The thing a lot of holovids don’t show you when it comes to the aftermath of a starship being damaged, is the sheer amount of mess that needs to be cleaned up afterwards. All they ever show is everyone scrambling to get systems functional again, especially if it’s in the midst of a battle. There’s sparks flying everywhere, small explosions, personnel being sent flying across the deck, maybe even blood, guts and toenails.

  But they rarely show the engineering staff, or more likely the enlisted grunts, inspecting every little nook and cranny of the ship with a bevy of instruments, cleaning up all the junk and clutter that got sent flying while the feces impacted the rotating oscillator (that’s “shit hit fan” for the non-technically oriented). All that junk could cause problems down the road if it wasn’t cleaned up. If the gravity plating went out, or you passed through some kind of anomaly, you could end up with some bit of scrap getting wedged somewhere critical at the wrong time and…

  Well, let's just say I’d worked on a few salvaging jobs that were caused by the ship’s crew being careful about cleaning up the junk.

  The reason I’m explaining this is because, while I was hiding in that access tube, freaking out about how I’d fucked up, and how I was gonna fix it, I started following some advice my father had given to me when I was a kid. “When you’re confronted by a problem you don’t know how to fix,” he’d said in that north eastern Canada franglish of his, “Get started on something you can fix. Sooner or later, the answer will come to ya!”

  So as I tried to stop freaking out, I started doing my damn job. I pulled on a pair of work gloves I always had tucked into the waistband of my trousers, and started collecting the refuse that was laying around in the tubes. I also made note of any of the areas that had any minor structural damage that hadn’t been identified in our previous damage report.

  If nothing else, I couldn’t be accused of slacking while having yet another panic attack.

  As happens when you clean up the junk, however, I was finding the odd bit of part that wasn’t completely totalled. Small things like bits of harmonizer coil, transducer crystals. They weren’t much, and most wouldn’t be able to function in their original capacity again; The harmonizer coil, for example, was crimped about a third of the way down its length. If I tried to use it as is, that crimp would cause its power rating to be much lower. It could fail at an inopportune time.

  But if trimmed at that crimp, it could be used for something else, and as I lay there staring at it, an idea came out of nowhere. I had most of the parts here to put together a…

  Ok, that’s odd, I thought to myself, I was about to ask what the hell a kaon lance was, but even though I’ve never heard of one before, I know what it is like I’ve built one before…

  Frowning deeply for a moment, I tried to pull the origin of that knowledge from my memory, but all that came to me was the word Riquotyr, and a faint image of being that resembled a leopard gecko if it had evolved to walk upright. With a shrug and a shake of my head, I banished the image, and belly crawled back the pile of crap I’d been piling up.

  Sure enough, all the parts I needed were there except three: a power cell, something the right size to house the entire thing, and a three eighths greebly. Hah! I kid. No comments from the peanut gallery Stacy.

  I paused for a moment when there was no wiseass remark from her. Stacy? What’s up?

  Again there was no answer. Had I somehow damaged the implant? That very idea was terrifying. I had no idea if a damaged cerebral implant could cause any damage. Could it be leaking something? Or sending random electrical signals into my nervous system? Is that what caused that random vision of the lizard person? I could feel my pulse start to quicken, and only then realized I had passed through my earlier panic attack and was about to experience another.

  Uh uh, I thought to myself, not doing that twice in one day. Get a grip Thomas!

  I could almost hear Stacy say “Ooo, I’d like to get a grip on something!” through his implant and snorted out a laugh. I knew it was just me anticipating her response, but the break in tension allowed me to get a few deep breaths in and calm myself down before my thoughts began spiraling.

  “Maybe she’s just trying to give me some space,” I said to myself, “while it’d be rare, it’s not the first time she’s done it. The last time was..”

  The last time was the night I broke down in my quarters and cried in Boudya’s lap. Huh, maybe she’s not as dense about that kinda thing as she seems.

  I paused again, just to see if she’d react to that thought, but there was nothing. She must really have decided to leave me to calm down on my own.

  “Well then Thomas,” I said to myself, “let’s see if we can find something to work for those last two parts and get this thing put together. Hopefully we can get it assembled before someone comes looking for us.”

  Yeah, I was talking to myself like I was a separate person. Don’t you know that talking to yourself is the only way to get intelligent answers?

  Ever find yourself working like an absolute madman for hours on a project? Something that you’d never even considered could be like unto the universe shatteringly important? Like you felt that if you didn’t get it done right then and there, the very fabric of existence would destabilize and you would just cease to be?

  That was how I was for the next four hours. I don’t remember most of what I did during that time except for the first hour spent belly crawling through every millimeter of tantaja tube in the whole Elegance of Light looking for those last two components. The irony of it all was that I finally located the perfect bit of tubing of the right material to house the entire contraption directly beneath Jophixa’s ready room.

  I’d managed to get the kaon lance assembled in just over three hours. Three absolutely frenetic, frantic, hours. I must have looked like some sort of mad scientist, cramped and contorted in that tantaja tube junction, pulling apart bits of scorched and half ruined junk, modifying it on the fly with the limited tools that I’d had in my tool harness. There was a lot of improvisation, like, I don’t think I jerry rigged anything that much in my entire career as a salvage engineer. I even had to carefully splice into a power conduit to get enough power to charge up the power cells in my tools when they died.

  Eventually, all that was left was to run it through some passive diagnostic cycles to make sure there was nothing disastrously fucked up. I mean, I obviously couldn’t test something that would emit a coherent beam of accelerated kaons with sufficient energy to theoretically burn through hull plating. Not there in a tantaja tube, the whole point of this was to fix things with Jo, not piss her because I melted a hole in the side of her ship.

  So while the little diagnostic unit from my tool harness ran its bivvy of tests, I finally let the frantic energy that had been driving me fade. I slumped down in the cramped space and let my eyes close, intending to only take a breather until the tests were finished.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Yeah. I crashed like a grompak freighter trying to make landfall in a hurricane.

  “You know, for a big ‘un, you’re a pain in the ass to find.”

  I woke with a start, which, considering I was contorted into a position that would likely surprise many yoga gurus, while huddled in the most inaccessible junction of tantaja tubes, resulted in me bashing several body parts off the walls; Including my head.

  As I held my head and hissed in pain, she said “oof, that looked painful.”

  Cracking one eye open, I found myself looking into Jophixa’s intense violet stare.

  She looked bedraggled and tired, much like I felt. Dirt and lubricant smeared on her face and uniform from crawling through the tubes, I don’t think I’d seen her looking so…unpresentable. Her face was pinched with exhaustion and worry, her brows pulled low so that a little crease was forming just above the bridge of her nose.

  “Uh, commander…I should apologize for…”

  Before I could finish, she had her hand clamped over my mouth and was scowling at me from mere centimeters away. “Stop.” her voice was not commanding, it was tired and soft, reminding me of some of our conversations back on the station before the rest of her people had been awakened. “Your benastians gave me an earful about a few things after… well, after. Lawkapt’s tits, your sister even got involved when she overheard the situation.”

  I tried to mumble an apology through her hand, for the three of them ganging up on her, but her hand just squeezed harder for a moment. “No.” she said firmly. “I don’t want to hear apologies. Cause if you apologize, I have to apologize, and damnit, then things will just get annoying. Let’s just consider it said, ok?”

  It took my brain a few moments to parse what she was saying, still caught staring into those violet eyes, but when I did, my eyebrows shot up in surprise. Was she really saying we were good, that nothing needed to be said between us? Thinking about it, a part of me sighed in relief, still worried about changing the nature of our friendship.

  But even with how clueless I can be regarding women, I knew that part of me was an absolute idiot. Things couldn’t just be the same, not after I’d just driven myself half mad putting together…

  I blinked suddenly, eyes still drowning in violet, and began to blindly grope around myself for what I’d been working on, hoping those initial tests had concluded. I would have preferred a chance to actually test the damn thing to make sure it worked, a functional weapon was a far more impressive gift, I thought. But I wouldn’t let this moment pass.

  Jo’s expression turned confused as my arms flailed around to either side, and released her hand from my mouth. She looked about ready to ask me what the hell I was doing when my left hand finally fell on the metal cylinder of the kaon lance. I brought it up between us to look at the test results, but I still couldn’t tear my eyes away from Jo’s. Luckily, she broke our eye contact first in order to look down at what I was holding. Once she had, I was able to glance down at the readout that showed all diagnostics came up green.

  A grin split my face as I disconnected the testing cables, then held the weapon out to Jo. “It’s called a kaon lance.” I explained. “I, uh, built it for you…”

  “A…kaon lance?” she asked, a confused look on her face.

  “It’s a weapon, theoretically?” I explained, “if it works like I think, it will generate a brief but coherent beam of charged subatomic particles. I think it should be able to get through even ktonshi armor…but it’s not tested yet. And well, I built it with scrap components from all the damage, so it might not even work…”

  “You built me a weapon,” she said, her voice slipping from confused to stunned, “that could possibly kill ktonshi…and you did it out of scrap?”

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but for several long moments couldn’t figure out what to say. I’d come this far, done all that work to get the thing put together, but never once thought about what I was going to do when it came to giving it to her. Finally I simply shrugged and started to babble, “Umm, it was the best I could do? Jo, you’re one of my best friends, and…I’m an idiot for not noticing what the uniform meant, and didn’t want to think about having feelings for you because I don’t want to lose our friendship. Jophixa, I’m really -”

  She cut me off again before I managed to get the apology out. Only this time, it wasn’t her hand she used to do so.

  Getting tackled by a one and a quarter meter tall woman, with muscles denser than your average human, and teeth that could be mistaken as having come from the mouth of a shark can be rather startling. Add to that being in the more-than-a-little cramped quarters of the tantaja tube, and the completely unexpected pressing of that mouth full of dangerous dentition against mine, and you could say I was knocked more than a little senseless.

  Whether it was more from the kiss, or from my head connecting with the bulkhead, your guess is as good as mine.

  My eyes refocused just as she was pulling away, her small hands slipping through my hair to delicately check the back of my head. “Please tell me I didn’t hurt you. It’s embarrassing enough for the commander of a ship to be chewed out by their junior engineer and their medical officer.”

  I couldn’t help it, and felt myself smiling at the thought. “I’m ok. I mean, I only hit my head. If a little bump like that was going to hurt me, I’d never have gotten off your space station.”

  “Oh, thank Giobha.” she sighed in relief, then looked at me with some hesitance. “Did I do that right, by the way? The…what is it your people call them…’chick flicks’ indicate it’s a standard act of showing…mmf!”

  I cut her off by grabbing her head much like she had mine - though I was careful about her ears! - and silenced her chatter by returning her kiss. I wasn’t pushing a deep kiss, as I knew from the first couple days with Tratsa that kissing was not part of giobhioni culture, but as I pressed my lips against Jo’s, I felt her mouth open with an odd kind of bold shyness.

  Have I mentioned before that giobhioni have startlingly long, agile tongues? Or at least, if Tratsa and Jo are an accurate sampling they do.

  Her tongue slipped past her sharp teeth and passed my far less intimidating ones, and before long, we were engaged in an oral wrestling match.

  As the kiss continued, escalating into a breathless, passionate fury that any memory of awkwardness over yesterday’s events fled from my thoughts, and my hands found themselves sliding up her muscular thighs in order to cup the fabulous globes of her ass. When I gave them a firm squeeze, she let out a surprised squeak around our kiss, but didn’t object.

  Instead, she ground her hips against me so hard I shifted against the metal grating of the tube’s flooring, my back sliding slightly farther up the bulkhead. I couldn’t help but smile at her reaction, and squeezed her ass a bit harder before sliding my hands up her sides towards…

  “Commander!” Stacy’s voice cut in over the comm unit on Jo’s uniform, “Have you found Thomas yet? There’s a priority communication coming in from Admiral LeBeau. Her aid is being insistent that the admiral needs to speak with you urgently.”

  Jo let out a deep throated growl like a beast wanting to tear something’s head off and eat its eyes. She put her arms around my neck and continued to kiss me fiercely, tongue exploring every square millimeter of my mouth as she decided to stubbornly ignore Stacy’s interruption.

  Unfortunately, Stacy did not just go away. The comm unit made an urgent alert chime, before Stacy again put in, “Commander, I’m sorry, but this does seem to be urgent. The Admiral has provided data showing signs of an unknown fleet transiting through hyperspace towards the coordinates of the Journeyman. She fears it might be forces connected to Benson Fisch. We need to be on our way immediately in order to beat them there.”

  Another growl erupted from Jophixa’s throat, and she pulled herself away from my lips. “Stacy, let the admiral’s aide, I will be there shortly. In the meantime, have Toftri get us underway. Unless of course something else has gone wrong while I’ve been crawling around in the bowels of the ship.”

  “No Commander,” Stacy replied, her voice a bit startled at the hostility in the commander’s voice, “I will pass on your orders. Have you located Thomas - I mean, Mr Aacen?”

  The look that Jo leveled at me was full of heat when she replied. “You could say I pinned him down, yes. And Stacy?”

  “Yes Commander?”

  “Be thankful I’m too far away to rip out any of your processors right now.”

  There was a long pause, then a quiet, “Oh…apologies ma’am.”

  “Dismissed.” she growled, focused on me again and gave me one more heart stoppingly passionate, if short, kiss. “Alright you. We’ll resume this discussion at a later time.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I smiled as she slipped off of my lap and turned to crawl down the tantaja tube, presenting that gloriously sculpted buttocks of hers. I had to exert a fair amount of willpower to look away from it. Clearing my throat, I continued, “I’ll be right behind you, I just have to, uh, adjust some equipment before I do.”

  A surprised bark of laughter echoed through the tube back to me.

  The Salvager’s Plague

  Ko-Fi or on