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

“Two,” Ramirez said. “Security will meet you in two minutes. Ramirez out.”

Vance hopped into his bunk to allow Williams room to manhandle the chest, but when the spacer instead opened the chest, complained, “Oh come on, we still have to keep that thing?”

Williams ignored him. The chicken stuck its head out, turning its headfirst this way and then that way to meet Williams’ gaze. “I’m sorry,” he told the bird. “If I don’t take you, security will.”

The chicken clucked in a way that Williams could only call soothing.

“I saw their knives,” he protested. “They’re going to kill you.”

“It’s a bird, man. You put away a dozen chicken wings every time the galley serves them. That’s like six chickens.”

“It’s different,” Williams murmured, unsure of how or why he knew that it was different. Unsure of why he’d done any of this, just that he knew, somehow, that it was different. The chicken clucked, still side-eyeing Williams. The spacer leaned in, drawn into the creature’s shimmering, oversized eye. It was almost as if he could see stars—

And the chicken pecked him, hard, in between the eyes.

Five minutes and change later, Williams was standing outside Transit Three clutching the chicken in his arms, flanked by the security detachment and Commander Ramirez. His forehead still throbbed, but the physical sting took some of the emotional sting out of the situation. Maybe it was just a dumb animal after all.

The doors hissed open. The captain and chaplain knelt with the beautiful Spacer Menendez and the other members of Transit Three’s staff. All had their hands clasped behind their heads. All had primitive rifles pointed at them by men in bright military uniforms.

“Awful lot of mess for a bird,” Williams muttered.

One of the security guys grunted. Ramirez just gestured impatiently.

Williams swallowed and stepped into the Transit room. The short-range wormhole back to the planet’s surface shimmered on the far wall, the city plaza he’d just left half an hour ago just visible beyond. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he couldn’t have been sure who he was saying it to—the brightly clad men, Fujiwara and Cahill, even maybe the chicken again.

One man wore robes and the face-covering headdress he’d seen on the planet. He couldn’t say if it was the same man or another, but the man— a priest of some sort, Williams supposed— stepped towards him, arms reaching for the bird.

The chicken took that as a sign to run like hell. It thrashed in Williams’ arms, and the spacer fought to hold on to it. He almost managed it, too, until he felt a searing, jagged pain in his leg. He dropped the bird reflexively and clutched at the wound. Blood streamed from between his fingers.

Spurs. The stupid bird had opened his leg with a spur, sharper and more vicious than any Terran chicken’s spurs he’d run afoul of; instead of a puncture wound, he had a long, bleeding gash. With his luck, this big-eyed, alien maybe-chicken would have venom like a platypus.

Afoul. Heh.

A man with a gun to Menendez’s back dropped it and let it swing from the shoulder strap as he dove for the chicken. The bird squawked and flapped its wings, backpedaling from the man, who promptly tripped over Menendez’s legs. The two went down in a tangled heap as the chicken bolted in the opposite direction.

The air was full of feathers. Pressure differential between the planet and the ship resulted in a faint breeze that carried the feathers towards the wormhole, but the absolute pandemonium erupting stirred everything into a swirling storm of black and red. Dzamglin soldiers ignored the Zheng He crew as they tried to corral the bird. The robed man screamed words at them that the translation matrix didn’t know or refused to translate, but Williams assumed it was a lot like the words Ramirez would have for him later at the captain’s mast. Fujiwara was helping Cahill to his feet and a member of the Transit room staff was pulling Menendez out from underneath the fallen soldier.

The chicken paused at the edge of the wormhole, uttered a single, taunting cluck, and ran through. The chaos began to separate as the Dzamglin soldiers half-retreated, half-pursued the chicken through the wormhole, and the Zheng He’s spacers made for the safety of a place outside the Transit room. Someone jostled Williams as he pushed past into the corridor and he realized, with a start, that the pain from the wound had vanished. Great. Absolutely some kind of poison in the spurs— an analgesic to keep the victim from fighting, maybe? Probably an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing. Maybe the chicken fed on blood, like a vampire bat.

But when he pulled his hands away, he found his leg was fine. His pants were whole. He couldn’t even find dirt under his fingernails when he held them up to the light. Williams muttered a perplexed curse, as the last soldier vanished and someone killed the wormhole.

Williams had been just on the verge of sleep when he heard a chicken. He bolted upright, slamming his head into the underside of Vance’s bunk and eliciting a stream of curses from both men. Every night. Every single night. In the weeks since Zheng He had been ordered to its next port by Fleet HQ, he’d either been woken from a dead sleep or right as he was drifting off. He staggered out of bed and pulled on a T-shirt. Sleep would be a while coming. Sleep was always a while in coming. He’d found it better to just slip off to the galley for a snack while the tension bled off.

As always, he stopped and peered into the narrow viewport next to their bunk. Zheng He’s skip-stitch drive distorted space into streaks and pulses of light. It wasn’t stars streaking past, not quite, but it certainly looked like it. He shrugged off the feeling that there was something just outside his grasp out there. That had