I walked back into the shuttle bay in a haze, just as the twins were walking down the Cutlass’ loading ramp, deep in conversation. I nodded to them on autopilot and made my way directly over to the manual crank for closing the blast doors.

  The conversation with Jophixa hadn’t progressed much farther than me attempting to apologize for not knowing the significance of the customized uniform. If she’d looked angry enough to tear out my throat with her teeth earlier, she was now - well, she was mortified I think. And that had me even more confused because Jo was always so sure of herself. Seeing her like that made my brain short circuit.

  With my heart already pounding like an orbital bombardment, I grabbed the hand crank, and glanced over to ensure that the way was clear for the blast door to be deployed. The Cutlass was secured at a safe distance, and I couldn’t see the twins, nor anyone else in the immediate vicinity, so I threw my back into it and started cranking. I doubted I’d get the door completely in place all by myself, but the mindless exertion might help me think. It always helped my brain to have something I could assign my body to do on autopilot

  Jo was my friend.

  Sure, I’ll admit that I’d had some more-than-friendship thoughts about her on occasion - for which Stacy loved to tease the hell out of me for - but admiring a friend’s ass discreetly (I hoped), was light years different than accepting romantic overtures. She was also my commanding officer, we worked together, and Elegance wasn’t that big a ship. How would we handle things if things went wrong?

  My mind raced in circles like a dog chasing its tail, trying to figure out how to handle this situation. I could feel cold sweat trickling down the back of my neck and into my collar. At this point, would our friendship recover, would it even be the same after what just happened? Did I feel more than friendship towards Jo in the first place? Would Boudya and Tratsa accept a third woman in whatever we had going?

  Growling to myself at the situation, I redoubled my efforts on the crank, even though I could already feel my shoulders burning and my forehead dripping sweat into my eyes. The muscles in my lower back and all down my arms were twitching like mad, like they were trying to burst free from my skin and flee on their own.

  “Hey SpannerMan, you want to swap out on that?”

  Glancing behind me, I saw Gertrude standing there, her helmet cradled under her arm, and looking not a bit exhausted from her EVA to get her ship back into the shuttle bay. Standing there casually with her well sculpted figure and expression like she could have totally deployed the blast door all by herself just seemed to annoy the crap out of me. At the same time something about her presence seemed to trigger an overwhelming impulse to flee.

  “I’ve got this.” I growled out, pausing for a moment to wipe sweat from my face.

  She raised one blonde eyebrow at me. “You sure, cause you look like you’re about to keel over. I really don’t mind -”

  “I said, I got this.”

  Her eyes widened slightly in surprise, and she raised her hands in a sign of surrender. “Alright SpannerMan,” she said simply, and then, almost understandingly, “Just don’t kill yourself man, I’m sure there are a couple ladies on board that’d be upset with you for that.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Yup, you’re right, it isn’t.” She said with a shrug, not even wincing at my tone. Instead, she gave me a rather knowing look, “But that blue bombshell and the hot lil doc wouldn’t be something I’d throw away in a fit of self pity over another woman rejecting me. Plenty of stars in the galaxy as they say.”

  Her words hit my brain like a spray of liquid nitrogen. I stopped cranking and turned to look at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Oh come on Thomas, you aren’t fooling anyone. We’ve all seen the way you look at the commander. Hell, Giselle and I had a bet going on how long it’d be before either she noticed, or you made a move. I lost, btw, hundred cred out the window, thanks to your lousy subconscious.”

  “But it’s not like…”

  “Thomas, you aren’t the only person who has made a fool of themselves falling for their C.O. It happens. I’m surprised she turned you down though. Giselle and I were damned sure the signals were bidirectional, if you get my drift.” She shook her head. “What was it? Concerns for crew discipline? The typical C.O. stance on remaining distant from those under their command? Or was it an inter-species taboo thing? Not that the last is likely, what with you and the doc being all over each other.”

  I just stared at her. What in hollow stars was she talking about? I hadn’t been doing anything other than treating Jo as a friend. I wasn’t…

  Tomminoms, I love you more than a fresh omnium processor upgrade, Stacy said silently, but you seem to be one of the most dimwitted twits in the Orion Spur, if not the entire galaxy when it comes to your own feelings. I can literally see through your eyes, remember? I can literally give you a report on the exact number of times you’ve eyed the commander up and down. I have medical telemetry on heart rate and body temperature.

  Stacy, I…

  What’s more, she interrupted, Boudya and Tratsa have been half ready to smack some sense into you for days. Tratsa has been since the day she saw you in that sexy, sexy uniform! She knew what it meant.

  Why didn’t she say anything? I demanded.

  “Because we try not to interfere in each other’s relationships!” Tratsa snapped from a couple meters away as she walked towards me, Giselle just behind her. I flinched and turned to stare at her. “If the commander had asked me for help, or you had, that’d be one thing. But she would not have been happy with me sticking my nose in without being asked. It’s just not done!”

  I just stared at her, and I felt a cold sweat suddenly break out all over my body. It felt like my nerves were trying to pull themselves out of my skin and run away like some demented nightmarish thing. I couldn’t breathe, all I could think of was how much I’d fucked things up, how I’d never be able to…

  Whoa! Tommibear! No, calm down, we can fix this. Stacy said urgently via the implant, but for some reason, it wasn’t sinking in.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but found that nothing would come out. My eyes started darting around to find an escape from their eyes. It was bad enough that Tratsa was giving me that look, but both Giselle and Gertrude were there, and I was trapped and…

  “Clear a path!” Stacy announced over the intercom, “get out of his way! He’s about to…”

  I bolted like a hare from a fox, my exhaustion from working the manual blast door crank forgotten as the panic spiked through my nervous system. I needed to get away, to hide, I just couldn’t…

  “What the hell?” Giselle asked.

  They were all staring after Thomas as he’d fled the shuttle bay. Expressions varied from concerned, confused, to a look of sudden self-recrimination in Tratsa’s case. The one thing the three of them had in common was an uncertainty of what to do.

  Silence reined over the shuttle bay for a full five minutes before Tratsa blinked and sighed, “Boudya’s going to be so pissed at me.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “What the hell just happened? Why’d he go spastic like that?”

  The resounding slap that Gertrude delivered to the back of her sister’s head made her stagger a step forward and swear, “For fucks sake ‘Trude, what the hell!?”

  “Stop acting like a crayon-munching jarhead.” Gertrude responded, “Remember ensign Canson?”

  Frowning, Giselle continued rubbing the back of her head for a moment before saying, “Wasn’t he the guy who survived - Oh, oh damn.”

  “Yup. Same body language.” Gertrude replied, then looked at Tratsa, “Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor? Not to mention his damned lover? What the hell?”

  Ensign Carson has been someone she and her sister had been stationed with on their first assignment. During a routine patrol in a sector that was supposed to have been a milk run, the squadron he’d been flying with, including four of his best friends from the academy, were jumped by a group of pirates they’d gotten a bit too close to.

  Carson had been the only survivor. Worst of all, his best friend, his wingman, had died because of a collision with his own fighter after enemy fire had knocked out their flight controls. He’d watched the man die in the same instant his own fighter had been disabled. Carson had never been the same afterwards, they’d had to discharge him due to the traumatic stress.

  Tratsa stared at her, stammering, “I…”

  “And you, Miss Artificial Intelligence.” she went on, glancing up at the nearest intercom speaker, using the tone she used for dressing down underlings as commander of security for a whole star system. “I thought you were his friend. Didn’t you research humans at all? Friends rely on each other to have their back.”

  “I didn’t think…”

  “Yeah, that’s obvious.” she growled.

  “Good to know the Giobhioni can mess up with their friends just as much as humans can.” She snapped out, turned and stormed back to the Cutlass. She wanted to go find the engineer and try to talk him down, but she’d seen the look on his face when she’d first approached him earlier. She’d spooked him for some reason, and that would just make things worse right now.

  With my heart pounding in my ears, I wasn’t even sure where I thought I’d go, not on a ship the size of Elegance. There weren’t many places I could go where they wouldn’t be able to find me eventually. Sure, I could go to his quarters, but Stacy had enough control of the ship that she could unlock the door to let whoever in if she felt it was necessary, even without my permission.

  I wouldn’t do that Tommy-

  Damn it, I thought to myself in a panic. I just wanted to be alone so I could try to get a grip on myself. I didn’t need to be told any more about how much I’d screwed up a situation that was so important, or how blind and incompetant. Just like I…

  No Tommy-baby, I didn’t-

  SHUT UP! I clenched my eyes closed and wished to all the stars in the ‘verse that the damned implant had a fucking privacy setting so I could just have a bit of privacy for a fucking change! Ever since I let them put the damn thing in my head, I was never sure when she was there, picking up my stray thoughts. I just wanted some damned fucking quiet!

  Mercifully, she shut up for once and left me alone for a change.

  My feet carried me in the direction of engineering, but as I approached the hatch, I remembered Boudya was still on duty, and I really didn’t want to bring her into this. If I interrupted her shift, it would just bring Jo down on her and that wasn’t fair. My fuckups were mine to deal with, not hers, and I just knew she’d stop what she was doing to try and help me sort things out. It was the way she was, even when she could be so damned sexual, she was so caring to those she…

  No, I wouldn’t do that to her. I fucked up then, I couldn’t do it again.

  When I stopped in my panic to choose which direction to go instead, I spotted a panel I knew concealed a tantaja tube - one of the many cramped access tubes that ran behind the bulkheads, allowing engineers to maintain systems that would otherwise be unreachable.

  Quickly, afraid that at any moment Boudya would open the hatch to engineering and spot me, I pulled the panel off the wall and climbed into the tube feet first so that I could pull the panel back into place. Leaving it leaning against the bulkhead would announce to anyone seeing it where I was, and I just couldn’t deal with any of them yet.

  Space inside the tubes didn’t allow for an adult human to turn around, just enough to shimmy their way along. So after pulling the access panel back into place, I was forced to belly crawl feet first through the tubes until I reached a junction and could turn around. Hell, maybe a junction would be a good place to just curl up and do combat with my own brain. Maybe I could figure out a way to fix things with Jo, because he didn’t know what he’d do if his blind ignorance, and his stupid behavior earlier, fucked up their friendship.

  “Boudya, uh…” Stacy said hesitantly through the engineering intercom.

  She’d been tits deep, hanging upside down over the Dimensional Shift Drive, replacing and retuning one of the nominally functional parts. The replacement had just come out of the ship’s minifac and she wanted to get it installed before the commander ordered the transition to hyperspace. Stacy’s interruption caught her off guard and caused her to drop the quantum seal analyzer she’d been using just out of reach.

  “Daughter of a…” She swore, she knew she didn’t have enough line on her harness to get down far enough to retrieve the analyzer, and it would take another twenty minutes to rig a longer line. “Damn it, Stacy, what is it?”

  “I wanted to inform you that there was a slight incident with Thomas in the shuttle bay.” Stacy replied hesitantly, a tone to her artificial voice Boudya hadn’t heard before, one that immediately made her concerned. “We might need your help finding him, and calming him down.”

  Going dead still in the middle of an attempt to elongate her spine just a tiny bit more in order to retrieve the analyzer, she blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s, uh, a bit of a situation.” Stacy said, then filled her in about what happened when Thomas had regained consciousness the day before, the subsequent meeting with the commander, and then the incident in the shuttle bay. “I’m so sorry, Boudya! I should have predicted what would happen, I should have told him about the uniform! But I didn’t think, and now my Tommy-baby is freaking out!”

  “I can’t believe this. I thought I explained to the both of you about his mental state! I let you convince me that we should let them figure it out on their own, but I figured you’d at least give him hints. But here you saw he was floundering about something sensitive, and then…”

  “I know! We fucked up!” Boudya would swear she was hearing something akin to tears in Stacy’s voice, “And I don’t know how to fix it. And…and… Boudya, he’s blocked me out! When I try to reach out to him through the implant, all I get is static. I can’t even pinpoint his location with it, and that shouldn’t be possible!”

  “Veski’ite!” Boudya spat angrily, “I ought to hunt down that station that is your physical body and start ripping circuits out! He better not be injured, or I swear…”

  “Tratsa is still getting medical telemetry from the implant.” Stacy informed her, “and she’s extremely concerned about what she’s seeing, but he’s alive. We just aren’t sure where he’s gotten too. I’ve checked all the deck sensor feeds…”

  “Have you had people go look in the main sections physically?” She’d stretched out again, and through the expediency of loosening her harness just a half centimeter, she was able to get her hands on the analyzer.

  “Yes, the twins helped. No sign of him.”

  “Sundered Void, He must be in the tubes. It’s always where he went to get away from people.” She started the scan of the seals she’d been testing earlier. She wanted to haul herself out and go looking for Thomas immediately, but knew she had to finish this or the Elegance might be in danger if the commander sent them into hyperspace. “I’ll start searching as soon as I confirm this seal is solid. Though it’d go faster if we could get someone smaller in there, like one of our giobhioni friends. They’d move a lot faster.”

  “Tratsa had to go back to Med-Bay to check on Miles.”

  Right, they’d moved the boy’s Q-pod to med-bay after the ship was damaged. The pod, and Miles, hadn’t been damaged themselves, but with all the repairs that needed to be done to the shuttle bay, he’d needed to be moved.

  “So, either Toftri or the Commander.” Boudya stated flatly, “You feel like explaining yourself to the Commander? Or is she being a big ball of stubborn self-pity thinking Thomas rejected her?”

  “She’s…upset, but I’ll tell her. This is my fault, I should have done more to… It’s my fault, I’ll get through to the commander.”

  “Good.” She snapped, she was going to need her life-mate’s help with this, and while Tindron and Thomas had been getting along well, she wasn’t sure if their relationship was ready for this kind of emotional intimacy. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then, not quite as tersely, said, “and Stacy, do not make matters worse! Get her help, but do it kindly!”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  It never rains but it pours. She thought, and got back to work on the seal so she could go help her anchak pull himself together.

  The Salvager’s Plague

  Ko-Fi

  Or now on Buy Me A Coffee