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watched the Aldorian's eyes fix on his arms and looked away, blushing. He'd only just met Lan and already he'd made himself look incompetent in a new and unusual number of ways: drunk and incoherent, incapable of learning Belaari, and now weak and feeble. Lan's impression of him would surely be getting worse and worse. The Aldorian was the first new crew member that Prez had ever hired and he'd desperately wanted to make himself look... at least professional .
    Thankfully Lan was distracted by the male in his arms who was starting to moan faintly. "Oh!" he said. "Is he...?"
    "Looks like it."
    Lan turned to go. "If I may ask..." he began, then apparently thought better of it and made his way through the dim passageway to the connecting apparatus that joined the two crafts. Prez hauled the sighing female up and over his shoulder and staggered after his co-pilot, grunting with effort.
    Soon the couple had been safely deposited on their own vessel and the Outcast was on its way to the jump gate coordinates. Prez had never been through one before and would have been excited, if the atmosphere on the bridge had been a bit more convivial. And it was cold, even though the gauge registered the correct temperature settings. He fiddled with the control panel and programmed in a system-wide error scan, just to be on the safe side. Lan's face had returned to its normal color, and he sat at the console, one eye on the Tablet and the other at the black void ahead. He made no effort to speak, and Prez sat back in his chair and pulled out another bag of Skits, sighing inwardly. It was going to be a long, long journey.

Chapter Two

    The Elders had always told Lan that it started in the stomach. The feeling of attraction, the unfurling sensation that signaled the beginning of love. Then it would spread up the spine into the brain, where the dormant areas would fire up and cause dancing lights in the vision. When you look upon the one true mate's face , they said , the sparkles will be like a shower of shooting stars. That is when you know your destiny.
    Lan had looked upon the face of his mate and felt nothing at all.
    Now, disgraced beyond measure and voluntarily exiled from his home, he began to wonder if he'd really felt nothing, or if love had just been a lot less powerful than he'd been led to believe. Why hadn't he just said the Words of Binding and waited to see what would happen? Life couldn't have ended up much worse than this -- having no currency, working for a strangely ambivalent creature whose moods were sometimes dark and hard to read, in a job that obviously involved illegal activity. He could think of no possible explanation for the drugged-looking couple in the shuttle, and the sensations from the jerking body he'd carried had been deeply disturbing.
    The silence in the cockpit was like mental cave darkness. He could feel the faint sensation of Prez's feelings tickling uncomfortably at the front of his brain, but he did not know what the captain was thinking, or why. He knew he should fill the silence by making conversation -- an activity he'd read about in the Aldorian Travellers' Guide to Belaar/Andra -- but he could not think of a suitable topic to start with. And to top it all, there was a new web on the corner of his console stretching from a miniature plastic tree with colored lights all over, right over to the window. He brushed the web away, wondering what other horrors awaited him in this job, the first he'd had since piloting the shuttle between Aldor's capital city and the space port in orbit. His life seemed like such a long time ago.
    To give himself something else to think about, he clicked on the Tablet and read through the list of Prez's skeleton crew to make sure he'd met them all. Doc's name was not among them. There was Kris, the engineer, who had a bald head with a stripe of spiked brown hair running from front to back. The one female, Glitch, was in charge of the computer systems and had a small, sweet