Two Scorpions in a Bottle Preview

Chapter One

The walk from the shoddy townhouse Joss shared with his two roommates to the Manor wasn’t exactly a pleasant one. The streets were paved with cobblestones, sure, but they were rutted and pitted, filled with oily puddles, and, in other places, almost covered over with dirt and sand.

The area was clearly rough, full of hovels, ramshackle buildings with shutters that clung to life by one lonely hinge, missing roof tiles speaking to a history of storms that the place had never quite recovered from. Some of the buildings had boarded-up windows or doors; others let their absence gape, like wide-open maws.

Joss paid no mind; he was used to it by now. Maybe when he’d first landed here, it had bothered him. But after five years, he’d stopped paying attention. He’d never been mugged, or if he had been, there had quickly been an order established—Joss might have looked like an easy mark, without fangs or claws, unlike some of the other alien species on this godforsaken hunk of space rock, but he carried a big knife and he knew how to use it.

That he still knew how to slit a man’s throat after all these years—it was a comforting thought.

Slowly, the dilapidated buildings gave way to slightly less ramshackle constructions—somewhat newer or at least whitewashed or, if nothing else, hiding their slow descent into decrepitude with bright, neon lights and marquees that announced “Tonight’s Entertainment!” or “Now Showing!”

The streets became more crowded, and Joss had to thread his way through throngs of people—a motley collection of aliens, some of them who lived here, like him, exiled from the common decency of the galaxy, and others who were “just visiting,” tourists come to gawp at illicit displays.

On the face of it, Oria was an asteroid outcropping that had once been  mined for fuel for the very spaceships that now carried tourists to its desolation. It was located outside the bounds of either Coalition or Alliance territory these days; it was a kind of neutral no-man’s land (or space, as the case might have been), which was why it was considered a safe haven for all the ne’er-do-wells, the filth of the universe, the undesirables who couldn’t survive in respectable society.

It had started out as a penal colony, and Joss could see why: it was lightyears from the nearest planet in any direction, and, as an asteroid, it didn’t have much in the way of natural resources. People were basically dropped off to die on Oria.

Unfortunately for their jailers, the prisoners banded together and found a way to survive—maybe they’d put one too many scientists on their gulag rock, but whatever. That was, as far as Joss was concerned, ancient history. The fact of the matter was that Oria rebelled.

Even more unfortunately: that rebellion led to most of the prisoners being killed, but also the discovery of what amounted to spaceship jet fuel. A mine was established. New prisoners were shipped in, and ore was shipped out.

At the end of the war, the mine closed down; the demand for spaceship fuel plummeted, since nobody was flying a bajillion fighters around anymore, and the vein they’d been mining was exhausted anyway. There were exploration expeditions every now and then, but on the whole, Oria had been abandoned by governments and capitalist interests.

That suited Joss just fine. Oria was outside the bounds of society, outside the bounds of politeness, of the law, and that meant it was the perfect place for someone like him.

It also made Oria a magnet for the criminal element of the universe. Plenty of illicit businesses had cropped up well before the end of the war. When the mine was still going strong, they’d had to import more workers than just the prisoner population. (Joss wasn’t sure that was true, if he was honest; in his experience, regimes that used prisoners as slave labor just made more prisoners when they needed more hands.)

Along with those workers—maybe the middle managers and the upper managers and such—came paychecks, and with paychecks came businesses that were happy to help people spend their hard-earned money. There was a building boom, and, beyond that, there were bars and casinos and hotels and bawdy houses and theaters and burlesque shows that promised entertainment for the workers who went deep down in the mine.

When the mine closed, those businesses were on the edge of bankruptcy. But the end of the war heralded a boom in tourism. And, well, Oria had developed a reputation.

So the mine had withered away, and the economy had shifted to sex tourism and drug dens and casinos. Joss imagined it was something like what Earth’s Las Vegas had been in the days of yore. Old movies showed revues and dancing girls, and people at splashy, shiny bars, drinking cocktails and wearing fancy dresses as they lost all their money at the roulette table.

Joss didn’t know if those depictions were accurate or not, and he didn’t know if Oria really was the New Las Vegas, the Las Vegas of Space, or whatever people were trying to call it, but he did know that people paid to see him get gussied up in drag and perform as part of a fairly raunchy revue, and he knew that johns paid some of those performers—himself included—to give them private shows sometimes, and Joss knew that pretty much everyone was drunk or shooting up or snorting something all the time. He knew there were lots of high-rollers who brought their work “associates” and offered them whores and drugs and chips at a table; he knew there were plenty of starry-eyed tourists who were here for a “wild weekend” or whatever.

And Joss knew that was what paid his bills, so every night of the week, except Monday and Tuesday, he walked from his shitty rental to the Manor, which was lit up like a torch, burning into the perpetual night of Oria’s sky, because the place had no real atmosphere, other than the bubble that had been erected around it. He’d go to the dressing room, pull on his stockings, lace himself into a corset—not that he needed one, considering how snatched his waist was anyway (thanks, alien DNA)—and he’d sashay out on stage and kick his legs high to give some so-called gentlemen a thrill.

It wasn’t a bad living, and it wasn’t like it wasn’t what he’d been doing before. Just with less espionage now.

And that was a good thing, because espionage was what had landed him on Oria in the first place.

Whores were good spies, something the officials on Scorpius had known well, and Joss had been well-positioned to be their little wiretap. He wasn’t fully scorpiate, so he was exotic, and people flocked to see him. Especially the humans. Oh, the humans.

And that was who the government was after, and they’d sidled up to Joss and the seducer had been seduced by sweet words, and—

He tamped down on those thoughts. They didn’t matter now. None of it mattered now. That had been years ago.

“Hey,” he said to Pip when he pushed through the Manor’s back door, clattering down the trembling set of wrought-iron steps.

“Hey yourself,” they replied. Pip was a human, which made them one of the aliens that was closest to Joss on this forsaken space rock. The other was Miriam, who was a scorpiate.

Joss was—as far as he knew—a rarity. Humans were infamously compatible with various species across the galaxy; he’d heard about human-Taurean mixes, human-Piscean mixes, … human-naga partnerships were practically a dime a dozen.

Human-scorpiate hybrids were rarer, and Joss didn’t know why. Maybe it was something about the DNA not blending well or something. Or maybe it was just that humans and scorpiates had been on opposite sides during the war, or maybe scorpiates, with their pincers and their fangs and their stingers, scared most reasonable humans off.

(Joss didn’t know that there were many of those; the humans he had met were all pretty crazy, Pip included, so he said that fondly.)

Joss’s mother, she’d been a diplomat. She’d been stationed on Scorpius during the years before the war, when humanity was still trying to be friendly with Scorpius, before they’d turned against them and joined the Harriods in their crusade against Scorpius. Joss had been born in the peacetime before the war, but he’d grown up amid rising tensions, and if he thought about it, he could feel the shift in his memories, the point where Earth went from being friendly to the scorpiates to outright hostile. It had been a gradual thing, and he’d been just a kid, but he remembered points when scorpiates had started glowering. When human delegations started acting superior.

Tension. It lined a lot of his memories, made him uneasy.

But the point of the matter was that his mother had been recalled to Earth when he was sixteen—ten, nearly eleven years ago now. She’d asked him if he wanted to come with her; he’d said no. So she’d left him on Scorpius, promising she’d be back soon.

The transport carrying the human delegation back to Earth was destroyed somewhere along the route. To this day, nobody knew exactly what had happened. Joss had read the report, which, he was pretty sure, said there had been an engine fire and the ship had imploded. There wasn’t anything left to recover—no bodies, no metal, nothing.

His mother was replaced as ambassador by some jackass or another, a real warmonger if Joss remembered correctly. That was two years before the war actually broke out. Joss was eighteen when Harriot bombed Scorpius for the first time; his grandmother had been killed in that first raid, and their house destroyed.

Homeless, destitute, and without a single relative to help him along, it was little surprise he ended up working in Scorpius’s entertainment district. It was good work on Scorpius, if you could get it—you had to be beautiful or rare or rarely beautiful or beautifully rare, and lucky Joss, he was at least one of those things. He was a rarity among the scorpiates, with their dark, gleaming armor; his human heritage had ensured he never developed a shell, so he remained as soft and pale as a scorpling, the epitome of youth and beauty. He didn’t have pincers like scorpiates, so he was defenseless. He didn’t even have a stinger.

He still had venom though, which he could deliver through a bite, and he did, exactly as clients asked him to.

That was what Harriot started the war about. Not Joss in particular, but scorpiates as a whole. Scorpion venom was a potent aphrodisiac, and Harriot accused Scorpius of using it—abusing it—to subdue whole populations and bind them into terrible trade agreements in order to enrich themselves, while also committing crimes against the autonomy of virtually every planet that traded with Scorpius.

It was a gross misunderstanding of scorpiate culture, as far as Joss could see, but other planets got behind Harriot. Once you mentioned the word drug, apparently all rational thought went out the window. Scorpiates were suddenly drug-addicted sex fiends spreading through the known universe like a virus, biting anyone and everyone to make them into mindless little sex slaves, and well, we couldn’t have that.

Once upon a time, fighting that unenlightened idea had been Joss’s concern. Now, however, that disgusting stereotype turned in his favor. It brought people from far and wide to Oria to see him. He was notorious—he looked oh-so-human, but he bit like a scorpiate, glowed in the dark like a scorpiate, and oh, wasn’t he just novel.

Sexy.

“You okay?” Pip asked as they were pulling on their stockings together.

“Fine,” Joss replied, carefully arranging the hose to hide a run. It wasn’t big enough to worry about, and besides, Li had warned him about the cost of stockings, the low supply, the difficulty of getting more out here.

The last war might have been over, but without a peace treaty in place, it felt like the entire galaxy was on the brink of a new one. Stocking shortages weren’t on anyone’s mind.

These would do for tonight.

Pip gave him a skeptical look. “You’re just quiet tonight.”

“Is that really so weird?” Joss asked, shimmying into his skirt. He wasn’t Miriam, who talked a mile a minute. He was pretty sure the only time she shut up was when she was dancing.

Pip glanced up from where they were fastening their own skirt. “I mean,” they said, “yes? Weird enough that I’m commenting on it, at least.”

Joss shrugged. He guessed that was a good enough point. “Ruminating,” he said simply.

An arm wrapped around his shoulders, dragging him into a hug. “Oh, thinking about the good ol’ days?” Miriam enthused. “I love when we do that! When I was six—”

“I was more thinking about, you know, before Scorpius got bombed,” Joss said, allowing himself to be pulled face-first into her tits. They weren’t really tits, not on scorpiates like Miriam; it was more like feminized armor.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “So, like I was saying, when I was six …”

Joss groaned, then shoved away from her. “You’re not that much younger than me,” he grumbled. She was, to the best of his knowledge, twenty-one—just five years younger than him. She would have been a lot older than six when Scorpius was bombed for the first time.

She put her hands on her hips. “Oh, and you know how old I am?”

“I’ve got a good guess,” he said.

There was a clap, and the three of them looked up to see Li approaching them. “Ladies,” the wolf said, “enough chit-chat.” He pointed to the stage door. “It’s time—your audience awaits.”

Joss barely suppressed a sigh. He shook himself mentally.

This was fine. This was great, even. He got to make himself look pretty and dance and he got paid for it, and was he going to complain about that?

No. Everything was fine. This … was fine.

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