Rene bowed his head and held his tongue, resolving to leave the talking to Solae. He wondered what bonded implied in Syshin society but supposed that it held enough truth in any case. There was a bond between them that went beyond fellow refugees. He wondered if it implied servitude as a liegeman an woman might define the term, or an emotional connection as between lovers. Again both held enough truth.

The interior of the starship/habit was surprisingly quiet. Normally a star ship was a nearly overwhelming symphony of pumps, motors, and electrical equipment. The subtle subversion of his unconscious expectations bothered him but he kept it from his face. The ship hadn’t been operational in many generations and the vast bulk of its internal machinery had been either salvaged or repurposed. The metal walls were still visible in some places but in others the Syshin had constructed their own internal walls from plant matter and red brown adobe. The resulting effect was not unlike the inside of a wasps nest, with dozens of small freestanding chambers constructed in what would have been holds and maintenance decks.

The technique had the added effect of making the space much cooler than it might otherwise have been in such a tropical environment, in places where the curvature of the hull as particularly extreme condensate dripped from the ceiling, often times into large pools fastened for just such an effect. Plants, some native a but mostly offworld varieties, grew around the fringes of the ponds with surprising profusion. Rene wondered if they would have been cave dwellers in their natural environment, or they had other ways besides direct sunlight to gather energy. The inside of the ship seemed almost disturbingly alive, more like a subterranean rainforest than a building as humans understood it.

Like most children Rene had gone through a phase of fascination with aliens. The reality was that despite the fact that a score or so of intelligent species had been identified, there wasn’t nearly as much interaction as one might imagine. Methane breathers from Hydax had colonized hundreds of worlds, but those worlds were so inhospitable to humans that competition for space or resources was virtually non existent. The same could be said of the majority of alien species known to man, with contacts existing mostly at academic levels and with tourism among the super rich. Only where metabolic processes were similar enough to allow the sharing of biospheres, did competition occurred. As with the Syshin, this usually didn’t go well for the non humans.

The Syshin watched them as they made their way down the long axial corridor of the ship. Many looked suspicious and others looked out right hostile, although they dropped their gazes as Nami swept them with her strange nonhuman eyes. There were a surprising number of them, adults as well as children, and they seemed to fill most of what Rene could conceive of as living spaces.

“They worry,” Nari explained when he mentioned it. Her words curiously clipped and with clicks deep in her throat that snapped off the end of her words. How Solae had managed to learn and speak the tongue was beyond him.

“With the..x-trouble, they worry humans turn on them, dangerous time,” the alien expounded. Her fears were probably justified, history was full of cases of minority populations suffering pogroms and massacres at times of turmoil and it probably wouldn’t take much for disgruntled workers to turn against the aliens when they were drunk on the equally potent intoxicants of alcohol and power.  The Syshin had a strange smell to them, perhaps only noticeable when they were in close proximity, it reminded Rene of spice mixes from Xandar or Chem-hi, though neither was a perfect max. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant but neither could he have claimed to enjoy the scent.

“Damn,” Rene breathed as they stepped through a mud covered bulkhead. The space beyond must have once been the main hold, no other space on a starship permitted so much open space, and stretched at hundred meters in both directions. The ceiling was visible thirty meters above and hung with dozens of glow bulbs, each bulb dangled amid a field of green vines, some of which appeared to be fruit bearing. The floor of the large enclosure was equally verdant with green vines pouring out of opened ventilation shafts and trees and bushes of dozens of varieties neatly, if eccentrically, spaced. Older looking Syshin, many with colorful plumage moved amongst the trees, pruning and tending them with tools of recycled steel or reshaped stone. 

In the very center of the hold stood a strange looking structure. It was nearly twenty meters tall and seemd to have been made on a frame of agricultural tubing formed into irregular pentagons which were then faced with the same adobe they had seen before. Unlike the earlier structures though, these surfaces had been polished smooth till they looked more like stone than mud. Many of the panels were painted with strange abstract art, mostly in greens and blues. The pentagonal panels fit together purposely but the lack of symmetry was unsettling to human eyes.	

Nari paused and said something to Solae in Syshi. Rene kept his face studiously blank but nodded his head when Solae did. His skin was beginning to crawl and he tried to banish thoughts of what might happen if these negotiations didn’t go well. Would the aliens try to collect the bounty on Solae? Had they heard the offer. He resisted the urge to let his hand slip into the pocket where he held his pistol. For now he had to stay calm and hope that Solae knew what she was doing.