[ 12 hours, 16 minutes, 39 seconds before impact]
...
Washroom duty was easily the worst job on the ship. Yet, unlike the competitor roles which fought for that title, washroom duty wasn't difficult or frustrating: it was simply humiliating. And nothing made Sonat more angry than humiliation.
The human was with her this shift, but the creature wasn't helping. It was acting out its role, as a casual observer, from its chosen resting spot, on one of the few benches Sonat had managed to scrub clean this rotation. As always, it wasn't speaking, and in typical fashion, the thing wasn't even paying attention to her as she struggled with the fiber brush along the slick floor.
Sonat wasn't certain if this made the whole situation worse, or if she was just so angry that she would find anyone at all to be irritating.
As the brush slipped out of her hands, causing her to fall forward on the partially scrubbed surface, she let out a note of rage. She had enough of this for one lifetime, and probably a little extra. The worst part was that Sonat knew for a fact Yitale had purchased two cleaner bots for this very purpose, but persistently stuck to the lie that they had gone missing.
That didn't even make logical sense- they were in the void, contained within a thick hull, and an environment shield: things don't generally up and leave to go somewhere else. So, here she was, a prodigal genius... scrubbing floors...
Oh, she was going to get back at Yitale for this somehow. Of that, Sonat was utterly certain. She was going to have her revenge.
Besides, it wasn't as though the red patches she and her brother had installed looked bad on the ship anyways, Sonat felt that they brought something of an artistic beauty to the ugly freighter. Void only knew the vessel needed it. The gigantic gray block they all called home wasn't exactly out to win any awards based on looks... though perhaps on carrying capacity. Sonat knew there was easily three times the space below deck when compared to the inhabited upper levels, which put it into the class of a “heavy” civilian vessel. There weren't very many of those still around.
Several crew members walked past the open doors of the washrooms, their murmurs reaching her ears in tiny clips of conversation. Though not enough to tell exactly what their conversations about, Sonat was fairly certain some of them were speaking about her.
Which was, again, humiliating.
Oh, Yitale was definitely going to pay for this.
As the rotation passed though, Sonat finally cleared the room, leaving it spotless. She might hate it, but she wasn't going to leave a job incomplete. That was something Syzah would do, and she liked to think she was of a higher quality than her sibling. At least in this regard.
Flicking her tail in signal at her inattentive guardian, Sonat left for halls.
The human got up to follow her, but stopped at a fork in the halls before wandering off in the opposing direction, towards the bridge.
She wasn't sure why.
Sonat was constantly trying to understand the human's motives, but never could make sense of the thing. It listened to Yitale, and obeyed her orders for the most part, but it didn't seem to prioritize them. It completely ignored the rest of the crew, for the exception of herself, Syzah, and... strangely enough, Di'her.
Apparently the medical officer had been the first of them to encounter the human when it broke free during the raid. Apprently, she had been with one of Yitale's Stewards, another Siren who, apparently, hadn't survived.
Di'her didn't talk much about that when Sonat had asked her.
From what the other surviving crew had said, the human had carried her on it's back the rest of the way, through the entire ship until it reached the bridge. Sonat was beginning to suspect that Di'her had unintentionally life-bonded the creature. Stranger things had certainly happened when one of their kind was close to death, though typically such actions were reserved for another of their own species.
As unlikely as it was, such a bond would explain a lot.
It wasn't as though such a thing was easy to do, in any case. Yitale had only partially done it- if at all, and she had been using a training collar as motivation. From Sonat's view, if there was any lasting mental link between the human and the shipmaster, it was still a small one. Of course Yitale and the human had certainly agreed to some contract, but neither were openly speaking about whatever they had discussed, so all that left Sonat was speculation.
Stolen novel; please report.
And it was driving her crazy.
There was too much of that going on. And a profound lacking of solid answers.
Problem solving was what she did, work out the known factors and variables, put them together, and get a meaningful result. She was smarter than half the crew Yitale had brought on put together- the problem was that she was constantly kept in the dark for anything useful! While she was stuck cleaning floors, Yitale and the bridge crew were probably still trying to figure out how their hull magically resealed itself. There was a problem that could take her mind of the human enigma they called a ship-guardian. There's something she could work on, and it would be far more interesting than cleaning, like a robot.
On the bright-side of things, Sonat was still a genius, and she had a reasonable hypothesis on the whole affair. Reasonable, as in she was already 99 percent certain of it, and now just had to figure out a way to prove it.
…
[ 1 Hour, 57 minutes, 19 seconds before impact]
...
Syzah wasn't thrilled with this.
On a scale of one to ten, ten being the least thrilled... well, he was a solid fourteen on the "thrilled scale" at this point.
Stalking through the ship's underbelly wasn't for the faint of heart on a good rotation. Yet, doing it when all the systems down here were set on standby, was much worse. Horribly creepy didn't even begin to describe: there was barely any light, every step he took seemed to echo off into the distance, and occasionally he would hear strange inexplicable noises.
Syzah cursed his luck, and his sister, equally. A bet was a bet though, and he'd given his word.
He knew Sonat had played him the moment he tried to call her bluff, and she suddenly pulled out a military combat shielding suit.
Next thing he knew, he was inside it.
To her credit, the suit was brand new. Fully loaded with the required tech, passive environment controls, and a two rotation life support system... Where Sonat had gotten it, he could only guess, but he was fairly certain he might now be wearing stolen military equipment. Probably the same equipment that they had been hired to transport. Though, he sincerely hoped he was wrong about that. Union federal crimes not considered, if Yitale caught them this time, cleaning the washrooms was the least of their worries.
Also to her credit, though, Sonat had been thorough with her plan. Their ever-watchful bodyguard was on an engineering shift helping Di'her, and Yitale was manning the bridge as they approached their landing point. That gave them a small window of opportunity for Sonat's crazy scheme. One which wasn't hard to keep track of either, as the weirdness that seemed to associate with deceleration was prevalent anywhere one could go on the ship. That made keeping track of time a lot easier for Syzah. But even if that hadn't been enough, Sonat had programmed a countdown in on his HUD screen.
Syzah called the whole thing a scheme.
A crazy scheme, created by his genius, perfect, sister, who never made any mistakes, and always seemed to be the chosen favorite...
So, it made him so much more frustrated that he still honestly wasn't even sure what he was doing. Obviously, he couldn't directly ask her. That would only make it worse.
No, at this point, he had accepted that he was just following instructions over the comm system and hoping he could keep the suit. If it wasn't stolen, of course.
"Keep going in that direction." Sonat's song commanded through the suit. "Your destination is somewhere over there."
His scanners were live feeding information to Sonat back in their quarters, who was tracking his progress with a holomap and a three dimension progression screen.
He made sure his comm's own reciever was muted, as he sang quietly to himself.
“Check every room, and don't waste time she says...” Syzah growled an angry hum as he kept up his brisk pace, pausing only sightly to illuminate each room with his helmet lights before heading down the hall to the next. Hopefully she wasn't running some sort of second audio loop, somewhere.
As his survey of the ship continued, Syzah began to slow down. The ship deceleration was tangible in more ways than one, and he was getting tired of running. His tail, also covered by the strange material of the combat suit, swished with each panting breath as he turned yet another corner, to check yet another room. It seemed that the ship was endless.
This room though, unlike many of the others, was filled with scrap metal, and not cargo. Hundreds of parts lay strewn about the place, and hundreds more were piled underneath those. As Syzah slowly brought his lights over them, his comm system buzzed to life with a hiss when the light fell on two bizarre looking... cleaning bots?
“I fracking knew it! I knew we had those.” Syzah jumped in surprise as Sonat's voice cut in as though she was standing right next to him. “Try and turn those things on, see if they work.”
Grateful for any excuse to catch his breath, Syzah approached the droids with a mild reluctance. One of these things had run over his tail on a trip when he was younger; he wasn't specifically fond of the things.
“Was this really what were were looking for?” He laid his hand on the first of the pair as he brought his lights down to focus on the holo-screen that greeted him. “I didn't think this was the type of thing you were going to go through so much effort fo-”
A loud crash from behind the cleaning bots brought his attention up, and he jumped back, bringing his lights and live feed back to the front. His right hand crept down towards the light-pistol at his hip as his tail straightened for balance. In the piles of junk that were scattered out in the back of the room, something was moving.
“Sonat... what else is down here?” The tip of his tail was twitching with panic as he carefully stepped backwards.
“Relax Syzah, I'm fairly sure that it probably isn't dangerous.”
With that, he drew his weapon and continued to back towards the hall. As he passed through the threshold of the room, and back into the hall, the heavy containment doors slammed down; the thick metal went whizzing past his face by barely a micro-unit. His comms buzzed to life yet again, and he heard that familiar voice chuckling.
“That, though, was just in case I'm wrong.”
The chuckling in his ear stopped abruptly as a giant dent appeared in the door.
Then another followed it.
“You're definitely wrong Sonat.”
For some reason, Syzah didn't find that statement nearly as satisfying as he always imagined it would be.