[C]She had a hard teacher before. It was the only reason she had gotten the delicate jobs on the ship before this one.

  It was nothing like this.

  Her instincts screamed that the male was an intruder. That she couldn’t trust him. Screamed to chase him out. She ignored it all.

  ‘My instincts might be right, but I can gain a lot more before I listen to them.’

  The lessons themselves were easy enough. Listening and remembering weren’t all that strenuous compared to what she had experienced before. It was only the fight against her instincts to stay near the intruders that made everything difficult. Difficult enough to be noticed apparently.

  “The more you fight them the louder they will get. Our kind can’t ignore our inner voices like some others can. I don’t know what they are telling you, but the best way to keep them quiet is to acknowledge and circumvent them. If they tell you to grovel and you don’t want to, just bow instead. If they tell you to run and you can’t, just move your feet. Small actions that somewhat appease them are better than completely ignoring them.”

  She sniffed at the thought.

  “You go first then.”

  ‘If he wants small actions, then I will leave the ship st. That’s what a chase is, right?’

  Her ears had been pinned back the entire time she had been waiting on Moose and Kitty to make a decision. To have the male there, watching, made her entire body twitch. Made her want to growl at him and help Moose remove the presence completely. But she couldn’t.

  Moose hadn’t asked her to.

  ‘I wonder what the humans wanted, to ask Moose to stay here though. Moose didn’t even bother acknowledging it.’

  At least she didn’t think he did. Kitty didn’t mention it.

  “More frozen water things. Also, pages. Many pages. Moose want things.”

  She didn’t know what ice had to do with anything, but Kitty clearly meant the data pads when she said it, waving the one she held around. Paper would be difficult. It was supposed to be very expensive and hard to find, even around a pnet like this. Especially in volume.

  The worst part was the st one.

  ‘What things did Moose want? Why couldn’t Kitty just tell me, instead of making me guess?’

  Maybe she was supposed to choose, like a test?

  She shook her head. If it was a test, she didn’t want to fail, but if she didn’t know what to work towards her chances didn’t look good.

  ‘What could Moose even need? Maybe I should look for magic things?’

  “I can understand ice, though it will be expensive. I doubt we will find paper here though. What are the things that we are supposed to get?”

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the male in front of her. She felt the low growl start but pushed it down.

  “What do you mean ice? We offloaded several pallets of the stuff, why are we buying it back?”

  She looked at the Crova and shook her head.

  ‘Why don’t my instincts hate her as much?’

  “They want data pads, not ice. Unless there are special kinds of magic ice, I guess. I don’t know what the other things are though.”

  It almost hurt to admit that.

  Keeping it to herself wouldn’t get anything accomplished though. She wasn’t on the ship anymore. This wasn’t her pce and she didn’t belong here. It made her fur y down and pulled her tail in, knowing Moose didn’t control this pce.

  She even missed Kitty’s chaotic presence.

  It was clear the two intruders noticed as well. Gncing at her a lot and whispering to themselves. Probably talking about how quiet she had gone. How different she acted.

  ‘It’s fine. I will be back with Moose sooner because they came beforehand.’

  The first stop had been security. They needed her to authorize the cargo and trade. After that, it was mostly just her following the other two as they asked about the various businesses. Trying to find paper and the mysterious ‘things’.

  The data pads were easy enough to acquire, pretty much sold at any port. The question about quantity was harder to answer. Kitty had just said more, not how many. They got three, one for each, and a box of repcement parts. Just in case.

  ‘Moose might break one. It would be good to have the parts.’

  They never did manage to find any paper. She had seen some interesting stuff at the antique and odd parts stores, but nothing that said ‘thing’ to her. It probably wasn’t the best pce to be in hindsight though.

  They tended to be out of the way.

  “Eek!”

  “Don’t make any noise and don’t move, or the bird gets a new mouth hole.”

  The unexpected words and the growl from beside her had made her tail curl between her legs. She could feel her legs tremble and her ears pin back as she turned to see what had happened. That all changed when she saw the Crova held from behind with a naked bde to her throat.

  She didn’t care much for the Crova, but the assumptions made her angry.

  “Seems like you’re not completely stupid. Thought I would be dealing with a thug that had more balls than brains.”

  She could feel her tail uncurl and her fur start to bristle.

  ‘I got completely ignored! How dare he interrupt us and make Moose wait longer. That might get expensive!’

  Her anger might have uncurled her tail, but the threat and knife had kept her legs trembling. It made her even angrier that she couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t deal with this problem affecting Moose.

  “You weren’t very smart when you stole from someone with money though. Can’t say I’m surprised, you furry eared thugs always bite more than you can chew. But you can’t run forever, so now you get caught and now you’re going to hand it over.”

  She perked up. Her fur calming down.

  “Moose’s. Not yours.”

  She had no idea when Kitty had left the ship, but she wasn’t surprised she had found them. Kitty always seemed to have a magic all her own.

  ‘Oof, that looked painful.’

  Watching the idiot fil around in Kitty’s grip helped her legs. Watching him be tossed to the ground and stepped on dissipated the st of the anger.

  “Bad small thing. No small thing games. Not time.”

  ‘I guess Moose got impatient. I guess it makes sense, it costs so much just to stay docked. We were supposed to have everything done before we docked. That was the whole point.’

  She walked up to Kitty while the old intruders fussed over each other and the new intruder.

  “Kitty. There aren’t any pages, no one has them. If you show me what things Moose wants, we can be done faster.”

  She knew she wasn’t going to like the answer when Kitty narrowed her eyes at her.

  “Not Kitty problem. Things are things. Many things. Not many words. Small thing problem.”

  ‘Ah, I guess Moose wanted supplies. It’s the only ‘many things’ I can think of that I don’t think Kitty has learned the word for yet. I hope Moose isn’t mad about the paper.’

  [B]He wasn’t sure why this visit was so much shorter.

  He had just settled in, doing his best to get comfortable, because he expected another all-nighter.

  What he got instead was a loud request for a shower from Kitty.

  As the girl had padded in, he noticed Pup and her friends back at the door. Though it seemed Pup’s friends didn’t want to stick around for this conversation.

  “We can’t have a shower yet Kitty, we are trading. We have to leave first.”

  That didn’t appear to be what she wanted to hear. She turned to Pup and started chirping, causing the smaller girl to shake her head and seem defeated.

  “Pup say done. Say not trade. Small things, not big things. Not like.”

  ‘That was certainly a sentence.’

  He really didn’t know how to parse that one, but a few back and forths between the three-person telephone got him a rough idea. They got some things but didn’t have everything he was looking for.

  ‘Shame. Could have really used those information books.’

  “Alright, if everyone is ready and we are set to leave we can go. You will still need to wait for a shower though.”

  A quick chirp and a double nod, one of which was unnecessary, got him turned around and back at the controls. Disembarking was almost as easy as docking, the ship doing a lot of the work. He imagined that the station was using guides and route calcutors to send location and piloting data to the ship. It’s what he would have done, and had seen done for lesser things, for a traffic space like this. The three dimensions would make the calcutions cost more, but it gave a lot more options as well. It probably worked out to be better overall, compared to ground traffic.

  Something neat to think about, but little more than a way to idle away the time as the ship maneuvered away from the station. He wasn’t about to leave the ship without a pilot in an active space like this. Even if they had true AI, he knew two heads were always better.

  ‘Not that I’ve seen anything to indicate they have a general intelligence. I would have expected to see some kind of sign if we had that kind of computing power out there.’

  He waited for about an hour as the ship sped away from the station, not leaving until they had passed the outermost pnet’s orbit. He hoped the map was as detailed as it appeared, he had been basing a lot of his calcutions on some retive measurements. It did seem to have a scale calcutor, or at least a number that changed as he zoomed in and out, so he could tell if he was at the same scale if he had to stop in the middle of a calcution.

  ‘It’s great that a lot of the math for the jumps is all symbolic. With the computer plugging in all the numbers as it goes, I just need to make sure all the equations are right and set the correct variables. We would still be stuck in dead space if I had to do all that solving without a calcutor.’

  He shivered at the thought of trying to do proofs out here. It would be a nightmare.

  Not being an asshole, he didn’t like leaving the ship somewhere that others were likely to find it in their way. He bet they all had competent crews and didn’t need the sometimes days it took him to figure out where they were going next.

  Kitty was very insistent for some reason though. He knew she enjoyed the shower quite a bit, but she normally would figure it out herself if she wanted one badly enough. The fact she insisted he be there only really happened if she was feeling neglected.

  ‘I suppose that tends to happen when we leave a system. I take so long with the math that she basically gets forgotten. Maybe she’s getting ahead of it this time?’

  Not that he really minded. Once the ship was safely out beyond the higher traffic areas that he had seen, he really wasn’t in any rush. He was very happy to have a decent night’s rest in his own bed rather than being stuck in the chair that was much too small for him.

  ‘Hmm, maybe I should see if I can move those benches in the mess hall. If I can find the right tool, I’m sure I can remove the top of that swivel chair. If that stapler is beefy enough for metal, I might be able to cobble a nice seat out of a bench and a crate lid. At least that way it won’t feel like I’m sitting on a pole.’

  Musing on the various ways he could staple a chair together, he let Kitty half lead half pull him into the showers. It was so routine at this point that he barely paid the girl any attention as she chirped away.

  ‘I guess Pup joined us.’

  Kitty used only his english when they were alone. If there were others, namely Pup, around, she would switch between the two seemingly at random. When he had needed to rethink his indifference to Pup after he had noticed the sizing trends, he had started paying more attention to her location. The fact she might be a gown adult, uh… female, had never entered his mind before then. He had absolutely no idea what the life cycle for aliens was, so he had gone purely off her size before. Now that that wasn’t an option, he had to face the fact she very well might not be young.

  He had dismissed it again fairly quickly. Pup was so small compared to him that it short circuited that part of his brain. Being conscious of that kind of thing just didn’t compute when any two-person activity would need to be ‘creatively interpreted’ to being with. Best just to ignore it completely.

  It helped to avoid barreling into cultural problems as well.

  That had caused a brief side tangent to Kitty though. Something which he immediately about-faced on and pretended it didn’t exist. Whatever it was. Despite, or maybe because of, the fact she was currently wrapped around his waist, he didn’t have the willpower to face that kind of introspection. Unraveling that rat’s nest of ethics and unknowns could wait until he had literally nothing else to do.

  Or more likely until Kitty forced the issue.

  ‘I just hope she has a much better vocabury by that point.’

  It was almost certainly a pipe dream, he could probably plot the inevitability on a graph with how much she seemed to be experimenting with things.

  At least whatever quest she embarked on to sleep had yet to lead her in that direction. He still didn’t know why she insisted that her ear had to be connected to his chest. The fact she didn’t seem to care one bit about the location or configuration of the rest of her body baffled any attempts to figure it out.

  It did let him move her to a spot where he could work in his little book though. Which was good, as it let him calm down and focus on something academic before bed. He was testing his transtion skills today. He had written down their need for crew members, attempting to get a list going.

  ‘At least Pup keeps a little distance. Compared to Kitty anyways. That intense stare will probably follow me into dreamnd though.’

  He shivered a bit.

  Life was strange.