After two days in the wormhole network, Kalan Rinn felt the paranoia start to fade. It wasn’t gone by any means, but it wasn’t the omnipresent, hovering, sleep-stealing thing it had been. It might have even gone away if he wasn’t inside a Zeren cutter-sized reminder of recent events. Claiming the ship as his own had seemed like a good idea at the time. He had gone through all the trouble to kill or capture everyone aboard, and the ship’s former captain had been engaged in acts of piracy…technically. Kalan’s seizure of the ship had been legal or legal enough. Looking back, though, he probably should have just scuttled the ship and gone his way. Scuttling the ship would have avoided the problem of incurring the wrath of the Zeren Authority for walking away with their navy vessel. Then again, the Zerens were coming after him regardless. He decided he might as well get another ship out of all that trouble someone else had heaped on his head. That thought was enough to make him clench his fists hard enough that his knuckles went white. I need to go and do something, thought Kalan. I need a distraction.
Of course, he knew that the real problem was that he couldn’t do the one thing he’d been almost hardwired to do from birth. He needed to practice, but that was more information than he really wanted to voluntarily provide to his very short-term shipmate. She would have certainly deduced that he’d received some specialized combat training somewhere, but he very much doubted that she’d guessed the truth. He didn’t see any value in providing her with more data points to work with as they went. He glanced at the time on the display mounted on the captain’s chair. She’d be on the bridge shortly. They’d been trading off shifts on the bridge to keep an eye on things, not that there was much to look at out the viewers. It was one of those inexplicable, universal truths that external viewers did not work in the wormhole network. No one really had a good explanation for why, the same way that no one had a good explanation for why unmanned communication drones suffered fifty percent attrition in the wormhole network. It just was, a simple fact of existence, like terrestrial gravity, but it always left Kalan feeling a little unsettled.
He’d never quite shaken the idea that there was something out there in the wormhole network, watching them come and go. Of course, something that could watch could also take, and ships did go missing in the wormholes from time to time. Granted, the odds of going missing in the wormhole network were statistically infinitesimal. Far more ships went missing in open space, but there was usually evidence when that happened. When ships went missing in the wormholes, they were just gone, vanished, like ghosts into a fog. It was the absoluteness of those disappearances that left him cold. At least, it did when he had too much time on his hands and no way to remedy the situation. The only upside of winding his way through that uncomfortable thought process was that it killed most of the time he left to wait before he could go and burn off some energy. Even if he couldn’t practice, he could still work out. There was probably a small gym on the ship somewhere. He spent the next few minutes reviewing a schematic of the ship until he found the gym. The AI he’d installed with copious help from the crew back on the Ankala Rising, not to mention that ship’s vastly superior AI, could have just told him. He could have just waited for Cera to arrive on the bridge and asked her, but he’d been doing his level best to keep his distance.
He said he’d take her as far as Cobalt 7. He’d also said that, once he got her to the space station, he was cutting her loose. He meant to stick with that. He could find other people, less compromised people, people he trusted more than the rogue Zeren officer to crew the commandeered ship. Even if she had, to his knowledge, followed every order he’d given her without fail, he couldn’t trust her agenda. It was the scent that hit him first. It wasn’t overwhelming, just a light floral scent in the air that hadn’t been there before. He whipped his head toward the hatch and saw Cera standing there, looking a little uncomfortable. For a long moment, Kalan found himself staring. She was wearing black pants with, Kalan thought, an unreasonable number of pockets, sensible work boots, and a long-sleeved shirt in some kind of pale cream color that Kalan couldn’t have named for a million credits. She was even wearing makeup. Again, it was nothing ostentatious. Just a bit around the eyes and something that made her cheekbones more noticeable. He even spotted the glint of a necklace.
It was the same kind of outfit he’d seen women wearing a hundred times on other ships, but Kalan found himself abruptly, and for the first time, aware of the ex-Zeren officer’s inherent female-ness. There had been something in the military uniform that helped strip away things like obvious sexuality. It had flattened curves and made all of the naval vessel’s crew somehow generic to Kalan’s mind, more like things and less like people. The abrupt change in her outfit drove home how false that perception had been. She eventually noticed him staring and a faint flush rose in her cheeks.
“What?” she demanded.
Feeling a little embarrassed and stupid, Kalan struggled to recover. “What happened to the uniform?”
“It’s not like I ever wanted to wear it in the first place. At this point, I’m pretty sure I don’t have any right to wear it anymore. Why? Does this look bad?” she asked, nervously tugging at the shirt.
“No,” said Kalan. “No, it looks nice.”
Cera rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what every girl wants to hear. That she looks nice.”
Kalan frowned at that. “But you do look nice? What’s wrong with looking nice?”
“Nice is one of those safe words that polite people use when they can’t think of anything else to say.”
“I am a polite person. What should I have said?”
“Aren’t you a freighter captain? I thought freighter crews were all rough. You should have said my ass looks good, or something like that.”
Kalan squinted at the woman. “Wouldn’t that have made you feel very uncomfortable?”
Cera thought for a moment before she nodded. “Yeah, actually, that would have. I guess I should be glad you’re polite.”
“Besides,” said Kalan, “I can’t see your ass from here.”
There was a pregnant pause before the woman burst into laughter. “So, there is a sense of humor buried deep, deep, deep inside there somewhere.”
“I usually keep it tied up, but it’s been a long sort of week,” said Kalan, leaning his head back against the thin padding of the captain’s chair.
“Every time you say something like that, it makes me want to ask a little more about what in the hells all of this was about.”
“You are honestly better off if I don’t tell you.”
“And you don’t trust me.”
Kalan nodded to acknowledge the point. “That too.”
“You must have looked at my records by now.”
“I did.”
“And that wasn’t enough to convince you that I’m not a friend to the Zerens?”
“It could be a cover identity. What better way to earn someone’s trust than with a story about how the evil Zerens killed your parents? For all I know, you got on this ship a week ago with the spy.”
Cera stared at him with big, dark eyes. “That is some next-level paranoia.”
“It was a very, very long sort of week.”
“Fair enough. As long as you drop me off somewhere that I can run away, I’ll be happy.”
“It’s another day or two, then you’ll be free of this ship and my company.”
“Oh, the ship’s not so bad,” she said, giving Kalan a wink.
Kalan snorted. “You ready to take over?”
Cera nodded and Kalan made his way over to the hatch. He saw her give him a vaguely speculative look as they crossed paths. When he was about to leave the bridge, she called out after him.
“Man, someone burned those manners deep into you, didn’t they? You didn’t even try to look at my ass. Are you sure you’re not a robot? Oh, are you just not interested in women?”
Kalan sighed. “Does it make a difference if I am interested in women?”
“It might. I’m young and, I think, not too hard on the eyes. Most men would have looked. I honestly thought you would after you stared at me like that. Since you didn’t, that means you’re very taken, completely repulsed by me, inhumanly disciplined, or someone installed your politeness with a branding iron.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Kalan weighed how or even if to answer the implied question. This was clearly some kind of test, but he couldn’t figure out what kind. It might just be her testing his boundaries, or even just testing her sex appeal to the opposite sex. On the other hand, it could be a test to see how susceptible he might be to a seduction approach. There was no right answer for all the possibilities, so he went with the least dangerous answer.
“You should assume people were handy with branding irons where I come from,” he said and walked off the bridge.
Once he was clear of that level of the ship, a familiar voice co-opted the comms on the ship to talk to him.
“I don’t think she’s lying,” said the Ankala Rising’s AI. “If that matters to you.”
“You know your opinion matters to me,” said Kalan.
“I’ve been monitoring her vitals. She’s been stressed, but there’s no indication of deception.”
“That’s good to know, but are you certain enough to bet all of our lives on it?”
“No, but you’re often willing to take chances that I wouldn’t.”
Kalan shook his head and then realized that the ship probably couldn’t see him the way it would normally be able to. “I don’t mind a calculated risk, now and then, but the rewards need to justify the risks. Keeping her around is too much risk for almost zero reward.”
“Probably so.”
Kalan walked into the small ship’s gym and took a few minutes to understand what he was dealing with. While some equipment was intuitive, not all of it was. He was happy to discover that the ship had a store of unused clothing and even proper footwear for working out. He found things that were approximately his size and put them on. He kept his regular clothes nearby out of habit. He never wanted to be more than two steps away from his weapons, even in situations where he didn’t expect trouble. After all, those were the times when people let their guard down, which made them easy targets. He took a few minutes to stretch, viciously stomped down on the urge to do one of his normal combat training routines, and decided where he’d start. He stepped onto a treadmill and, after a little on-the-spot tutorial from the machine, he started it up. He started with a slow jog to let himself acclimate to the unfamiliar exercise. He got a lot of other kinds of cardio, but he’d never been willing to trade away the space on his ship for a treadmill. Yet, he'd done a lot of running when he’d still been training on his homeworld, had still been an acolyte of the Warders Under the Night. He’d missed it.
He managed about four miles at a fast clip before the muscles in his legs transitioned from the casual protests that always came with new kinds of exercise to the more intense pain that signaled it was time to stop. He slowed back to a casual jog for another half mile before he reluctantly abandoned the treadmill for resistance training. He was about halfway through a set of bench presses when the AI spoke to him again.
“She has a crush on you.”
Kalan paused for a half second before resuming the exercise. “Who?”
“Cera. She spent almost an hour trying on different outfits and adjusting her makeup.”
“What makes you think that has anything to do with me?”
“It might just be me interpreting incorrectly, but she did keep muttering things about what he might like.”
“Even more reason not to keep her around. The second that crush wears off, who knows what she might do.”
“I don’t have an opinion that, one way or the other. I’m just giving you the information. You have to decide what you’ll do with it.”
“Yeah, I know. She isn’t the only one who’s been stressed. How are things back on the ship? Is Temera behaving herself?”
“She is not. She’s made no less than twenty attempts to break into my systems.”
“That seems wholly unnecessary and unproductive. We’re going where she wants to go.”
“We’re going where she wants to go, eventually. It’s not precisely the same thing.”
“True. Was she trying to access anything specific?”
“Navigation. Weapons. Logs. Anything that might give her an edge or tell her more about you and where you’ve been. I’ve locked her out of everything except the galley. She's currently pouting in her quarters.”
“Good. Seal her in there, and patch me through.”
“Done. You’re patched through.”
“Hello, Temera.”
There was a long pause, and then Temera’s wary voice came over the comm system. “Captain. What can I do for you?”
“I was going to threaten you, but it seems threats don’t work.”
“I don’t know-,” she started.
“Did you think that I wouldn’t find out you’ve been trying to break into the ship’s systems?”
There was another long pause, and then the hollow gong-like noise of someone hitting something metal.
“You’ve locked me in here.”
“That’s what happens when children misbehave. They get punished. You can stay in there for the next, oh, twenty-four hours and think about what you did.”
“I don’t suppose it would help if I apologized?” she asked.
“It might help me be less likely to break one of your legs the next time I see you. It won’t change your current circumstances. I don’t know exactly what you were after, but you clearly knew it was something I wouldn’t like. Otherwise, you would have just asked.”
“I apologize for trying to break into your ship’s system.”
“Thank you. The hatch will unlock in twenty-four hours. Disconnect us.”
“Kalan! Wai-,” she managed to get out before the connection was broken.
“She won’t like that,” noted the AI.
“She’s not supposed to. At this point, if I didn’t need her to smooth the way with the Ikarens, I’d leave her on some barely habitable moon. She’s definitely way more trouble than she’s worth.”
Kalan spent another two hours in the gym slowly grinding himself into a state of sufficient tiredness that he might actually be able to get some sleep. Yet, even when he did manage to sleep, it was the kind of fitful sleep that seems to provide no rest, just disjointed half-memories of unsettling dreams. He dragged himself through something resembling breakfast, although he felt a pang of sympathy for the rank-and-file crews on Zeren ships. The coffee was terrible and the food was only food in the most technical sense of the word. It might keep people alive, but they sure weren’t going to enjoy their meals. After knocking back a third cup of the terrible, almost-coffee, Kalan went back up to the bridge to relieve Cera. She was sitting in the captain’s chair, cheek propped up on a fist, and staring at nothing with her eyes half-closed.
“I’ll take over now,” said Kalan from the hatch.
Cera all but threw herself out of the captain’s chair, whirling to face Kalan with wide, startled eyes.
“You scared half a year of life out of me,” she gasped, before taking a moment to smooth out her shirt.
“I apologize.”
“Maybe you could just try to make some noise when you move.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Kalan. “You should get some sleep.”
“Yeah. Once my heart stops racing, I’ll probably be ready for that,” said Cera, before she gave him a kind of semi-salute. “The bridge is yours, captain.”
“Thank you,” said Kalan.
With that Cera walked past him and out of the bridge. After a moment of thought, Kalan turned to watch her go, making a point of making a bit of noise. She glanced over her shoulder, and Kalan could see her cheek lift as she smiled.
“Well, at least she’s happy,” he muttered to the empty bridge as he settled into the captain’s chair.
In a bid to make the day go faster, he spent most of his time reviewing logs. The more of that he did, the less guilty he felt about spacing the captain. The man had been an ass of mythic proportions who intentionally sabotaged his junior officers with mediocre evaluations, and handed out excessive punishments for the most minor infractions among the enlisted crew. Based on the man’s personal logs, he was a rabid xenophobe about anyone who wasn’t from the Zeren Authority. Kalan sincerely doubted that anyone who wasn’t a blood relation was going to mourn his passing. The mission logs were a little more interesting. It also seemed that Zeren Command knew what kind of person they had with the former captain. If there was an ethically questionable mission appropriate for a ship the size of the cutter, it seemed they sent this ship. Most of the missions weren’t obviously illegal. Yet, most of them looked like things that most captains would have balked at, at least privately. Kalan hoped that the other captains in the Zeren Navy were cut from better cloth than Semmes had been.
By the time Cera arrived on the bridge, Kalan had at least skimmed through close to two years worth of mission reports. She gave him a curious look.
“What’s with that face?” she asked.
He glanced up at her and said, “I was looking over the mission reports.”
She grimaced. “Oh, that would explain the look. We got sent out to do some nasty things, although, the marines did most of the really ugly stuff.”
Kalan nodded. He’d gotten that much from the reports. When Cera didn’t expand on that thought, he let it go. He supposed he could have quizzed her about the reports, but if she was a plant, they would have had her review the files just like he did.
“I’m ready to take over up here,” she said, gesturing around the bridge.
“Computer, how long until destination?”
“Estimated time of arrival is six hours,” answered the ship.
“I’ll be back in four hours,” Kalan told Cera.
“Why?”
Kalan shrugged. “I’m always on the bridge when we enter or exit the wormhole network. It’s just tradition at this point.”
The vague confusion on the girl’s face immediately gave way to understanding. Traditions were things you just didn’t mess around with on ships. Even if you didn’t believe in bad luck, there was no percentage in tempting fate. Kalan killed some time in the gym and with taking an unnecessarily long shower. He was always very conscious of water usage on the Ankala Rising because they had such a finite supply. On a ship designed to support a couple of dozen people, though, he could indulge in an absurdly long shower and not feel like he was putting everyone in jeopardy. Even more importantly, though, he didn’t have to worry about wasting power to keep the water hot. This cutter had more than enough excess power for him to take a shower for a year and not worry about cutting into essential operations. He followed that glorious shower by getting a not-at-all glorious “meal” in the galley. He choked down two more cups of the travesty that the Zerens called coffee, and finally headed back up to the bridge. Cera ceded the captain’s chair to him, and he went back to reviewing files until the computer announced that they were approaching the transition back to regular space.
“Computer, signal the Ankala Rising.”
A moment later, a very aggravated-sounding Temera came on the line. “Yes, captain?”
“We’re about to transition back to regular space. Is everything ready there?”
“Yeah, the robot navigator tells me we’re good to go. Not that I can double-check since I’ve been locked out of every system.”
“Next time, don’t go snooping your ally’s systems.”
Kalan could almost hear Temera grinding her teeth. “Duly noted.”
Another full minute passed before the ship dropped out of the wormhole. Kalan had been waiting for a countdown. When it didn’t happen, the transition surprised him enough that he mostly missed the terrible feeling of being nowhere. After a few seconds, the external viewers came back on, and a bit of quiet relief washed over Kalan as Cobalt 7 appeared on the screen.
“Home again, home again,” said Kalan. “Cera, that is Cobalt 7, your waystation to just about anywhere that isn’t Zeren territory.”