“You’re dead lucky, Cap,” Portia, interstellar customs officer, said through a mouthful of vapor. “Zeru’s docked on station. He’s exactly the kind of pilot that goes in for this kind of thing.”
“You say that like I should recognize his name,” Aykhan stated with a chuckle, threading fingers through her short black hair. She picked up the glass of brown spirits Portia had offered her and tossed it back with a hiss of delight. “Some new do-gooder hot shot?”
“Old do-gooder hot shot,” Portia said with a smirk. “Here.” She slid conventional paper across her desk and pointed at the cover page with a sausage-like finger. “Pilot Caleb Zeru. Thirty-two. Tuber. Owns his own craft, Sigyn. He’s been doing under-the-table traffic for about fifteen years now. For your fuel, he’ll take you across whole systems, back, and then some.”
“And he hasn’t made enough to get out of this kind of traffic?” The captain snorted incredulously. “How good could he be?”
“He’s one of the weird ones that love it,” Portia explained, grinning. “Reminds me of a certain captain I know.”
A prideful, indulgent urge to fish for more compliments shot up Aykhan’s spine before she gestured for another glass of whatever it was Portia had bragged about earlier. And they say I have no restraint, she thought to herself. Look at all this impulse control! If only they could see me now. After the custodian refilled her glass, she heard herself saying in a half-whisper, “Aright, Port. I’m interested. Set up a meeting. I gotta meet this old hot shot for myself.”
She wasn’t expecting much. To her, all pilots fell into three categories. Hot shot meant skillful and pig-headed. Takes pride in their ship meant they were crew-hating and fuel-guzzling. Good to their captain meant they had drinking, drug, or sex problem—and folded like an aluminum sheet when faced with any accountability or authority.
She adored their predictability, mainly because predictable meant controllable.
Caleb is a hot shot? She laughed to herself as she showered in the back room of her capsule hotel. I can deal with hot shots. Hot shots have something to prove, and I am going to ask him to prove it.
After cleaning up as best as one could on canned sanitizer and even more canned-tasting water, Captain Feline Aykhan of Khan Enterprises made her way along the mezzanine above the station’s market plaza. She’d been inside slimier stations. The Prominade was one of cleaner ones in the system, full of tourists and photonrunners.
She supposed the only downside about The Prominade was the fact that it ran on old tech and lacked any true gravity. Everything in the outer ring spun at .5 PW, so whatever water she hadn’t scraped off with a towel earlier clung to her skin like a layer of sweat, chilling her in the artificial atmosphere locked in the mid-sixties. Oh, but they gave out magnet boots and air cans at the gate, so she didn’t have much to complain about as far as quality of life went. But leave it to Aykhan to find something to complain about. She’d complain about not having anything to complain about, given the chance.
She looked down into the plaza and flicked a finger across the surface of the personal computer imbedded in the left forearm of her suit, bringing up the photo from her pilot’s conventional file. Zeru had the same caramel skin and black hair she sported, but his cut was longer, pushed back from his face in a bun. The face of this mortal was interesting to her, because it was a mangled twisting of silvery tissue. There is a burn mark here, a stapled laceration there, a red puncture from a bolt to the face there. His right eye’s iris glinted red in the photo, so she assumed he was still in the cockpit because of an implant.
She tilted her head to the side and indulged in a rare, if brief, moment of reflection: We live in a beautiful future where mortals are half-plastic by the time they reach majority, and this fucking damselfly has chosen to look like jerky. If fuel did motivate this guy, he’d look like a sex-bot. I can’t believe I’m thinking it, but that fat little woman was right. He’s weird for a human. At least I have the excuse of not being one.
She flicked the image away and returned to observing from the railing. Look at all those little creatures, living their little creature lives, justifying all their little creature comforts. She took a deep breath of the station’s ionized air. “Smells like money.”
She was supposed to meet the pilot and his union rep down by the gel bar for the ceremonial handshake. She marked the union rep in seconds, sporting the tell-tale orange and green uniform. There’s the pumpkin, she thought. So, where’s my Cinderella?
“Money’s right. So many people… It’s like a seek-n-find game.”
Someone with a voice like gravel and broken glass had joined her up on the mezzanine, and she turned a blazing, charming smile on them, gearing up to tell them off. The smile lingered on her face, but the words died in her mouth.
Caleb Zeru leaned against the railing next to her. She only knew it was him because of the name and callsign stitched onto the back of his quaint, little, leather flight jacket pulled over the top of his bodysuit. His face was obscured by a helmet plastered in brand stickers.
She thought she’d known what she would make of him, but now she reassessed. She’d never been one to keep her silence about anything. She held out a glove and his faceplate canted toward it, but he didn’t move. She caught herself before she could demand to know what his problem was. She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She gave him the benefit of the doubt with the fakest, awkward smile she could muster and sputtered, “Oh! You don’t recognize me! I’m Captain Feline Aykhan. I’m supposed to be meeting you down at that gel bar. What a coincidence. Did you want to get a lay of the land too?”
At that, he seemed to shake himself free of something and he quickly doffed his helmet, tucking it under an arm as he took her glove in one of his own. “Oh, no, that’s my fault entirely, Captain. I didn’t recognize you. You have longer hair in your profile.”
“And yours is shorter than mine,” she said with a huffed laugh.
He ran a glove over his crew cut and muttered, “I’m sure I completely blend in with the military types now.” He gave her a rueful smile as if to say, Say something about the scars, I fucking dare you.
Oh, I’ll fucking say something, she thought. She gestured at his leather and said slyly, “You kind of do. I only knew it was you because of the jacket.” When his implanted eye telescoped into a pinpoint, she smirked. “It’s… got your name on it?”
He pulled at the garment self-consciously before his natural eye blinked at her. “Right! Duh. I’m—‘Course.” He put his helmet back on and depressed the pressure valve. Then he waved for her to take the stairs ahead of him. “After you, Aykhan. Mister Connelly has all the paperwork.”
“Captain is fine, Pilot,” she said with a thin smile.
She couldn’t see his face, but she could read the course correction in his stiff bearing: So, it’s gonna be like that. She expected him to rail against the cold professionalism. Most hot shots would. But Zeru just nodded. “Apologies. After you, Ma’am.”
She took the stairs two at a time, her magnetic boots making an unsatisfying clicking sound as they made contact and disconnected with the steps. What is this itching, uncomfortable feeling? she demanded from herself. This isn’t tension. I know sexual tension, and this doesn’t have the same acidity. And it’s not annoyance, because if it was, I would have shot him in the face by now.
She’d had two thousand years to get to know herself. It had to have been a decade since she’d felt something like this, so it took her a moment to really name it—or rather, name the absence of it.
Ah! she declared internally in self-satisfaction.
Suddenly, for the first time in eleven mother-fucking years, she didn’t feel bored with it all.
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