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Lieutenant K’nn’bz Rch doesn’t believe in magic, but sometimes, even an advanced life form has no choice.
A research station parked over a world taking its first steps toward interplanetary flight is a sweet ride. You settle into high orbit and play peekaboo with space junk. A clutch of scientists follows events on the surface and debates whether the jumped-up primates currently in charge will achieve interstellar travel—and whether they should be invited to join the Cooperative if they do. The military component is larger, since we run the joint, but our main duties consist of keeping those debates from escalating to antenna pulling and preventing space pirates from following the trails of said planet’s first Voyagers to their source and trashing the place.
But sweet gets sucked out the airlock when a Primus of the High Council decides to take a taxpayer-funded vacation—ahem, “fact-finding tour” of said solar system. Suddenly it’s all high-stepping, synchronized wing-and-weapon maneuvers in the main hangar bay. My squadron and I looked like the dancers in the video of 42nd Street we watched as part of our Earth Culture Sensitivity Training.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if this particular Primus hadn’t brought along his first-hatched, hereafter known as “Junior” to protect the guilty. Junior had just completed a brief, undistinguished stint in military service, and daddy was checking all the boxes to qualify him for a career in politics. (Star-faring gods preserve us.)
Meanwhile, our station commander, Colonel G’rrll’n, was trying to elevate her ranking on the current general’s list through strategic butt kissing. “Junior,” she churred, “I understand you passed your pilot’s exam.”
On the fourth try, and only after the former academy commander was encouraged to retire.
“How would you like to take a spin over the continent that looks like an Aviann in flight?”
That’s how three of the station’s burliest marines, cultural anthropologist Dr. V’nnnn’lll, the requisite tub of the sapient fungus known as Gunk, and I, Lieutenant K’nn’bz Rch, found ourselves on a shuttle disguised as a dirty ice ball buzzing the Capitol of Earth’s United States in the middle of a summer heatwave. Clueless doesn’t begin to cover it.
“Take that you ugly hairy-headed arthropod oppressors!” Junior crowed, shaking his forelimbs at the viewscreen.
The shuttle pitched forward. Shithead was flying manual! I slammed the override on the copilot’s cradle and hauled the yoke back with my forelimbs while my mid-limbs danced over the controls. The shuttle’s nose crept upward. I banked, manipulating the shuttle’s magnetic response to the Capitol’s iron dome. Our hull screeched against one of the dome’s ribs. Then the repulsion factor kicked in. We shot down a street of stone buildings and old row houses toward the Potomac. Exoskeletons don’t sweat, but I swear my joints were leaking. Unlike Junior, I passed all my flight tests on the first go and had collected hundreds of hours on the station’s shuttles, which is how I wound up babysitting him in the first place. But this exam had no retakes…
Read the rest in Familiars, available for pre-order from Zombies Need Brains, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.