CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

joining the Merchant Scout Fleet. He’d seen a lot of chickens in his life and taken off nearly as many chicken’s heads. He’d never felt much pity for one before.

He heard men shouting in the distance—maybe another street or two over. The chicken looked at him with those, big, shimmering eyes, and Williams almost wanted to weep for the poor thing.

“Fine,” he said to the chicken, “fine. Come on. But hurry!”

Once you got down on the ground, Dzamglin was just fine. There wasn’t much in the way of flat ground, but the unrelenting mountains provided a sort of harsh beauty. Coupled with the brightly colored pagoda complexes clinging to the sheer cliffs and cities laid out on the infrequent plateaus, it was actually a rather lovely world.

Except from orbit, Captain Alberto Fujiwara thought, staring balefully at the viewscreen. What he saw from Zheng He’s viewscreen was about twenty percent of the surface of an ugly grey ball. He’d seen asteroids that had more going for them.

“Ground to orbit gate established, Captain,” someone called from a station off to the side of the bridge. “Transit estimates five minutes for full transfer of inbound personnel, another three for transfer of outbound.”

Eight minutes. Call it ten. Longer than he’d like, but business as usual. Inbound personnel shuffled through the short-range wormhole without any enthusiasm, lugging shoddy and expensive souvenirs in with them. Outbound personnel positively bounded through, eager to get off the ship, eager to see something new, eager to get laid. “Nav, prepare to compensate for gravitic disequilibrium. Engineering, increase reactor output by point oh one and keep an eye on the matter/antimatter mix. Let’s see if we can keep the power frequencies clean this transfer.”

There was a chorus of Aye, captains and repeated orders with minor variations as bridge staff relayed more specific instructions to their departments. A few minutes later, the report came that all inbound personnel were aboard ship. Fujiwara sighed and felt a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying release from his shoulders. SP3C Williams was back aboard the ship, and there had been no angry calls from the local government, no somber visits from Father Cahill, the ship’s chaplain. It wasn’t really fair to Williams to single him out like this. He wasn’t the first spacer whose libido had made a mess on shore leave, but there’d been a big difference between marrying a Rigellian stripper, and, well, that mess back on Capella.

For the first time in thirty-six hours, Fujiwara relaxed.

Williams steadied his duffle bag on his back and squared his shoulders. He’d tried packing the chicken in the bag, but it squirmed and looked, well, really obvious. No one in Transit would fail to notice him violating the Lister Protocol if his bag was squawking and moving about. So he’d stuffed the chicken in his hotel room, and tried to avoid looking nervous around the men in robes and long knives on their hips checking every corner of the street as he went out and purchased a large, ornate chest. The thing would eat up most of his personal space in the quarters he and Vance shared, and Vance would most likely gripe about it, but hey. Earth was only three months out. He could transfer it—and the chicken—back home to his parents then. The real trick was going to be keeping Vance happy until then and hoped he kept the secret. He went out and bought his bunkmate some of those creamy, cake-like bars the man had raved about after his own trip to the surface.

Three months was a lot of good will to expect from a box of sweets. Williams went back out, bought Vance a fancy knife the vendor called a “kila” and the translation matrix just called a “knife.” The translation matrix was like that, missing a lot of the local flavor initially. Williams entered a correction by tapping it into the virtual keyboard woven into the sleeve of his uniform. “Not just a knife. A fancy knife.”

As an afterthought, he snagged Vance some nudie holos and realized he’d just blown all of his remaining pay on this stupid chicken. The thought vaguely frustrated him, but all the same, he brought his haul back to the hotel and settled down in front of the chest to figure all this out.

The chicken looked at him and then at each souvenir in turn. Its big, shimmering eyes might have hovered on the knife, and then the nudes, but it was the chest that caused the chicken to look back at him doubtfully.

“What do you want from me?” Williams asked. “I can’t just march you through the wormhole.”

In response, the chicken pecked his knee. Hard.

It took a bit of coaxing and a bit of trial and error, but eventually Williams and the chicken got it figured out. The chicken settled down in the box and actually held still while Williams arranged some items around it. He draped his spare liberty uniform over the chicken with a muttered “sorry,” and then tried to strike some balance between tossing things in haphazardly— as any hungover spacer might do— and not unduly hurting the chicken. Eventually he got it right, closed the lid— with another whispered apology— and lugged it down the stairs, conscious of every jolt the poor bird was experiencing.

The rest of Zheng He’s crew on Dzamglin gathered together in a wide plaza that normally served as a market in this section of the capital city, but had been marked out for personnel transfer during Zheng He’s time in orbit. Most everyone looked a little haggard, a little hung over, and little disappointed that their liberty was up. A few looked energized and a few bored. Williams felt amazingly conspicuous, but aside from a few buddies he bumped into, no one paid him any undue attention.

Including the robed men with knives.

They wore bright orange, with some sort of headdress that was part turban, part shemagh. They looked a