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She snorted. "I think you drank too much of your own tea," she said, as the inner door rumbled open. "Either that or you baked your little monkey skull way too long in the sun. Say hello to George."

Fergus stepped into the airlock doorway and stopped in his tracks. He had seen many aliens in his life, but George was something new. They were about three meters tall, bright red, and rather like a cross between an enormous caterpillar, a sea slug, and a porcupine in the middle of a fireworks explosion.

They stood in an upright, tapering S curve at what Fergus could recognize was the helm, though he figured his odds of being able to fly this ship in an emergency were probably not much better than if he jumped naked out into space and tried to push it. Long, faintly bioluminescent ripples stood out along the length of the alien's body on either side, undulating gently, their back a spiny profusion of long whip-hairs whose ends glowed like fiberoptics. Their front held two rows of fuzzy tentacle-feet, and as they faced them, eyes began to appear and disappear at the ends of tentacles.

"Hey, George," Qai said.

Colors shifted through the spectrum along the stiff hairs, and a voice in a thick Bounds accent translated from somewhere along the ridged ceiling. "Wah hey, took you smalltimes."

"He cooperated," Qai said. "This is MacInnis."

Now that's interesting, Fergus thought. Qai wasn't using his real name, and the choice of that alias in particular couldn't be coincidence.

"Helloes an' greetings, MacInnis," George said. "I am easiest being called George by you, with th' ey-em-eir words. Is this okay?"

"That's fine. I'm with the he-him-his words," Fergus said.

"Ahahaha yes so, humanguy," George said. Ey paused, then more tentacles opened up eyes, and some extended toward him, blinking. "'Tis a kitty? Kitty kitty?"

"Uh..." Fergus said, and looked down at the carrier still in his hand from when he'd come aboard. "Yes?"

"Kitty kitty yes!" George said. "As th' humans tell, it is looking like you, Qai."

"I don't look at all like that thing," Qai said, pointing at Mister Feefs. 

"But you do, though," Fergus said. Qai bared her fangs at him. "Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. You want me to skritch you behind your ears to make it up to you?"

"You want to spend the rest of this trip stuffed in a locker, slowly bleeding out?" Qai replied. She flexed her hands, extending all her claws one by one. "No? Then shut up."

"I'll shut up if you tell me what's going on and where we're going," Fergus said.

"I would think you'd have guessed that already," she said. 

"Back to Crossroads?" Fergus asked.

"No. If anyone was stupid enough to keep Maha that close to my usual orbit, I'd have her back and a sack full of trophy heads to boot, and you'd still be sitting on your beach, wasting all your natural talents on tourists," Qai said.

And my unnatural talents, Fergus thought, but that was something Qai didn't know, and didn't need to know. "Sfazili Barrens, then?" he asked. It was the next-most-obvious guess where Qai's pirates might be.

"Yes," Qai answered. "Let me show you your cabin." 

He followed her deeper into the ship.

The Sfazili Barrens was a stretch of empty space between the planet Guratahan Sfazil and the thin band of outer systems that were the nominal outskirts of human-familiar space, known as the Bounds. Crossroads Station, where Qai and Maha usually kept shop, was in one of those systems. Beyond the Bounds was the Gap, which separated them from the next galactic spiral arm out; comparatively, the Barrens were a mere tide pool to the Gap's vast, desolate ocean of emptiness.

The Barrens' few star systems were meager and mostly uninhabited or uninhabitable, which usually meant the same thing. Because of the low density of star systems, there was also a distinct lack of the strange little divots in the fabric of space where one could easily and quickly jump from one to another like interdimensional connect-the-dots. If you didn't want to travel along the dotted lines, passive jump could get you from just about any point you wanted to any other, but it was orders of magnitude slower, barely a few times faster than lightspeed. Fergus had often explained the difference between passive and active jump as the difference between skipping a stone quickly across the surface of a pond versus folding the pond so that the two shores touched with your stone held between them.