We Hire Humans, Chapter 8

Chapter 8

It was hard to keep track of time, and I didn’t know the full schedule, so it was impossible for me to guess our chances of reaching Earth while the greenship was there. The only thing to do was hope. Fretting over it wouldn’t do me any good.

Not that there was much to distract myself with. The life pod didn’t have any facilities for study or entertainment, and believe it or not there’s a limit to how much sex you can have. So we spent a fair amount of time just talking.

Most of it was personal history. I told Starlight about growing up on Earth, about my marriage and divorce, university, and my fascination with xenos.

Starlight’s family was traditional, by his People’s standards; four mothers and a father, and a dozen or so siblings, all living together in one dome on one of their planet’s moons. They were technicians and astronomers, maintaining a radio telescope built into a crater. He had gotten his name because unlike his siblings, and for that matter most of his People, he enjoyed being in a space suit, out under the open sky, just looking at the stars.

It was a facility like theirs, on a different part of the moon, that had first spotted a xeno ship, before he was born. Some of the first tech credits their People were able to spend went to improving the radio telescopes so that they could detect ships entering their system. They...