Memory Transcription Subject: Chief Executive Officer Sifal, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 26, 2137

  The Vice Queen’s Court was the second bar I’d ever been in, and in some ways, it reminded me of the Cropsey Carnival back on Earth. The furniture was a mix of space-age and rustic, like the owner had bought a matched set of mass-produced restaurant decor straight off the factory line, then spent the next few years methodically replacing it piecemeal with whatever hand-made oddities she could get her claws on. There were scents in the air of grassy herbs and piquant spices--I’d have to ask where the kitchen sourced them--and fragrantly sweet fruits cut through with the sharp bite of spilled ethanol. The peculiar tang of cooking meat was absent, obviously, but thanks to the patrons, the scent of warm fur and lively musk in the air was overwhelming.

  It was crowded!

  Prey though they may have been, I think this could very well have been the most people I’d ever seen in one place before. The occasional lavish state banquet I’d been permitted to attend back during my early officer days under Betterment, those were long tables seating one or two dozen people of importance. Afterwards, the very important people--not me, not as a mere Ensign--were invited to withdraw to an even smaller room where the hosts shared various psychoactive leaves, to smoke and take tea together while they discussed matters of politics and industry. The last time I’d bothered to visit a ‘recreational’ tea shop on a space station, it had been a quiet affair as well. Vriss and I had gotten a secluded table in a curtained private room. We discussed the philosophical and tactical implications of what we’d been reading in human literature over a shared pot of warm water steeped with something chemically calming.

  But that had just been the two of us, at a table that barely could have barely seated five. Arxur did small groups, you see. The Vice Queen’s Court must have sat a hundred! The entire planet only had a population of a couple thousand. From a business perspective, it was utter insanity. And yet here they were, packed all together, out in the open. I could barely hear myself think over the quiet roar of conversations… for the few moments it took for the entire building to notice me and go dead silent.

  Jodi quietly shuffled me over towards a bar stool in the corner. I wasn't sure if it had been empty before, but it was now. The seat next to it, too, which Jodi helped herself to. She looked tense, but I didn't blame her. I wasn't a hundred percent sure yet if the old primitive’s head was screwed on as straight as a predator’s, but if so, she was a bodyguard with a panoramic view of a room full of people who likely wished me ill. Sitting at the bar, up against the wall, at least limited the angles of approach if someone wanted trouble.

  I looked around a bit nervously at the throng of panicked faces, and tried to smile politely. “Hello!” I said. I kept my voice soft and a touch sing-songy, the way you’d address a timid housecat. “Please, carry on. Don’t mind me. Just checking out the local scenery.”

  One of the bartenders, a giant of a Takkan woman--she was nearly as big as Zillis!--hesitantly tip-toed forwards towards me. With suspicious narrowed eyes, she stared at me, trying to make sense of my presence here today. I gave her a little wave. “My name is Sifal?” I said, nearly making it a question, because I was direly questioning what was going on. “What’s yours?”

  The Takkan reached out a hand, tentatively, like she wanted to grab a pot off the stove and wasn’t sure if it was still hot to the touch or not. She delicately rested her hand on my snout, and, in the interest of interstellar diplomacy, I tried not to flinch. “Please don’t touch me without my permission,” I said softly, keeping my head perfectly still.

  The Takkan yanked her hand back, afraid to lose it, and squinted. “Huh. Softer scales than I thought. I gotta update the costume.”

  “Sorry?” I asked, confused.

  She shook her head. “Nothin’. I’m Kara. Welcome to the Vice Queen’s Court! Boss’ll be with ya shortly, I suspect.”

  The whole bar flinched as one as the kitchen door slammed open and a member of a comparatively smaller species popped out. It was the owner, the mildly fuzzy biped with patagia from this morning. Vivy took the scene in. The room was full of a silent herd, unsure whether to riot, panic, or go back to partying. Vivy chose partying on their behalf. “Hey,” she said, waving a paw at the live band, “I don’t pay you to gawk. Keep playing! Kara, you wanna do the honors?”

  “Ah, my favorite!” said Kara, half to herself. Still within arm’s reach of me, the big Takkan nodded and took a deep breath. “EVERYBODY COOL YOUR FUCKIN’ TITS!” she roared, louder than I thought possible for an herbivore. Laza, as a lifelong infantry commander, probably would have taken it as a challenge. Me, I just flinched, and clapped my hands over my eardrums reflexively. Kara pointed a thick thumb at me for the crowd’s benefit. “BOSS SAYS THIS ONE’S COOL, SO EITHER GET BACK TO DRINKING, OR DRINK SOMEWHERE ELSE!”

  There was a slight beat of time as Kara’s words sank into the crowd. Then music kicked back up, and the tension began to leave the room. It stretched my newfound talents for affective empathy to their limits to venture a guess at what the prey were thinking, but if you assumed they defaulted to falling in line behind a charismatic leader--‘herd-mindedness’, for lack of a better word--then it probably went something like ‘Sure, there’s a bloodthirsty monster in the room, but it’s just one monster, and Vivy and Kara said they have things under control. We can trust them, right?’ It tied back nicely into Kloviss’s earlier observations about the importance of recruiting local collaborators. Or my half-witted ramblings to Debbin about Judas goats. I was still kicking myself, a day later, for blabbing mindlessly about that, but it held up. There was simply nothing I could say to the prey that they wouldn’t be more amenable to hearing if the words came from one of their own.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Works in reverse, too, to be fair, I mused, recalling Vriss’s oddly dismissive hostility towards Debbin. Even the very literate needed some time to adjust, when the world got too wild, too fast.

  “Hey, welcome!” said Vivy. I did a double-take. She’d crossed the room while I’d been lost in my own thoughts, and I wasn’t expecting her to be just across the bar from me. “So glad you came out this evening. How are you?”

  I wasn’t sure how literally I was meant to take the question. “Full, if that sets some minds at ease,” I began. “Little nervous, bit out of my element. Arxur gathering places tend to be a bit smaller than this. More intimate.”

  The little short-furred marsupial locked in on me, which was unsettling. Arxur could cross their eyes just fine. Watching an herbivore cross her eyes and have them stick that way, like she’d abruptly transformed from side-eyed prey into a front-eyed predator? It was eerie. It was like watching something harmless shed its disguise and reveal itself as an equal. And it left me with a peculiar sort of vertigo that was hard to identify. Fear, lust, embarrassment… just a weird fluttering.

  Wait, what the fuck was that middle one?

  “We can do intimate,” said Vivy. Her voice was high-pitched, by physical necessity--she was half my height and slim--but her voice was resonant like a corded set of bells. “But let’s set the mood, first! What’s your poison?”

  I still couldn’t read Nevok, or whatever other languages littered the shelves behind the bar, but I recognized certain scents, and the idea of bottles. “We Arxur tend to favor relaxing teas,” I said, momentarily ignoring the existence of un-relaxing teas. I had to learn it explicitly from human literature and a weird conversation with Vriss, but, suffice it to say, you weren’t getting ahead in a fascist regime without uppers. “I think I’m mostly smelling ethanol, though? I’ve heard that’s popular on the human homeworld, but it’s an oddity on mine.” More of an industrial solvent, really…

  Vivy licked her lips. “Fascinating,” she murmured. “Yes, I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s hard to wrap my head around, but if your people didn’t spend their earliest days of civilization leaving fruit juice and grain porridge around to ferment, why would you care for it more than odd mushrooms and leaves?”

  “‘Leaves’ is a loaded word,” I said, with a grimace, “but not an inaccurate one. ‘Leaf-licker’ is something of a slur against herbivores these days, but it actually started as a condemnation of Arxur who chewed--”

  Jodi patted me on the back firmly, politely, but just hard enough to make me stop mid-sentence and look around. “Enough, already,” the wizened Yotul said. “I need a beer yesterday. Vivy, can you summarize your menu in broad strokes?”

  Vivy blinked, but didn’t lose a beat. “The usual Federation fare,” she said, in an attempt to be catty.

  Jodi snorted. “Never had the pleasure. Take it from the top for me, would you?”

  Vivy sighed, and waved a paw dramatically. “Beer from fermented grain, wine or cider from fermented fruits, spirits distilled from either, mixed back in with juice if you like. We also have a couple relaxing teas, but that’s…” The Letian woman paused for a moment, eyeing me up and calculating. “Less popular.”

  I felt a little more embarrassed than I probably should have. Yeah, obviously, even after a solid portion of the patrons had taken Kara up on her recommendation to ‘drink elsewhere’, half the bar was still visibly having a bad time, and I felt like I was to blame. For being me, for being a predator, and for being an Arxur, specifically. A human surely would've had an easier time fitting in. Humans could survive on herbivore food. Humans could drink beer without getting a tummyache. Nobody in the bar had lost a relative to getting eaten alive by a ravenous human raider.

  Nothing for it. I just had to suss out what parts of the local customs wouldn't harm me. “I can’t really… handle carbs,” I said, awkwardly. “It’s a digestive issue for my species.”

  At my side, Jodi nodded. “Beer for me. For her… can you do a King’s Cup?”

  Vivy blinked. “What’s in it?”

  “Herbal tea and a splash of spirits,” said Jodi. “There’s more to it, on paper, but if you can’t handle carbs…”

  Vivy nodded. “Of course!” She glanced back at me and smiled. I hadn’t drank a thing, yet, but I felt a little warm in the face. What the fuck? How? She was tiny. Even among predators, I didn’t even like humans that way because of how small and squishy they looked. What changed?

  I shook my head. Surely it didn’t matter. It was just my feelings misfiring because I was used to having Vriss around. I hadn't been alone for a whole night in months. I missed it. I missed him.

  Kara set a tall glass mug in front of Jodi filled with a frothy tan liquid that smelled of toasted grain that had gone off, while Vivy brewed me some tea. A few minutes later, she set a warm mug of something pinkish in front of me. It was a warm night, granted, made warmer by the assembled prey, lounging around and socializing in the same room as us. Wild, how communal they got about social interactions.

  Jodi clinked her mug against mine, and took a long drink from it. “Fuck, I missed this,” she murmurred.

  I cautiously sipped at my own mug and absorbed the aromas. As requested, it was sugarless, but the flower buds Vivy had infused the tea with had a subtle sweetness all of their own. I had no idea what season Seaglass was in, but the tea, at least, smelled like spring blossoms and antiseptics. Tasted like it, too. The latter, in short order, had me feeling rather peculiar in short order.

  “So Vivy,” I said, carefully controlling my maw. I had to avoid snapping at people, for diplomatic reasons, but also my tongue was rapidly starting to feel funny, like it didn’t quite fit my mouth anymore. Buzzing. “What brought you out to a colony like this, at the edge of space?”

  I glanced off at the rest of the tavern as I awaited her answer. Some heads ducked down or avoided eye contact at my gaze. Tragic, but I didn't blame them. I had endless hearts and minds to win back after what my people had done to theirs. And I wasn't going to let any stupid intrusive thoughts ruin my first evening having some genuine social activity like one of the civilized species of the galaxy. Not like one of me.