Slamming her credit slip on the bar, the young woman plopped herself on a stool with a heavy sigh. Casting her yellow eyes on the barkeeper, she grumbled something about a gin and tonic before reaching back to peel her thin black top away from her sweaty back. Large, but slender hands plucked at the fabric before tiredly landing on the bar, and she leaned forward on her elbows. The short bone spurs jutting out of her elbows—surrounded by small patches of black scale—dug into the wood below, but she gave no sign of caring as her drink arrived.
With a grateful nod to the barkeep, she downed the first half of her glass in seconds, making a face. Her head lowered until it met the bar between her arms. She drew in a slow, deep breath, and let it out even slower. Bare, claw-tipped toes gripped at the stool below them. Heavy eyelids closed, her mind on fire but her body weary.
Just as she began to relax, a voice tickled the membrane just inside the unadorned hole in her head that passed itself off as an ear. A tired eye cracked open, peering past her pale, earthen-colored skin. She frowned. Them, again. No doubt they were here to talk about her at a distance they clearly believed to be just out of earshot. It wasn’t.
Jason, Marcus, and Sam—the fat-ass, the muscle-head, and the closet case. All three of them were, unfortunately, vivid examples of the human soldier stereotype she worked so hard to ignore. Jason spent as much time eating greasy fried food as he did working out and cracking jokes about women and ‘aliens’. Marcus had biceps nearly as big around as his head, and held more affection for his own physique than he did his own mother. And Sam, easily the most obnoxious of the lot, spent nearly every waking minute working tirelessly to avoid any potential confusion about his sexuality.
Sam was currently inhaling as much cheap beer as Jason was faux chicken—real chicken never made it this far from human colonies. In between swigs of beer, the pale, surprisingly fit male was blathering about what a fag anyone was for touching her. Marcus seemed to be ignoring him, his eyes off in the distance, trained on some busty, elf-like girl. Jason was laughing, a noise as deep as his gut was wide. To be fair, underneath all of that mass was a fairly healthy, tremendously well-trained body, but it was more comforting to mentally dress him in a marshmallow suit.
She sighed again, killed the second half of her drink, and ordered another. Sharp teeth clenched tight. She was sick of this. A few weeks ago, she’d politely turned Sam down for a date. Sure, she’d thought really hard about vomiting on his shirt in response, but her actual words were closer to ‘no, but thank you’ than they were to ‘die in a fire’. Yet so convinced had he been that she held some ulterior motive for turning him down, some deep secret, that he’d spent the next few days obsessively digging for dirt about her.
It hadn’t been terribly hard for him to find what he felt was an incredibly juicy secret. A quick search in the ship’s public registrar revealed the basics. Her name was Nako Terral. She was twenty-eight years old. She was born on a small moon orbiting a large, uninhabitable gaseous planet. She wasn’t human, obviously, but hélu. She wasn’t quite a she.
The second drink arrived, and she made short work of it. Small, sharp claws emerged from her fingertips, drumming the bar impatiently as Sam went running his mouth about how gay she was, no matter what sex her date might be. Jason was still laughing; Marcus still seemed ambivalent, but he was casting the occasional glance and smile in her direction.
The homophobe’s discovery was not exactly a terrible secret. As five minutes on Overnet would reveal, there was only one sex of hélu. Male and female never entered into the equation. Their physical features were, like hers, predominantly female, and most people—most reasonable, intelligent people—were satisfied to address them as female regardless of any discrepancies in their genitalia. Then again, most reasonable, intelligent people probably paid enough attention in primary school to know that not every species across the galaxy reproduced the exact same way.
After calling for a third drink, Nako reached her decision. As embarrassing as it was, and as afraid as she was that her superior officer would be just as thick, she was going to report them. She shouldn’t have to put up with this. Most of her fellow soldiers—male or female, human or otherwise—were either ambivalent about her anatomy or respectful enough not to make an issue of it. After all, she wasn’t about to sleep with them, and at first glance she looked a bit like a human of Asian descent. Except her grandfather was either an iguana or a lawnmower.
No sooner than her third drink had arrived, she slaughtered it, stood, and slapped down a tip. Blood rushed to her head as she tried to take a step, her footing faltering slightly. Taking a deep breath, she willed herself to walk straight. As loathe as she was to admit it, her species was not terribly famous for its constitution. Her empty stomach didn’t help, either, nor did weighing just over a hundred and twenty pounds. But she was, if anything, well versed in acting sober, regardless of her actual state.
Ten steps. Twenty. She smiled a bit to herself as she settled into a steady gait toward the door, but before she could leave, she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Marcus. Her right hand slid behind her back as she turned around, clenching the grip of her holstered dagger. “Yes?”
A large, dark-skinned hand gestured back toward the bar. Marcus smiled awkwardly. “I saw you were drinking alone. I, uh… was wondering if I could fix that.”
Her grip tightened around her dagger. “I’ve had three, Roid Rage. I’m going to my room.”
Scratching at his stubbly black hair, he shrugged. “So I can… get you a drink to go?” he offered. “Come on, it’s on me and—”
Nako scoffed, rolling her eyes. “I want nothing to do with you and your shitty friends. All of you can catch fire. Could I make that any more clear?”
Marcus smirked, exhaling slowly and eyeing his feet. “Nah, I know. Look, Sam is a cunt, and Jason isn’t too bright. But I’m not asking you to sit with them.”
She glanced toward Marcus, at the table he had come from, and back at him. It wasn’t like all of her ‘friends’ were the best people in the world, either. This was a rough place. Good company could be hard to find. With a deep, frustrated breath, her shoulders slumped. Behind her back, she released her dagger. Her hand fell to her pocket. “Fine, fine. But o—”
“Man, really?? I really didn’t exp—”
“But,” she interrupted, “only if you can gimme an actual reason.”
Marcus bit his lip, making a face. “Oookay, pressure pressure, ummm… I think you’re really, uhh…”
“Interesting.” She raised an eyebrow, amused.
“…Shit. You’re about to tell me that’s a bad answer. No! Totally not because you’re interesting. You’re just….” His feet fidgeted again, and he looked for all the world like he was in pain. “Fff…. Nnn… neat?”
“Neat.” A quiet laugh slipped past her defenses, and she found herself shaking her head. “Neat, Marcus? Try again.”
“Fuck! See, this is the part where I have to come up with a really great excuse, really fast, or I’m S.O.L.”
“Yep.”
He frowned dramatically, hands waving about as he choked on every possible answer. “…you’re… hot?” He winced, prepared for the worst.
Nako’s face screwed up, and before she could help herself, she cracked. A coarse cackle burst from her lips. “Ohhh, lord. See, Marcus, herein lies the problem.” Her hands fell to her hips, and she smirked as she savored the look on his face. “Pretend I did let you buy me a drink, as if I were actually one of your human ladies and gave two shits about your elaborate mating rituals. Now pretend, having consumed just a bit more alcohol, I’m suddenly so inebriated that I’m drooling on myself and unable to form coherent sentences. Then pretend you do what you want to do, and drag me off to bed while I’m incapable of making sound decisi—”
“I… but—”
“There’s still the fundamental issue of anatomy. Let me spell this out for you, Marcus.” Taking a step toward him, Nako leaned in close, holding her hands in front of her face. Her left hand formed a circle, and she stuck her right index finger through that circle. “This is what you’re after. And believe it or not, I am capable of that part. Lucky you! Buuut…” she trailed off, waving her hands in a circular motion, demanding the answer from Marcus.
He sighed, giving her a cross look. “Look, don’t be a bitch. You think because Sam is a homophobic imbecile, I must be stupid, too? I actually paid attention in primary, thank you. And for shit sake, if I don’t know what a girl from another system has got crawlin’ in her panties, I am not gonna find out the hard way.”
“Good.” Nako blurted flatly. “In that case, Mr. Science, you’ll understand when I tell you that I think your buying me a drink is fairly pointless. I am not a woman. So—”
“So you just strung me along. Thanks! You’re doing a gr—”
“So, you’ll understand when why I’m offering to buy you a drink.” She grinned, challenge in her eyes.
Marcus blinked. Leaning his head back, he brought his thumb to his chin, eyes narrowing as he considered the situation. After a short silence, he smirked. “Why don’t you buy your drink, I’ll buy mine, and we can engage in civil, unbiased discussion about the, uh… I don’t know, the current state of intergalactic affairs?”
Rolling her eyes, Nako nodded toward the bar and took a step past Marcus. “At a bar? Fuck that. I’d rather talk about titties and porn.”
