No media prepared Rin for what Kashi-Sulak really was. The port itself didn’t seem strange or alien; it looked different as much as Bogota and Chicago looked different, but at the core both were just cities. Their shuttle landed, and they went through customs and out of the space port before Rin started noticing alien things: weirdly shaped vehicles, octagonal hatches, and signs in what he could only guess was Rh’z. Devon led them through the transit tube and up to the surface where they finally entered the city of Ts’kk (known as Prizem for humans, which just meant “port” in Far-Galactic). 

Ts’kk felt like one of those playgrounds for kids where there were smaller models of shuttles and buildings perfect for 8-year-olds. However, everything was not only small but also weirdly bulky, usually had eight corners, and nothing looked like something you could sit on. And there were a lot of Gemi. Previously, Rin only saw them in the media or in the news but somehow they were different from what he saw around him now. Yes, they were short and eight-limbed and shaped like overland jellyfish with no obvious head or eyes or mouth. But they still felt like actual people despite the whole wrongness of their look and behaviour.

Gemi scuttled around on their business. They wore assorted colourful clothes. They had technology that helped them communicate or enhance their senses. They ran shops and traded with shop-keepers. They visited sights and took photos of them for memory. 

Just like humans.

Devon took Mikey and Rin around Ts’kk and a couple of nearby villages, where it was much more obvious they were no longer on Earth. Whatever passed for flora on Kashi-Sulak looked nothing like Earth trees or grass. Colossus was different; there, humans brought a lot of flora and fauna over during terraforming. The same was not possible on a mixed colony world. Some things were the size of trees but looked like tentacles, some were the size of grass but looked like sticks, and some felt like feathers to the touch. Nothing was clear green or yellow or blue, but an unnatural mix of all of them. When Rin mentioned this, Devon smiled and explained that Kashi-Sulak was a hard world for Gemi to live on for a similar reason: they cared about colours and their meanings, and most of the shades of local life went against the colour combinations they were used to.

Through the day (well, night) Rin, Mikey, and Devon visited an impressive canyon filled with spectacular waterfalls, the excavation site of a town belonging to a long forgotten civilization (they were believed to be Gemi precursors, back when their society was much more divided), and the biggest food market back in the centre of Ts’kk, where Rin admitted he had never before eaten protein that was not produced in a lab. Devon insisted they try roasted sea worm, which was a local delicacy; it looked and sounded very gross but tasted savoury and perfectly salty. Rin thought he would be fine without ever eating it again: the dish looked too much like a living creature to be appetising.

They first arrived in the afternoon and now, 12 hours later, it was early morning. The three of them watched the local sun rise above the horizon from the observation deck back at the port while they waited for their shuttle to announce the boarding. The sky was getting lighter and the streaks from arrow-like human shuttles and roundish Gemi crafts eventually got dimmer and barely visible. Rin was relieved Mikey and Devon got along well. They were more than happy to share gossip between each other which left Rin out of it, just the way he liked. 

“Living on the Hopestar, I keep forgetting there’s life outside of it. That there are people down on the planets that spend their whole lives without ever leaving the atmosphere.” Mikey murmured leaning on the glass. He looked exhausted.

“Many of them have even fuller lives than us.” Devon chimed in, his eyes fixed on the lights of the city in the distance. He looked equally tired. It was the middle of the night for the second shift.

So Rin decided to blame their sleepiness for getting lost in the end. He decided to drop by the toilet before they boarded the shuttle but neither Mikey nor Devon wanted to go with him. He was able to find a sanitary room and made his way back only to realise he somehow left the embarkation zone and now had no way of getting back into it because the tracking system insisted he had already checked in. He contacted Mikey via his interface and after some panicked messages, they agreed the best way was for Rin to buy a new ticket to the next shuttle. He headed out to find the ticket terminal at the same time as their shuttle took off and out of the connection range; without directions from Devon, he got completely lost.

Rin managed to fight the panic; the shuttle would take an hour and twenty five minutes to reach the station, where Devon would be able to contact him again and point him in the direction of a terminal or an information booth. The best he could do is to figure out which of the things that he could see around him were prominent enough to be location pointers. This trip made him realise that humans can call their language Far-Galactic and it would have nothing in common with the F-C he learned at the Academy or the one used to write books he took from the ship library. The letters were mostly the same (at least more familiar than the sigils Gemi languages used; apparently, there was more than one) but often similar looking words meant completely unrelated concepts. Combined with Gemi architecture, confusing signs kept sending Rin in circles around the same embarkation zone again and again. At least, he hoped it was the same one.

Rin tried to sit in the waiting area but it only caused the panic to rise up again. He got up and decided to check a busy corridor hoping it would lead to the lift pods. It didn’t, and instead he found himself at the edge of the port mall. He felt extra awkward because most of the people here were Gemi and so he stood out in a way he was not used to because for a human he was quite short. He was about to head back to the embarkation zone when he heard a familiar voice. “Mr Richard?”

Rin turned around with great relief as he recognised the person speaking. He had to suppress a chuckle: Andrew Haasan towered over surrounding Gemi near the entrance to the nearby store. He looked as calm as ever, perhaps a little more tense in a crowd than at his library. He carried two transparent vacuum sealed bags with shop logos; one seemed to contain tea, the other held what had to be a stack of thin books.

They met in the middle of the waiting area next to a plastic sculpture surrounded by several octagonal recesses with rounded corners that Gemi used to rest in when their limbs got tired. Haasan’s eyes rested on the green symbol on Rin’s shoulder before he asked: “How did you manage to get down to the planet on your own?”

Rin felt heat rise to his cheeks. He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the librarian. But it was his best chance to return to the Hopestar in time. “I didn’t. I got here with Thoresson and Alice.”

“Alice?”

“Devon Alice, the steward? I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before…”

“Ah, of course.” Haasan finally looked away from his face to look around the mall, which allowed Rin to take a proper breath. “Why aren’t they with you anymore?”

Rin sighed and explained the situation. He knew Haasan well enough now to read his expression as very guarded amusement rather than annoyance. This made him feel even more embarrassed. This whole situation could have been avoided if he just waited to use the toilet on the station instead.

“Perhaps, you could point me in the direction of a ticket terminal? And back to the embarkation zone?” He finished with what he hoped wasn’t a pleading expression.

“The private ship I am taking is leaving in twelve minutes, it will be best if you come with me. This way, you have no chance to accidentally get lost again. Follow me.”

They didn’t go where Rin came from but up a level and to the lift pods (he could never have guessed they were in this area). Private docks had even less signs in Far-Galactic and the ceilings got so low that Haasan had to mind his head as he stepped through the hatch into the gates area. A friendly round-faced captain waited for them at one of the gates and after a brief explanation agreed to take an extra passenger. She authorised the payment through a handheld terminal and hurried them inside so they didn’t miss their launch spot.

The ship was a small cargo hopper with a passenger area containing only seven jump seats. They were the only passengers present. Rin buckled up and watched Haasan do the same for his bags and then to himself. “Have you used this ship before?” he asked as the engines roared to life and a light tremor started going through all the surfaces.

“Almost every time we stay on Kashi-Sulak, yes. Captain Shek is stamped, she has been offering her services to the Hopestar in the past decade: transporting cargo, making business connections, posting job applications and so on. Sometimes, having an actual person in the area is better than sending a thousand outnet messages.”

The cargo ship wasn’t big to have a strong enough generator so the gravity shifted as they started accelerating out of the atmosphere. Rin fell silent in his seat, the engines humming too loud for a casual conversation. An hour later, the station was finally close for his interface to catch the outnet connection and download a dozen frantic messages from both Mikey and Devon. He replied that he was safe and on approach and promised to explain everything once they met at the crew gate. Then the ship entered the gravity field of the station, and for a minute they hung upside down before the captain rotated the hull. The clamps closed on the cargo hatch with a thunk loud enough to make Rin’s teeth snap. He started to really appreciate piloting a space liner with its own independent gravity and clamps low enough as to not affect the cockpit.

The moment they were allowed to disembark, Captain Shek rushed through the passenger area and rolled out several linked hovercrates. “Here, the additional supplies Kamenev asked for. I checked the expiry dates before they sealed the boxes.”

Haasan handed his bags to Rin and pulled the crates out of the airlock with unexpected power. “Thank you, on my and Captain Kamenev’s behalf.” His expression was politely neutral, which made Rin wonder what he really felt about going on these errands.

As they walked down the station corridor, he inspected the bags in his hands, curious about both the tea blend and the books. Unfortunately, they were wrapped tight with nothing but shop contacts. He looked up to ask the question but turns out Haasan was watching him closely and noticed the interest.

“Do you know what Kashi-Sulak is named after, Mr Richard?”

“Uhm, it does sound Far-Galactic… Is the first part the type of grain?”

“Not a type but a generalised term for all the grains, yes. And sulak means mouth of the river. The first colony was seeded between the ocean and a river, in an area perfect for agriculture. The main grain was bioengineered from the local plant and got named Kashi-Sulak. Now, centuries later, they use parts of the plant for different purposes. For example, the stem tissue can be ground down and brewed as tea.”

Rin looked down at the bag again. “Should it be called an infusion instead of tea then?”

“On Earth, perhaps. Why should a Kashi-Sulak producer who barely knows any Earth Standard care about that? Or us, for that matter.”

Well. Why indeed? If it looked and smelled like tea and brewed like tea, why couldn’t it be called tea? Why did it matter what plant was involved and if it even was a plant? Rin felt silly for not ever asking himself these questions. In general, not just about tea.

“That’s fair. I apologise if I came off snobby.”

The softest of chuckles escaped Haasan’s lips and Rin looked up in surprise. He caught the moment when his face returned to the neutral amused and the unusual emotion was gone. “You couldn’t come off snobby even if you tried, Mr Richard. But I’m glad you found this new perspective valuable.”

Rin turned around the other bag and opened his mouth to ask about it when another familiar voice said: “And since when are you allowed to commandeer pilots to do your job?”

“Here we go,” Haasan murmured under his breath in Far-Galactic, his expression neutral but in a dangerous way, eyes slightly narrowed.

Rin realised they reached the crew gate area. He could see Mikey and Devon near the gate itself; Devon looked relieved while Mikey’s face froze in a wince. Karim and Oddi stood on the other side, both edging a bit closer to hear what’s going on. About a dozen stewards and engineers also mingled nearby showing various levels of interest. 

The person right in front of Rin and Haasan was First Pilot Andrade.

And he was drunk.