Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

An Outside Perspective

He had his transfer papers shoved into the breast pocket of his lab coat as he sat on deck of Europa station twiddling his thumbs and waiting. He had been here for the last few days, enjoying the amenities of the station which included a shit ton of fast food and more than one descent bar. Despite how nice the station was comparable to the asteroid he had been stuck on for the last year, he was still glad to get off the station and back onto a ship. He wanted to see alien planets, and experience alien things.

Despite having worked in space for the past year or so, he had not, in fact, ever met at alien. He hadn't even seen one from a distance. To his great dismay.

The first time he had ever seen one in real life was on this very station two days ago when a cargo ship full of Tesraki built microchips was transferred in. He knew the military installations did lot of work with the Tesraki considering the Tesraki homeworld was the new East Asia, in terms of manufacturing anyway. A lot of companies outsourced the building of their products to Tesraki since the costs associated were cheaper even with dong it off world.

The Tesraki population was absolutely massive in comparison to the human population, and those of them who weren't too good at economics spent their lives in factories helping to manufacture whatever gadgets the others of their species came up with. Where humans had fought for centuries to break up inequalities like that, the Tesraki had never even considered it.

To them it was less about some sort of injustice and more about that being the way the dice rolled.

If you sucked as an entrepreneur, than you might as well make yourself useful somewhere else.

It was hard to fathom how someone could just accept that as cultural dogma, but all of the species had their little quirks. I mean the Vrul had no problem with some weird sort of authoritarian communism that left most of their people oppressed and in the dark, and the Drev didn't see slaughtering each other at every opportunity to be a moral issue either.

A lot of the thins that humans tended to think about, aliens just didn't.

He supposed that all came down to the fact that humans, unlike any other species, believed deep down that they deserved something better than what they already had. That lead them to protests and innovation and reform. Other species didn't really think in those terms. They thought about what had been done and what worked, and there wasn't much afterthought beyond that.

The Tesraki were probably the most similar to the humans in this regard, in that, they could be greedy little bastards when it was warranted, but it was always economically and not socially.

Warning: airlock in docking bay Alpha engaged.

He lifted his head to the sound and quickly got to his feet, grabbing his duffel bag and hurrying towards the docking bay. Alpha was one of the larger docking bays reserved for ships that were too large to fit o the station. The Primary UNSC fleet ships were the only ones that measured that large, and the only one that was scheduled to land for that day was the Omen.

His new transfer station.

The Omen was the furthest ranging ship in either the GA or the UNSC fleets. It was the second largest known ship that had ever been built by any alien party, aside from the Celzex, thought it seemed unfair to count them considering they probably had the technological capabilities to build themselves a space ship as large as a small moon given a few years.

He turned to stare out the window watching as the massive behemoth was slowly maneuvered into place, micro engines on her port and starboard sides firing with all the delicacy of a hummingbird's wings. She was a beautiful ship, with graceful sweeping lines up and down her hull, and blinking blue lights on top of that. She was a real work of art, probably the most beautiful ship this side of the galaxy.