The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Princess of the Void.

Happy Crab Burden.

“So the guy who tried to get away,” Dylan says, as the shuttle drifts from the station toward the sleek skyscraper of the Qena-Qel. “What’s gonna happen to him?”

“We’ll send him home.” Xamika’s tail pulls back on the clutch. “Not with a hostage and not with any technology he can bring back, but if he really wants to go, we aren’t about to spend manpower stopping him. He’ll say he was abducted, and nobody will believe him for a while, and maybe he’ll be picked up and questioned by your government, but he won’t have anything useful to say.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, he’s not getting the full payment, that’s for sure.” Xamika flicks the catch over the transponder. “He ruined one of Researcher Jainema’s earrings. We’ll have to knock at least a few million off his recompense.” She brings the shuttle to a stop in the frigate’s towering shadow. “Okay. I’m changing. No peeking, kay?”

“You’re gonna look flawless and I’m gonna be bumming around in a metal t-shirt,” he says, as she rummages through the duffel she’s packed and scurries behind the row of seats.

“I think you look quite masculine.” An expensive-looking tunic flips over the seat and lands in his lap. “But you can put that on if you like.”

He opens the crimson tunic and whistles at the intricate embroidery along the front. A forestscape, he thinks, though the alien geometries of the trees make him unsure. He turns to thank Xamika, sees the dress slipping down over her head and the bare lusciousness of her naked back, and looks away again. He changes from his metalfest shirt into the tunic and straightens its waistcloth.

“Help me out here,” he says. “This is two holidays at the same time?”

“Sorta. Come back here, okay? The shuttle will fly itself.”

“Are you decent?”

“What?”

“Are your clothes on?”

“Ohhh. Yes. C’mon.”

He climbs behind the seats. Xamika has changed into a rose-print sundress, its billowy skirt further exemplifying her teeny-tiny waist.

“So originally,” she says, as she secures a braided band around her head, “this is an Eqtoran holiday called Koa’t Qavava. It celebrates Koa, the Goddess of Crabs.”

He boings one of the antennae on her headband. “Of crabs?”

“And resilience,” Xamika says. “And endurance. But yes, crabs is her sigil-animal, and what you eat on Koa’t Qavava. We’ve moved a Taiikari festival called the Night of Joyous Burdens to overlap with it, which is to celebrate the laborers of the Empire.” She clicks a high-vis belt around her midsection. “Hence the, uh… bifurcated costumes. We’ll work out the mix better as the mirikan go by.”

“So does every sector celebrate it on a different day?”

“Sure,” she says. “Second-tier Taiikari holidays move around all the time, to better fit onto host holidays. It’s a bit far, admittedly, but Zar Tymar—he’s the cleric in charge of the sector’s omnidivine church—he saw the opportunity and he’s progressive enough to make the link. Xami says kneel.”

He gets down on one knee. She hangs a wreathed necklace around his shoulders. Little beads in the shape of crab claws clatter along its line.

“We haven’t quite figured the combined name out,” she says. “But happy Crab Burden, Dylan Thorogood.”

He laughs. “Happy Crab Burden, Xam.”

The shuttle slips from space’s eternal night into the Qena-Qel’s artificial day.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...rab-burden
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