Free Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore

shower badly,” I said.
    Black Amber came out of the bathroom herself and spoke alien to Tesseract as she dried off her phony human body, not bothering to cover either the fake cock or the real fur-rimmed pouch slit, like a wide navel—an unreal shameless body to her. It made me a bit angry, until I saw the bullet scar below her ribs.
    Tesseract answered her, and she began bobbing like a turkey cock, furious. The singsong speech turned to hissings.
    “You told her Mica wanted me to be a cadet,” I said.
    “Yes,” Tesseract said. “Now go take your shower.”
    In the shower little Rhyodolite prodded me with the gun to turn me around, bend me over. “One of the ones who shits,” he said, as if having an anus was a defect.
    “I’m sure you knew that before,” I said. What if they’d seen pornographic movies from space, us unknowingly naked before aliens?
    When I came out, Black Amber stared at me with those big eyes as one of the Barcons took a plastic bag of Gwyng bones to the ship. She finally asked, “Why should Mica want you to take his place with us?”
    “We tried to escape Warren together. I wasn’t sure what he planned to do with me once we found the locator. But I guess he did have plans for me, after all.” I remembered how I’d been afraid he was just using me and felt guilty.
    “Your brother is a criminal,” she said, a quiet voice with a buzz saw in it.
    The two Gwyngs and the big skull-crest guy, Tesseract, gently led Black Amber back to the room Mica’d used. I let the Barcons put me back in my room and heard them tape the windows and slide wedge locks in under the door. I got into bed and stared at the ceiling, lights still on. They’ll make killing me look like an accident, or suicide.
    When I woke up, the smaller Barcon watched me from a chair. Funny jaw, I thought again, too many bones in it. And the bones around the eyes, the eyes themselves slanted, like a wolf’s eyes, not like human Orientals. And the six fingers on each hand. I wondered how they could go around in public looking like that. But then humans didn’t expect aliens to go running around in public.
    From the sun on the floor, I knew it was well toward noon. I’d slept a long time, but I didn’t feel drugged.
    After I dressed, I went into the kitchen past the humanoided Gwyngs, who looked at me as though I really was an amazing horsefly.
    Black Amber handed me a bowl of scrambled eggs and raisins. Too much salt, I thought absently, before I looked closer and realized raisins and eggs! Smiling probably a bit too grimly, I ate the eggs as if nothing was wrong with them.
    “When do you have to be inspected by your legal people?” the larger Barcon asked.
    “I’ve got to go to see him in three days.”
    The aliens gave me about half an hour to eat and get really awake, then Tesseract called us all to the living room. I smelt court when I saw how they’d set up the furniture, and almost balked at the door. Tesseract sat behind a table with alien machines on it, strange contraptions in battered aluminum like boxes, as though they’d seen lots of travel.
    So, then, the Barcons on the couch were the expert witnesses, and the three Gwyngs on the other side of the room were prosecutor and jury. I worried about the defense.
    Instead of asking us to rise, like I expected, Tesseract played his hands over a keyboard real fast. A machine spoke for him in English, introduced himself as an investigator for the Federation of Space-Traveling Systems.
    Yeah, last time I’d just been up against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The machine spoke next in two other languages, the birdsong Gwyng one and what Tesseract and the Barcons used.
    Tesseract said, through the machine, that he had been authorized to deal with emergencies, deaths, and wills of Academy officers, cadets, and pre-cadets. The Gwyng called Mica had been a pre-cadet assisting two others when their ship failed, sub-catastrophically, and space-holed to a planet with a sapient