Chapter Twelve - Dinner Time

Humans needed to eat. It was right up there with the needs to drink, sleep, defecate and fuck. So it came to be that in space, where space itself is ironically a premium and where people are packed in tighter than sardines in a can, things like food need to be made in such a way as to take up as little room as possible.

The solution to this existed already.

MREs contained everything that a soldier needed to keep going. They were small, easy to carry, relatively lightweight, and would block up a solider's guts like nothing else, eliminating the need to defecate and doing a number on their willingness to fuck.

So they were perfect for space travel.

Plus, at the tail end of the first inter-system war, there were enough cargo containers full of them to drown out a small colony.

So, the average space-farer grew used to eating out of a bag. The better flavours were traded like a currency, and corporations everywhere rejoiced in the simple arithmetic and logistics of feeding crews with pre-packaged meals.

Two meals per person, per twelve-hour shift. Easy maths.

Then some perverse captain had an idea. What if he fed his crew with food that didn't taste like a bad mixture of rubber and cardboard, spiced with microplastics? Cooking in space existed already, but so far it had remained the prerogative of luxury yachts and cruise ships.

The captain discovered that warm meals, while more expensive for logistics and space, increased crew happiness by a significant amount. A happy crew was a crew that would accept a slightly lower pay, which at the end of the day, meant a slightly lower overhead.

Lauded as a financial genius, this captain went on to launch a new career selling kitchen modules designed to be fit into pre-existing spacecraft hulls. It even came with a free recipe book!

Gunships, tugs, fightercraft and any really small ship couldn't really afford to have a galley, but those were now the exceptions rather than the rule.

The Held Together had one of these pre-made galleys installed. It was a wonder that the ship hadn't come with one to begin with, seeing as how it was just large enough to serve as a passenger ship as well as a cargo freighter.

At the moment, a big, rather burly man was behind the counter, sleeves rolled all the way up to his shoulders, and his left arm, all chrome and exposed wires, was on full brazen display.

The arm ended in a cylinder from which several tools were poking out. Scissors, a whisk, several knives. Enough implements to give a professional torturer some wild ideas.

"Hawk!" Twenty-Six cheered. "What's for supper?"

The man, Hawk, looked up and grinned. He had probably been handsome once, Ivil admitted, but age did as it usually did and had turned him into more of a grizzled old man than anything else. "Nothing too special. Got some fish-sub at port and some authentic Korean sauce imported from Earth. Get ready for something spicy!"

Twenty-Six's eyes went wide, and she even clapped her hands excitedly.

Ivil took a deep breath through her nose, and had to admit that whatever Hawk was cooking, it smelled nice. Spicy and sweet in equal measure.

"You're one of our passengers?" Hawk asked, gesturing at Ivil with a whisk, then a knife, then a rotating spoon.

"I am," Ivil said. "I'm Evelyn Ville. I take it you're the ship's cook?"

"Cook, cleaner, sometimes coms officer," Hawk said. "On a ship this small you can't just do the one thing. Everyone needs to pitch in a hand to help." He waved his missing limb. "I sure did. Hah!"

Ivil smiled a little, allowing herself to be amused by the man's simple humour. Then she felt someone trying to pull her and glanced down at Twenty-Six. "Come on, there's no assigned seating here. Just plop yourself down wherever. Hawk always serves us after we're sat."

"Thank you," Ivil said as she allowed herself to be pulled over to the table.

Twenty-Six sat across from her and blinked while looking Ivil right in the eyes. "So! Did you go to any interesting places, being an astro-archeologist?" Twenty-Six asked.

"A few," Ivil said. "Mostly those who think they're my higher-ups want me to stay on or around Mars, but I've never been fond of sitting in one place and letting things happen. I've been to almost every planet in the system."

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"Almost?" Twenty-Six asked.

"I've never flown to Mercury," Ivil said. "I should visit one day, just to say that I have. What about you? You're from Saturn, right?"

"Yep! But other than that, I've been to... Ceres, Jupiter, some of its moons of course, and then back home to Titan and such. We did a mission down by Mars once, but it was a quick hop and drop, and that was it. I really haven't seen that much of the system for someone who practically lives on a spaceship."

"That's unfortunate," Ivil said. She wondered if she was handling this whole small talk thing well. She was never the most sociable person. Once, she'd made an effort to be polite and ingratiate herself, but the time when she was so weak that she needed to rely on the opinions of others was long past. This, at least, was good practice. "I'm sure you have plenty of time to visit other worlds. You're still young. At worst, you could pick a job on a ship heading to the places you want to see."

"Ah, I could, but that would mean leaving this old beauty behind," Twenty-Six said. She patted the table. "I've put in a lot of sweat to make sure she lives up to her name."

Ivil nodded along, but was distracted as the door into the room opened. A trio of unfamiliar people walked in.

The first was an older woman, maybe twenty years Ivil's senior. She was wearing a jumpsuit with a well-worn leather jacket over top of it. There were a few patches on its shoulders and front. Ivil recognized some of them as the insignia of Jovian fleets from the third inter-system war.

The woman was blonde, though now her hair had lightened with a few streaks of white. She had the look of someone who had aged prematurely, stress pushing her hard.

Behind her was another, much younger woman. She walked with a straight back, eyes fixed ahead and face locked in the neutral mask of a politician. She was pretty. Ivil couldn't help but notice it. High cheekbones, a noble bearing, and clothes that might very well cost more than what the ship made in a year.

It wasn't just nice clothing, it was the sharply-angled and pristinely cut outfit of the nobility of Phobos. Tight pants with a wider cut at the bottom, corset beneath a leather jacket. All entirely impractical for life onboard a ship. A monocle sat over one eye, the glass on it flickering through a few readouts.

And she had cores. A few of them. She wasn't quite a C-classer, but it felt like she might only be a couple of cores short.

Behind them, taking up the rear and making the others look better in comparison, was a gangly man in a patched-up jumpsuit. He was carrying a small crate before him, and smiling dopily at the woman in the fine dress.

"Is that the captain?" Ivil muttered to Twenty-Six.

"Yeah! And that's the princess," Twenty-Six said. She raised a hand to wave. "Captain! This is our other passenger! Her name's Evelyn."

The captain frowned for a moment, then nodded to Ivil. "A pleasure," she said. "Missy mentioned you were onboard already. I hope you don't mind matching our itinerary?"

"I'm ready to leave whenever," Ivil said. "Do you have a departure time?"

"Soon," the captain said. "Tomorrow, in fact. Twenty-Six, can we have last checks after dinner?"

"Sure thing, boss," Twenty-Six replied with a casual salute.

The man following the captain brought his crate over to the kitchen, and then returned. "Wow! Two beauties," he said as he extended a hand to Ivil. "You just let me know if you need anything, love."

Ivil stared at the hand, then she met the gaze of the so-called princess.

There was an instant and unmistakable flash of womanly understanding between them. This guy was a moron.

"Donny, don't be a creep," Twenty-Six said.

The princess sat down on Ivil's left. "Aurora Sterlinworth," she said.

"Evelyn Ville," Ivil replied. "You're from Phobos?"

"And you're Martian," Aurora said. "You look... familiar."

"I get that a lot," Ivil replied casually. "But unless you're well-versed in the history of the last few inter-system wars, then I'm sure we've never met. I'm a professor of astro-archeology at Hellas U."

"Ah, not a subject I'm intimate with."

The awkward moment was salvaged as Hawk swept into the room, a large tray ahead of him. "Everyone's here! Well, not Missy, but that's expected. I've made something special, you'll love it!"

***