Why Humans Make Bad Pets!

I’ve gained an orange friend III

As I said, the two week journey was pretty uneventful, except for a few isolated moments of entertainment genius. Considering the boredom that kind of inactivity tends to create, I was thrilled when we made it. Our destination was actually a station above the planet, but there were far too many ships around it for me to be able to give it a once over to see if the blue-giraffes in question were there. I’d only seen the ship from the outside a few times anyway, and then only through that hospital’s windows.

Manthlel found us a docking port, since apparently the operators had a particular form they wanted you to follow rather than my suggestion, which had been to just yell “Where do you want me to park!?” into the microphone until they gave us a straight and simple answer. This was the first station I’d been to where everyone wasn’t wearing hazmat suits, and it was a welcome difference.

Although dirty, the station had a comfortable, lived-in feeling, and the bustle of busy aliens going about their important work was a sharp contrast to the fearful caution of my previous station experience. It was also significantly more confusing. “How are we going to find anyone in this,” I asked as we joined the steady and inexorable flow of the crowd.

“First place we’ll check is the docking master. If he’s the relaxed type and likes the look of us he’ll tell us anything we want to know. If he’s strict and takes his job description seriously, he won’t tell us a thing unless we have a permit or a high enough security clearance code, in which case we can ask around and see if anyone has heard of a recent shipment of vaccines. If that doesn’t work we could just wander around and hope we find something, but we’ll be pretty lucky to find anything in this mess.”

The dock master was probably the most uptight xeno I’d ever seen. If he clenched his butt-cheeks any more I figured the resulting heat and pressure would make him s**t diamonds. The moment we asked for information concerning cargo ships crewed by blue-giraffes, or “Vizk-tiks” as Manthlel called them, he virtually sprayed us with spit in his eagerness to ask us to show him the necessary paperwork or clearance. When we said we didn’t have any, he started yelling while waving around something that – from the way Manthlel later explained it – was the xeno equivalent of a cattle prod. Once again I had chosen to turn off my translator when he started yelling, so I chose to believe he was giving his impression – and a good one at that – of one of those inflatable wavy-armed advertising things you see in front of used car dealerships.

Plan B didn’t work out too well either. There were many cargo ships carrying vaccines, and had been for several months. Apparently they just arrived whenever they were able, a point which caused Manthlel some political annoyance. From the way he told it, the Dominion was so overtaxed with the war on top of all the usual logistical nightmares they dealt with that they had been unable to organize a dedicated medical convoy to deliver the vaccines all at the same time, so had instead leased the work out to private vessels, which was in turn creating nightmares of their own. I didn’t care so much for the political reasons for why it was. The only thing that I cared about was that it meant the blue-giraffes could be here but there was no way to be sure except honest legwork.

Thankfully the station was symmetrical, which made it easy to keep track of when I had Manthlel work his way up from the bottom and I’d come down from the top. That’s when my height really became a problem. Before, I hadn’t really needed to see far through the crowd because we had been heading for set destinations. Now I had to be able to see what kind of ship was docked at each port through the use of handy little displays next to each dock which detailed the ship connected to it, and it would have been much easier if I could have seen over the crowd. Being 5’9’’ (175 cm) had never felt so inadequate. Thankfully, this crowd was much easier to push through, so in the end it just meant I had to walk right up to the display rather than glance at it from afar.

Manthlel was probably having an even worse time of it than I was. He was trying to find a ship based off of the vague description of an inaccurate memory by someone who doesn’t pay much attention to detail. If he actually managed to find them I would probably start wondering if he had met them before, because more than half the ships I was seeing could have matched my wholly inadequate description.

It’s a miracle I actually found them, especially considering that the guy usually given credit for dispensing miracles doesn’t seem to see me as a friend. I would have passed right by, if I hadn’t seen a familiar blue face atop a long neck exit an airlock and join the flowing station crowd. I would have yelled out to catch Mama’s attention, but I doubted she would actually answer to that name, and even if I had known her real one I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce it. Besides, her face had the determined set of someone on a mission, which, on the face of a blue-giraffe, probably meant she was about do something of supreme importance, so I decided not to run up and grab her attention.

She hadn’t activated the lock on the panel beside the airlock, so I assumed someone must still be on the ship. I was sure no one would mind if I let myself in. After all, I was their beloved pet, wasn’t I? Sure, I may have almost killed them, and traumatized their children, and come close to ruining their livelihood, but that’s not something to hold against a guy. They’d just be absolutely thrilled to see me.