I leaned back in my seat, listening to the music drifting from the speakers. It was an old, old song, probably Old Earth era. Before the expansion. Before we made Contact with other creatures. Before, really, anything of importance ever happened.

            I flagged down a waitress and asked for another drink. She rumbled back in a heavy grumbling tongue. I slid two coins to the edge of the table. She swiped them up and walked away to get my drink, laughing. Humans don't normally order the house drink in places like this.

            Those are bad for you, ya' know." A small man slid into the booth across from me. He kept both hands on top of the table. Smart man.

            "A partner, of sorts. It's not important. Where's the manifest, and my payments. All of them." I had actually only hired the huge alien for the hour. No one messes with a seven-foot tall rock. And I enjoyed the process of living too much to take risks.

            "Fine, fine. Here you are. Your next job. And," he shifted, unhappy. "Your payments. Don't mess this up." The Cairn stood up, allowing him to leap out of the booth and stumble away. The Cairn was still grinding in laughter when the server brought the drink. I evened up with the Cairn, and nodded thanks.

            I left the dive and walked over to a nearby park and lounged on a bench until my tail finally showed up.

            "That was interesting," he mewled. "Can't wait to see what we do next." He took the dat I had obtained and slid it into a SA pad.

            "Land on H'tachi, pick up cargo. Take it to Kerin V, Sranlo cluster, freelance around a bit, checking in with the network in three months. Easy enough, though the H'tachi cargo isn't quite legal. Ah well. Do we accept?"

            "Do we have a choice?" I asked mockingly. The lithe Mrkash laughed, and said, "Does it really matter?"

            "Are we warmed up yet?" I asked as we strapped into the freighter. Five point locks... there. I jacked my helmet and suit into the Pallas' computer systems and activated the holofield displays.

            "In a few moments. Be patient."

I nodded to myself, and then locked in the rest of harness clips. Following that was a lap belt, and more connectors and tubes, for air, water, and electronic communication. Life support systems became active as I stuck in the last tubes. I shivered as pale blue coolant began gushing through my flight suit, immediately dropping the surrounding temperatures.

            "Why have we never fixed our heat sinks?" I growled.

My partner, Tarin, four and a half feet of lithe feline Mrkash, laughed, his voice lilting made lower by electronic static.  "If we had any money, we could. It's your own fault we got these big engines."

            I sighed. Tarin was the epitome of wit. Well, sometimes. But he was right; it was the big engines, not the small heat sinks, which caused the trouble. The Pallas, our small freighter, was composed of a tiny cockpit and cramped living quarters mounted on four huge engines. The engines were spaced ninety degrees apart around the rear of this hpi, with a large empty rectangle of space in between them. We could fit the standard fifty-meter long cargo pods into the space, and an extremely small bit of internal cargo under the crew cabins.

            The living quarters themselves, shoved between engines and cockpit, consisted of a tiny shower, waste reclaimer, a toilet, a sink, and two tiny cots. To the front of the cabins was the cockpit itself. Arranged like an old helicopter, Tarin, the pilot, sat in front of me and lower down in a large bubbled-out cockpit, with expanded viewpanels around him for near three-sixty vision. I was ensconced in a seat behind and above him, managing just about everything else. We could reach the living quarters by leaning back the seats as far as they went, and sliding out through the tiny spaces they created.

            "Are the engines ready yet?" Tarin asked impatiently.

"Yeah, yeah," I answered. I flicked a small switch, sending power crackling into the main electronic systems. "Power rerouting to you now. All checks are coming up normal. Engines secure, maintenance accesses secure. Grid failure on sensor three, I'm just gonna' shut that one off. That's what redundant systems are for."

            One by one, we checked through the complicated flight prep. Warm up and cool down took forever on a top grade starship. We were done a half hour later.

            I flipped on the planetary Communications network, the main groundside Cnet, and turned to the spaceport's channel. "This is Freighter 3-5-S, desig Pallas, requesting launch clearance," I inserted into the chatter of the radio frequency. The tower replied quickly.

            "Roger that, Pallas. Auto launch engaged... now. Have a nice ride." I switched off the active channel and leaned forward. "We're auto launching!" I shouted over the din of the igniting boosters. Tarin nodded. I leaned back and continued supervising the system to active status.

            The Pallas jerked as the launching assembly lifted our nose to the sky. With a roar, an explosive charge flung us away from the planet's grasp. Tarin aided with judicious use of the atmospheric thruster placed between the engine cross. We never landed on a planet with a cargo pod, so the thruster would't be blocked in takeoff.

            I looked back over my shoulder, watching the Pallas ' launch trail. A long, spiraling, smoky snake chased us, writhing from old launch bay to the edge of the atmosphere.

            A huge bang sounded from behind me and the smoky vapor contrails disappeared in an instant. I jerked back to my station, scanning for trouble. I eventually realized it was the engines shutting off; another of the Pallas' stupid quirks. I kicked Tarin's seat to stop his laughter, but he just continued chuckling as he switched on the quartet of plasma thrusters.

            “Heading to cargo rendezvous. They're firing the pod from an outer moon on orbiting the third planet. We have about... a day or so to line up." I nodded. Docking with the lumbering pods was the most dangerous part of a freighter's service. Even worse than cleaning exhaust vents with the engines on.

            I sighed to myself. In between the jobs given to us by our handlers, Tarin and I tried to do little hauling jobs to turn a little profit in our indentured servitude. We were contacted by a large organization, only known to us as the Company, that "helped" struggling merchants like ourselves. We had been bought out of debt, and were now forced to run jobs for the sprawling organization that owned us. It was a way to survive; but between ship upgrades and general upkeep, we weren't doing very well on paying up and breaking out of servitude. Until we did pay up, we were forced to run nasty jobs for the company; hauling dreamjuice, "shredders," and listhetics, just to name a few fun cargoes. I shuddered at the thought of a Systems Cop penetrating one of the Company's pods full of narcotics or weapons. We were a little lucky; our personal handler was friendlier than most, having worked up from a similar position. He occasionally even showed personality, and friendliness. I didn't trust him farther than I could throw the Pallas.

            "You don't need me right now, right?" I called down to Tarin.

"Nah. Go take a nap, kid. I'm going slow right now, we're in no rush."

            "Thanks. Call when you want' a change shifts."

I pressed against my seat latch, pushing away the back as I unplugged myself. Without fresh coolant, the heat of the engines hit me like a wet blanket. I slid through the tiny hole behind me, stripped off my jumpsuit and hit the cot in just my shirt and flight shorts. I swore and hit the cot again, this time with my body, not my forehead, and fell asleep.

            I awoke probably five hours later. I sent Tarin back for some rest of his own, and slid into my station. The cargo pickup was still hours away, but I set some of the morphing controllers to pilot functions, just in case. I then tuned into the local Galaxy Net stations, scrolling through for something up. I finally stopped at a music station, playing some new electar hits. Sounded pretty good for planetary local band. The weather cut in for a short report.

            "And I'm here at GN-S46, your local Earthling station. For all you bipeds out there, here's some forecasts: Solar prominences are flaring up, giving ya'll some good outward sailspeed, but you'd better keep an eye out for electromagnetic bursts and the occasional radiation storm. Other than that, the starry skies are clear. No other anomalies, other than incoming comet Q'sari. Local name, I expect. Anyways, it should be quite a sight for those traveling nearby."

            And that was all. The station put the music back on, and I relaxed for a while, listening to the low thrum and occasional pop of the engines, and the pinging of the sensor grid. This was the upshot if the life of a traveling merchant/smuggler. Straight above me, I could see a huge purple nebula engulfing a group of stars. It looked pretty close, only a couple dozen light years away. This was a pretty part of this galaxy. I wished more of my life were like this. Peaceful. Beautiful. Yeah, right.

About three hours into my shift, I began to disassemble the circuits connecting my station boards and reorganize them, trying to con at least the semblance of efficiency into the various systems. Tarin and I had liberated our system of control panels from a wrecked pirate frigate. The dead vessel had been well stocked with good equipment; we had found several other treasures concealed in its hull. But the holofield panels were the real gift.       

The original Pallas had been outfitted with hardware panels. We had added software, some purchased, some given to us by the Company, others homemade, and a few copied from unguarded computer systems. But the panels had been difficult to rewire, and versatility is an asset in our business. Thus, the holofields had been a huge jump in quality.

            While holoreactive technology - holograms responding to movement - have been common for a century or so, holofields which used physical feedback were relatively new. The new field projectors could add substance to the arrays of dancing light; my panels felt like real ones. Yet they could be made transparent, allowing me to work with internal systems, using wires and connectors of light to change connections in the software. Hardware just wasn't important anymore, with real reactive fields. To pass the time, I opened the front panels to touch and began "rewiring" the virtual connections, trying to get that extra little jolt of speed and reactivity. After a half hour of that, I just leaned back in my seat and stared up out of the canopy, keeping an ear out for any alerts from the scanners.

I awoke Tarin eight hours later. We were still two hours out from pickup, but he didn't need to be groggy. We sat and talked for an hour and a half, than began settling down to the task of docking to a huge, one hundred meter long cargo pod to a ship one third of its size. The pod itself came into view on the rear sensors. We had angled in just ahead of the huge rectangle, and were leveling out now.

            Cargo pods, huge, long rectangles, were the mainstay of interstellar trade. While some ships can carry as many as ten of the things, our ship could just barely fit one, right in between the engines.

            "Ten clicks and closing," I muttered. “Locking down nonessentials." I shut down power to the living quarters and disabled all life support except oxygen flow.

            “Go to full suits, Tarin." I locked my helmet onto my pressure suit, heavier than the usual mechanic's jumpsuit. This was vac-hardy gear, able to protect me in case of an emergency. The helmet hissed and pressurized, leaving me in m own, stable environment. I turned up the coolant as Tarin increased engine power. 

            While many pilots laughed in the face of alien threats, solar storms, juggernaut SysCop sweeps for contraband, I never met anybody wasn't touchy about a pod docking. Grabbing a multi-ton pod full of who knows what, and arresting its momentum,  successfully of course,  could be dangerous. And it was. Every day you heard about at least one ship getting rammed. Sometimes the crew was ok, sometimes not. But pressure suits were are always necessity.

            “One click... braking... right. We're right in the path. I'm going to try to match momentum. Beginning matching now. And... matched. Pusher ready?" Tarin kept up the monologue for the recorder's sake as much as mine. If something broke, we would be sure to get insurance. If we survived, of course.

            "Pusher active and ready, aye." I cycled the pusher controls to my main systems. I locked the pusher onto the pod and pulled on it. The cargo pod began to accelerate as the pusher reflected a continuous stream of gravity pulses onto the boxy shell. I regulated the containers speed while guiding Tarin to line us up to lock the pod evenly between the engine booms.

           â€œAlright. Tarin, rotate seventy-three degrees starboard. Ah! Too far. Back three degrees. O.K, we're close. 0.073 degrees port... Now .00015 port... Good. Alright, begin braking. Ten seconds till impact. Brace Yourself."

"Bracing, aye aye."

            There was a long, rolling clang, and Newton's starging laws flung my head into the control panel.

          â€œAre we alive, Tarin?" I mumbled, disregarding recording units.

“Aye," he responded absently, typing in confirmation codes to the cargo pod and disabling the security.

“Pod locked locked in and secure. Handshake and recognition software proceding.  We're alright now."

            I checked over my consoles. Interesting.  

“Tarin, srrl venthi klss." I began hissing in his feline Mrkashi tongue. Roughly translated: We have a audio bug. He responded in the same language.

            Anything serious?

Nah, I answered. Tracker and recorder systems in the pod-looks like language recognition systems only. Anything not in Standard Terran will be filtered out as background noise.

            Alright, he mewled. Turn on the counter program. Wouldn't want you to hurt that beautiful voice of yours with all this growling.

            I almost laughed. A few keystrokes and program I-863 began rerouting the listeners into an endless loop. Every three minutes the program would pause and we would have a thirty second period with the recorders on. A silent ship would be a touch too suspicious.

          â€œAlright," I rasped in Standard Terran. My throat was killing me.

“Should we just leave the locator as it is?"

           â€œYeah. It's not like it is actively bothering us -" A chime pinged, starting the thirty second recording time. We went through boring shipboard talk - necessary anyways -  as I plotted the route to di-portal, and from there to H'tachi.  

            Upon reaching the di-portal we were smoothly set into a queue of ships waiting to enter the gateway. From our position near the back of the angled line I could see a small cloud of stars far off in the distance.

         â€œTarin, what does your deebase say about Sranlo? I waited while the feline pilot entered the information into the Mrkashi Commando Dbase stitched into his left sleeve. A little gift from his friends when he had departed Kash Prime.

            “Um, let's see. Looks like a group of Sol type stars - medium-loose, not too much interaction. Oh, and a bit of a tourist trap: a trio of red giants all locked into each other's gravity wells. As far as population, looks like a standard mix for a cluster this close to the Calhan cluster." The Calhan cluster was the one closest to Earth. Humanity had built their own di-portal connecting to Calhan. A deep distrust of the Sar had led to a clamor for human made, human controlled arteries stretching to the heart of Homo Sapiens. The Sar, owners of the vast network of di-portals throughout the galaxy, had finally given in after a long brush war. Given the Sar's highly mobile resources, we had been luckily to even survive, let alone come out slightly on top.

          â€œPerhaps three percent Human, fifteen percent Sar, seventeen percent Testudine, and the rest a pretty even mix, nothing above one percent." The Testudine, our reptilian allies, had their homeworld in Calhan, and apparently some small states in Sranlo. 

Star clusters were the major hubs of population throughout the galaxy. Pulseways connected individual planets around the cluster, while diportals connected one mass of stars to the next. Some clusters were slowly condensing, others spreading out; in eons of time each would be gone, either compressed together or scattered too far to be considered a star group. Cargo haulers like Tarin and I connected them all together, using sails, pulseways, and diportals to connect planets, systems, and clusters together in a web of trade.

Speaking of which, I accessed our internal Cnet.
"Tarin? What are we carrying anyways?" The pilot checked as I monitored the flow - or lack thereof - of ships through the portal.
"Looks like a nice load of engine cores. I guess we have a reputation for keeping cargo safe."
I smiled, reminiscing several fights with pirates to complete extremely lucrative contracts.
"Yeah, I guess we do have a concentration of, ah, defensive implements, don't we?" 

 I glanced at the distant cluster again, and rested my head on my arm. A few decidedly nonutilitarian ships breezed past, annoying me as our line slowly shifted forwards.
"Why," I muttered, "do we have to wait here in line? There's room for everyone."
"Paperwork, Mr. Pallas; We all need to be processed by the great Sar Commisionary, don't we? Anyways, we're low priority cargo. On top of that, you just don't have the right connections, amigo."         
        I jumped at the new conversant. I hadn't realized I had leaned on the transmit key on the communication panel. I kicked the back of Tarin's chair to break his laughter, the heavily armored console rocking from the light blow.

"Low priority cargo by a pig's eye. Those sharal's aren't carrying a red cent, and they aren't stopping.                              

“Anyways, why are you sitting here, then? If I'm low priority, are you on an outing to grandma's?" 
      Someone laughed over the open channel and a couple more ships jumped into the conversation.
       "Yeah, I mean, we're here with a load of diamdrum laser cores, and those ricosis are running by carrying a reservation for Shallanar resort."
       I winced; shouting out a cargo like that was not the most intelligent thing to do. Must be a new pilot.

"Diamdrum lasers, eh? Better keep an eye out, kid." A new voice broke into the chatter, a hammer waiting for an exscuse to drop. 
      "Play nice, and just pop those pods right off, alright." A trio of freighters drifted into view, sailing from above and to the right of the line. The young pilot was stupid, as well; the cargo stayed attatched, and he began pulling the ship out of the line. I began pooling power in our lower scan-shielded capacitors, just in case.
        I checked twice to make sure I was on the intraship Cnet.

   "Tarin. Shall we?"
         "Aye," he growled. "Give me some teeth."
     I pushed the ship into a fully powered state, arming all weapons and shields.
      "Tarin, we're too slow with this cargo; open fire from turrets. You've got lower and bow; I've got top and stern. Feeds on field three."
      He took over the appropriate weapons, graying them out on my seventh display. Our attatched cargo pod was equipped with a two barelled plasma turret on each corner, and the Pallas itself only had a string burner right under the cockpit and a missle pod in the keel. Only the most valuable containers came with weapons; a reputation for protecting dangerous cargoes was invaluble in the buisness.
     "All freighters," I called over the open Nets, "Ships Spinster, Arkan, and Dessel's Folly are attacking the Rover and the Pallas. Stay away if you don't want to mess up your hullplates.
   "Pfah! All freighters! Protect your own!" The voice which had first answered me spilled onto the net channels. Ahead of us a corvette twisted out of the queue and began firing at the pirates.
"Go Tarin go!" I shouted as I began hammering away with the turrets. Blobs of fusing energy rained on the vessels bursting into quick flares as they impacted. A heavy static cannon mounted on the friendly corvette's underwing spat a ball sized metal bullet. The projectile missed but its pulsing electric sheath grounded into a pirate, shorting out the power and destroying delicate shields. Tarin fired one of our tiny Tern missles and blew the engines into dust.
        The remaining pair of ships wheeled and split, one going for the original target, the other turning to deal with the lumbering Pallas . The small corvette - the Andromeda - wheeled after the other ship, leaving us alone.
I winced as a powerful laser beam slammed into the cargo unit behind us. Reflector shields distributed some of the energy, but the rest splashed over the blocky container, scarring it with rivulets of flash-frozen liquid armor.
       I fired back, preparing myself for another hit, one hand placed over the emergency panel.
The burst of energy never came. A spear of light flashed across my vision, a near blinding white with the distinctive rainbow tinge of a diamdrum weapon. The pirate was caught right in the middle, the supercoherent beam flashing through at the speed of light. A small flash followed the sparkling afterimage as the ship crumpled and died. The last pirate ship just stopped as air burst out explosively. Green and white Systems Cops coalesced from the diportal, a couple seconds late, as usual. I gasped as a new ship emerged into view.
It was still surrounded by the remains of a cargo pod's frame and flat pieces of metal that had disguised the ship as a freighter. In front of me was a real, big as life, Coranth starship.
Perhaps an explanation is in order. The Coranth were a group of creatures, human to Sar and back again, who had abandoned their own nations to join the Core; a kind of AI supercomputer. Except the super meant in real ability, not processing power. With its beyond-sentience abilities and technology, the Core could have easily swallowed the galaxy and gotten to fast work on the next one. Instead, it had established a kind of police system; with ultimate resources, the Core could afford to be altruistic. "We are moral until someone unmoral and more powerful than us threatens our life," as Spider Robinson once wrote. Based of the planet of Coranth - named after its master, certainly, created by the Core itself, possibly - agents of the AI - Arlans (odd name, with no known roots) - patrolled the galaxy, keeping an eye on things. It took nothing up to a full blown catastrophe to bring the Arlans away from the Core's boundaries; in the meantime they patrolled the Core's territory as police, and elsewhere as information gatherers.
It all fit together now. The nervous youngster with a valuable cargo; a good lure, but hard to swallow if you thought for a second. I just hoped one of the pirates had been taken alive, and keep the Arlan happy.
But again, I digress. Coranth ships are something to gape at. Long, flowing lines, occasionally sweeping out into graceful outposts of equipment. Clad in white, with the complex knot of a Core insignia on the top of the hull, the ship looked like a diving hawk, complete with a hooked nose of a cockpit, a flat back, and a gently curving belly. A horizontal fantail concealed a pair of engines, with only a few black smears of wear and exhaust marring the otherwise pristine surface.

The ship itself had been disguised with bits and pieces probably scrounged from a scrapyard somewhere. Putting all subterfuge aside, the Coranth ship began blowing off the framework with small explosive charges. The quick to fight corvette slipped back into the line, and the ships began quickly slipping through the portal; apparently SysCops just wanted us gone.

I shuddered at the disconcerting transition between clusters; the starscapes shifted immensely as we passed through the seemingly empty ring.

Out on the other side Tarin and I moved out of the outbound lane and brought up a map of the local area. A pair of pulseways led out to the nearest stars. Pulse travel is complicated, and warrants an explanation at this point.

Pulseways were the epitome of the great stardrives everyone had expected as shown in the twentieth century space opera novels.

The pulse assemblies were able to push a ship out of conventional space into another so far theoretical dimension (odd how people aren't yet sure how it works; it just does) that had no distance between points, and then pull the ship out at another pulse machine.

The pulse assemblies make use of the universe's "quantum foam:"  little bits of energy are constantly popping in and out of existance throughout the whole universe, coupled with appropriate antiparticles, simply apperearing into vacuum; real life spontaneous generation. At least that's how I always tracked it. Anyways, instead of a single molecule pulseways simply cause whole ships to pop into existance.  The only catch to it all was the  power draw needed to successfully  complete the transit was inordinately large; a simple starship could not carry a supply big enough to power even entry, let alone pushing back into what we considered reality. Also, the pulseways helped regiment movement, so that two ships would not both appear in the same space.

     The machines themselves could take several different forms. The most common were two pairs of rings connected by a thin bar of machinery, resembling skeletal binoculars. Ships appeared in a ring and continued to the next one for the subsequent hop; the other pair were used for traffic in the opposite direction. These types of pulse machines were used to connect the beginning and endpoints of a pulseway. The "caps" looked like a tapering cone hooked to a ring; the ring was for entering traffic, and the cone was the culmination of the pulseway, ships exiting out of the open "bottom" of the cone and continuing to connecting pusleways or their nearby destination.

Tarin and I were lining up to the entry ring to H'tachi when a small ship hailed us on a direct channel, no use of any sort of cNet.

"Pallas this is the Starfly, Ship Captain Jorgan Glenn speaking. Nice work out there. I'm always glad to see another moralist in the business. Anyways, I'm wondering if you'd like to pair up and run a few contracts? My partner and I were just heading from a job before that little incident back there.

"Anyways, we're at loose ends here, and someone who likes to fight as much as you needs a bit more firepower around than you have. So?"

I grinned at the invisible voice. "You'll have to ask the Captain. Patching you through."

Tarin, of course, had been listening the whole time. The pause was for a simple conversation. Tarin had no problems with the request, and I agreed. He spoke into the channel, his lilting voice filling my speakers.

"Why not, Captain Glenn. We're heading for H'tachi III, cargo drop on the second moon."

"Roger. Let's go."

The corvette moved in front of the Pallas and moved into the center of the ring. The Starfly emitted a short radio signal that sent the ring into motion. A quarter rotation and a burst of photons were dumped in place of the dissapeared Starfly. Tarin moved us into the center of the now dissipated flash of light and sent our own acquisence signal to the assembly.

Pulse travel is not much different from any normal method of transportation. Just imagine a ride on any normal ship, or even a groundcar, with the windshields blacked out. And thats it. And it only lasts a double handful of instants; five seconds at the most.  By the time I had blinked twice we were out.

It took three jumps to reach H'tachi; we had about two hours of sailflight between each jump as we transited to the next pulse ring. There was little traffic, and we made good time to H'tachi III.

Once we had reached H'tachi III we veered off to drop the cargo; we released the locks and ramped the engines to full power; after we pulled away we veered off, leaving the pod to its fate at a disassembly station.

We landed in Bakarak spaceport, a sleepy little city unruffled by the constant movement of ships coming and going. Tarin and I slept on the ship, finally waking sometime around local midnight.

Tarin put on his scarce dress, and while I made myself presentable in the reclaimer he had clipped a small needlegun to his belt and tossed my larger and more obvious plasma weapon on my cot. I emerged from the reclaimer a little freshened and attatched the massive pistol to my hip. A small strap near my knee kept the weapon from flopping around. I then took a small geno needler and slipped it into a small pocket under my left arm. It was near invisible, and had saved my life a few times.

We popped open the hatch in the floor of the cabin and climbed down the ladder and out of the ship. As my boots hit pavement I took a deep breath of air. Foul chemicals used to clean and service the ships mixed with the sweet odors of local trees.

"Beautiful place, I would think." A new voice invaded my inspection.

I turned and looked at the tall man who had spoken. He was in his early fifties, his blue dyed hair leached away by gray here and there. His blue eyes locked on mine and held them for a few seconds, weighing and analyzing. I broke the grip of his stare and took a glance at his much more exotic friend.

His partner, I judged, was about four feet tall, with brown eyes - four of them - devoid of their whites. He was insectoid, with ten spindly legs. He really reminded me of a huge wasp. His wings were folded back and covered with a protective shell glistening with oily color. He walked on four legs, used the middle two as small graspers, and the top pairs were locked into prosthetics that split into four more limbs, each covered with sticky blobs to mimic the natural grasper hairs on his other legs. I judged that a mix of physical and mental commands powered the artificial arms; plugs studded the top of his head. His body was a deep red, the deep red and black of blood and soil. The head was exactly like a wasp's, an evolutionary parallel.

I blinked at the strange creature and nodded a greeting. The middle two limbs folded inwards in response.

"Glenn, I suppose," Tarin broke in. The man nodded.

"And my partner, Jark. A nickname of course. I can't understand his language, much less speak it."

Jark chittered and snapped his mandibles. I raised an eyebrow until a mechanical voice began speaking.

"He is correct. My real name would be unpronouncable to those who do not have normal mandible structure. And the nuances of natural wing movement seem to escape many of you softkin."

"Sure," I said, shrugging. "I'm Maley, and this is my parnter and pilot, Tarin."

Jark did his middle leg