Shadows Chapter VII: Watched

Author's note: the Ng'chrit'kee are a genderless species, as such, the pronouns "he" and "she" are inappropriate for them, as is "it," which is a gender neutral word, not genderless. So I have elected to take from the Turkish their third person pronoun "o" which also has no gender. I will use it for referring to any Ng'chrit'kee, and its possessive "onun" in place of "it" or "its."

The spacedock facility was enormous. When it first hove into view, it didn’t seem so with no visible objects for reference. It was just a dot, barely larger than the background stars, though equally bright. But it rapidly swelled, and, as it did, I began to make out details, and little swarming specks appeared around it, rapidly darting to and fro around it in a buzz of activity. And as it continued to increase in size on our approach, the speck grew more slowly, blurred confusingly until its parts began to separate and reolve, and soon all was dwarfed by its immensity.

It was a giant spider web of metal, shining in the dark. Where threads connected, I spied ovoid shapes whose irregularity became more apparent as we approached, just as those threads became far more than insubstantial. The nodes proved to be large asteroids serving both as mounts and crossways for immense corridor-like pylons, each easily as long as you Earth’s moon is wide. The whole structure soon filled my viewport and the flitting ships, many of which were easily as big as the one in which I travelled, out of view beyond the windows edges. The sheer size of the facility truly hit home when a gateway opened in one of the asteroid nodes and we flew *inside* it.

A chime sounded, drawing my attention away from the window, and the wall screen flashed to life, revealing an image of Captain standing in a room equally as luxurious as mine.

“Please forgive my intrusion,” he started, “but I wanted to let you know we will be staying at this facility for at least two weeks for maintenance and repairs. Maybe longer. So you have some time to make your decision. Feel free to explore as you will. The Bosun will see that you are assigned a ship pad so you may pay for any luxuries you may wish to partake.”

Onun image blinked away to blackness before I had a chance to respond.

* * *

I’m not sure what I expected when I exited the Ng’chrit’kee vessel, but it certainly wasn’t what I encountered. Instead, what sight lay before me stopped me in my tracks and left me staring awestruck and jaw agape. Instead of a narrow tunnel, the airlock instead let us out onto a railed gantry overlooking an immense chamber, the other side of which was almost lost in a thin mist-like haze. Up, down, and all around, the walls were lined with starships of varying shapes and sizes interspersed with many-windowed permanent looking structures fronted with neon signs. In a reflection of outside the structure, gantries similar to the one on which I was standing spider webbed across the cavern, some meeting at points where they supported mid-air buildings of their own. Amidst the metal threads small things floated about, only the nearer onces clearly visible. These too had numerous forms – from lazily drifting gas bags to more rapidly moving rocket-propelled creatures of two, four, or more limbs. Along the gantries crawled ant-like streams of denizens moving in all directions.

Down to my right, the balcony terminated just before an open-topped skiff which was docked sidewise against the hull of the Ng’chrit’kee freighter. Several large airlocks lay open and the crew were already offloading goods onto the skiff.

Left with only one choice as to where to go, I stepped off in that direction. The walkway curved and left the wall, and I soon found myself suspended over unsettling depths on a bridge wide enough for four elephants abreast. And a good thing that width, for heading my direction undulated a giant wormlike creature, easily of elephantine girth and much greater length, its face consisting of a halo of multifaceted opaline eyes surrounding a writhing fringe of barb-tipped tentacles with a circular toothless, lipless maw in the center. Several tentacles held sundry devices, and it hissed and clicked at them as it approached. Clearly sentient. I suppressed the urge to stare as I stepped to the side, and we passed each other absent incident.

Sweeping down to merge with another, my gantry became a ramp and I was soon faced with a fast moving crowd flowing in two directions. I couldn’t help but boggle at the dizzying variety of creatures before me. In all my travels, I had never seen the like. My guess was the close correlation in spatial proximity in their respective realities of the worlds I’d visited somehow constrained the forms of the sentient beings to largely humanoid. Those making up this flood certainly were not subject to similar limits. They ranged in size from a mere hand span to the gargantuan – some larger even than the worm I’d passed. Three were puff balls, spider-like beings, humanoids of incredible variety, octopi, stars with points radiating in all directions, and more worms. They walked, crawled, slithered, undulated, tumbled, and performed other means of locomotion for which I have no words.

I dove in, and it was all I could do to keep myself from being swept away. I wondered how the smaller sentients kept themselves from being crushed underfoot. It reminded me of New York City. The noise was cacophonous. I certainly couldn’t make any sense of it, and my loaned tablet remained silent. Probably for the better.

The skyway I was on and several others came together to meet at a mid-air building the size of a skyscraper. Cuboid, it was peppered by windows seemingly randomly placed, interspersed with various neon and holographic signs portraying multitudinous beings each making what could only be beckoning gestures. Smells began to waft my way, as mixed a bag as the crowd, first something mouthwatering only to have a breeze replace it with something gut-wrenchingly putrid. Holding up the pad quickly confirmed my suspicions that the dozens of alien scripts in the signs all expressed basically the same thing: this restaurant or that, each with its own cuisine targeting differing clientele. I had found the interstellar food court.

Pushed along by the press of people, I entered the building through an immense archway, far larger than was necessary to admit even the most gigantic of the incoming patrons.

Once inside, any semblance of order the stream of sentients outside had was lost as they all scattered in different directions, each with a separate destination in mind. The guts of the facility were just about what one would expect from a mammoth, many-storied food court, a single giant enclosure lined with table-filled balconies and verandas that fronted open-air restaurants, none of which lacked for a constant influx of customers replacing an equal outflow. Tables, booths, and people filled the bottom floor, though some of the establishments provided recessed pits in lieu of tables. Not all the tables had chairs, and those that did had as many shapes and sizes of them as diners.

Espying one that seemed to be frequented by Ng’chrit’kee, and remembering that the food on the freighter had been palatable, and finding it doubtful that any of these eateries had ever seen a human let alone served Earth-like food, I elected to work my way there that I might partake of their offerings.

As I wriggled through the crowd, I developed a sense of being watched. I tried to shake it off. How utterly preposterous a concept; I couldn’t be of any interest to anyone in this menagerie. I was no more bizarre than anything around me, and there was no possible way anyone here could have any idea who I was, or even care, let alone have a grudge against me or suspicions of my intent. And yet, the feeling persisted.

The furniture in the restaurant was less confusing in variety than I’d anticipated. I suppose this was due to it specializing in foods that catered to humanoid creatures like the Ng’chrit’kee. I quickly found an empty table by the window and took a seat. As I did, the ship tablet chirped a pleasant tone. I pulled it out, and saw that is was already displaying a menu of the fare this establishment had to offer, as well as the joint’s name – the Lusty Lahob’nan. Whatever that was.

It didn’t matter though, I was there, and famished, and I wanted to take in the sight of the astounding panoply of species parading past outside. A couple items resembling more appealing versions of the cuisine I’d had aboard ships caught my eye, so I tapped their entries, and a new little icon appeared hovering above the table – it resembled a generic humanoid serving person. Setting the little computer down on the table, I leaned with my arm over the chair back and gazed out the window, trying my best to ignore the watched feeling and just enjoy the view.

Some of the crowd’s constituents certainly caught my eye. One in particular stood out – pun intended. Taller than anything else, its two extremely elongated legs had knees well above its headless pear-shaped body. Three appendages protruded from the fatter lower end of its torso – two front and one in back, all three tentacles, yet possessing so many joints, they moved in a strikingly serpentine fashion. I couldn’t make out an orifice from where I sat, but its torso was capped by a ring of gem-like bulges that I took for sensory organs. It moved with a long, slow, purposeful gait, carefully placing its birdlike splayed three-toed feet with each step.

The gangly being didn’t flinch a whit when went flitting just above its head and between its legs a creature much resembling a crystalline paramecium. Now *that* was a sight. Completely transparent, one could see all its colorful organs in startling clarity, each a blazing gem in bright primary colours. Sparkling lights winked and raced around its insides, creating a display that would rival any laser light show. How it moved, and stayed airborne, I could not tell, thought it did bear an iridescent fringe of translucent cilia which pulsed in time to its stop and start motion.

I was still gaping at that beautiful being when my food arrived suddenly, startling me out of my reverie. The plate was still hot and steaming, piled high with colourful cubes, and the smell got my mouth to watering almost instantly. Digging in, I found it to be far better than the shipboard cuisine, though the flavor combinations no less odd.

As my appetite disappeared with my meal, the notion of being watched returned, growing naggingly at the edges of my consciousness. And with that feeling, I grew increasingly restive, so seeing that my repast had automatically been deducted from the ship’s account, I rose and left the tavern, seeking to lose whatever watchful eyes were upon me in that sea of sentient beings.

The story continues in Chapter VIII: Followed.