Page 38 of Tempting Cargo
“Okay, Muzi. Again?”
“I’ve fixed it too many times already. Not the panels, yet—graphene panels last for years and years. Except we haven’t used graphene panels in about a century. But it’s Orithian, so what do you expect?”
I played back her fast words in my head until I followed. “I don’t know. What should I expect? New here, remember.”
“Orithian stuff is usually shit, but I do like the flatcake heaters. They’re hard to get anywhere else. Cap gets a crate of the prepackaged flatcakes every time she can; she loves them. And so do we.”
“Crap, we ate loads.”
Muzati gave a full belly laugh, making the tools in her headspines wobble precariously. “Not a galley crate. A cargo crate. We’ve got hundreds. But that’s no use if the heater’s broken. Where am I going to get replacement panels out here?”
Damn. I was really hoping to get it fixed today. “Do you want to have a look? In case I’m wrong, and it’s not that. I’m only used to human tech, though this made enough sense.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, and turned away. “Hey, humans! This is the remake ofLovers of Lietanand it’s terrible. I don’t know what they were thinking. Let me introduce you to the best holovid in the galaxy. Comnica, play season twenty-seven of theOrkri Wrestling League. Watch out for the Golden Tsati, he’s the best.” She gave me a grin. “Much better. Where was I?” She pulled two tools from her braided headspines and rolled them round her fingers. “Orithians insist on doing everything differently. They have to conform their ships to an extent, but the rest of their tech, especially little things like this?Kheh.”
“Maybe we can work together,” I said. “What’s Orithian?”
“Oh gods, I forget that you know less than a nipper in prime academy. And you’re askingmeabout history? If you want accuracy, you want Paiata, not me, not that I’m not accurate, buthe knows all the details, whereas I know the basics. Youareonly after the basics, aren’t you?” She looked up expectantly as she took a breath.
“Basic is fine.”
“Right, so we—kri’ith, big-ass spiky people who can kick a shaa’s arse from here to Bzhalti—have two homeworlds. About, what, two hundred years ago, there was a civil war. The traditionalists didn’t want to get involved with other species or the wider galaxy, and the modernists did. The first homeworld is called Orith—that means ‘home of the children’—and the war destroyed half of it because it went on for, like, a hundred years. Pass me the small twist driver.”
Amongst the growing collection of tools was another thing similar to a screwdriver, so I held it out.
“No, that’s a crosswrench. The one with a blue handle. Yeah, that one. So in the end, the modernists left them to it, and that’s us, the Orkri’ians. We’d already started terraforming the largest moon, so we all skykked off to the shiny new place and called it Orkri just to piss them off. It means ‘home of Kri.’”
“And Kri is?”
“The creator god, from whom all other gods came. Not that we give a shit about the gods. Unlike the Orithians.” She gave an eerie grin that split all the way to her ear ridges.
I sorted through the words before speaking. “So kri’ith means Kri’s children? And you called your moon ‘home of the main god’?”
“You got it.”
“I see why that might have pissed some of them off.”
“Right. And we call it a planet now. Galaxy convention. If you can live on it, it’s a planet, even if it’s a moon.”
“Okay.” Slightly confusing, but nothing I couldn’t get used to.
“Do you want to know what pisses the Orithians off even more? Having to see Orkri in the sky every night, covered in the lights of all our cities, and having to see all the space traffic going to and fro all the skykking time.”
I grinned. “I can only imagine.”
“When I was a nipper, we adopted the second moon too, not to live on, but for industrial stuff. The skykking complaints we got about two Orkri’ian moons lighting up the sky. I swear it was all my parents talked about for a whole year. The Orithian government actually sent an ambassador to Orkri, they were so pissed.”
Her face was even more animated than usual, and I suspected Muzati was as interested in history as Paiata in her own way, even if she didn’t realise it.
I pulled a wire connector out. “So, if the two planets hate each other, why have you got an Orithian pancake toaster?”
“Ohhhhh— Whoops. Did I leave an important bit out?” Muzati slapped her palm across her face. “TheDorimisais Orithian. So’s the captain.”
“What?” I struggled to get my head round it. “But she—”
“Doesn’t strike you as stuffy and traditional and all that ulthshit? No. She’s been out here too long. She’s an honorary Orkri’ian. Happens to quite a few Orithian traders. Just don’t tell her parents.” She put a finger to her lips in an exaggerated secret gesture.
This was getting confusing. “Wait. She’sout here. I thought you just said—”
