The Betwixt Book One Read Online Free

especially not me. But
you, Mini, you got manners. Don't underestimate how much that
scares the hell out of people, especially the rough
ones.’
    I really didn't think the Commander had been too frightened of
my well placed 'sorry's' and 'thank you's', but at least he'd
smiled. And for someone who was living in ‘strange times’, a smile
couldn't hurt.
     
     

Chapter 2
    The rest of my day had been so-so. It was so-so because I
never really liked going to the Med Bay. It was always an
uncomfortable ordeal that would see me smiling blankly at some
fresh-faced doctor who was just ‘fascinated’ by my genetic
phenotype. ‘White hair', they'd say, ‘I've never seen anything code
for a trait that white.’ Then they'd prod around in my DNA, sucking
their teeth and waggling their eyebrows. ‘Amazing! Your morphology
is almost completely human, just the hair and eyes – how did that
happen?’
    Through the entire time I'd always just be sitting on the
corner of the bed, dead eyed, trying not to encourage them. Most of
the time my halfy status only ever saw me mild disdain or
indifference, but to doctors and geneticists I was a curiosity
worthy of closer examination.
    ‘ Your eyes are so intriguing,’ this doctor had said, ‘they
don't match anything I've ever seen before . . .
‘
    I just sat there patiently as I watched the counter on the
medical scanner tick down to complete. With a little ping, it
finally finished its task and I almost threw myself from the
bed.
    ‘ Oh, are you sure you couldn't hang around
Miss . . . ahh,’ the Doctor flicked his eyes to the
scanner to read my name, ‘Mini?’
    Now that was fascinating. For someone who supposedly held such
an interest in me, how was it that he couldn't even remember my
name? I shook my head politely. ‘I'm sorry, I really have to get
back to work. Perhaps another time.’ With that, I had left, very
quickly.
    I hadn't gone back to work, of course. My shift had been
almost up when the little red guy had attacked. Plus, I really had
to go back to my quarters and feed Hipop. So the rest of the day
and night (which is a rather relative notion in a space station) I
had spent with my monkey cat watching galactic TV, and maybe more
than once, thinking about a certain handsome, but curt
commander.
    The next day saw me back at work, apron tied tightly and
neatly around my skirt. I wasn't about to have a repeat of
yesterday, thank you. And things were busy, really busy. The place
was packed, with GAMs, cargo crews, and general space riff-raff
sitting or standing in every available space. And there was a buzz
in there air, the likes of which I hadn't heard since a GAM cruiser
had gone nuclear at the edge of the system several months ago. They
were talking, all of them, between slinging down their alcohol and
shoveling in their food.
    At first, stupidly, I thought it might have had something to
do with my little altercation yesterday. After all, it isn't
everyday a waitress gets attacked by a tiny monk-alien. But no, it
would take more than a table-tipping fight to electrify this
room.
     
     
    It didn't take long to piece it together though. I would hear
snatches of conversation as I whirled around taking orders and
handing out steaming plates of things that really pushed the
definition of ‘food’.
    ‘ Came in yesterday,’ one GAM said between fork full’s, arms on
the bar as he talked to freight captain. ‘Dead as dead can
be.’
    ‘ Ghosts,’ a Crag rumbled to a bounty hunter, ‘never happen on a
Crag ship'.
    ‘ Station engineers won't even look at it, they're getting the
GAMs to go in. Good luck to them.’
    ‘ They found her out in the middle of nowhere, towed her in.
Said they haven't seen anything like this
since . . . ‘
    But as soon as I would pick up on a conversation, I'd be
called to another waiting patron. As the day wound on, I found the
Commander's words reverberating around my head: 'these are strange
times'. Well these were certainly