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Philippe raised his hand, and Patch
pointed at him. “Why did you call them the Cyclopes?” he asked.

Patch turned and looked at the
picture. “Oh, you know, they kind of look like a Cyclopes because of the way
they’re built—you know, half-guy, half-horse?”

Philippe tried to keep his voice
calm. “You mean a
centaur?
”

Patch stared at him a minute. “Is
that what they’re called? No, like a Cyclopes, you know, like in mythology?”

“A
centaur
is half-man,
half-horse,” said Philippe. “A
Cyclops
has only one eye.”

“Oh,” said Patch, looking at the picture.
The alien, Philippe knew, had four visible eyes—or eye spots, anyway—one on
each side of each shoulder. “Oh, I totally fucked my sister on that one. Sorry
about that, guys—just try to remember Cyclopes, OK?

“So this one I didn’t fuck up,”
Patch continued, changing the image. “This is the Magic Man.”

The Magic Man?
thought
Philippe, as he saw the familiar image of the Communicator—the only alien who
could speak English, as well as every other alien language. But of course
Patch
would call him the Magic Man: That was the name for the Communicator that was
popular among the sorts of people who had psychotropic plant parts tattooed on
their bodies.

He raised his hand again. Patch
looked apprehensive as he called on him.

But Philippe didn’t intend to ream
him out. “Did you get to meet the—the Magic Man?” he asked, with genuine
curiosity.

“Aw, no, I didn’t—I was bummed
about that, too,” Patch replied. “He was off doing something else. I didn’t get
to see him at all—this isn’t even my picture.”

Patch continued with his list of
names, making Philippe suddenly grateful that he hadn’t met the
Communicator—hopefully the alien’s first contact with a human would be with
someone a little less likely to offend.

Patch named off the White Spiders,
the Blobbos (“They, like, drive little cars around the station, ’cuz they’re
small, and they steer with their foot.”), and the Snake Boys, and then thank
the Lord he ran out of species before Philippe’s blood pressure made his head
explode.

I can fix this,
he thought.
When
we get there, I’ll just ask them to change the names.

“Pretty well, yeah. Just, like,
watch the slang, you know? Like, I asked them, ‘What’s up?’ and they, like,
totally couldn’t understand that.”

“OK, thanks. Vip, you’re up.”

Patch waved his hand, the wall went
blank behind him, and he sat down.

A somewhat less gigantic and
considerably tenser-looking South Asian man took his place. He began speaking
in a rapid-fire cadence, with no pauses for questions, nor, apparently, for
breath.

“You’re all outfitted with modified
earplants, and your uniforms will have two patch mikes—one on the left that’s
your normal com, one on the right that enables your translator mike. I know
this is important to some of you—you are wearing no alien technology, it’s all
built on Earth.

“The translator doesn’t work that
differently from the one you use with non-Union-English-speaking populations:
Every word you speak is translated into a universal code, and that code is
translated into an alien language by a receiver the alien wears. When an alien
wearing a translator speaks, it’s put into code, and the code is picked up by a
receiver and translated into Union English by your earplant. Everyone uses the
same code, so you only need the one translator.

“The earplant’s wired directly into
the auditory nerve like always, so no one else hears what you hear. One thing to
remember: If you or the alien aren’t wearing your equipment, or it’s not on,
the doctor tells me that there’s a good chance that you probably cannot even
hear each other, because a lot of what they say isn’t within the range of human
hearing. Also, the aliens know only Union English—any other Earth language will
not translate and possibly cannot even be heard. So keep that in mind. Got it?”

“So what are my concerns?” George
continued. “My concerns are allergens and disease. From what the aliens tell
us, no pathogen—no germ—has been able to make the jump from one alien species
to another, but there’s always a first time. You could also develop allergies
to anything—alien dander, alien bad breath, anything—and they could be severe.
So: You wear lonjons all the time. These have been modified so that if you
start to have an allergic reaction, you get pumped full of drugs and I get
alerted so that maybe we can save your life and keep your mom happy. The aliens
say they keep the atmosphere and the surfaces in the common area very clean,
but don’t be stupid—don’t touch what you don’t need to touch, and don’t eat
anything that’s not a ration bar.

“You
must
wear the lonjons
at all times, even in quarters, that’s an order from your MO. There’s also
biohazard gloves, which you should probably wear in the common area. But I’m
not going to make that an order.”

Shanti walked up to the front of
the room. “OK, I want to focus everyone’s attention on the first part of
Patch’s presentation.” She waved her arm and Patch’s first slide appeared, then
she flicked her hand until she reached the cross-section of the prong.

“You see here our worst-case
scenario. We shut this airlock, we blow ourselves off from the station. We’re
not going to have a ship sitting at the alien station, because the Union
considers that a security threat to Earth, so that means we fucking float in
space until the Union decides to come find us. Of course, the aliens have
ships, so in the worst-case scenario, either they’ll be attacking us, or
they’ll be attacking the ship that comes to rescue us, or they’ll just be
heading on through the portal to attack Titan and Earth.”

She stopped and looked at the
soldiers.

“Anybody here want to be in that position?
Because trust me, if we wind up in the shit, and it’s the fault of
anybody
here
—someone was stupid, someone started a fight, someone fucked up—it
won’t matter to you if we get rescued. You, personally, will be dead. I will
fucking kill you myself. Do you hear that? I will kill you myself. And I’ll
fucking take my time about it, too.”

She looked across the room, and she
caught Philippe’s eye, she winked.
Oh, my God,
thought Philippe.
This
is supposed to reassure me.

“Everybody got that? Now, let’s prep.
Lonjons and new unis are in the back.”

She clapped, and everyone stood up
and began to introduce themselves to Philippe. He caught a few names—Ofay, Mo,
Vijay, Cut—and exchanged a few pleasantries, then realized with a start that
the large, burly man shaking his hand was not wearing a shirt. He looked around
and realized that all the soldiers were pulling their clothes off, picking up
new clothes from the back of the room, and changing, right out in the open. He
held back an exclamation: They were not wearing undergarments, not at all, not
of any sort. And at least four of them had the SF cranky kitty logo
seared
into their flesh,
right above the heart.

“Hey, doc!” Shanti’s voice boomed
out again.

“Yeah!” came George’s voice.

“You wanna take Philippe’s lonjons
and take him to your office? I don’t think he’s worn them before, and we’re
just gonna be talking weapons. The medics can make sure everything’s working.”

“Sure,” said George, who handed a
small device to a large, pantless Asian man standing next to him and grabbed
two suits from Shanti. “Let’s go,” he said to Philippe.

“Glad to,” said Philippe, and
eagerly escaped.

Philippe lay in the cubby, trying to fall asleep. He had
gone to bed early, right at the start of the 8 p.m. sleep shift, in hopes of
both getting a good rest and reducing the number of people he was forcing to
sleep on the floor.

But his mind kept going back over
what had happened that day. The Union Police he had worked with in the past had
a certain hard-bitten quality to them, and at times they could be blunt. But
they were always aware that they were representing the Union—its authority, its
historic role in binding countries together and improving people’s lives. They
were, in a sense, diplomats themselves, so they bore themselves with a certain
gravitas.

The SFers—oh, God. Philippe had
never heard such casual threats tossed around:
I’ll break your arm, I’ll
snap your neck, I’ll shove this [random object] into your [specific orifice].
Not to mention the constant and casual references to sibling incest to mean
that someone had made, might make, or was going to make a mistake. He could
only pray that such obscenities wouldn’t translate very well where they were
going.

He shifted and touched his chest,
feeling the lonjons’ slightly clammy exterior. It was supposed to be his second
skin while he was on the alien station.

It was an impressive piece of
technology, albeit one whose wonders had been described in rather too much
detail by George. Even though the suit could handle it “without even giving you
a rash,” Philippe fervently hoped that he would never have to empty his full
bladder into the lonjons. And the fact that the female SFers were on menstrual
suppressors so that their monthly bleeding wouldn’t “trigger” the suit was
something that he simply had not wanted to know.

But the suit itself? He was
certainly falling prey to what his parents called Nifty Toy Syndrome. It was
like a bodysuit, with short sleeves, a turtleneck, and stocking feet. It was
made out of God-only-knows-what—it certainly wasn’t ordinary fabric. Whatever
it was made of was so stretchy that the lonjons had no fasteners: You could
literally stretch out the turtleneck far enough to step into the suit.

This stretch helped make the
lonjons such an effective form of protection. If you got stabbed or shot. and
the weapon got through the tough outer layer, the super-stretchy underlayer of
the lonjons’ fabric would get pulled into the wound by the force of whatever
was going into you. Then it would operate as a bandage, releasing coagulants
and antibiotics. You could put the outer layer into “hard” mode (or it would do
so itself if you were injured), which made every part of the lonjons that
wasn’t covering a joint nearly impenetrable. You could put on a hood that would
filter out any poisons in the air, and if the suit was in hard mode, you could
put on the hood and it would get hard, too, becoming a helmet. There were also
medical sensors and medical patches embedded into the suit, powered by your own
body’s heat, so if you accidentally came across something that turned out to be
toxic, your lonjons could perform immediate triage. And if anything at all bad
happened, the lonjons would instantly send out a distress call.

Definitely nifty.

Of course, at dinner the SFers had
a long debate over the best ways to kill people who were wearing lonjons.
Philippe had gone to pick up his ration bar after he had had a second meeting
with the still-obdurate Wouter Hoopen and had sent a memo to Beijing
strongly
recommending that the SFers be replaced by Union Police personnel as soon as
possible. About a dozen thankfully fully clothed SFers, including Shanti, had
been sitting near the bar dispenser, munching on their ration bars together
just like they were eating a proper meal. They had hailed Philippe as he walked
in.

It wasn’t like a trained diplomat
like Philippe was going to refuse to sit and have a meal with someone, even if
that meal consisted of a 100-gram rectangle. But the experience didn’t exactly
put his mind at ease concerning the impression the SFers were going to make on
the alien station.

Patch had thought that Philippe’s
last name was Thai and mentioned wanting to go to Bangkok. Philippe had told
him that his father was actually ethnically Vietnamese, but said that he would
love to go Bangkok and see the many temples and historical sites. It was
obvious from Patch’s replies, however, that if the SFer ever made it to
Bangkok, he’d never leave the koffie shops. Philippe had toyed briefly with the
idea of breaking the news to Patch that there was no such thing as Thai
cannabis anymore, since all the legal THC was synthesized at a laboratory
outside Calgary, but he had decided that he’d rather not.