Esmeralda left Earth in search of culinary perfection.
       Two dozen interviews later, she landed a gig washing dishes on a hip little moon on the outskirts of the Milky Way, after revising her cover letter to describe her time as head chef in a five-star Parisian restaurant as "less inspiring than the fungus on fueling-station moon fries."
       Her prospective employer, a multi-tentacled space squid (just squid to him, given that this particular moon was devoid of water and required imports not from the planet it orbited, but from a pristine and uninhabited neighbor, which was part of its appeal), laughed for five minutes while smacking his arms on the desk. Esmeralda kept her smile relaxed, and hoped.
       After what felt like an eon, Barthemous--who had recently installed his nephew as sous-chef and claimed to need all paws on deck (she didn't correct him) for the Galaxy Gastro cooking competition--waved his tentacles at her in order to seal the agreement. He laughed another five minutes at her attempted reciprocation, then set her to work scrubbing stardust out of a gravity-resistant cocktail mixer (lesson #1 in intergalactic mixology: VIP's take it floated, not stirred).
       She'd paid her dues once before, on Earth.
       She could do it again.
       Beside her at the sink, a three-foot space faery (just faery to her, given that the legend of Earthen faeries originated from a few bold pranksters of her race) washed plates with impressive vigor. The faery's wings buzzed, giving her the impression of a dragonfly trying to land.
       "Why do you need the stool?" Esmeralda asked, nodding to the wings.
       "Rude," said a line cook from behind a curtain of silken hair that brushed Esmeralda's shoulder as he passed, forcing her to wonder what good his full-body net could possibly be doing to keep the strands out of the space-weed noodles.
       Or perhaps space foodies had a taste for alien-hair pasta.
       "Sorry," Esmeralda said. "I try to avoid acting like the ugly Earthling."
       She preferred the term Earthen, truth be told, but sensed that to use it would win her no favors.
       The line cook snorted, inhaled a wad of hair, and coughed all over the noodles.
       "That's all right," the faery said. "I get it a lot. My wing-beat speed is only around 670 per Jupiterian hour, when the average faery can do 1,720."
       Esmeralda didn't know how to respond appropriately, so she just nodded.
       "Means she's slow," said the line cook.
       "Not exactly," the faery whispered to Esmeralda. "It means I get tired quicker. I'm Adele."
       "Esmeralda."
       Esmeralda was debating the safest way to ask Adele more about herself when Barthemous' nephew-the-sous-chef burst into the kitchen, tentacles flailing.
       "Health inspection!" he cried, spinning a circle that brought carnival rides to mind.
       Ezekiel, the space squid nephew, was apparently only part squid, as his entire body was covered in a fine layer of scales. Esmeralda assumed the scales to be the same type one might find on a reptile or a fish, until they leapt up to voice their own squeaky-toned panic: "Hide them! Hide them!"
       Esmeralda had not noticed sentient scales on Barthemous. In fact, she found these ones to be so distracting that she didn't see the line cook coming, which made it all the more surprising when he shoved her toward the closet with one heave of his hairy paws. The faery, Adele, fluttered behind.
       Esmeralda, who'd tried to make herself agreeable, said, "I'd like to know why we're being stored with the mops, when someone has a moment."
       It was, perhaps, the rudest sentence she'd ever uttered.
       "Quiet!" shushed the line cook. He slammed the door, leaving Esmeralda and Adele alone in the dark. At least, it was mostly dark; Adele's hair glowed faintly with a sheen of green light that Esmeralda hoped wouldn't leak under the door.
       "Earthlings aren't supposed to be allowed in kitchens," Adele told her, and suppressed a shudder. "Think of the disease."
       Esmeralda looked at her hands. "I think I'm rather clean, all things considered."
       Adele patted her shoulder, then wiped her hand on her skirt. "No offense."
       "None taken," Esmeralda said, though she wasn't sure she meant it. Apparently, there was a reason she hadn't been able to procure a job beyond Earth's stratosphere.
       She was vermin.
       "And you?" Esmeralda asked. "Why are you in here?"
       Adele brushed a strand of fluorescent green hair behind her ear. "Tax evasion."
       With the door shut fast, Esmeralda could not see the creatures attached to the footsteps that now invaded the kitchen. Space elephants, perhaps, or space kraken--they certainly sounded as though they had as many limbs as Barthemous and his nephew combined.
       "Won't they need to check the closet?" Esmeralda whispered. She couldn't help but wonder if the acidic scent cloying at her nose was meant to be some kind of an Earthen repellent, as it was starting to make her woozy.
       Adele responded with a nudge to Esmeralda's ribs. Not the time for discussion, apparently.
       On the other side of the door, voices murmured. That was expected. Esmeralda pictured check marks on clipboards and questions about hairnets.
       Next, there came what sounded like the clang of a rather large pot. Less expected, but perhaps space health inspectors were more hands-on than their Earthen counterparts.
       Third, the unmistakable hum-and-crash of a DestructoBlast-4000 laser gun, followed by return fire from a Defend-O-Matic 9, which, to be honest, didn't stand a chance, though Esmeralda would have been first to admit her bias in favor of the DestructoBlast. They might not be as user-friendly, but were endlessly customizable.
       Silence.
       Muffled voices.
       More thunderous footsteps, the swish of the kitchen doors, and then silence, this time stretching long enough that Esmeralda dared to turn her head to find Adele's gaze in the dark.
       It was beginning to seem unlikely that the line cook would return to liberate them.
       Esmeralda cracked the door open.
       The first thing she saw, when her eyes adjusted to the light, was that the previously spotless tile floors were strewn with four-foot-long strands of hair.
       The rest of the room was covered in bits of the kitchen staff.
       "I guess it wasn't really a health inspection," Esmeralda said, opening the door for Adele to see.
        "Wow," said the faery. "Where did they get a Vapor-Blast?"
       "I think it was a DestructoBlast. The 4000."
       "Not likely. The coating of bile is as even on the ceiling as it is on the walls. A DestructoBlast could never achieve that kind of uniformity. It practically looks painted."
       Esmeralda, who'd seen the power of the DestructoBlast line for herself at the 3019 Galactic Showcase while working a dunk-the-Earthling tank (which, in retrospect, ought to have alerted her to the extent of the galaxy's anti-Earth sentiment), was so busy formulating her argument in favor of the superior gun that she almost didn't hear the squeaky voice calling from the spoon rest.
       "Help us! Help us!" it cried.
       When Esmeralda picked up the utensil, Ezekiel's last living fragment hopped onto her hand. It was a single scale the size of an Andromedan dollar coin, copper in color and in possession of strong vocal prowess, though Esmeralda could not see where it kept its mouth, or any of its facial features.
       It looked, quite frankly, as though it ought to be decorating a shoe.
       "You saved us!" it cried.
       Esmeralda looked around the gut-strewn kitchen. "I think it's just you."
       The scale perched on her shoulder and hopped left, then hopped right, as though searching for its brethren. "Oh, woe!" it screeched. "Oh, what have you done!"
       "It wasn't us," Adele said. "Who would want to murder an entire kitchen staff?"
       Esmeralda, who had not yet sampled the food, felt it might be best to refrain from comment.
       "Casino scum!" the scale said. "They've been after us since that poker game in the Centauri System."
       Esmeralda, who had to twist her head at an awkward angle to address the shoulder-clinging scale, said, "I see. You owe them money."
       "A token. Maybe a few," the scale admitted. "But it's no reason to vaporize us!"
       "I told you it was a Vapor-Blast," Adele said.
       Esmeralda withheld an eye-roll. "I don't think our friend was being literal."
       "I have a name, you know," the scale said. Esmeralda had the distinct impression that if the scale had arms, they would have been crossed.
       "What is it?" Esmeralda asked, expecting the scale to name the nephew.
       "Left Torso Quadrant, Forty-Six."
       "Oh," said Esmeralda. "That's. . .specific."
       "All right, LTQ-46," Adele said. "How many tokens do you owe?"
       The scale hopped toward Esmeralda's neck, as if that might save it. "Whatever we owe, it's nothing compared to Uncle Barthemous."
       It would stand to reason that the only person--squid--willing to hire an Earthen would be a gambler.
       Esmeralda hurried out of the kitchen, with LTQ-46 on her shoulder and Adele on her heels. She fully expected to find the office window coated in squid mash, or some similar variation of the kitchen disaster.
       Instead, the place was clean, and silent.
       "Looks like he bolted," Adele said, while LTQ-46 sobbed into Esmeralda's neck.
       Esmeralda squeezed around to Barthemous' side of the desk, trying to imagine where she would go, were she a squid on the run, while simultaneously considering the potential ramifications of running the restaurant in his absence.
       A trail of droplets on the edge of the desk provided the answer to both. Armed with suction-cup-laced tentacles, a squid might just go up.
       Esmeralda dropped her head back, nearly unseating LTQ-46 as she did. Fixed to the plaster above, with his tentacles splayed like an upside-down ceiling fan, clung Barthemous. Tears rolled down his forehead, raining into the office and soaking Esmeralda's hair before she could sidestep the deluge.
       "Uncle Barty!" LTQ-46 cried, rallying. "You have to get out of here! They'll find you!"
       At the sight of the frantic scale--the existence of which surely provided Barthemous with an accurate representation of the scene in the kitchen--the squid descended, tentacle over tentacle, and bumped Esmeralda out from behind his desk, using one arm to run an antibiotic wipe along the places she'd touched while withdrawing a weather-beaten suitcase from the bottom drawer with another.
       "What are you doing?" Esmeralda asked.
       "You've got bits of my nephew on your shoe," Barthemous replied, sending LTQ-46 into another fit of sobs. "It's time for me to go. Yeah. Too bad. Another few days, and we'd've won the Galaxy Gastro. I could've repaid them. I could've booked that Centauri 6 vacation."
       "And saved your nephew?" Adele supplied.
       "That, too."
       "Why don't you cook?" Esmeralda asked, thinking of how many jobs he could do with all those tentacles. Who needed a full kitchen staff? Barthemous was a full kitchen staff.
       "Me? I don't know a pot from a pan! I can't tell a tomato from an asteroid root! My nephew Ezekiel, he was the--well. Not the brains. Can't say that if we're being honest."
       LTQ-46 wailed.
       "He was the one with the plan," Barthemous said. He hefted his suitcase and flopped over the desk, shoving Esmeralda out of the way, once again, in his hurry to reach the door.
       Esmeralda knew a chance when she saw one. "I could win the money for you."
       Adele snorted. LTQ-46 hiccupped. Barthemous twisted the doorknob. "No use trying to cheer me up with jokes," he said.
       "No, really," Esmeralda said, thinking fast. "Don't withdraw from the contest. Let me do it."
       "No judge is gonna taste anything that's come within a mile of an Earthling."
       Esmeralda decided not to remind him that he'd hired her to work in his kitchen in the first place. "Adele and LTQ-46 can be the faces of the competition. I'll just make the food."
       Adele swallowed a gagging noise. LTQ-46 said, "I still owe the casino scum a metric ton of tokens."
       "Just Adele then. Look at how green her hair is! She'd be perfect."
       Adele preened and wiggled her shoulders. One down.
       Barthemous sniffed. He let go of the door. "What would you cook?"
       Esmeralda knew better than to suggest orbit-grown lettuce, or potatoes cultivated on Mars. No eight-rock delicacies would be good enough. "Maybe an appetizer sampler. Wyrms in blankets. Pig wings in buffalo sauce. Micro-bacteria on a--"
       "Don't say log," Barthemous groaned. "No, no, no. You have to think bigger. I want to hear words like 'crème de shrimp' and 'big bang alfredo'."
       Esmeralda was beginning to think Barthemous had made a rather large leap by entering the Galactic Gastro in the first place.
       "What about astronaut tartare?" LTQ-46 suggested.
       "Yes!" Barthemous shouted, pounding his tentacles on the walls. "Astronaut tartare! Exactly the kind of thinking we need."
       Esmeralda considered flicking the scale off her shoulder. "I hope that's not made from real--"
       "OK, OK, I see why you'd object. But that's the idea." Barthemous let go of the door, and Esmeralda felt a triumph coming on. "Can you really win, Earthling? Really?"
       Esmeralda didn't know. "Yes," she said. "I can win."

       She couldn't win.
       Adele said she was happy to still have a job where embezzling was optional--a remark Esmeralda chose not to probe, since she didn't keep Barthemous' coffers and didn't care, particularly since Adele wasn't squeamish about helping to scour their former colleagues' juices off the cabinets.
       LTQ-46 on the other hand, having been asked to keep Esmeralda from making disastrous menu choices, was becoming a bit of a diva.
       When Esmeralda used the cosmic radiator to toast a loaf of bread, the scale called her a tasteless, back-planet third rocker. She found this to be a rather redundant insult, and let it go.
       When Esmeralda suggested churning the cream with dust instead of dark matter, LTQ-46 threw himself into a bowl of eau d'ultra violet salad dressing, and had to be removed with a slotted spoon.
       And, when he decided her brownies were too heavy on the chocolate, and she made the mistake of pointing out his lack of mouth, teeth, and, most importantly tongue, LTQ-46 stormed off, allowing Esmeralda and Adele time to decant the wine and select pairings without interference. The scale returned three hours later, staggering drunk (a condition he achieved, according to Adele, by way of a soaking hot gin bath), and had to be tucked into a matchbox to sleep it off.
       Which would have been fine, except that, in his absence, LTQ-46 had wagered a second metric ton of tokens on the very-very-very off chance that a snail would win a race with a spaceship--which the scale claimed to have misread as space-hip ("And how," he argued, "could a bone win a race?").
       Esmeralda suspected him of harboring a secret weakness for the underdog.
       Whatever the case, LTQ-46 did not have a single metric ton of tokens, let alone two, which left him quivering uncontrollably on the kitchen counter until the inevitable casino thugs banged through the doors, Vapor-Blasts in hand, to demand payment.
       Esmeralda ignored Adele's triumphant squeal at the sight of the guns, and focused on the matter at hand.
       Barthemous and his family claimed to hate her solar system, but they sure did love to gamble there.
       The thugs wore full-metal facemasks, a staple of life on their tumultuous moon, where buildings and spaceships and skulls were mercilessly subjected to a constant barrage of pebbles. The masks were so deeply pockmarked that, in a different scenario, Esmeralda might have been interested to know how often they needed replacing.
       "Didn' we jus' vapo this kitchen, Tim?" one of the thugs said.
       The second sniffed, a thick inhalation that called slurping dogs to mind. "Smells familiar, Boris."
       Tim and Boris set their sites on LTQ-46. "Ezekiel left a descendent," Boris said.
       The two were, to Esmeralda, indistinguishable from one another. With the moon masks down and their identical gray jumpsuits, they might have been tall humans or short giants, or twin hybrids born of a forbidden tryst.
       "Pay up, scale," Tim said. "Or say bye-bye."
       "If scales can talk, Tim," Boris said.
       Never one to let an insult slide, LTQ-46 said, "I talk better than you can, Centauri trash!"
       Esmeralda was reluctant to step into a situation that might end with someone scrubbing her guts off the toaster oven. Seeing as it seemed likely to happen either way, however, she stepped forward. "He'll have your money in a week."
       As far as she could tell--based on the fact that they did not open fire--the thugs turned their attention to her. "Boris," Tim said, "there's an Earthling in this kitchen."
       Boris shuddered. Esmeralda considered offering him a snack, then decided against it.
       "Payment is due upon completion of race, Earthling," Tim said.
       "I didn't read the fine print," LTQ-46 whined.
       "Not our problem," Boris said. "Says so, in the fine print."
       Esmeralda held up her hands. "If you kill him now, you'll never get paid. If you wait a week, you will."
       LTQ-46 puffed himself out, like a pom-pom destined for a first grader's craft project. "That's right. My genius is about to win the Galaxy Gastro."
       Adele shook her head. If Barthemous and Ezekiel had the same penchant for showing their hands, it was no wonder they were such bad gamblers.
       The thugs stood as still as powered-down knight bots. Waiting, Esmeralda assumed, for instructions from their casino boss.
       "You expect us to believe you're actually gonna cook with a human in the kitchen?" Boris asked.
       "I just do the dishes," Esmeralda said.
       Another pause.
       Tim lowered his Vapor-Blast and adjusted his facemask. "You have one week."
       Esmeralda couldn't shake the impression that the thug was disappointed.

       Two days later, the judges arrived.
       Judge #1 was a celebrity chef in her own right, known throughout the tri-galaxy area for her chocolate chip cookies. (When Esmeralda claimed the recipe as having originated on Earth, Adele laughed so hard that her mascara smeared, threatening to delay the entire affair as she reapplied.) Esmeralda would have categorized the judge as a space-giraffe, given the length of her legs, had the judge boasted even a hint of a neck.
       Judge #2 was an android whose sensors evaluated the food on a molecular level and determined whether its composition favorably predicted a delicious meal.
       And Judge #3 was a space-hopper (also space-hopper to him, give the ease with which his species jumped from planet to planet, like so many blades of grass). LTQ-46 claimed to have seen him around the casinos. "A high roller," he whispered. Esmeralda wasn't sure she believed it.
       The first course went off without a hitch, even after Adele picked the sort-of-giraffe's pocket and LTQ-46 knocked over the space-hopper's water out of spite, drenching himself repeatedly in the process.
       Before Esmeralda could plate the main entree, the restaurant doors swung open, and Tim and Boris returned.
       "Earthling in the kitchen," Tim said, with all the subtle control of an air raid siren. "Earthling in the kitchen!"
       The sort-of-giraffe stumbled to her feet. The space-hopper hopped into his teacup. Even the android gasped.
       "Not possible," the sort-of-giraffe declared. "Not possible at all."
       Esmeralda, feeling it would be preferable to vacate the kitchen by her own power instead of being dragged through the doors, wiped her hands on her apron and calmly entered the dining room.
       The sort-of-giraffe swooned. The android caught her.
       The space-hopper's antennae quivered over the rim of his teacup.
       "Why would you sabotage your own money?" Esmeralda asked the two faceless thugs. "You won't get paid if we lose."
       Boris--though it might have been Tim--set his hands on his hips. "Earthling in the kitchen," he said.
       Explanation enough.
       Esmeralda wiped her hands again. She imagined a soundtrack swelling behind her, violins that would carry her speech throughout the galaxy, or at least prevent her from dying right here and now. "I don't see why Earthens are considered so very bad. Is a Bolognese less Bolognese-y because Earthen hands prepared it? Does floated sugar cease to defy gravity for the presence of a human? Does a perfectly poached egg care from whence it came?"
       "Yes," the judges (and Adele, and LTQ-46) responded, in chorus.
       Esmeralda was not at all sure she could win this.
       "I do not detect signs of pollution in the food we have consumed thus far," the android announced. "Nothing that smells of infection or hate. No sign of her presence."
       Earthens, Esmeralda reflected for the first time, may have brought this on themselves.
       The space-hopper launched himself over the rim of the teacup, landing with a skitter beside the ever-expanding universe rolls. "Truth be told, the Gastro could use some publicity. We hardly get advertisers anymore. They're about to cancel us."
       "Earthling in the kitchen. Might be just the sort of headline we need," the sort-of-giraffe agreed, having regained consciousness--though Esmeralda noted her reluctance to take another bite. "Like a country amoeba, making her mark on the big city."
       Esmeralda elected to take this as a compliment.
       "I think we can declare our winner," the space-hopper said.
       "You don't have more restaurants to visit?" Adele asked.
       "The last three got Vapor-Blasted, didn't they?" the space-hopper said. "Tim? Boris?"
       "Blasted," Tim repeated--though it might have been Boris.
       "Right," the other agreed.
       The space-hopper clacked his jaws. "Tell the boss I'll see him Saturday for poker. And Barty," he added, casting his words toward the ceiling, where the squid had entwined himself with the gaslight chandelier, "expect reporters."
       When the judges and thugs were gone, Esmeralda tipped her head back to look at her boss. "Can I have a job, now?"
       Barthemous dripped down, tentacles waving along the tabletops as he crossed the room, making a mess of the place settings. "You're hired."
       "To cook this time?"
       "Certainly."
       "Here?"
       Barthemous, who had raised a glass of space port to his lips, hesitated. "Well. Well, well. You have to understand."
       Esmeralda waited. The squid downed a shot.
       "My new patrons are going to expect a certain level of service. Of cleanliness. Triple-layer gloves can't keep out every evil, you know."
       Esmeralda, who was fairly certain they could, waited.
       "Don't you worry," the squid said. "I just came into some money. This place is about to open a franchise."

       Two weeks later, on an unhip little fueling station on the outskirts of Saturn's rings, Esmeralda was still finding her orbit legs.
       She'd paid her dues once before, on Earth. She'd do it again.
       At least she was cooking. One rung climbed. Sights set on the next.
       She drowned the metal basket of frozen root veg in asteroid oil, standing back to enjoy the sizzle.
       "Order at the fly-up," Adele called as her in-store register dinged.
       Esmeralda went to the window, where the pilot waited, antlers tapping impatiently on the roof of his commuter pod. "Double astronaut burger, hold the mayo," he said.
       She'd paid her dues once. She'd do it again.
       Esmeralda keyed in the order and adjusted her hairnet, flashing the pilot her best Earthen smile. "Would you like moon fries with that?"