With nothing but the calming view of empty blackness filled with pinpricks of light through the forward viewport, I finally relaxed into my seat. The orbital was falling far behind me, and the short-range scanners weren't picking up anything heading in my direction. With all the nerve-wracking stuff behind me, my first thought was getting some food, preferably something sweet, maybe chocolate or something, but as I thought about getting up and walking out to the galley, I remembered that I still had a demon-looking splicer girl who had spent the last week pretty much pointing a gun at my head.

A quick look at the camera feed showed she was still sitting in the head, practically in the same spot she had sat down hours ago. It made me realize I needed to visit the head myself. Thankfully, there were two on the ship. As long as I was quick and quiet about it, I could probably get in and out and lock myself back in the bridge long before she noticed. Fortunately, I found myself correct in that assumption and while I could probably find something to eat, she wasn't actually that far down the hallway and might hear me slamming cabinet doors as I had no idea where anything was stored, or even what was stored. Probably should have taken inventory, but the ship was probably stocked for eight people to come back this way and I doubt the two mouths that were fed had really eaten up much of the stock. There was more food in the Flying Brick that I could pilfer when I got the rest of my stuff. However, it'd be a good six or seven days before I actually activated the Rift Drive, which is something I should probably figure out how to work, followed by like another four days in the Rift itself. Then I'd probably have about six hours to approach the Flying Brick, grab my stuff, and search the cargo hold for whatever box I'm supposed to be getting. All that meant about 10 days before I even got to the Flying Brick where I had to deal with my other problem.

I couldn't exactly be sure how much of a problem Samantha was. I had clearly been hit in the firefight between me and the crew, but she had patched me up well enough that I had pretty much healed already with a slight exception of general soreness in my arm and side, which was not as bad as it was yesterday. I really didn't want to keep her locked in the bathroom like she had done to me. It seemed like a lot of extra work. but what to do with her. We were going to have to work something out. She clearly didn't know how to work the ship and therefore was pretty much useless in that aspect, but I also didn't want to space her. I already felt bad for murdering her entire crew despite the fact that they had technically pulled me out of the Rift so they could loot my cargo hold. A certain amount of retaliation was justified. The excessive retaliation wasn't. I still felt really bad for gunning down the two guys in the lock and I still felt weird by the fact that they were actual people. I watched Samantha sit on the head for another minute or two before reaching for the comms button with a long sigh.

“Samantha, I think you can leave the head and make your way to the nearest comms. We need to have a chat," I said over the shipwide. Why? Because there were no comms inside the bathrooms, at least as far as I knew. I watched as Samantha slowly got up, stretched, made her way to the door, and seemed to be surprised that it opened. She couldn't actually lock herself inside without me pushing something in front of the door to keep her in. I figured she would have heard that, or not hear it, technically. Oh, well. I flipped to the next room's camera and watched as she made her way to the comm box where she paused and pretty much just stared at it. In some ways, I found it interesting that the comms on most ships were essentially a box that had actual buttons and actual wires that ran to an actual switchboard. Really it was one of those redundant systems that are supposed to continue working on emergency power and I guess sometimes the old tech was better in such situations. Samantha finally pressed the button.

"What?" Came the single-word question that was to be the start of our new relationship. One that would likely end badly.

"You and I are gonna spend the next 10 days heading back to the middle of nowhere. Unless you want me to drop you off at a station, we should probably work out some sort of truce."

It looked like she was just staring at the box. The cameras weren't placed at the greatest of angles and there was a high probability that that was exactly what she was doing.

"What kind of truce?"

"Preferably the kind where we don't shoot at each other, or lock each other in the head, or space each other, or experiment on each other."

Again, she stared at the box while I stared at the back of her left shoulder. It was at this particular moment I realized she had a tail, and the thing must have been prehensile because it was moving around quite a bit. Seriously. What kind of parents would design their child to look like a demon? A succubus specifically. Freaking weirdos.

"So if I promise not to experiment on you, you'll promise not to murder me?" The inflection in her voice said she didn't trust me at all and that she wasn't happy here.

"I'd be perfectly willing to drop you off on a station somewhere."

"I can't do that."

I knew my next comment was gonna poke the bear a bit more, but I kind of had to know if my assumption was right. "So in an attempt to avoid prison, you've basically made the ship your prison. Is that right?" Samantha looked like she was gonna jab the button and yell back, but instead just hovered with her finger next to the button for several ticks. "Yeah, that's it," she started, some heat in her voice. "You had a problem with that? Maybe you should stop at the station and you should get off."

"Would you actually like me to do that?"

Again, she made like she was gonna jab the button, but froze. Clearly, it dawned on her that if I got off the ship, she'd still be on the ship and she had no idea how to fly the damn thing. This was an awkward situation for the both of us. I watched her shoulders slump and she turned around, put her back to the wall, and slid to the floor. I let her sit like that for a while.

“I'm sorry for murdering your crew. I really did think I was in a game and to be fair, they attacked me first or at least they attacked my ship," I said. She didn't make a move to respond. “Have you been flying with them long?” That's what you were supposed to do. Ask them questions, get to know them, be somewhat personal with the other people. Actually that was probably for a hostage situation, I think. I’m really not qualified for this shit.

"Two years," Samantha said, startling me from my thoughts. "Well, for two of them. Four of the guys were new. They were only here for a few trips. The engineer has only been with us for a couple of months and honestly, he's a fucking creepy dick."

"So you only liked two of them?"

" We had a working agreement."

If I understood the words and tone of voice correctly, she wasn't on particularly good terms with the crew of the ship with the unpronounceable name. “What was the agreement? You could stay on the ship as long as you provided medical support?"

I watched Samantha as she paused again. Maybe I should have just let her speak because my gut said that pause meant she was gonna lie to me. "Something like that."

Well, I guess that was vague enough to not be a complete lie. "Is that all you did?" I asked.

"I had a couple other ship duties. Kept inventory on things, that sort of stuff."

"Did you do any of the maintenance on the ship?"

"No," she replied tersely.

I had to shrug. I didn't think she did. While I was fairly confident she could figure out some things. My understanding is that she didn't touch anything mechanical.

"Ok, so how do you wanna do this? I don't trust you and you don't trust me and both for pretty good reasons, but at the moment we seem to be stuck together.”

"You stay on your end of the ship. I'll stay on mine." She proposed.

I shook my head before realizing she couldn’t see me. "I'm pretty sure there has been no maintenance done in the last week, and that's pretty much the first thing I wanna do once my nerves settle. Unless you like the idea of the CO2 scrubbers failing? Then there's daily VSIs. Basically, I need to be able to walk around this ship just to keep it running. I'm not an engineer, but I know how to do basic maintenance."

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I watched as she stared at the comm box before starting to pace back and forth. Nobody wanted to die because the CO2 scrubbers didn't get changed or some dead sensor never picked up an increase in volatile gasses. She also clearly didn't want to deal with the murderous male person on board the ship. I watched her throw up her hands in exasperation. It was kind of funny to watch, and I was pretty sure she was not aware that there were cameras everywhere in this vessel.

“I don't know what to do," she said.

"Well, we can either completely avoid each other or learn to work together," I suggested.

"Yeah? And how do we do that?"

"Well, I guess for starters if you wanted to find me a tablet, drop it off in front of the bridge and then you can go hide in the captain quarters while I do the VSI."

"What the hell is a VSI?"

"Visual Sight Inspection. Basically, I got to find all the damn sensors and make sure they're working."

"And why is that important?"

"A dead sensor can't warn you of a drop in pressure or dangerous mix of gasses."

"Fine. I'll get you a damn tablet."

I followed Samantha's course throughout the ship as she tried to figure out where to find a tablet that she could actually log into. The first two she found didn't work, or at least she couldn't get into them, but she did manage to locate one in a spares cabinet in engineering, and with no real surprise it included the program and stylus for checking sensor heads. She notified me via the ship comms that she would be hiding in her little medical room and that she would shoot me if I opened the door, whatever, not like it really mattered. I slaved the tablet to the console, allowing me to make sure that she was staying in her little room and then went out to the galley to search the cupboards for food because I hadn't eaten in what felt like forever.

***

Over the course of several days, our tense truce became a somewhat hesitant working relationship. It started out pretty simply. I stayed holed up in the bridge, she stayed holed up in her little medical cabinet. We stopped using the ship's comms network to talk to each other, switching over to the tablet's messaging system over the ship net. For the most part, this streamlined our ability to avoid each other. It also made it possible to have little fig-leaf gestures such as "making breakfast now, want any?" I was sleeping in the bridge, not willing to have a potentially hostile person in between me and the controls if something went bad. Samantha seemed to stick to her little medical cabinet though boredom and biological needs had her coming out more and more often.

I spent much of the time trying to familiarize myself with the ship systems. One of the major issues was that I was pretty sure I would be locked out if the consoles ever turned off. The captain would have a captain's key which was likely hidden on the ship. But how to find a captain's key? After searching the captain's quarters for a while, I realized that such a thing might actually be in the ship’s schematics. Sure enough, it was. I couldn't quite figure out how to find the actual safe, but as I had a pretty good idea of where it was, a couple of tools from engineering helped me pry open the metal paneling that hid the thing followed by a couple hours worth of watching videos and reading the manual on how to use one of the torches to cut the safe open. Sure enough, there was the captain's key and some money. I already murdered the poor bastard, might as well rob his ass while I was at it. All the commotion I made even got Samantha to poke her head out the door which she promptly popped back into when she noticed me noticing her.

Once we were far enough away from the station that sending telemetry for the Flying Brick would take roughly six hours to arrive, giving myself a head start, I squirted off both the coordinates and my insurance claim for my poor, hapless ship. With that, we left the comforting stars of real space for the ominous glowing lights of the Rift. By then, Samantha was doing the cooking and honestly, she was pretty good at it. While I realized she could be poisoning the food, I also was fairly certain, again, that she didn't know how to fly the damn ship and poisoning your pilot probably wouldn't get you very far. Theoretically, she could have poisoned me and got me in a situation where she could have me at gunpoint again, but she had already tried that and when she arrived at the station, she had realized that she was screwed on account of the excessively large bounty on her head. So I figured I was pretty safe eating the cooking and it was pretty good. Better than mine, though, to be fair, I mostly lived on reheated burritos.

We were a day into the Rift when she took the first major chance. She had invited me to eat breakfast, which was the norm. However, when I got there, she was still in the room. The standoff was a bit odd; at some point, I had stopped checking her location on the ship’s cameras at every given point, and I found myself standing on one side of the table, tablet in hand, while she stood on the other side, gripping the back of the seat like she didn't know if she was supposed to sit or flee. It was the first time I got a good look at the girl and when you took away the fact that her skin was red, her eyes were red, and she had horns, she was kind of hot. Well, I suppose the red skin, eyes, and horns didn't actually reduce the attractiveness, merely just made it weird because this was not a fantasy setting. Had she been in any of my games? I'd totally be into her. As it stood at this particular moment, I didn't know if I had just been tricked into a trap or not.

"Hi," she said, her tone uncertain.

"Um, hello," I replied, with an uncertain tone of my own.

For a while longer, we just stared at each other, but I figured this was gonna go nowhere unless one of us made a move, and she had already done the staying in the room. So I figured I'd do the sitting. She hesitated a minute before sitting down at her end. We ate in silence, the only actual sounds being the blowers of the environmental systems and the sounds of forks hitting plates. We both ate with one eye on the other person. It was very awkward. She was nearly finished with her eggs when she said, "Sorry, um, I don't remember your name."

I chuckled. I'm not certain why I found that funny. "Grant Takata."

"I am Samantha Drakon. You can call me Sam. Please do not call me Sammy."

I nodded an acknowledgment, and we both went back to silently eating. I finished first and slowly put my plate in the sink while keeping Sam in my periphery.

"Thank you for the meal," I said before making my way back to the bridge where I could be safe. I watched Sam on the screen as she continued to sit at the table, staring towards the bridge. I had no idea what she was thinking, but after a few moments, she finished her meal and began washing the dishes. I was in no way going to complain about having an attractive splicer girl cook for me and clean up afterwards. If only I was certain she wasn't going to cut my throat while I slept. To be perfectly fair, she probably had similar concerns about me.

From then on, all meals went pretty much the same. We were only a day out from the Flying Brick when I realized it would be beneficial to have her on board the bridge with me. I fretted for several hours about how I was going to bring it up when I decided to just blurt it out during lunch.

"I need your help."

Sam looked at me slightly startled. She turned her head to one side so she could stare at me through the corner of her eye, a seemingly odd gesture, and I was mildly surprised to find that her ears were slightly pointed.

"You need my help with what?" she asked.

"I need to dig out a cube from the Flying Brick's cargo hold," I explained. "I don't know how long that's going to take, and I could use somebody on the bridge watching for the ship that I'm sure is going to appear a few hours after we arrive."

Sam just stared at me, worrying on her lower lip for almost a solid minute. "Ok," she finally said. "I don't know how the computers up there work."

Somehow, that was kind of a relief, admission from her, the source, that she couldn't just fly away without me. I nodded. "It's pretty simple. You're not gonna be flying the ship or anything, just watching the sensors and yelling at me if something shows up."

Sam nodded and continued eating. Today's lunch was essentially just noodles and some type of chicken broth, which was one of those things that wasn't really so much cooked as reheated. I couldn't complain; I ate the same brand quite often. Sam took a deep breath before opening her mouth to speak.

"You know what I did before I ended up here, at least the gist of it between what you've read in the wanted poster and my explanation of how that played out. What did you do?" she asked.

I recognized this as mostly just trying to get comfortable around each other, much the same way that I had tried with the… personal connection, hostage situation, thing. As we were going to be working together, we probably should work on the whole interpersonal thing. Not really my best set of traits.

"I ran an Interstellar freighter for the last four or five years. I think before that, it was pretty much preparing to run an Interstellar freighter. Very boring, you know, just get a can, fly to the next port, get a new can, repeat. Mostly I played games."

"You've mentioned that before, playing games. You thought this was a game?" she put quite a large scoop of sarcasm in that last question.

"I have a Neuro Helmet system. Gives full immersion and has an adaptive AI that can pretty much create any type of situation. It's very expensive, but on the same note, spending days, if not weeks in between systems with nothing to do but regularly scheduled maintenance, it gets kind of lonely. And yes, the system is capable of reproducing realistic physics. Those settings are usually turned off or down so that people don't confuse the real world with the in-game environment."

Sam didn't verbally acknowledge my statement; her face just kind of twisted up into a half-believing grimace, and she nodded. It didn't really matter what she thought. As far as getting the box and getting out, we were in this together. I could have dumped her off at the station. I still wondered if that wouldn't have been the best idea, but on the same note, she still didn't come off like the psychopath the wanted poster said she was. Conversation had died. We finished our noodles in silence, and then I did VSI. Tomorrow, we'd be rendezvousing with the Flying Brick.