Assegai by SJ MacDonald

Author:SJ MacDonald [MacDonald, SJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-29T22:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Alex was told, next morning, that nobody knew what was going on with Skipper Eldovan. Enquiries had failed to turn up any clue as to why she had boarded a liner at Kavenko instead of the expected courier. It seemed as if, for reasons unknown, she had simply changed her mind.

‘Oh well,’ said Alex, since there was nothing he could do about that. The Assegai would leave Karadon as scheduled, he would open his orders an hour later and he would have to decide then what to do about Eldovan. If it was possible, with whatever destination they’d been given, he might be able to pick her up from the liner. If not, she would find a message from him at Karadon informing her that she had missed them, and that they had been obliged to depart under sealed orders. She would have to go on to Chartsey, then, and make the best of it by working with the Samartians there.

All the same, he paused for a moment, looking at the report which was open on his desk, still wondering what could have made an officer like Eldovan ditch the courier provided for her and travel first class on a liner instead.

He found himself looking at her ID picture, as if there might be some clue in that.

It was not an engaging picture. Eldovan was Altarbian, by birth though not by genetics. Altarb was one of the most insular worlds in the League, with very little emigration either outward or inward, so Eldovan would have stood out there as an unusual physical type. The Altarbian genome was tall, slender, with a high rounded forehead and slightly elongated skull. The rounded forehead was considered beautiful in Altarbian culture and attention was drawn to it with upswept hair and sculpted eyebrows.

Eldovan had those. Her hair was clipped to Fleet regulation length but it was dressed up in a classic Altarbian style, a stiff cone rising about fifteen centimetres above her head. This was very modest by Altarbian standards. Alex had been to Altarb once and had seen many people with hair half a metre high or more, sometimes even having to duck to get through doorways. Her eyebrows were sculpted, too – pencil thin, in a strange flattened S shape at least two centimetres above where they should have been naturally. Makeup had flattened her skin tones to the kind of porcelain look considered smart on her homeworld.

Her skin, though, was not the deep blue-black which was normal for Altarbians, and nor did she have the rounded forehead or large, rounded eyes. Her forehead was flat, her eyes almond in shape and hazel in colour, her skin tone light bronze. Alex wondered what it had been like for her, growing up on a planet where anyone who looked different or even dressed differently was stared at as if they had two heads. Some people had even got off public transport when Alex had got on it, not hostile as such but so disturbed by his weirdness that they’d backed away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.