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its collar. “Evening, all.”
    “H’lo,” a few of them muttered.
    The ensign nearest me was an Uctu, the correct name for the race whose section of the galaxy ran a third of the way along the Imperium’s border. Humanity, upon beholding their nearest nonhuman neighbors, promptly named them “Geckos,” after the reptile of Old Earth that they most resembled. There had been a movement to rename them “Dragons,” as being more complimentary to a fellow spacegoing race, but it failed. Herpetologists pointed out that Uctu had large, slightly sticky pads at the tips of their flexible fingers, and their blunt, round-eyed faces failed to look fierce even when provoked. Geckos they remained. Unlike some of their neighbors the Uctu evolved under nearly identical gravitational and atmospheric conditions so they battled with the Imperium and the Trade Union, the largest of the Human-occupied systems. Over thousands of years that border had shifted up and back, until there were both Uctu and Human systems under the dominion of each. The Geckos had been fairly quiet for the last few decades, so this Uctu must have been born on Imperium soil. He was quite young, I reflected, still having the luminous turquoise spots on the rough skin above his eyes, and the reddish scales that ran from the crown of his head and disappeared down the back into his uniform collar had soft edges instead of points. The tab at his breast pocket said redius, k. I smiled at him.
    “Pok no Ya inho?” I inquired. It was the polite way to greet one of his kind. They were keen multi-media viewers. The current style of digitavids were invented by an Uctu scientist. I had kept up for several seasons with the Ya! show, an ongoing search for the most talented dancers. Uctus loved dance.
    The Uctu showed a brief flash of his sharp, flat teeth. “A fan you?”
    “Avid,” I assured him, sitting down. “Lord Thomas I . . . Kinago. Ensign.”
    “Kolchut Redius. Did you not tremble in boots yours?” the Uctu whispered.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Because you were late,” a human female ensign with tilted golden eyes and black hair informed me from across the table. She shifted her slim shoulders in her uniform as if she had only just learned how to wear clothes and wasn’t at all comfortable with the exercise. Her name was Anstruther, P. “The old man’s a stickler for punctuality. You’ll pull extra duty.”
    “Not if I can help it,” I said, leaning forward, then automatically immediately back to allow the removal of a bowl of soup by a thin hand in a white sleeve. The moment I realized the china basin was moving away, I reached for it, but in vain. The servers cleared the table swiftly to make way for the next course. I was ravenous. A lightly cooked yak wouldn’t have been too small a meal to bring me. Instead, I concentrated on my tablemates. They would be my companions for the duration of my enlistment aboard this vessel, and I was eager to befriend them.
    “What makes you special?” Xinu asked. He had coffee-dark skin and shiny black hair. The cost to tailor his uniform to wide shoulders down to impressively narrow hips had been well spent. His teeth, brilliant white, had a small blue jewel in the center of each.
    “I’m just me,” I said modestly.
    Xinu pretended to stick his finger down his throat. “False modesty makes me tired,” he said. “Admiral Podesta has been known to kick people out when they’re fifteen seconds late, and you sashayed in after ten minutes. Why aren’t you back in your cabin eating survival rations?”
    I shrugged disarmingly. “I suppose I owe it all to my mother. She’s an admiral, too. Professional courtesy, I suppose,” I added, glancing back in alarm at Podesta, who was eating a green salad from a pale blue china bowl with quick, stabbing bites of a gleaming silver fork.
    “He’s never heard of it,” said the dark-furred Wichu beside Redius. His name was Perkev. He showed his rows of pointed teeth.