The Duel

The station bar serves four species and keeps the lights low so nobody has to look at what anyone else is eating. You are carrying three drinks back to your table when the station lurches, your elbow finds something solid, and the solid thing turns out to be the drinking arm of two meters of armored warrior, now wearing his drink.

It is not a friendly hello. The bar goes quiet with the practiced speed of a room that has seen this before, and your station-issued translator bud crackles to life in your ear, faithfully rendering every syllable of what follows. You will shortly wish it hadn't.

This, it turns out, is the single worst thing you could have said.

He listens to the apology the way a surgeon listens to a patient insisting the tumor is probably nothing. Then he holds up one hand, silencing you, and glances at the ceremonial blade on his back in a way that makes several patrons remember appointments elsewhere.

Now turns out to be negotiable — station regulations, he concedes with disgust, prohibit dueling before 0600. What is not negotiable is the fact of it. He asks: blades, or bare hands?

Your honest answer produces the first smile you have seen from him. It is not reassuring.

A question, you realize. He is genuinely asking. You shake your head no, emphatically no, and he nods as if you have finally said something sensible — then leans down to your ear, so only you can hear the terms.

🔒 Untranslated

JIH SoH-joH 'Iw neH!