Moizle caught itself cleaning its palps for the sixth time in an hour and forced its forelegs back down against its thorax. Engineering was normally a hive of activity, but nearly everyone had evacuated to safer decks in case this maneuver didn’t work.

If Rogers was nervous, Moizle certainly couldn’t tell. He was glistening with self-produced moisture, but most of the humans did so when close to the engines. His thick fingers rested on the rippled bar of the manual flow control lever, betraying no nervous twitching or tapping.

The com-light flashed to life before the captain’s voice filled the air, tight with tension. “On my mark. Three, two, one, mark.”

Rogers yanked the handle, opening the valve that had kept a plasma flow at bay for the past six days. Moizle reared back on its hindlegs, the other four tapping and swiping at screens to monitor the spread of magmatic lifeblood through the heart of Kinnereth’s Prayer.

“Twelve percent, no problems.”

Rogers cupped a palm over a curved portion of the bulkhead around the engines. “She’s cold.”

Moizle cocked its head 45 degrees, its dichoptic eyes allowing it to keep an eye on Rogers while the other stayed glued to the displays. “Who’s cold?”

“The ship. She’s been hunkered down for days running off batteries! This is going to be close.”

“Thirty-five percent. Crewman, our ship is a sexless object. Why do you assign it a pronoun?” Moizle’s antennae waggled, the sensitive stalks useless for navigating cultural schisms.

Rogers ran a hand over the sweat-damp stubble on his head while he tweaked the timing on the plasma injectors, trying to squeeze a bit more throughput out of them. “It’s human tradition. Ships are always women. Couldn’t tell you where that started.” He walked over to stand beside Moizle at the displays, his solidly built frame only rising to the mantis-like being’s ‘shoulder’ at a few hairs under six feet. “It helps us form a connection.”

“Sixty-four percent.”

“They’ve seen us. Can you give us any more, engineering?” the captain asked, and Rogers could hear the grim set of her mouth and the fatigue they were all saturated with.

He touched the com-band on his wrist. “We’ll do what we can.”

Moizle watched Rogers clamber back into the nest of metallic conduits and insulation-coated coils that embraced the injectors. The human pulled an omnitool from his belt and tuned it to cutting mode.

Moizle left its display, dancing forward, scythe-like forelegs lifted and antennae wagging like mad. “Crewman, those are the safeties! Without them--”

Rogers had already sliced through a half-dozen of the feeds. Alarms rang and hooted throughout the bay, lights in several spectrums protesting the human’s butchery. “If we don’t start moving in the next twenty seconds, the safeties won’t keep anyone safe. Sorry about this, Kinnie!” He winced as he sheared through the rest of the linkages, the innermost force-field guiding plasma to the engines winking out of existence. The Prayer gurgled and roared, and Moizle swung itself back around.

“One hundred percent. Captain, activate drive!”

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Both felt the characteristic twist of the drive engaging, exotic math and precision engineering performing a waltz so amusing the universe temporarily gave the Prayer a free pass to violate the laws of physics.

New alarms added their complaints to the chorus, and Moizle’s multifaceted eyes looked like halved disco-balls with warning lights flashing off their domes. Rogers struggled to keep the plasma flow even, legs set wide in a squat while his fingers danced across a panel streaked with his sweat. “Hold together girl, we’re almost out of this!”

The gut-twist of traversal ended, leaving the insectoid and human staring at each other for a long minute.

“We’re clear!” boomed the captain over the com, and Rogers grabbed Moizle around the thorax in a hug that made it squirm and flail, chitin creaking under even the light embrace!

“Rogers, the engine--” it protested, fruitlessly prying at distastefully-moist mammalian arms.

Rogers cursed, dashing back to his console and the two rushed as much as they dared through the shutdown procedure.

With the plasma purged from the engine once more, Rogers squeezed his wrist. “We’ll need some time to make repairs.”

The captain sighed, “Acknowledged. Crew, return to duty stations. Relieve active personnel ASAP and send them straight to the mess for champagne.”

Moizle watched Rogers murmuring to a plasma conduit as he repaired severed connections, and tentatively caressed the edge of its console with a foreleg. “A...fine performance, ship. Shipess? Ladyship? Computer, how does one properly address a feminine starship?”

“There are no standardized greetings for such an eventuality. Do you...require counseling, crewman? You have been in proximity to a human for dozens of hours.”

Moizle’s antennae splayed out to either side, flattened to the top of its head. “You always ask that!”

“The offer of counseling is accepted eighty-seven percent of the time from beings in your situation. But have it your way.”

***

A pair of scaled creatures simultaneously set down the tablets they’d been reading and turned to one another. Verbal communication was unnecessary but this pair had been around humans long enough to get into the habit of verbalizing their thoughts. It was simply rude not to.

“Greybead, you noted the strange relationship the humans have with vessels recorded aboard Kinnereth’s Prayer during their recent encounter with pirates?”

A slender snout dipped in an affirmative, purple eyes literally aglow. “The nuances are many. The bio-metric data was fascinating. I have a thought. Do we share it, Roughbutton?”

The other arched a scaled eyeridge, pausing their conversation while a harried human rushed through the Interspecies Relations office clutching a sealed box that appeared to be lurching and squealing. Once the door had sealed again behind them, Roughbutton slapped her sinuous tailtip politely upon the floor. “Of course. If humans gain from a relationship with a vessel, we should make a relationship possible. Something beyond the one-sided delusion they currently entertain.”

Greybead grinned, a gape of the jaws that exposed clusters rather than rows of teeth, bracketing a pair of bifurcated tongues. “They will appreciate this gift, I think. They have brought much to the Confluence, and we have done little for them we would not have done for any species in the straits we found them in. It is not such a huge task either, correct? Even the smallest ships humans serve on have AI on some level. It is a question of changing the relationship of the AI to the superstructure and systems.”

“But to the crew as well,” Roughbutton amended with a slow blink. “How delighted they will be!”

Greybead hesitated, nictitating membrane closing to cloud their eyes. “In combat situations, will the loss of such a companion not damage them more than usual?”

The two sat a moment in thought, the soft blue glow of their neural implants pulsing, barely visible beneath their fine scales. Greybead spoke up again at length. “They will mourn them as they mourn any other fellow crewmate. Some of them do so already.”

Roughbutton clasped her claws together. “Now, what personality shall we campaign for?”

Greybead squinted. “We may need to run some trials. Let’s see who will volunteer to have their vessel brought to life...”

***

Author's note: I've loved the premise behind HFY since reading Alan Dean Foster's 'Damned' series, and thought dabbling in the genre would be fun. I look forward to spinning up another fun little series that will confuse use of the term 'shipping' even further.