Alex

“Reporting for duty, Ma’am.”

The captain gave me a once over before nodding. “Good to see you back in one piece, or at the very least see you able to perform your duty again.”

I nodded “Even though everything happened yesterday, it’s still very nice to be doing something productive again.” I thought for a moment. “Getting paid is a nice bonus too.”

She flicked her tentacle. “I’m sure it is. Now report to your station, which is going to be next to Iskender over there.” She pointed to one of those beaver lion aliens standing next to a console that was about the correct height for me to see over and still be able to access the dials and switches on it.

I nodded once again and made my way over to my station, with the various aliens within twenty meters or so of me not even trying to hide the fact that they were taking pictures of me. It was most likely as proof to their families/significant others that didn’t believe them when they said they were serving with a Terran.

Why the hell is it that everyone that does space travel is obsessed with dials and switches? Touch screens are so much better for overall functionality, I thought to myself as I finally rolled up to the station. The whole thing was covered in dials and switches and sat in front of four holoprojectors giving a real time feed of the various camera systems in the ship. Thank God there’s a dataport here that I can just plug into. Sure, I could read all the labels for everything and manually change them to operate the camera system. But where would be the fun in that? I watched as the left index finger of the mech turned into a datajack and was inserted into the dataport, all in plain view of Iskender, who was still standing directly to my right.

I turned my head, dismissing the twenty or so popups that obscured my vision, all of them asking if I was sure I wanted to connect to the ship systems. Iskender turned to me and made a show of looking me up and down. Her voice was smooth and soft. “So, you’re the Terran that everyone was so riled up about?”

“In the armor,” I said as I tried desperately to get the mech to access the camera system. These two operating systems were clearly not meant to mix, but I’d be damned if I had to learn how to use dials and switches to operate this bulshit!

“Well, since no one so far has told you this, thanks for repelling those boarders,” she said.

“Oh, thanks, I was just doing my job. And it wasn’t just me, most of the security team was also there to help.” I gestured to the partially repaired mech. “And I didn’t exactly get out of it unscathed.”

“Still, it was rather brave of you to head the counter-boarding operation, you really put yourself on the line there.”

I shrugged. “Oh, that? I was just following protocol, and I didn’t even get hurt by the explosion. Not really. It was just the mech.”

She got closer. “Yeah, but that doesn’t make you any less brave, considering the height difference.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I narrowed my eyes. What is Iskender playing at? I better change the subject. “Weren’t you on the bridge when all of that happened? And what do you do here?”

She waved her paw around. “I was off duty yesterday, and I don’t live in the same part of the ship as you do. As for what I do here, I’m the chief engineer!”

Oh, dear God help me. I could feel my stomach curl. “Oh, that’s pretty cool!” I paused for a moment as I tried to think of anything to talk about as I finally got my mech systems to play nice with the ship systems. “That reminds me, how come we aren’t using FTL to get to the Strength Through Diplomacy? It would only take about an hour or so to get there,” I said as I did the mental math in my head. “So why three weeks?”

“Well,” she started, “it really has to do with the fact that when the pirates ripped us out of FTL yesterday, they deactivated the FTL drives by damaging them, so we need to go everywhere sub light. To add to this issue, we can only repair so much of the drives without making a pit stop somewhere along the way at a service station. Your people are so demanding that we get to your embassy ship and make no pit stops along the way that we have no choice in the matter.” She shook her head. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that your people would even demand something like that, because it would take us perhaps a day at most to get the repairs done and then a forty-five-minute jump to get to them!”

“Yeah, Terrans aren’t exactly known for having an abundance of good ideas, especially during times of crisis, which this probably falls under.” I started to flip through the camera systems. “And we can also be more demanding than we should be, like with the whole thing with the Yalayans.”

“And that’s another thing! What was that all about? You could have asked for the condemnation of the Yalayans and the Senate would have probably accepted the proposal. Why go through all this song and dance of cutting off trade altogether?”

“We’ve always been an isolationist species, as evidenced by all of this,” I said as I gestured to the mech. “We’ve never really had anyone else to trade with, so we are used to all of our industries being ‘in house’ so to speak. The people that are getting really hurt by this aren’t really Terrans, because we’ve only just gotten to do trade with the galaxy and we only trade raw materials for currency or technology. But I can see why you aliens are so uptight about the whole issue,” I said, scrolling through the cameras for any wrongdoing the crew may be, well, doing.

She gave a deep sigh before turning and looking at me with a bit of anger in her eyes. “Uptight doesn’t even begin to describe how the Galactic Community feels about the whole thing! My species relies heavily on the iron exports from Terran merchants for the ships that we build and sell off to other species! And that’s not even mentioning the steep discount that your people give us because we buy so much of it! We can’t exactly go to your competitors now because that would drive up the price of the ships we build!” Her voice was getting louder as she continued, causing heads and ears to swivel over to us in curiosity.

I gave a shrug. “Well, like I said, I’m not the one in charge of those decisions, I’m just a guy that wanted to see the galaxy, and the only way to do that was by signing on with a merchant vessel like this. Honest to God, if I knew that this would happen, I would have stayed on the ship that I was living on and gotten a job as a dockhand or something like that, I don’t know. But you need to believe me, I didn’t want any of this.”

She seemed to study the featureless face of the mech I was entombed in and gave a long sigh before turning back to the console. “That is true, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling this way.” There was a pause. “Sorry for taking it out on you.”

If there was ever a time to extend an olive branch, now would be the time for ‘hearts and minds,’ as the old Terran saying went. “Hey, I don’t blame you for reacting the way that you did. If I were in the same boat as you, I would react the same exact way. So, let’s make the most of this situation as we can, yeah?”

She clacked her teeth together, a sign like smiling in humans. “You’re right, I hope that these next few weeks are as productive as we can make them!”

I smiled and nodded. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.