Theresa was the only crew member on the bridge apart from Captain Shishab. She was sitting cross-legged and straight-backed on her chair, unmoving. She said she was meditating when she sat like that, but Shishab knew she was watching the ships out the window, memorizing their patterns and specs. She knew every model of every warship in use. She had helped salvage more than a few.
Shishab steered them a little closer to the Canteron fleet so she would have an unobstructed view. He fixed his eye on the world through the spyglass.
“You know what they remind me of?” Theresa asked. She wasn’t looking at him, but he was the only one in the room, so she must have been talking to him.
“What?” He asked.
“Billiard balls,” She said, “all we need is the cue ball at the right angle to break them out of formation.”
Shishab decided he wasn’t in the mood to learn what billiard balls were. He clicked his antennae in agreement, and they settled back into watchful silence.
Almost an hour later, Isa brought Shishab a meal, and Marcus followed behind her. He swapped places with Theresa as the lookout. She stretched her arms above her head, rolled her neck. They swapped without a word. Marcus reclined in the chair, making it creak, and immediately began to play on a handheld electronic.
“Do you know who Dron Acharya is?” Marcus asked some time later.
Shishab wiggled his antennae, then said aloud, “No. Is that someone important on Earth?”
“No clue. They’re a…planetary surveyor?” Shishab turned and saw Marcus was frowning at his phone.
“A scholar of worlds,” Shishab said, “gone to your home to catalog it, I suppose.”
“Catalogue it? Why?”
Shishab waved his spoon at the human, “Curiosity. To learn. That’s what they say anyway. Always sounded like a bullshit reason to me.”
“Ah, never mind. Looks like my planet-side friend knows a lot about them,” Marcus stood up from his chair. “More than you do, anyway.” He left the room.
Shishab watched him go, incurious. The Lorak were not a curious species. That was why they made such good pirates.
Marcus had to stoop low through some of the corridors on the Sliver, but the rooms were plenty large for him. He found the rest of the humans in their quarters. Theresa was still looking out a window, but the others were reading, playing a game, or napping.
When he came in, Theresa looked at him. “You’re on guard duty.”
“Nothing is gonna happen,” Marcus said, “not out there. But it looks like something might be happening back home.” Those of them who had been laying down sat up. News from Earth was scarce and very rarely good.
“Cheyenne sent me a Twitter thread,” Marcus said, “from an alien who’s hanging out on Earth. They’re a planetary surveyor.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Carlos rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Dr. Carlos Huante Sanchez was a chemistry Ph.D. from Georgetown. Theresa had asked him, when they first met on the boarding dock of the Quick Sliver, why he had decided to go to space. Carlos had said, “I’m too damn old to wait for another opportunity to go to space.”
“Oh, so this isn’t some breaking bad thing,” Theresa had asked.
“Well,” Carlos had said, “maybe. If you count my kid being the one who dies of cancer.” And that had been enough of an explanation for all of them.
These days, Carlos tended to smile a little more easily than he had back then. He smiled now, at the seven young faces and two slightly older ones looking back at him. “They’re with the galactic library,” he said, “you know, where I get all my reference materials from. Which one is it on Earth?”
“Somebody called Acharya,” Marcus said, “looks like a goddamn pangolin with deer ears.”
“They’re a good one, from what I’ve heard. A little eccentric, but who wouldn’t be if your job was to study alien planets.”
“So, what is it?” Alex asked, “are they going to colonize Earth or something? Do we need to turn around to fight the alien threat off?”
“Not yet,” Marcus passed his phone to Theresa so she could take a look at the pictures, “see for yourselves.”
There was a moment of tense silence while the others waited for Theresa’s judgment. Then she huffed out a laugh. “Damn. That’s cute. They look like water bears.”
“Who do?” Alex asked.
“The Frid,” Marcus passed the phone to them next. After a moment and a coo, they passed it to Carlos, who was the first one to actually read the text alongside the pictures.
“That’s the aliens whose planet those fuckers snatched up, isn’t it?” Carrie, another ROTC runaway, hooked a thumb toward the Canteron war fleet.
“Yes, it is,” Carlos said, “that’s the point of what Acharya is saying here. Looks like they learned how twitter works just to talk about the Canteron and their habit of planet-snatching.”
“They’ve done it before?” Marcus asked.
“Didn’t you read this?” Carlos waved the phone at him, and Carrie snatched it from his hand.
“No,” Marcus said, “I was a little more concerned about Aliens moving to America like some kind of Men in Black spinoff.”
“Well, it says that the Galactic Library was the one who gifted that planet to the Frid, as a kind of stepping-stone to help them jumpstart their space exploration. And that Acharya was the one who handed over the deed.”
“Do planets have deeds?” Theresa asked.
“No,” Alex said, “but I bet they made a real pretty certificate for it anyway.”
“He must be pissed off,” Marcus said, “I would be.”
“Oh he is,” Carlos pinched at the screen. “he calls it ‘a disgusting abuse of the Canteron’s power’ and ‘a crime that cannot go unpunished.’”
“Strong language.”
Theresa took the phone back from Carlos and read through the whole thread again.
“Let me see,” Carrie said. She read for a moment, clicked her tongue. “They’re putting pictures of babies next to a call for action against this empire. Really going heavy on the pathos.”
“Almost like they know it will make everyone else pissed too,” Theresa said.
“Also like they are worried they might do the same thing to us,” Carlos said.
There was silence for a long time in the dorm room. Theresa was still looking out of the window.
Wendell, who up until that moment had been silent, said, “I’d like to have another planet. Aside from Mars, I mean. That doesn’t count.”
“What are we going to do?” Marcus said like it was the logical next step.
“Are we going to do anything?” This question earned Carlos nine blank stares.
Isa poked her head around the doorframe. She had followed Marcus to the dorm minutes ago and had been listening to their conversation. She was big for a Lorak, and her exoskeleton didn’t extend around her torso like it did for Shishab and the other crew members. That was because Isa was a Lorak brood mother, or would have been. She had left her colony behind just before reaching sexual maturity. Her body was not happy with her decision, but she was, and if part of the reason was that she preferred her lovers to look a bit less, well, Lorak-like, then that was no one’s business except hers.
“Did you all get enough to eat?” She asked, making the humans jump. The tension in the room snapped like an elastic band.
“Yes, Isa,” Theresa said, “thank you.”
“Is your home planet being surveyed?” Isa continued, pretending not to hear the dismissal in Theresa’s voice. “I wasn’t alive when the galactic library looked at our home, but when they labeled it a category three, nothing changed, you know. Except that the galactic emigration people started suggesting better planets for us to move to.”
“Really?” Alex asked, “no one tried to like, buy the planet? Or take it from you?”
Isa’s antennae and first set of arms waved almost frantically. “No, no, no! Not even the Canteron would do that. Invading a home world or a colonized planet with weapons would ensure the whole of civilization coming down on them.”
“What about that planet then?” Marcus gestured out of the small window to the tiny almost invisible blue dot.
“No one lives there,” Isa said, “at least, no one sapient. There are plants, probably some small animals.”
“Ah okay, I see.”
“Thank you, Isa,” Theresa repeated, sharper this time.
Isa clicked her antennae together again. Theresa was not a brood mother, but she did tend to throw her social weight around. Never mind that Isa was in a rather compromising relationship with Marcus—she still had a brood mother’s biology and some things needed to be tended to—Theresa was still mostly in control. She withdrew from the room. The door closed and locked behind her.
There was a moment of silence inside the room. Theresa looked at Marcus, not reproachfully, but perhaps judging him just a little. Then her ice-queen persona melted a little and she said, “Like Carlos said, are we going to do anything? Because I want to.”
As it turned out, they all wanted to.
However, the discussion was mired in the “should we” stage, but Theresa had a solid argument to get around that. “We are not the United States Government,” She said, “we aren’t even the Spanish government. We have no political power, no armies, and no servants. We don’t even have our own ship. We can’t frame this conversation as if we were declaring war because we aren’t.”
“We’re pirates,” Carrie said. “we’d probably be criminals back on Earth at this point. So, if anything, we should disavow any entanglement with the planet when we do this.”
There was a thoughtful moment. They looked out the windows at the billiard ball warships.
“Very well,” Carlos said, “but what are we going to do exactly?”
The discussion took on a feverish pitch. There wasn’t much to do on the ship, so it was several hours before any of the Lorak besides the captain, who could not move, and Isa, who was busy sulking, noticed that they were missing. When they did, they found the door to the human’s quarters locked and their voices raised but muffled. They crowded around it, unsure of what was happening. Were the humans fighting? Were they, perhaps, re-establishing a social hierarchy, or making some group decision? They didn’t know.
At last, almost four hours after the door had locked, it opened. Carlos was the first one out, followed by Ferdinand, the human biologist and cook. The rest of them emerged more slowly, eyes bright and reflective, heads high. They said nothing to the Lorak, as per their conversation, because the Lorak were a cautious and shy bunch, and they didn’t do well with confrontation.
Even so, Carlos went by muttering to himself loud enough for Isa to hear. “‘There are no Geneva conventions in space’ they said. ‘The first thing I did was check,’ they said. Little corn-fed psychopaths the lot of them. Walking around with the ingredients for thermite in their pockets. What the actual fuck.”
