“You’re Captain Aykhan?” the operational warden asked. He straightened up and held out a grease-streaked palm. “Portia said you’d be coming by.” She shook firmly, watching his face, but he didn't turn the greeting into a contest. He introduced himself and his outfit frankly. “Name’s Lachance, Stephano Lachance. That’s your chief electrician, Beacham. Wave Beach! Your HVAC exec is the lady over there, Alonzo. Thanks, Zoey. Your prime engineer’s worked for Zeru before—Eyes on me, Morgan! He looks young, but he’s a twenty-year schematic-junkie. Cyborg, I think? He’s got an AI bean in his head that helps catalog.”
“Any medical or QoL on your roster?” Aykhan asked.
“A metal practitioner from planet-side.”
The captain gave him a tight smile. “You have a bot on your crew?”
“Born doctors are spread thin as it is, Cap. Long as we’ve got a grafter and fab machine on board, we should alright with just the bot. ‘Sides, Morgan was a Disso’ scout on-world, back a decade. He can patch anyone up in a pinch. He just can’t prescribe anything worth prescribing.”
I hate robots, Aykhan growled internally, her hands reflexively clenching. An AI-touched engineer wasn’t much better, but at least he’d be easier to kill in a fight.
Unlike people, robots were unreadable and unpredictable. If they weren’t controllable, she would have declared a vendetta against their kind centuries ago. Outwardly, she smiled neutrally. “Will we have a mechanist as well, just in case the bot needs medical attention?” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
Lachance laughed at that, taking her sardonic remark at face value. “Not this time around. If the thing goes haywire, we’ll space it—same as we would any other piece of bloody equipment that’s turned itself into ballast.” He adjusted the respirator around his neck to sit around his mouth and nose. “The boys are ready to load up whenever you are, Cap. By your leave.”
As far as small-vessel crews went, Lachance’s was the best on the station. She wouldn’t have paid top-side rates for anything less. As she went through the motions of verifying the manifest and okay-ing supplies, she couldn’t feel that itch from before. A familiar dullness had returned to the edges of her inner kingdom.
I’m so bored, she thought to herself. This is boring. I can’t wait to get back in the vacuum. There’s cosmic danger there, at least. And pirates. And flares. Hopefully something goes wrong in-flight, and I’ve got to save the day again—anything to break up the monotony. She knew she could always manufacture something (fabricating an alien attack or a ghost haunting came immediately to mind, even if they didn’t inspire), but she wouldn’t pull anything like that until they were a couple crew cycles out from The Promenade.
Even she didn’t shit where she ate.
Lachance saluted her, hand to brow, and the rest of his crew followed suit. I dunno why I’m so caught out.Eleven specialists, a warden, a pilot, twenty-hands, and a captain in close quarters for nine months on the photon highway… She huffed to herself silently. Plenty of time for things to go awry.
“Welcome to Khan Enterprises, Warden Lachance,” she said mechanically, returning the salute with a snap. “We load up as soon as possible. Sigyn is docked at spot eleven. I expect everything to be buttoned up in the next six hours. Let me know of any shortfalls. I’ve got a bottomless well of black gold that we can dip into to catapult over any red tape.”
Lachance winced a little at the short timeline, but he nodded upon recovery. He turned and addressed his people, “Expedite any move orders off the dock. You heard the captain. We close cargo at seventeen-hundo. Ten after, clear the bay.” Aykhan was move ordering herself, when Lachance asked after her, “Cap, when are we expecting the pilot?”
Jerky? She started in interest, but she kept her voice level as she said, “He has a deadline of twenty-hundred, but it’s his ship. He’ll probably be by earlier. He’s aware that—”
“I’m helping pack up, Warden!” a gravel voice called across the concord. She barely prevented herself from whipping around to see Pilot Zeru jogging over to the lot of them as the rest of the crew dispersed to their respective duties. He had a beaten-to-shit backpack covered in patches hanging off one shoulder. “Hi again, Captain,” he greeted Aykhan briefly before facing Lachance. “I defer to you, Sir. Put me to work. I’ll help get everything buckled down.”
Lachance was beside himself. “You don’t need to do all that, Sir. We’ve got plenty of hands to—”
“I insist,” Zeru said, his expression lost behind his helmet. He gestured toward where his ship was parked on the ring. “I used to be a loadmaster years ago. I trust your guys to strap a tight load, but I’ll feel better knowing I helped in some way.”
Lachance glanced between the two of them for a moment before he nodded to the pilot. “Pack your own chute. I get it. Get with my second, Jack. He’ll take you through the inventory from the top of the sheet. You know how to read a manifest? Good. Maybe you can teach Jackie a thing or two while you’re at it.”
“Captain.” Zeru saluted and she returned the salute out of habit rather than intent.
That itch was back, flavored with the tang of anticipation. Aykhan, to appear aloof and only slightly busy with other, more important captain-y things, made herself scarce to let the crew work without a micro manager involved. She knew, given the chance, she’d be one. She wasn’t even an expert in any of their fields… but they wouldn’t be able to fucking tell, and that was part of a greater problem.
Knowing Zeru wouldn’t be there, she lingered inside the pilot’s lounge in the docking bay, trying to overhear anything about their projected leave time. They were on the status board for a midnight take-off, which meant that Zeru had applied for launch ahead of time. She was surprised that a self-interested hot shot had taken the initiative. She could count on one hand the number of times she hadn’t had to put in a request because her pilot had been too busy posing for photon-fetishists and other assorted fans.
He’s on the dock, moving with the movers, she mused internally. Perturbed, she reassessed her initial perception of him again. He’s got to be one of those flying types that wants to be involved only because he’s concerned about scratches to his rig. That would explain the brand freebies! He’s a ship jockey in the way that I’m into body building! It all checks out. The jacket, the pleasantness, the stickers, the scars… I’ve got a bead on you, Pilot Caleb Zeru.
In certain circles, if you possess a thing’s name, you control it.
So, call me Solomon, she thought to herself with a small smirk as she watched all the little ants working within the inner ring. She flicked a finger across her PC and brought up her latest correspondence. The Colonial Governor of Norlina-4 had responded back to her innocent proposition. She smiled to herself as she catalogued the acidic language and obvious dislike toward her. But then she closed the application with a satisfied huff of laughter.
For all his bluster, he hadn’t even bargained on her price.
She said out loud, “Predictable.” What she meant was, Boring.
Just once, she’d like someone to gainsay her. Just for the novelty of it.
Before she could fall too deeply into that shallow depression, a youthful crew member popped his head into the lounge and said, “Captain Aykhan? I’m Father West, your chaplain. They’re ready to board your effects whenever you are, Ma’am. Operators are awaiting your word to start preflight.”
She smiled congenially. “Of course, Father. I’ll follow you.”14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmkgSWusYIO
“All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Darkness before us, and Darkness behind us, may it shield us from the radiance that would otherwise consume us,” Father West intoned, right fist clenched against his breast.
The handful of crewmembers that had gathered about West released their own fists and rose from their kneeled positions, replying as one: “Darkness preserve us.”
Zealots, Aykhan denounced internally, rising herself to smile beatifically and exchange religious pleasantries with the half-dozen. Humans are always seeking some intelligence behind the indifference of the universe. The truth is, they are the closest thing to gods that the material world will ever witness. Maybe that’s what really separates them from me: ignorance. I at least know what I am.
Lachance met her after she broke away from the group. He didn’t comment on the open display of faith, but his eyebrows were raised as if to note. After a bit of small talk, he gestured grandly at the dock. “Captain, meet Sigyn. She’s a Class 4, with an efficiency cap of thirty-five personnel. She’s an insect-dreidel that can maintain planet weight in the thorax ring modules when she’s at cruising speeds. She’s had a recent interior refurb, so everything’s got a new-ship smell.”
Aykhan crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s not the interior I’m worried about, Warden.” She couldn’t help but snort in derision. “She looks like a war relic.” She’d be better off filled with concrete and turned into a static display.
Sigyn had enough concussion damage that it looked purposeful. Her hull was a pebbled, beaten copper color that threw sparkling lights about the docking bay like a disco ball. There was only one viewport on her underside, exposing the internal wires and rigging for a navigation bay. The rest of her smaller, positional instruments were new, shining like oiled chrome, betraying they’d been knocked off in a recent firefight or collision. Given Zeru’s pristine traffic record, Aykhan bet on the latter.
Lachance smirked. “Admittedly, she’s seen more action than most fleets ever will in their whole commissions. But that's Unity tech for you. She ain't pretty, but she'll beat us to Doomsday… I’ve seen’r heart, Cap. She’ll fly well.”
“How’d the pilot come by it?” she wondered aloud.
“I guessed inheritance,” Lachance said. “But the pilot told me he dragged her out of a Disso’ impound and dusted her off himself. Coulda pressed for more details, I imagine, but it looked like talking about his ship might get him hot and bothered, so I left it be.”
She laughed at that. “Sounds honest.” Sounds like a bunch of bullshit. Dusted her off, my ass, she thought. This fucking can is camouflage. Garbage heap on the outside, Taj Mahal on the inside. “Ready for preflight when you are, Warden.”
Lachance nodded. “I’ll let the pilot know.” Then he keyed the radio hooked over his ear and pulled down his mask to say without impediment, “All-up, this is Warden. Ops are a-go. Clear the bay. Break. Lithium, this is Warden. Give ‘er a little gas. Read back before ready.”
Over the net, the officers all called back confirmation and bodies jogged away from the ship as blue and yellow lights about the dock began to rotate, spitting more glittering flashes about the space. Then the automated bay voice called over the comm in five languages, back-to-back: “All personnel, please stand clear. Magnetic rigging to disengage in ten seconds.” Upon the last note of the final notification, the ship’s bearing arms broke away, spraying the hull with super-cooled gases.
Sigyn hung suspended in the air, like a fly in amber, then slowly listed to the side, beginning her first rotations of the trip. The cockpit wasn’t at the front of the ship, instead operating from the center of its “thorax”. Still, the forward-facing end of Sigyn looked like a face. It had “eyes” and “mandibles”. It looked like a horrifying cross between a snake and a scorpion.
The ship slowly turned its starboard side toward the docking bay to expose the circular personnel bridge port. Pilot Zeru came over the net with, “All-up, Lithium here. Ship’s green across the board, save on eyes. Everyone wave hello to Sigyn for me.”
“He’s doing an optics check,” Lachance said as everyone on the catwalk all waved enthusiastically at their home for the next nine months. The explanation felt patronizing, but Aykhan knew he wasn’t just saying it for her benefit alone. “How’re we looking, Lithium?” the warden asked.
“Low quality, but she’s got a thing for pixels.”
Lachance barked a laugh. “AI ought to help make some sense of the cameras once Engineering’s on board—if we need the detail, anyway.”
“Heard. Tango. Sigyn’s good to run. Lithium out.”
The warden pulled his mask up and treated the captain to expectant eyebrows before turning to leave. Aykhan’s answering smile had been unassuming and bland. She said to his back, “Have the manifests sent to my berth. We don’t need to waste any more time at port.”
“Aye, Cap,” he called back, adding, “Fastest make-ready I’ve witnessed in years. Pilot Zeru must be the real deal. Sigyn looks as ready to be off as the rest of us.”
“That she does,” she said softly. Internally, she scoffed, It’s always bothered me that people personify ships. Mortals will pack-bond with literally anything. Draw a face on a soggy box and now it’s a sad, soggy box. Pathetic. She clasped her hands at the small of her back as everyone else retreated to the boarding platform. The bridge hissed as it extended out of the ship’s side like a turtle’s head. The door, with its horizontal hatch design looked like a probing mouth.
Aykhan’s eyes narrowed. She studied Sigyn for a few more minutes, then went to the lift platform to grab her bags.14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡF5Q6ZPxcby
“All hands, this is Captain Aykhan speaking. Welcome aboard Sigyn. We’re looking at fair weather for the next one-hundred-and-twelve cycles until we reach the Lan System, at which point, we’ll muster for a cycle as we sling through Lan-3's ice rings. Twelve shifts after should give everyone plenty of time to acclimate and deal with any gaff before we get too far afield. Half-way mark is the Lan Zhu outpost on Lan-1. I hear they have real wheat there. Wheat beer. Wheat noodles. Wheat bread. At one-ninety-six, we should be in the Norlina System. Light guide us, Darkness protect us. Over and out.”14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWKHLlbMDwm
For all the wonder of being out in space, it wasn’t that much of a shock to imagine that people could go a little crazy living in a metal box with no windows for weeks and weeks on end. Humans are habitual creatures by and large, but they also, in a contrarian twisting of nature, crave challenges and twists to their precious routine.
So, for the first few days, the high of being on an adventure kept tempers from flaring, and upsets to a minimum. Aykhan didn’t receive any reports and hadn’t expected to. Then the first petty complaints about food and sanitation times came rolling in. The captain reveled in it.
Like clockwork, reality soon set in. Talk of the future basically died out. Reminiscences about estranged family members or home-world activities evaporated as if exorcised by Father West. After two weeks in the vacuum, morale had evened out to acceptable, crotchety, disenfranchised levels.
With the plummet in morale, Aykhan mood soared. Now, everyone was just as bored with the universe as she. Misery does indeed love company, she mused happily.
Aykhan had witnessed the sequence a thousand times without variation, so she only took note of things if they deviated from statistical half-truths. She was gearing up to note in her log that all was still well when Warden Lachance reached out to her over their internal message system: Captain. A word at the mess?
She glowered at her PC. The mess hall? In full view of the crew? There wasn’t a birthday planned for another six weeks, so it couldn’t be that. What was so important that he needed to see her face-to-face, but not so important that it could wait for the third meal in two hours? Her curiosity was piqued, but not as piqued as her irritation at this breach in expectation and etiquette.
She wasn’t on the ship to network. She was there to get a leg over on a pompous colonial sycophant. She couldn’t endanger the lives of her crew if she cared about them. Well, in theory anyway. She hadn’t ever gotten around to caring about anything or anyone in the last eleven years, so she wasn’t sure if she was still capable.
Perfectly put together, perfectly relaxed, she ventured out of her private berth and walked along the outer rim of Sigyn’s gravitational thoroughfare. When she reached the hatch to the dining area, she held onto the stability bars and pulled herself into the quarter-gravity area, gliding along the floor like a figure skater. She activated her magnets as she reached the officers’ table and took her place at the end. The table was occupied by every off-shifter, which was odd enough. They were also talking over one another, so it was difficult to tell if they were arguing, debating, or planning an impromptu orgy. Surely, she wouldn’t have been invited to a discussion about mutiny.
After waiting for a lull in the conversation, Lachance offered her a nod in greeting and asked, “Been to the cockpit yet, Captain?” The query managed to quiet the rest of the table and a dozen eyes locked onto her face in rapture.
Aykhan kept her expression beatific and approachable as she said, “Why, no. No, I haven’t. Why? Did we receive a private line from one of the corporate dinghies we passed?”
Of all the things she could have said, this surprised Lachance the most. Trying to talk over the piling, borderline insubordinate protestations, Lachance finally leaned over to her and asked, “Where’d you comm the ship from then? When we made it by Outbound?” She could smell beer foam on his breath, but he seemed steady enough.
She blinked at him, disliking the creeping sense that she was outside the know. “I used the captain’s line from my quarters.” He looked at her like she’d just admitted to tramping over some sacred fern, and she felt herself slipping into the deeper end of frustration. Control. She had to get control of this conversation. She could invoke her authority of course, but that wouldn’t make her any friends, and she needed them to be “friends” until she got paid the other half of her due. Lachance was a sailor’s man. He might’ve been the warden on the dock, but in the ship, he was everyone’s advocate. He was the closest thing their privateering world had to a commissar. She almost envied him for his position.
Almost.
She smirked and asked, “Is it a tradition in this sector to comm from the cockpit? I’m not the pilot. There’s no reason for me to be there. Why? What’s got everyone excited about a bunch of switches and displays?”
Lachance pulled her away from the group as the others only got rowdier, beginning to fight over who was going to go knock next and how much the bet was. Aykhan was at a loss, but she didn’t let it show on her face. Instead, she gave her warden a bemused look as if to ask teasingly, This is why you called me to mess? To waste my time?
He made a gruff, half-laugh and said, “Sorry about them, Cap. The lot are going ‘round and ‘round about Zeru. We figured since you’d seen the inside of his cloister, you’d be able to put their bets to rest. But I hadn’t reckoned that you’d be in the dark as much as the rest of us.”
Aykhan refused to be in the dark with anyone, let alone gnats that deigned to speak at her. But she smiled because if it involved Zeru the Ghoul, it had to be interesting.
She hadn’t yet encountered anything about the man that didn’t interest her. She hadn’t seen him at all since their parting on the dock. In fact, now that she reflected, she couldn’t remember seeing him anywhere on the ship. Not at mess, not in the sanitation rigging, not even exercising around the ring, where people only worked out to prevent muscles and tendons from fully atrophying. His berth was next to hers, and yet she couldn’t remember seeing him come and go from it.
Safely ensconced in Sigyn, they were flying straight and true through known space. The only frontier they’d see during this first leg was the ice belt ringing their first planetary slingshot, Lan Bailou, or Lan-3. And the closest cosmic body to that was more than a month away—an unnamed comet the size of a baseball. What could Zeru be doing that required him to muster at his station this long?
Something feral rose up inside Aykhan at the thought that his antisocial behavior wasn’t incidental. Could Zeru be a spy? Did he know about her contract with the governor of Norlina and her double-dealing? Was he in cahoots with planet-side pharma dogs, feeding colonial racketeers detailed reports of their progress? Could he be a sleeper agent of the Dissolution Group? Now, that would be interesting. Or was he part of the scattered Unity dregs, and just biding his time to scuttle them and abandon ship?Had he already bummed a shuttle? Could she be sitting on pirate-bait even now?
Her expression went from approachable to dead.
Lachance was saying something, but when he caught her eyes, his words petered off. He blinked rapidly for a moment, then he gave her a well-meaning pat on the arm and gestured airily. “Never you mind, Cap. It was just a harmless bet. Far as we’re concerned, perhaps the pilot’s a bit of a loner like you. No harm, no foul.”
“Loner? Oh, no that won’t do. I’ve just been buried in some paperwork the last few days.” She managed to paste a smile onto her face, but she could tell it didn’t look right based on Lachance’s sudden concern.
“Bet's up in two hours. Some say he's dead. Others are convinced he's, er, conducting himself inappropriately using the ship's security system.”
“And what do you say?”
He fiddled with his respirator. “I don't think the pilot's anything more than a ship junky. He's probably overclocking the cores. Alonzo agrees with me. She’s never encountered a craft this complicated all but fly herself. For my part, Sigyn's the finest vessel I've ever seen, and I've been on a couple officer corsairs in my time.”
“Same, same,” Morgan nodded emphatically. “She’s immaculate. Only mark against her is her Unity vin.”
“You’ve run with Zeru before, Morgan. What say you?”
Morgan blanched when everyone looked at him with betrayal in their eyes. Evidently, they hadn’t been clued into that fact like his bosses had. He cleared his throat and said, “It was about like this, but he wasn’t running the Sigyn. He was sitting in the captain’s rig, Camel Conney, at that time, oh, maybe a thousand cycles ago. He flew that shite-kite truer than anyone else could’ve, but I can’t say much more. I saw him boarding the ship with us, but the next time I saw him was three weeks later when we made port. Standoffish, they called him, but none could say he wasn’t a beast on the stick.”
Aykhan’s words came out sounding unaffected as she declared calmly, “Well, a bet is a bet, Warden. I'll head to the bridge myself. He can't refuse me entry, can he?”
Lachance might have said something, but she didn’t hear him over the slow, steady thumping in her ears. She disengaged her boots and floated back to the ring.
Instead of waiting for its rotation to bring her to the cockpit’s hatch, she chased the door and grabbed hold of its stability rails, activating her boots to snag on the threshold. She’d been prepared to cling on for life but was surprised to discover that Zeru hadn’t activated any gyroscopic counterforce, so she went weightless hovering in the alcove.
He was either working in zero-gravity, which was strange enough, or there was no one on the bridge. She hit the call button and didn’t have to wait long. The hatch opened and low volume Ekhancci spilled into the ring, taking Aykhan back to a place she’d almost forgotten about—a system that no longer existed—a culture that had been wiped out.
The primal, energetic beat was softened by stringed instruments and two vocalists whose intertwining lyrics sang of a timeless yearning.
It made Aykhan think of her daughter.
“Sigyn, pause the music.” The egg-shaped room went eerily silent. A shiny, beetle-black helmet looked up. “Need something, Captain?” Zeru asked her, upside-down from her perspective, his boots hooked into a navigational station’s stirrups.
She pulled herself into the space, head-first, and ran along handles and inactive interfaces until she was facing the communications relay. As she slid her feet into the stirrups under the station, she said smoothly, “Just checking to see if your intercom is any different than mine.”
He didn’t say anything to that; didn’t even shrug. He just turned back to his station, writing calculations on a flat slate of matte plastic with a grease marker. Every now and then, he’d use the back of a gloved knuckle to erase something and correct it. The only bit of him not covered in pro-gear were his forearms, but then those were covered in a rainbow collage of new and old tattoos. Way to advertise your disfunction, she thought. Is it impulse control or mental illness you struggle with, Caleb? Aykhan’s lip unconsciously curled, and she had to force herself to look away before she said anything damaging.
The intercom. Right.
His was identical to hers. She’d expected as much.
Using his disinterest to her presence as an opportunity to look around, she noted that while his berth had appeared barren, the bridge was a trash heap of prohibited items and personal displays. Even being one of the larger pits she’d been in (fifteen feet across at its widest), it was so full of junk that it felt claustrophobic. Fortunately, underneath all the human detritus, the stations themselves looked new, dusted and buffed. There were souvenir stickers on every surface that didn’t have a secondary purpose, making what could have been high-tech appear secondhand at best.
Rubbing an absent finger across a layered smattering of band logos and inspirational platitudes, she noted with interest that even the stickers themselves were new.
It was as if Zeru had made this place only look lived in.
She’d come by out of a paranoid need to prove her instincts right. She lingered because paranoia had given way to genuine curiosity. How pedestrian of me. Caleb is probably a hundred things, and spy is just one of them. She asked conversationally, “So, who’s signing your paycheck? A colony? A worlder warlord? Disso’ Group? Tell me. Is it just gas you’re after, or something prosaic like honor?”
He wiped something off his board and said, “Your name was on my fuel card, Captain. You tell me.”
Her smile this time wasn’t so forced. In fact, it felt a bit indulgent. She toggled a couple settings at the comm station and played with the levels as she said, “I thought the numbers on my fuel card would’ve been enough for no one to ask any questions.”
“I didn’t ask,” he said, audibly bemused.
“What’s a man even do with three months of fuel?”
“What’s a woman do with nine?”
“Charter a ship and traffic drugs.”
He laughed then, canting his head to look at her over his shoulder. “You think the intercom sounds different coming from here? Like, the output sounds more authoritative?” he speculated. He wasn’t accusing her of anything, nor was he joking.
“I don’t know,” she replied just as seriously. “Apparently, I committed a mortal sin by making announcements from my berth. I wanted to see if there was any difference between your station and mine, but there’s no difference in the hardware.”
“You could’ve asked over the chat.”
“I could’ve. But now I know for sure. It’s just an albatross.”
“A what?”
“A superstition.”
“An alien superstition if so. And I’ve been all over.”
“This sector’s not that diverse to begin with.”
“I mean all over.”
She crossed her arms and sat back against the consol as she faced him. He was perpendicular to her, so he had to cock his head and look up to meet her eye, but the awkward orientation didn’t seem to bother him. She tilted her head and he, consciously or unconsciously, mirrored the movement. She said, “You haven’t left the pit since we left port. But it doesn’t smell like it. I expected to see a nest of rocket rats when I got in here.” Instead, all she smelled was compressed air, leather, and the faintest hint of sweet berry ‘n’ apple gel. “You haven’t been sleeping in here, have you?”
“Did an albatross say I wasn’t allowed? Someone should start charging those supernatural beasties bilge rates.”
She covered her mouth to keep the bark of laughter down.
Her amusement seemed to embolden him. “Lachance should’ve come here himself if he was that worried. Not right pulling you away from your berth to do a wellness check.” He stuck his math plate on the wall, affixing it with a magnetic strip, and slipped out of his stirrups without using his hands. Pushing away on a toe, he grabbed hold of another station above her head and flicked a couple switches before twirling to grab another display a few feet further away, a heel and an elbow balancing against corners and kiosks just so.
Aykhan, for the nth time, reassessed the pilot. On The Promenade, Zeru had been a jittery ball of exposed nerves and tension—a typical photonrunner physically jonesing for his next high, his next paycheck, his next flight. She’d sworn she’d seen his type before. And she’d seen what they did as soon as they hit the open black. With nothing to occupy them between maneuvers, they usually cocooned themselves in booze, sex, or other hazardous tinkering.
But within the quiet sanctity of Sigyn’s cockpit, Zeru didn’t twitch, carouse, or seek validation over the ship’s intranet forums. He simply did his job, listened to old music, and danced from perch to perch as if he had nothing better to do in all the universe but be.
Aykhan felt like an intruder which didn’t make sense.
This was supposed to be her charter, her fuel, her crew, her pilot—A bag of tools to be used, bent, and discarded.
Ah. It’s not interest after all, she told herself. As she studied Zeru twisting and somersaulting from panel to panel, aware that she was watching him and simply not caring, she kept her face very blank and very still as she let the feeling wash over her like a baptism in kerosene.
Caleb Zeru was manufactured imperfection. He was hiding something under the layers upon layers of complimentary, adhesive advertisements, and she had a feeling that that something was bad news. She didn’t trust all that grace painted with cheap tattoos for a single quantum second.
Watching how confident and elegant he moved, when most would’ve been content to bounce and flounder, the captain felt herself hit terminal velocity as she mentally leapt from jealousy into the deep, cold maelstrom of hatred, from which there would be no easy return.
If she hadn’t needed his vital signs for all Sigyn’s biometric authentications, she might have killed him then and there just to remove his anomalous existence from her perception. She’d have sealed the cockpit and told the crew he was a stir-crazy fuck that no one needed to bother until they were ready to make planetfall. Then she’d be just as shocked and shaken as the rest of them when the port authorities discovered the evidence of his self-destruction.
She’d cry a little. Maybe she’d make a speech. Then she’d buy a new pilot, another ship, and another crew at her half-way marker and that would be that—hands clean.
But Sigyn was just as troublesome as her namesake, keeping a trickster alive for the sake of secret, sacred bonds.
I’ll just have to content myself with annoying him from now on, she thought with an outward smirk. At least then, her odium could be channeled into something more occupying than brooding.
She asked, “You think I’m too good to leave my berth?”
A loose glove froze, hovering over a button. After a moment, he depressed it while saying tentatively, “Of course not, Captain Aykhan. That wasn’t what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” She only wanted to see him squirm.
Instead, he knocked her back on her mental heels as he asked quietly, “Did you get injections to change your eye color? Or is the real Feline Aykhan orbiting some gas giant at the edge of the system?” It took her a moment to catch on, and she hated him even more for making her feel half a step behind. She meant to agree with his first assessment, just to get him to laugh such paranoia off, but before she got the chance, he shook his head. “That was unfair. I apologize.”
She berated herself internally. Had she changed her eye color recently? What color were they now? She couldn’t remember. She tried to keep her unease at bay. She scoffed, “That’s not the craziest thing I’ve been accused of, Pil—”
Zeru made a fidgety sort of movement with his hands as he sputtered, “Sorry, it’s just—Forget it. I just meant that—You’re the captain of this ship. You shouldn’t be made to worry that I’m not doing my duty. I apologize. I’ll talk to the warden. And I’ll give you biometric access to the bridge so you can come and go when I’m not here. Unless you’d prefer a status report sent to your PC?”
Is all that word vomit meant to put me at ease? Because his reaction seems like an overcorrection—like he’s been questioned like this before. I didn’t even say anything and now he’s talked himself out of the conversation. Aykhan crossed her arms and tried to keep the grin off her face. She suppressed the urge to bite into his neck and shake. She asked, “And when are you not here?”
He capitulated with a mumbled, “Granted.”
“I get it. This is your nest,” she finally said, and he relaxed. She took one last look around the space before taking a shot in the dark: “Having access to every camera feed in every cabin, I’d feel safely removed too. It’s the separation, isn’t it? You get to be a part of everything without committing to it… So, are you a germaphobe or a voyeur? Tell me.”
Zeru didn’t react.
Oh, he’s joking. No? Really! Come on. He cannot be that predictable. Maybe he’s just offended by my implication? Not knowing for certain either way delighted her.
Aykhan shrugged. “Everyone copes differently. At least you have the decency to keep it behind a closed door.” She pushed away from the terminal and gripped the handle next to the exit. Over her shoulder, she added, “So much effort in covering yourself up… and yet, you didn’t bother weathering anything to look authentic. It’s almost like you want someone to notice you haven’t owned this ship for fifteen cycle-cycles. I bet you haven’t even owned her for one. So, who’s really the fraud between us?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Ma’am. Again, my comment was out of line,” Zeru said mechanically and Aykhan had never heard someone sound so defeated. “It wasn’t my intention to put us at odds.”
You’re not getting out of this that easily. “Oh, perish the thought!” she replied, waving a hand as if it was already water under the bridge. Then she clicked her tongue and said thoughtfully, “Mm… Now that I reconsider, I should be back after crew-rest, Pilot. I think your comms are different from mine after all.”
“Captain,” he stated softly. She wasn’t sure if what she heard in his voice was pain or resignation.
“Lachance is just as concerned over me not showing any interest in the crew. We help each other by interacting, don’t we? Or have I misunderstood you? You’d rather… do math on your own?”
He didn’t say anything, but she could hear one of his leather gloves creak as it squeezed and rolled on a lever.
She punched the door release. “Keep this open from now on. Personally, I like being seen.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Not without reluctance, she left, hopping from perch to perch with a smirk of satisfaction on her face. What a rush. Will he cry or snap before I break him, I wonder? She sighed happily to herself. He’s no hot shot, I know that for sure… But I also know he only gave in to keep me from digging further. But if being accused of being a deviant was more appealing than revealing the truth, I have to know what he considers worse.
She could hardly wait to begin testing.
She needed to blow off some steam first. As a bonus, it would keep the crew from thinking her sudden proximity to their pilot was motivated by anything more than convenience. It would have to be a woman then. That would keep Lachance from pulling anyone aside to talk of pregnancy, and it would put a rift between her and Father West so he wouldn’t think to leverage her “faith” later. And if she managed to snare Alonzo (who used to be Unity according to Beacham) or Bianca (who used to run with a pirate gang according to Jackie), she’d have a prybar she could use with some of the local outfits.
Five birds, one bone.
Aykhan prized efficiency above her myriad other qualities.
She messaged Lachance right before the two-hour deadline: You were right, Warden. You won the pot. He sent back a surprised emoticon.
That would at least pacify the peanut gallery while she dug in further. She floated toward Engineering and thought, Hypothesis: Sigyn’s pilot is a voyeur after all. She smirked to herself. Control: complete. Experimental trials: in progress.14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ45aGgimRWL
