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

little Buddhist, but while Williams hadn’t had too much interaction with Buddhists in his life, he didn’t think all the ornaments these guys wore on their robes were really in keeping with the Buddhist aesthetic. But then things had gotten all muddled up out here during the Diaspora. I mean, look at what had passed for Scriptures back on Capella IV….

The blood, too. The robes were stained with blood, and while the kila that they wore on their hips had been sheathed every time he’d seen them, Williams would have bet there was blood on them, chicken’s blood, knives too hastily sheathed when his chicken had escaped too soon to be cleaned properly.

He couldn’t have articulated why, exactly, that filled him with horror, not when he’d killed his fair share of chickens and eaten more than his fair share of hot wings, but the chicken’s big eyes seemed to fill his mind as the men prowled around the outskirts of Zheng He’s gathered crew.

Ahead, in the space that had been marked off with vibrant but temporary spray paint, the short-range wormhole manifested in a cascade of vibrant energy and a noticeable discontinuity. Transit could just be glimpsed through the wormhole, a sterile room of dark metal and the comfortably-dim lighting common to the Terran Merchant Fleet.

The men craned their heads this way and that, peering into the crowd.

The spacers began to file through.

Williams sweated bullets. His palms were wet, and the chest threatened to slip from his hands.

The chicken remained mercifully silent.

And they were through.

“Hey! You! Spacer!”

Williams froze, grumpy crewmen pushing past him.

“Yeah, you,” the woman repeated. Williams looked up to see a beautiful, dark haired woman standing behind an instrument console and motioning him over. He couldn’t read her name tape or see the stripes on her shoulders through the crowd of inbound spacers, but Zheng He wasn’t so big that he hadn’t seen her from time to time. Spacer First Class Menendez, comma something he’d never been able to find out. “What’s in that box? Sensors are reading something screwy in there.” She tapped her console and then beckoned him over again.

Williams swallowed nervously and tightened his grip, but obediently cut across the stream of people to her workstation. “Just souvenirs, ma’am.”

“Well, open it up and let’s see.”

“It’s just some holos and stuff…”

“Something you don’t want me to find, Williams?” she asked, peering at his name tape.

“No, ma’am. It’s just—”

“Open it up, Spacer.”

Williams swallowed and shot a silent apology to the chicken. Then he set the chest down and opened it up. The holos had been left on and blazed into life as soon as the chest opened. Menendez blushed, Williams blushed, and the chicken stuck its head out between the thighs of the exotic and holographic beauty. Williams began to stutter out an explanation, but Menendez’s eyes seemed to focus on something distant and invisible to Williams. “Well,” she mumbled, closing the lid, “everyone has their vices. Must be energy discharge from the active holos.”

“Captain,” the comm officer called, “Incoming hail from Dzamglin Planetary Central. Coded urgent.”

“On screen,” he sighed, praying fervently to the God he didn’t believe in. Fifteen minutes. Fujiwara had been given all of fifteen minutes without the emotional weight of Williams’ presence on the planet weighing him down. And, sure, maybe it wasn’t about Williams, about some faux pas the otherwise excellent young spacer had committed— but if it wasn’t, he’d give up his hard-fought atheism and go have a chat with Father Cahill about joining his church. Because that would be the only way he’d be convinced that there was a God.

In the weeks that they’d been here, Dzamglin’s official communications with the Zheng He had been laconic. Taciturn, even. But now a man whose face largely was obscured by a brightly colored headdress was pacing impatiently in front of the screen as if oblivious to the situation. Suddenly, he stopped and spun to face the screen. “Oh perfidious thieves,” he railed, words filtered through Zheng He’s translation matrix. “Foul wanders! Purloining vagrants! Would you spirit away our children as well?”

“Excuse me?” Fujiwara said mildly.

The man threw up “Feign ignorance if you must, but return our—” And here the translator’s approximation of the voice faltered. The man shouted for another second before the matrix offered, in clearly artificial tones, “our [haruspex/sacrifice/auger/warrior/aphrodisiac]!”

Someone giggled nervously in the silence.

Fujiwara frowned. “Come again, Minister?”

The man repeated the word. Ramirez, Zheng He’s XO, mumbled, “There has to be a translation error, Captain. I thought the linguistics had the Dzamglin matrix pretty well hammered out, but…”

“I’m afraid, Minister, that I’m unfamiliar with that… item.”

The minister froze in mid-tirade and slowly dropped the hand with which he'd been gesturing wildly. “Inanimate object it is not. Rather a fowl, vital and proud, eight hands plus a half, black as galactic night and bright as flame. Gone, now, from our city, and in the company of your honored crew.” His head tilted, as though listening to someone offscreen speak. “Mayhap a discussion best conducted in the flesh. May we board your ship of wonders?”

That there had been an interstellar society of some sort before the Diaspora was evident and easily verifiable; there were humans and human-derivative cultures everywhere the Merchant Scout fleet went. But the actual records of that society were at best, muddled with myth and fable. There was one account in particular that suggested that pre-Diaspora Transit was less a gateway to be stepped through and more a legitimate teleportation. Fujiwara often pined for that reality, not so much because the short range wormhole was somehow inconvenient— shuttles were inconvenient— but because those same records suggested that the ancients could analyze the data streams in that teleportation system and recognize hazardous or unauthorized materials and either store them safely away as digitized patterns, or else leave them behind altogether. Those ancients, if they were real, would have known about the chicken and left it planetside. And they certainly wouldn’t have had the flood