Liftoff by Tyrean Martinson

Author:Tyrean Martinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tyrean Martinson
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The Spaceport

The spaceport city bustled with life in every color of the rainbow, and Amaya suspected she couldn’t see the full color spectrum with her human eyes. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but not everyone in the city was Dryadarian, Terr, or Ratterran. There were aliens she had only heard of in myths, fairy tales, and legends, and some she’d never seen before. She wasn’t sure what they were really called and she wasn’t going to ask in front of their driver, but some of them looked like dragons of a smallish size, giant birds with colorful plumage, and glowing beings, who were bipedal, but elongated in height. Plus, there were aliens who were smaller than her, some slim and some round, some who looked like she imagined Tolkien’s dwarves might, if dwarves carried guns and grenjens instead of axes. She was trying hard not to gape and barely paid attention to the way Sol handled the last exchange with their driver, but she caught him give a generous amount of Xiatat Credits to the driver in exchange for keeping their role in the deaths of the Ratterrans quiet, and to take care of the Nardel.

After the Dryadarian dropped them off at the edge of the trading center, Sol wanted to start on a reconnaissance mission in the spaceport. After a few feet of walking through the market next to the spaceport, though, he gave up as Amaya marveled at everything, from the wild range of people to the variety of goods available in the market. At one point, she stopped in the middle of a busy walkway because she thought she saw a pixie, or something like one, flying into a clothing shop that sold space suits.

Sol tapped her on the shoulder and nodded to an establishment with opaque windows. She followed him. The establishment turned out to be a restaurant with a one-way window view of the city street, and another one-way window looking out on the spaceport. An open kitchen took up the center of the restaurant. Private booths along the walls created seating areas. Once they took a seat, and the booth’s privacy doors closed, Amaya gawked openly at the spaceport’s hangar. Ships of all sizes and shapes dotted the cavernous space.

“This place is used for illegal trade,” Sol explained. “That’s why the tables are in individual nooks with opaque glass doors. The windows are one-way, so no one can see inside.”

Amaya nodded slowly. “Good.”

“You seemed to take our Dryadarian driver in stride, so what is the matter?”

“The number of people.” Amaya paused. “I mean, the number of different types of people here. Do I call them ‘people’?”

“For some reason, the Elvesan made their word stick for that in the Xiatat language, so we call all intelligent people ‘tuigseach.’”

“Tuig…seach?”

“Yes.”

Amaya thought it sounded like something from somewhere on Earth, but she wasn’t sure. “How, I mean, why…do I recognize so many of these other tuigseach? Elvesan and dragons don’t exist anywhere outside fantasy books on Earth How can they be here? Real?” They were real.

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.