Short Fiction: "Cupid's Scattergun"
"Cupid's Scattergun" is a bit of an odd story. It hinges on the odd relational logic of an alien species, though the path that logic takes is left implied.
When I deal with non-human sapients in my fantasy and sci-fi, I try to figure out more than what makes them look different. Aliens should be alien in psychology as much as physiology - as I have hinted in past posts, I think their thinking should be at least more alien from humans than the thinking of the most distant human cultures are from each other.
The Atro'me featured here are, chronologically, the second xenosapient species human explorers encounter (after the Reachers), and the first against which humans must fight a war. That war, however, was almost seven hundred years ago for Ali, Mahir, and Konnila - Atro'me are, by the 30th century, relatively well integrated in the Reach, with small colonies of Atro'me scattered across most of human-dominated space from the Silver Strand to the Coreward Frontier. The largest Atro'me settlement is found on Mars in the Sol system.
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Ali didn’t know much about the mythologies of ancient peoples, but he did remember that some ancient cultures on Earth, before the Space Ages, believed in a magical creature which was responsible for distributing amorous feelings. He’d always considered the idea to be grotesque, even by the standards of ancient peoples; after all, they pictured the agent of love as a winged child, often little more than a toddler, which wore a blindfold and lurked in bushes and behind rocks places with a magical bow and arrow, with which it shot random passerby. Ali had always wondered how they thought it hit anything while blindfolded, and how its chubby little child’s arms could draw back a bow with enough strength to fire even the smallest arrow.
Ali also knew that at some point, the ancients had figured out this wasn’t actually the cause of romantic feelings. Over time, the peoples of Earth had come up with better explanations, and the creepy bush-whacking child with the bow became a metaphor rather than a hypothesis. How the consistent lack of arrow-shafts sticking out of the love-struck had not undone the whole idea before it could even get started remained a mystery.
Though he used to laugh at the quaint ideas of ancient peoples, Ali had reason to reconsider his scorn as he examined the surveillance feeds from the previous week. "I'll be damned. That punk Cupid traded his arrows for a scattergun.”
- - - - - - -
Ali's ship Elena Finn was not large, even by the standards of Frontier supply runs. Her accommodations amounted to six cabins a small lounge, with the bulk of the squat hull being taken up by a pressurized cargo hold. The ship had been designed to transport sensitive equipment which need regular inspection or maintenance during transit, and its two-spacer crew made their living mainly by running medical supplies and sensitive electronic equipment between Frontier worlds. Conditions onboard were never as comfortable as those on a proper passenger liner, but in the absence of labor-intensive cargo filling the spare cabins with med-techs or logistics engineers, Ali and his partner Mahir were only too happy to take on a few passengers to pad their profit margins.
Just before shoving off for the last leg of a cargo circuit through the outer Frontier, Mahir went out into the port station several hours before departure on a last-minute supply errand and returned with a well-dressed Atro’me in tow. The sapient, speaking Anglo-Terran with a hissing accent and professorial vocabulary explained that he had been hoping to find a ship with enough free berths to take his family to Maribel in a hurry, and since Maribel was Finn's next destination, the trio speedily negotiated a fare for six passengers.
As Mahir took the grateful Atro'me's payment and started configuring the spare cabins, Ali excused himself to find a software patch on the station's datasphere to allow the ship’s food processors to cater to Atro’me diets. Fortunately, he found one quickly, and noted with some relief that the software upgrade was both cheap and low-footprint. Evidently, these sapients required a diet very similar to that of humans.
Ali was still installing the patch from a console on the command deck when the Atro’me family arrived at the boarding hatch. He’d expected from the earlier conversation that the family was composed of two adults and four children, but all members of this family looked to be adults of the species. The female at the head of the group seemed older and walked with an upright bearing, and the other four, though bedecked with the wild, vibrant crest colors and brighter, almost orange-hued skin of relative youth, kept their heads bowed and followed their senior closely.
Leaving his work unfinished, Ali hurried to greet the group and lead them to their patriarch. At first he saw no difference between the youths, but as they introduced themselves, he could tell from their voices that three of the four youths were females; the fourth, the oldest, was a male. They all spoke Anglo-Terran fluently like their father, but they said little, deferring to the monosyllabic answers of their taciturn mother.
Less than an hour after Elena Finn got underway, the youths left their cabins and began wandering through the ship, curious as to what it contained. At first, Mahir and Ali let them explore, as they thought the young adults would be smart enough not to touch anything marked dangerous.
This policy lasted only forty minutes, which was how long it took for the youngest and smallest of the youths, a quiet female named Konnila, to find her way into one of the maintenance crawlspaces and set off several alarms. Leaving Mahir at the helm, Ali assembled the passengers into the lounge and laid down the law about what was off-limits during the rest of their five-day journey to Maribel.
Evidently, his instructions had frightened the family; the Atro’me retreated into the three cabins assigned to them and stayed there for three full shifts, with only the father venturing out to access the food processors in the lounge and talk with the crew.
For the remaining four days of the journey, Ali let Mahir deal with the passengers, and they started coming back out of their cabins. This arrangement proved to be suitable for everyone; Mahir had always been more outgoing, and Ali liked his quiet. Whenever he wasn't sleeping or helping fly the ship, Mahir went to the lounge, chatting or playing games with whichever subset of the passengers happened to be there at the time.
It became quickly clear to Ali, who often watched goings-on in the lounge remotely from the helm station, that the passengers all seemed to like his affable partner. In particular, Aroyki, Tarbira, and Konnila, the three young females, seemed to hang on his every story, often remaining in the lounge to listen to stories of life plying the space-lanes long after their brother and parents had retired for a sleep cycle.
At first, Ali didn’t think anything of this; Mahir was the sort who loved having an audience – any audience – for his embellished tales. He probably didn’t think too hard about why he had the audience he had. Ali had his suspicions about the way his partner smiled at the oldest sister, but didn’t think that there would be much of a problem. Mahir was too responsible to get overly familiar with paying passengers, and the girls’ father would be only too happy to interfere if there was a problem. If the family patriarch had accepted the situation, Ali decided to stay out of it.
A few hours after the passengers disembarked at Maribel, Mahir had approached Ali with one of them - Konnila, the youngest - in tow, standing a little straighter and seeming far less shy than she had been before. Mahir explained that the youth wanted to join the crew, but the way she hung on his arm indicated that her interest was in the man, not the vessel.
Though the youngest in her family, Konnila was adult by human and Atro'me standards - twenty T-years of age - so Ali's first reaction was cautious optimism. Elena Finn was a handful for two spacers to maintain, and Konnila came on as an apprentice, which made her a very cheap hire. Within the first day of coming aboard, she had learned enough to make herself useful while Ali and Mahir replaced a set of dodgy electrical conduits. She didn't set up her own cabin, evidently content to share Mahir's, but Ali let this go. Their personal lives behind that door were none of his business.
- - - - - - -
The reality of what had happened at Maribel was now only too clear to Ali, and it was far too late to change his mind about allowing Konnila to hire on with Elena Finn. He'd happened on rather informative security recordings entirely by chance - it wasn't normally his habit to review the security feeds.
Konnila's return after Finn reached Maribel had not been a simple matter. Each of the three girls independently arranged to return to the ship after their family disembarked and while Mahir and Ali were elsewhere on the station, each giving the ship's computer the excuse that they had forgotten something. Aroyki and Tarbira had retrieved stashed luggage when they came aboard, and it was clear they had no intention of returning to their parents.The youngest arrived last and carried nothing, her demeanor indicating uncertainty. For the others, their return was premeditated, but for Konnila, it seemed to be a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on perhaps by a realization of what her sisters were doing.
The older two had planned everything out, except one thing - neither seemed to expect to run into her sister in the corridor in front of Mahir’s cabin.
Though the corridor security monitors aboard Elena Finn lacked audio recording ability, the heated argument that ensued when the girls found their ploy mirrored remained evident in the silent video. The chaotic argument paused only a moment when Konnila arrived, then resumed with only a few interjections from the newcomer - it was clear each older girl saw the other as the primary threat to their designs.
As no-one was willing to surrender their claim, the argument soon became violent, with the two older girls falling upon each other, striking, raking with their fingers, and biting. It was the biting Ali remembered most vividly afterwards - Atro'me, after all, carry sharp teeth in wide jaws capable of opening to unsettling angles for a creature so otherwise similar to a human in shape and proportion. He could not tell from the recordings alone what sorts of injuries those two girls inflicted, biting, raking, and generally tearing at each other, but he suspected both would have needed medical attention.
The third Atro’me girl, Konnila, stood aghast at this struggle for several seconds, all but ignored by her older siblings. This was, of course, the very same curious explorer who’d set off alarms on the first day of the voyage by getting into the maintenance crawlspaces. She was the quietest of the passengers, especially after Ali’s lecture about off-limits areas, but the fury which had taken her two sisters seemed also to kindle something in her.
It happened so fast that Ali had to play the recording back at half speed to see it clearly. Konnila, standing statue-still throughout most of the fight, suddenly took up the heavy polymer travel-case the oldest girl had brought. Swinging it overhand by its carry-handle, she battered Aroyki and Tarbira over the head. Tangled with each other as they were, neither was in a position to fight back. Ali doubted that Konnila was strong enough to kill them with the semi-rigid piece of luggage in so few blows, but the determined set to her face suggested she would have done it if she could.
Before either had regained consciousness, their younger sister dragged them one at a time to the airlock and down the boarding umbilical into the station. Ali didn't know what had happened to them after that - the ship's security system had no way of recording goings-on beyond the umbilical. They were still alive when they "disembarked", but Elena Finn's systems could tell him nothing else.
Konnila returned and appropriated their bags for herself. She spent several minutes carefully wiping up the dark blood spattered on the deck and bulkheads in front of Mahir's cabin, then dragged "her" bags to the umbilical, where Mahir would find her an hour later. While she waited, she dug out a slate computer and seemed to be reading something.
Mahir had understandably reacted with surprise when she told him what she intended, but it took her only a few minutes to make an impression on him. Despite first appearing shy, Konnila turned out to be quite persuasive and unwilling to take no for an answer.
The security feeds told Ali that by the time he had returned to the ship, the pair had already been into Mahir's cabin and emerged once more, wearing different clothes. No security system recorded goings-on there, but he didn't need much imagination to guess.
Ali paused the recording as his image appeared, returning at last from cargo negotiations. He had agreed to permit her aboard as an apprentice, and now there would be trouble over it. Elena Finn was a day and a half out from Maribel now, loaded with time-sensitive cargo that would not permit backtracking. It was a shame - he had been beginning to grow used to the addition to his crew; Konnila had proven generally quiet, polite, and unobtrusive, keeping her more outgoing traits, of which Ali deliberately preferred not to speculate, hidden behind the door of Mahir's cabin.
Now, though, Ali had seen the recordings, and he needed to figure out what to do about them. Mahir, who did often browse security recordings in the ship's computer, would stumble on them eventually, and even deleting them would only prolong the inevitable. Elena Finn kept backups, and those couldn’t be easily deleted. The longer Ali kept the secret, the more tainted by inevitable fallout he’d be.
Sighing heavily and reaching under the pilot’s console for the flask which he kept there for special occasions, Ali called his partner to the helm.
(Banner art by Wiktor Paluch.)