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Not a soul aboard the Octothorpe would admit to witnessing First Mate Lahiri’s departure. This was somewhat suspect, given that the ship could best be described as a dented sardine can that had somehow achieved escape velocity.
Technically, the Octothorpe was still registered as a mid-class private transport, but it had been gutted, stripped down, bulked up and rebuilt a dozen times over with storage and savings in mind. Life support was only switched on permanently in a quarter of the ship, where the atmosphere, temperature and lights were all set to one unhappy medium designed to keep the various life forms on board just alive enough to complain. Quarters were cramped. Sound carried. Yet everyone in earshot of the captain’s cabin conveniently heard nothing at all for the full duration of the shouting match going on inside.
“—since the goddamn Edgeport job! What, did I just imagine that? We got brain worms going around the ship again?”
The crew’s shared auditory blip lasted through the captain’s roared response, the sound of a door being triggered with more force than was strictly necessary, and the distinct clank of the first mate’s steel-toed boot kicking a wall. Plausible deniability extended to temporary blindness as Fred Lahiri came stomping down the corridor past the rec hall and the galley. By some unlikely confluence of circumstance, no one on the mechanics team was in the hangar when Lahiri’s flyer fired up, and everyone standing watch just happened to be blinking at the precise instant when the radar registered a launch.
Despite the fact that no one had heard or seen a thing, word spread through the Octothorpe with all the stealthy speed of Xylian clap. Knowing and worried glances were exchanged among the veteran crewmembers. A book was made and a few discreet, early bets were placed. Anyone who didn’t have somewhere else to be decided it might be best to lie low in their bunks for a while.
The unlucky six on watch in ops were braced and ready to duck when the captain turned up twenty minutes later. Nothing of note was on the sensors, but each of the watch was studying a monitor, instrument or interesting stain on the floor with devoted intensity when the door slid open. Their focus did not stop them from being very aware of the captain’s fathomless gaze fixing itself to the empty chair where the first mate ought to be sitting.
“Where is Lahiri?” The question was posed in a voice that triggered primal fear in every species whose ancestors had ever dwelled near deep, dark water.
No one answered. Since everyone had technically been addressed, everyone excused themselves from being the one responsible for replying.
“That was not,” the captain rumbled dangerously, “a rhetorical question.”
The scrap and salvage game was littered with the broken fortunes and frozen remains of the greedy, the stupid, and the lot who could only be described as ‘those poor bastards.’ For every rumor picked up in a station bar or set of coordinates mined from an old corrupted compfile that led to a motherlode of unclaimed platinum and palladium, there were ninety-nine that would turn out to be a hoax, a trap, or a complete waste of time.
But those weren’t the odds on the Octothorpe, not under their captain.
Common belief among the crew held that the galaxy itself did not dare waste the captain’s time. He wasn’t merely Nsziltha, but the traditional kind of Nsziltha from the archipelago on the dark side of Thani who still carried an enormous bone knife on his back and didn’t believe in telling anyone his name. He wasn’t greedy, he wasn’t stupid, and no one could look at that terrifying face and call him a poor anything. He didn’t operate a business so much as he led a hunt, stalking the abandoned edges of civilized space with the singular focus, eerie patience and calculated violence of an apex predator.
His was a crew who knew how to keep their mouths shut about the ship’s trade secrets and how to keep their frivolous questions to themselves. They had all made good money putting up with their captain’s particular ways, and none of them were spoiling for a trip out the airlock by admitting they had just heard—
“Haven’t seen Lahiri all day, sir,” Gilt blurted out, taking one for the team and lying through her beak. “I thought he was out scouting.”
Everyone else in ops latched onto the story and nodded as one. Hadn’t seen Lahiri all day. Must be out scouting. Certainly hadn’t heard him call the captain a fucking selfish, limp-tentacled asshole on his way to the hangar. No recollection of anything about him quitting.
The only problem with this story was that no one went out scouting in the flyers without the captain’s say-so. Their reprieve lasted only as long as it took for the captain to flick an irritated tentillum at the console.
Lahiri’s personal comm line auto-pinged back, blocked.
So did the comm in his flyer.
“Lahiri.” This grave pronouncement went out on the ship-wide alert channel through every panel and comm line on the network. “You are absent from your post. This is a disciplinary offense. You have twelve seconds to report in and explain yourself.”
Those twelve seconds would later pass into ship lore. It was said that for the first time in its twenty-solar voyage, the whole of the Octothorpe fell utterly silent. Every speech organ stilled and every respiratory system paused. Some even claimed the engines cut out, the very ship holding its breath in fearful anticipation. This last claim was spurious, but certainly it was suddenly so quiet in ops that everyone immediately heard the only thing that could possibly make this situation worse.
Gilt’s panicked gaze met Eb Stom’s over the console at the faint whirring sound of something obsolete and untimely approaching on wheels.
Not a soul aboard the Octothorpe would have dared be the one to tell the captain that Lahiri had deserted. However, contrary to the baseless optimism that had compelled Lahiri himself to insist they keep an obviously defective roboid salvaged from an abandoned mining operation on LXJS-14, “Buddy” neither possessed nor constituted a soul.
Helpful, Buddy’s display screen flashed proudly as it rolled into ops. This visual cue was a recent upgrade, implemented at Lahiri’s encouragement and intended to augment its toneless audio function. Out of the crewmembers present, only Eb Stom and Nivlin appreciated the irony.
“First Mate Lahiri has left the ship,” Buddy announced through its tinny speakers. “First Mate Lahiri has decamped/departed/flown the coop/split.”
The captain looked down slowly at the roboid, his dark eyes narrowing. The patterned blue rings on his beard of pallials flushed darker, and the ops watch all edged back as the venom sacs under his jaw swelled minutely.
Sympathetic flashed on the display screen as Buddy’s sensor swept over the captain’s face.
“The captain is angry. The captain is furious/irate/outraged because First Mate Lahiri has left hi—”
“No unauthorized personnel in ops!” Gilt bleated, diving from her station and grabbing the roboid by its neck as Nivlin hit the release for the door.
Not entirely unused to this kind of response, the roboid had already deployed its buffers when it was flung into the corridor. It bounced harmlessly off the far wall and then dropped back onto its wheels with a pneumatic hiss. The phrase Processing Input scrolled repeatedly across its screen.
All six members of the ops watch read this message character by character as though it held the secrets of the universe, unwilling to risk looking up and seeing the expression on their captain’s face as he realized he had just been dumped.
“Terrans,” Nivlin grumbled, retrieving a hand-rolled mossie from the box under hir bunk.
Despite all the elbowing and dirty looks exchanged amongst themselves, no one on the crew had worked up the nerve to ask the captain exactly where they were going and if their promised R&R was still on the calendar. He had taken over Lahiri’s seat for his watch in ops and had stayed there for six watches straight, maintaining sole control over comms and navigation. Innocent star maps and anyone who breathed too loudly received the coldest of death stares while an increasing and worrying distance opened up between the ship and any place with decent nightlife.
“This is why you’re never supposed to have just one of them,” Gilt said, settling on the opposite bunk with Eb Stom. “I watched a thing about it. Terrans are eusocial, completely off the charts. If you keep them isolated from other members of their species, they’ll imprint on anything. Other sapient species. Non-sapient species. Roboids. It’s like trying to slot a J3 cable into a P6 power source. You can kind of make it fit, but eventually something’s going to blow up.”
Nivlin lit the mossie and took a hit before passing it around. They smoked in thoughtful silence for several moments.
“I mean...the captain’s going to murder him, right?” Eb Stom didn’t like being the one to say it out loud, but he felt that someone had to.
“Who says we’re even going after him?” Gilt asked, although her pulmonary structure wasn’t really in it.
“We’re going after him,” Nivlin said. “Why else would we be doubling back across the black?”
“The captain lost face,” Eb Stom said. “It’s a matter of honor. You know how it is with the Nsziltha.”
“That’s a stereotype,” Gilt protested.
“It’s not a stereotype if it’s true! I’m not judging here, I’m being culturally aware. Haven’t you ever read their epics? It’s all blood feuds and dueling to the death.”
“I refuse to believe you’ve ever read a Nsziltha epic,” Gilt said. “I’ve heard you complain that the Flipper and Gorgax comics are getting too long.”
“All right, so I watched the vid version. But I’m just putting out there what the cowards who pretend they can’t see species don’t want to admit. We’re missing our R&R because we have to go kill our old boss.”
“The captain will want to do the actual killing,” Nivlin said.
“Nivlin!”
“Fair point, Nivlin,” Eb Stom said. “And come on, Gilt, what else could we be doing here? Catching up to Lahiri so the captain can say he’s sorry and offer him his job back?”
All three took a moment to consider this, and the absurdity was almost enough to give them a much-needed laugh.
Gilt eventually breathed out a puff of smoke on a sigh. “Maybe Lahiri will come back on his own.”
Eb Stom looked at Nivlin, who had served on the Octothorpe the longest. “Has he ever taken off before?"
Nivlin shook hir head. “He and the captain have been shacking up for what, five solars now? I’ve seen them fight often enough. Seen Lahiri sleep in his flyer. Seen Lahiri make the captain sleep in his flyer. But he’s never left before."
"If he doesn't come back," Gilt said, "there's going to be a vacancy."
This prompted another thoughtful silence.
On the surface, the position of first mate was an enviable one. The cut was better, and the first mate got at least something of a vote when it came to the big contracts, insofar as the captain regularly made it clear that the Octothorpe was not a democracy. The first mate also had a private bunk with a porthole view and a 3D monitor—a bunk which its current owner hardly even made use of due to the fact that he slept in the captain’s cabin. This waste of prime real estate was a source of resentment among the most junior members of the crew, who were stuck doubling up. And of course, if something were ever to happen to the captain, the first mate would have a leg up on inheriting the Octothorpe’s maps and salvage agreements.
All that said, no one in their right mind would want the job.
The problem was, the first mate had two main responsibilities: 1) take care of the most boring business on the ship, and 2) keep the captain happy.
This first came perilously close to a desk job for a group of beings who had chosen a freewheeling life at the edges of occupied space. Lahiri was the one who had to organize the stowing, upkeep and off-loading of every piece of scrap the Octothorpe took on. He stood two watches a day. He managed the work crews and was responsible for general ship morale, which largely involved breaking up fights, arbitrating disputes that were about to turn into fights, and yelling Terran nonsense like “We live in a society, goddammit!” The man made spreadsheets.
The second responsibility was enough to give even the most ambitious crewmember pause. In any other line of work, having sex with the boss might have been derided, but on the Octothorpe, this warranted a certain admiration for Lahiri’s bravery. It was dawning on the crew that up until now, the captain might have actually been in a good mood.
"If Lahiri isn’t fixing to make his own way back," Nivlin said, "then he'd better be running hard."
They quickly passed the mossie around again and sent up that sentiment on smoke and a prayer.
The roboid dubbed “Buddy” by First Mate Lahiri was a ZipCorp Class 2 Maintenance Roboid, Version 6. It had been designed and manufactured to carry out a routine set of errands in a highly regimented ore extraction environment and had already been two versions outdated by the time it was abandoned along with the rest of the mining operation. Due to these limitations, it took three full days working at ultimate capacity to completely process what had happened.
Identified issues that had passed the threshold for statistical significance included the following:
1. The Octothorpe had been traveling at maximum speed since First Mate Lahiri's departure. As a result, the engine room was presently 4.6 degrees IHU above recommended operating parameters.
2. The Octothorpe had changed course 7.536 times more frequently since First Mate Lahiri's departure than the previous solar's median rate. This would reduce the navigation system's projected lifespan by 2.1 solars if it continued for another week, and by 6.12 solars if it continued indefinitely.
3. As of the last watch, 28 individual Priority 2 and 3 maintenance tasks had not been completed. When queried, the crewmembers’ mode response was that they would require an amount of payment not forthcoming to leave their bunks any longer than required by the watch schedule.
4. Furthermore, a survey scan of the crew revealed 36 facial expressions mapping to attitudes that fell within the taxonomical category of dissatisfaction. This had briefly triggered a Mutiny Alert in Buddy’s programming, but since Buddy was no longer connected to its manufacturer’s network, it was able to terminate this protocol in favor of a more pressing concern.
5. Namely, that since First Mate Lahiri’s departure, no one was providing Buddy with new media. Lacking biometric identification, Buddy was unable to sign up for any streaming service. It had become accustomed to regular uploads from First Mate Lahiri, who had informed it that processing the great works of Terran art would foster self-awareness “but not, like, the ‘kill all humans’ kind, okay, buddy?”
Primary conclusion: First Mate Lahiri’s presence was correlated to acceptable function of the Octothorpe.
Secondary conclusion: First Mate Lahiri’s absence meant that Buddy could not watch any new televids.
Inasmuch as Buddy was capable of experiencing desire, it wished to correct this situation. To do so, it proceeded down a series of corridors that had been a median 76% to 89% more populated on comparable samples prior to First Mate Lahiri’s departure and located the captain where he stood alone on the viewing deck.
Priority Inquiry, Buddy displayed. “First Mate Lahiri has initiated divorce protocols?”
The captain looked down readily and issued a sound of respiratory distress that barely avoided triggering Buddy’s First Aid protocol.
“Mr. Lahiri has deserted.”
Buddy processed this information and mapped it to data points from the 237 Terran serials and 1022 vids it had watched to date. Seeking Clarification. “First Mate Lahiri has initiated a trial separation?”
“Breach of contract,” the captain said after a 4.5-second pause that indicated uncertainty. “Absence without leave. Treason. He will not be missed.”
This last utterance could not be filed correctly in light of previous established conclusions. Buddy dismissed it as an error.
Helpful. “First Mate Lahiri has gone to stay with his mother/procreator/parent or guardian of origin. This is customary in Terran disputes.”
The captain did not immediately respond. Buddy’s sensors identified his facial expression, within an acceptable 5% margin of error, as curious.
Explanatory. “Citation: Octothorpe\PubNet\Users\FLahiri\Personal\TV.”
“Ridiculous.”
This utterance likewise seemed at odds with the captain’s actions, which were to open the navigation system on the monitor in front of him, retrieve the ship’s present course, and draw an interpolatory line to the most proximate G-type main-sequence star.
Helpful. “It is customary to bring Schedule 1 stimulants and the reproductive structure of Angiospermae.”
The ZipCorp Class 2 Maintenance Roboids had been optimized for survival on worksites prone to cave-ins and unscheduled explosions. As such, Buddy easily vacated the space it had been occupying 10 milliseconds before it was replaced by a 1.2-meter down-thrust osseous blade.
After five days, the captain's bed had finally stopped smelling like Fred.
This was fine. Good. Fine and good.
What did he want that thrice-blasted mammal scent hanging all over his cabin for anyhow? The distraction of it was almost certainly what had been keeping him from sleeping properly. No, not the distraction—the imposition. The trespass.
It was shameless, the way Terrans went around wafting their pheromones everywhere, secreting it indiscriminately all day through their pores, leaving it rubbed into your mattress along with their microscopic moultings. They camouflaged it with a senseless cycle of synthetic products that removed the oil from their temperamental primate skin and then put different oil back on it, but that deeper scent lingered, uninvited, unwanted, warm and salty and stimulating appetites unsolicited.
The fact that he could smell nothing but himself when he finally lay down after another overlong watch only meant that his nest had been restored to proper order and that he wouldn’t have to throw the bedding into the incinerator as he had with everything else Fred had left in his cabin. This had not added up to much, but he had still taken a great deal of satisfaction in flash-burning several packets of sweets, a tooth-brush, and a stray sock.
He was currently attempting to recapture the feeling by scrolling through Fred's partition on the ship's network. The public folders had already been purged, and he was now working his way through the private one, mercilessly tossing out whole galleries full of images of juvenile animals and every episode of that terrible Cirellian series Fred had not wished to risk being spoiled for. He could have wiped the files all at once, but it seemed a charm for sleep to delete them one by one, watching the list slowly dwindle down to nothing.
Or almost nothing. At the bottom of the directory were a half-dozen vids whose names he recognized, having uploaded them himself.
His tentilla hovered over the screen, ready to flick the first one off into oblivion. He hesitated before tapping the file, bringing the vid up to fill the display in front of him.
There was the traitor himself, naked to the waist and propped up on one elbow. Fred was smirking up at the camera, the ridiculous patch of keratin strands atop his head standing up in dark and glossy disarray.
"You recording this?"
His own voice answered. "I am. So I would suggest you make it good."
Fred snorted and laid a few sloppy kisses along the seam of his pouch. "Don't I always?"
Laughter. His. "Standards have been slipping."
“Asshole.” Laughter. Fred’s.
He watched impassively. On the display, Fred’s tongue dragged slowly over his primary, gaze locked with the vidmaker.
There was a sudden pang in his crop, attributable to annoyance. He flicked over to the next vid.
Fred was panting, braced on his hands and driving forward with the expression of idiotic bliss he wore when he was enfolded.
He skipped to the next vid.
The display darkened. Now all he could see was the back of Fred’s head. The picture blurred further, rocking slowly back and forth. Fred was moaning quietly, his voice hardly breaking through the rustling whispers of foolish talk.
It was a terrible recording. You could hardly see anything, and what you could was barely stimulating. He didn't know why they had kept it.
"Oh, yeah," Fred said, gasping. "That’s it, big guy..."
He was going to find him. He was going to find him, and then he was going to—
There was a soft, wet sound on the audio. Even through the haze of his exhaustion, he vividly remembered wrapping his pallials around Fred’s neck and tasting his perspiration, feeling the pulse of his circulatories.
He was going to find him. It was a matter of principle. He had to make an example of him. The crew needed to see that you couldn't simply abandon the ship mid-watch without the captain’s leave. You couldn't just pack up your things and go home.
Fred did not have a mother, but he was running back to the place he had been spawned all the same. He had refueled at Corsico and had pinged the radar at Targus Station. The roboid had been right about that, at least. Sometimes it nearly earned its keep, if only when he needed one inhuman mind to understand another.
He snorted at the absurdity of the rest of it. Flowers? Sweets? What did the roboid think this was, some kind of pair-bonding?
This was a professional dispute. He was going to make that very clear when he tracked that shirker down.
He lay back and watched the vid through to the end. Then he watched it a second time, and then a third. Finally, he tapped on the last minute marker, just after the point where they had spent, and set that to play on a loop. Fred was breathing heavily in his ear, satisfied and close to snoring.
Sporesucker, he thought sourly as he closed his eyes, and in time the familiar sound finally lulled him to sleep.
By day ten, fear-based inflation had hit the Octothorpe and large amounts of credit were flying from account to account, supplemented by the bartering of alcohol, sweets, and spare flyer parts. The majority of transactions were based on bribery. Those who could afford to pay someone else to take their turn on ops duty were doing so, and there was currently a posting on the crew's message channel offering five thousand notes and a case of rakeberry gin to anyone willing to inform the captain that the tertiary engine had burned out.
The remainder of the commerce flowed to the betting pool.
"What did you put your money on?" Eb Stom asked, passing around his third-to-last smoke.
"'Bone knife,'" Gilt sighed. "I need a sure thing right now. My account’s almost wiped."
"'Shot with his own blaster,'" Nivlin said. "You?"
Eb Stom froze, his head cocked to one side. All three shut their mouths and held still as heavy footsteps passed by the supply room they were hiding in. They gave it a full minute, just to be safe, before continuing their conversation.
"I managed to get in on 'Beaten to hell, surviving at least one hour,'" Eb Stom finally said.
Nivlin scoffed. "Optimist."
Outside the mess hall, Rusty found her path blocked by the roboid.
Request. "I wish to place a wager."
Rusty bent down and smiled indulgently. "Well now, little fella. Minimum buy-in's a hundred notes, and I know you’re not on the payroll—"
Transaction. "I have one hundred notes.”
Her comm pinged, and her eyeridges subsequently rose in surprise as she took in the link-up data. "Where did you get a hundred notes?"
Explanation. "I earned many notes. I have run errands/performed small tasks at the request of sixteen crewmembers who do not wish to see the captain because they are anxious/frightened/terror-stricken."
"Huh. Well, that scans.” As the ship's principal bookmaker, Rusty approved of entrepreneurial spirit and was not inclined to get hung up on the legalities of carrying out commerce with a roboid. She pinged over the betting list and let Buddy process the choices, which ran the gamut from mere bodily harm to the prediction that Lahiri’s corpse was going to be stuffed, mounted, and put on permanent display in the mess hall
Uncertainty. “Match not found. Seeking entry for ‘First Mate Lahiri forgives the captain and returns.’"
She laughed. “Oh, sweet thing, no. There's no entry for that. The game is to pick something that's likely to happen, but not the same something that everyone else bet on. What you probably want is Lahiri getting shot in the—"
Certainty. "I wish to propose this entry.”
Rusty fixed the little roboid with an exasperated look and was met, of course, with metal patience. A relatively moral being by Octothorpe standards, she didn’t relish the thought of taking a hundred notes away from a roboid that was incapable of understanding basic life interactions. However, since the roboid was also incapable of understanding the value of a hundred notes, she supposed it all came out square.
"Fine," she said, dutifully recording it with such other one-offs as 'Lahiri skinned and made into seat cover,' ‘Lahiri’s still-beating heart eaten by the captain,’ and 'Lahiri saved by divine intervention (personal appearance by a deity with at least 500 followers).’
As it happened, the crewmember with the biggest stake in the pot also happened to be the one to answer the hail that came in from Mars half an hour later. Baro had a sinking feeling as soon as xe saw the point of origin, but xe answered it from the comm-point anyhow.
“Hey there, Baro. Looking good. Is your boss around?”
“Off the clock,” Baro lied. “What do you want?”
"It's not about what I want," Mama Minna said. "Someone whispered in my ear that you're missing one of your pretty little flyers and the pilot to go with it. Told me your captain was offering a reward for promising leads."
Baro snorted. "And you're about to tell me you've seen them both."
"The flyer’s parked in one of my lots, and I have it on good authority that the pilot is staying at a place called Shiv's in the capital." She winked. "You just say the word and I can have him dead in twenty minutes. Fifteen if you smile."
Of all the luck, Baro thought. Xe had 'Damn fool gets himself killed before the captain even finds him' in the betting pool. All it would take was one little nod to end all this fuss right here and turn a profit besides. Hir eyes barely flickered as they accounted for the witnesses: one who would surely keep her mouth shut, three who could probably be bought off, and two who might be trouble. Then there was Mama Minna herself, who Baro trusted to keep a secret about as well as xe trusted a tick not to suck blood.
Baro shook hir head with a sigh. Lahiri deserved a fighting chance, the poor bastard.
"Keep him alive," xe said curtly. "We're about a day away."
With that, xe cut the link out on her and grudgingly slunk off to ops for the unenviable task of informing the captain that they had found his man.
Fred Lahiri was on his third drink of the morning when, unbeknownst to him, the Octothorpe made orbit around Mars.
The drink was decent, stout enough to double as breakfast. Given that dinner had started life pre-distillation as some kind of root vegetable, he felt he was doing pretty well on the self-care front. It was a decent bar, too. The roboid tending it was slow but functional. Three out of the four whizz-bang machines were still working. There was even a shooter table with a full set of cues. Someone had gotten themselves killed at it last night, but it was a nice enough place that the body had already been carted out.
He had grown up here. Well, not here-here, not on a barstool. His upbringing might have been a little wild, but it hadn’t been completely feral. He was from the residential sector down in the crater, and he’d been almost five before the colony’s parent company had officially discontinued support for the project. Those who could afford to leave had left, and everyone else had shrugged, learned how to download bootleg life support systems, and carried on.
It felt right, being back somewhere that was limping along out of spite: somewhere that payment was always demanded upfront and people started bar fights because they were sad.
Fred hadn’t even bothered looking up for the one that was about to start. It was background noise, part and parcel of the rising buzz of the mid-morning crowd and the throbbing at his temples. A stale draft of poorly recycled air had snuck in when someone halted in the doorway. Bodies had shifted under protest as someone moved insistently through the press huddled around the shooter table. Someone else had taken outsized offense to the interruption.
“Watch it, freak—"
It was the split-second of absolute silence that made Fred put his drink down and reach for his blaster. His heart was suddenly beating fast. There was no real reason to believe he would know whoever had just walked in, but something about that flicker of unnerved quiet made an image flash in his mind.
Two meters and change, and built like the wrath of some angry sea god. Eyes you could drown in and arms that could finish the job. A way of holding very still until he moved, and a way of looking at you that made you back down fast unless you’d ever seen him laugh.
It couldn’t be, he thought, trying blearily to make out the bloodline markings in the shoddy reflection of the blacked-out screen above the bar. A Nsziltha, maybe, but not his Nsziltha. This misery bender had pickled his brain. He was seeing things.
His hallucination swaggered through the gap in the crowd that had miraculously opened for him, closing in on Fred and his drink and his week-long headache.
Fred didn’t turn around, but neither did he look away from the screen. His chest suddenly hurt just as bad as his head. He couldn’t say whether it was good to see him, but it was good to look at him. He hadn’t thought he ever would again.
That was the thing about space. Planets were small, and there were only so many directions on them. You could run as far as you wanted on whatever world you were born on and sooner or later trouble would catch up with you. Once you broke free, though, you were gone. There were too many places to go and too much emptiness in between them, and even if you wanted to come back to somewhere, you probably never would.
The captain walked up to the bar, halting an arm’s length away and waiting politely for the bartender’s offer of service. Fred’s hand stayed on the grip of his blaster as the captain ordered himself a pint of malt. Breathing seemed harder than it had a minute ago.
He heard the ping of payment followed by the thunk of the pint on the bar top. Then the lights dimmed as the captain turned toward him and took a step forward.
"Is this seat taken?"
I’m so drunk right now, he wanted to say. And hungover. I’m drunk and hungover at the same time, and it wouldn’t be any fair to challenge me to a duel, so just...just sit down and let me put your stupid ice-block hand on my forehead for a minute and I’ll be good to go.
Or, Fuck, I missed you. I didn’t want to, but I did. You look really good, and I regret, like, 96% of my life decisions from the past week.
Or, Big guy. Just that. Because he thought he’d never say it again, and if he didn’t, no one would. The next sap dim enough to fall for the captain would probably get appropriately weak in the knees over hearing he’d eaten half his siblings in the pouch and would call him Born-Fifth-and-Fat-on-the-Flesh-of-the-Weaker with a straight face and all the stupid heart-type feelings that Fred had spent five years cramming into two little words like ‘big guy.’
But what he said was: “Yep.”
Because no matter what people said about the Nsziltha being proud, they had nothing on Terrans.
The captain sat down anyway, the prick. “And you?”
Fred blinked. “Huh?”
“Are you taken?”
His jaw tightened, or at least he made it tighten because he was still pissed off. He still wanted to be pissed off. He wasn't going to go crawling back on his belly. "Nope."
The captain took a drink of his malt. "A fine-looking mammal like you? Now why don't I believe that?"
Fred frowned to keep the corner of his mouth from doing anything downright idiotic and shrugged. "I was keeping company with this guy for a few years. But he turned out to be kind of an asshole."
"I believe I know the type."
He eased up on his blaster. Just a little.
“Myself,” the captain said, then cleared his throat, “I have...someone at home. Ridiculous man. High-maintenance.”
Fred upped the frown to a scowl and bit back a reflexive ‘fuck you.’ He took a drink instead. "I bet if you think about it, really hard, he doesn't actually ask you for all that much."
No reply came for several seconds, and then the captain grudgingly admitted: "No, he doesn't. But I believe I give him a great deal."
The thing was, Fred couldn't argue with that. It took being down at rock bottom to realize how far he’d fallen. He had been happy. He had been flying.
"He’s...very intelligent,” the captain continued. “An asset. However, he gets some very foolish ideas in his head sometimes."
"What?" Fred said, putting his cup down hard enough that the ale sloshed over the side and onto his hand. "Like thinking that sleeping in the same bed for five years might mean you're living together? Like thinking that pointing it out wasn’t going to make the other guy in that bed freak out?”
There went those venom sacs, swelling up in the way that always made Fred perversely tempted to poke them.
"Like not giving a man time to digest an idea before throwing things and running off."
“We were short on bunks! All I said was that we could let someone else take mine, given that I never fucking use it!”
"It was not...an entirely baseless idea. Necessarily."
Exhaustion never showed on the captain’s face, not like his own, which currently felt like bruised fruit. He could hear the pebbly sound of it in the captain’s voice, though. He rubbed his eyes and felt his shoulders slump.
“Maybe we should have talked about this stuff. Before we...I don’t know. Maybe we should have figured this out. So no one went and got...worked up.”
The captain made a rattling sound in his crop. “On my world, half of successful matings end in cannibalism.”
Fred sighed. “Yeah. We’ve got some weird baggage about making things official around here too. So, uh, maybe you and me can do this the easy way.”
“The easy way?”
“Yeah. Did you give away my job yet?”
“No.”
“Do you maybe want me to come back?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to keep living together?”
“Yes.”
There was an unexpected crinkling, and Fred watched in bafflement as the captain took a handful of chocolate bars out of his coat pocket and set them on the bar top. They looked like they had come out of the vending machine outside. Fred picked one up and examined it more closely. It was two years past its expiration date, which supported his hypothesis.
"If you ever do this again,” the captain said, “if you leave shouting and...not giving a man a chance to voice his thoughts fully, then I will come after you. I will hunt you down and make you answer for your treachery.” He paused. “At the very least, you will be billed for lost profits."
Fred swallowed hard, his fingers compulsively smoothing down the tearaway seam on a chocolate bar wrapper. He then leaned over, precariously given his state, and softly bumped his shoulder against the captain’s. "Don't go getting sentimental on me."
"Never." There was a moment’s silence. "Am I going to have to beg?”
He knocked back the rest of his drink and got wobblily to his feet. “Never. Come on, big guy. Let’s go home.”
If consulted, not a soul aboard the Octothorpe would have named Mars as their first choice of recreational destination. However, with three days’ leave on offer after their recent ordeal, they all found themselves delighted to pump some much-needed funds into the struggling economy of a plucky abandonware colony that at least had a few bars and hotels to receive them. Besides, they had not in fact been consulted.
“Are you sure the captain’s off-planet?” Gilt asked, glancing worriedly around the bar.
Eb Stom double-checked the link and flashed his comm as proof. “Captain and Lahiri are both on the ship. I for one intend to drink until I’m incapable of thinking about what they’re doing up there.”
“Let me get the first round,” Rusty said with the largesse of the bookmaker, who never loses no matter the outcome.
A cheer went up, and only Baro carried on griping. “—how the spit did the roboid get Lahiri’s bunk? It’s a roboid. It doesn’t need a bunk, it needs a charging station!”
Nivlin shrugged, signaling hir order. “Well, it’s got a bunk now. Everyone in line for Lahiri’s berth either owed it money or wanted the money they’d paid it back for their R&R.”
“Gives me the shudders, a roboid scheming like that. This is how it all starts, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” Nivlin said. “Next thing you know, we’re going to have to put it on the payroll.”
A hundred clicks skywards in geosynchronous orbit, Fred Lahiri was sitting up in a bed that could by consensus be described as his. He was naked and significantly more sober than he had been the day before, and even what he was seeing on the bedside monitor could not entirely remove the smile on his face.
“Seriously? You deleted all my files?”
“You had quit,” the captain said from a prone and likewise naked repose beside him. “Network space is for active crewmembers.”
“You wiped my work stuff but kept our sex tapes. Yeah, real professional priorities there, big guy. Did you delete them, or did you delete-delete them?”
“I am not familiar with the distinction.”
Fred’s fingers flew over the input, and he sighed in relief. “Good. You just put them in the stash. Boom. Restored. And jeeze, has no one updated the maintenance logs since the twelfth? What the hell were you guys doing all week?”
The captain reached over and turned off the monitor. He slid an arm around Fred’s waist and then a tentacle around his leg.
“Tomorrow,” he said, drawing Fred back down on the mattress.
In the adjacent cabin, Buddy linked its auditory input directly to its new 3D monitor and First Mate Lahiri’s restored television folder, and paid no attention to the loud and rhythmic sounds that began to issue through the wall.