Fifteen minutes into my marathon tantrum, Jophixa - in an extremely no nonsense tone - issued me an ultimatum; I could go to my quarters and cool off under my own steam, or I could be dragged there after she knocked me unconscious. Even through my anger, I remembered how strong she was, and how much our first meeting had hurt; So I moved myself to my quarters to continue to rant and rave for at least another hour.
Stacy continuously tried to calm me down with suggestions of how we could better use the time. Those suggestions were full of lewd acts of course. When I reflected later, I really wasn’t sure where she was getting all those ideas from. I know I didn’t have that kind of variety of porn in my personal files. Unless Boudya had hidden some there as a prank. Frankly, if I’d been in my right mind at that point, some of the things Stacy suggested might have made me faint in shock!
It wasn’t until around two hours later when I felt small, strong hands suddenly spin me around from where I was pacing, and launched several feet to bounce once off my bed, collide with the padded headboard, then land in a heap back on the mattress.
“If you are quite finished!”
I looked up to see Jophixa standing about where I had been a moment ago, hands balled and resting on her generous hips, glaring at me with a look that half reminded me of my mother the day I’d been escorted home after getting into a brawl at school. Is that an expression that men just inspire in women? Or do they practice at it? I think Boudya leveled the same one at me the last time I saw her.
Blinking, I rubbed my shoulder where it had collided with the headboard. My brain seemed to be in the process of rebooting, stuck running the memory diagnostics. “Uh…maybe?” I said, brilliantly, tearing my eyes away from where they’d drifted back to her hips, and forced them to meet her hard violet eyes. “Was there something you needed C..commander?”
“Yes there is something I need.” she stormed over to me, and I had to firmly block out comments Stacy was making in the back of my mind regarding how this was the way certain adult videos started.
“I need you to get your head back in the game Mr. Aacen.” she barked. Grabbing me by the front of my shirt and pulling me upright. “In case you forgot, there aren’t that many Giobhioni left in the galaxy, as far as we know, and there’s a Ktonshi contagion out there, possibly already turning members of your species into members of theirs. We know nothing of your Commonwealth, nothing of the other species in this quadrant of the galaxy. Or of this time period. You are our only contact out here.
“I’m willing to put rescuing your sister and this Boudya person in the priority list of this mission.” She continued, “Even a high priority, if you can give me a reason for how it’ll help with the rest, but I need you thinking, and telling me what our next move is! Where do we go from here?”
Clearing my throat, my brain started to spin up like a first generation tunnel drive - slow, clunky, and threatening to go offline again if breathed on wrong - I brought a hand up and tapped her arm. “I’m back in the land of rational thought Commander.” I told her, “Thanks for snapping me out of it, even if I think I’m gonna have to visit the Doc to make sure my shoulder isn’t dislocated.” I smiled at her, “That time I deserved it, but you still owe me for our first meeting.”
She blinked, then scowled at me. “Don’t try to flirt with me Aacen,” she growled, “Now is not the time for that bullshit.”
“Just having a bit of fun in the midst of impending doom,” I said, shrugging, then moved to get up. Jophixa held me in place for a moment or two, before seeming to realize she was still gripping my shirt and letting go. “Fucking Fleet bureaucrats. Okay, I’m assuming you don’t want to just head back to the station, get more crew and plan from there?” Jophixa bared her sharp teeth at me, the Giobhioni equivalent of shaking her head. “Right then. Suggestions for first priorities? We need some sort of comms relay so we can utilize Commonwealth comms assets without having to pop out of hyperspace to do it. Then, with your permission, I need to find Boudya and my Sister. They should be together, since before I let Barstol drag me on this Void Damned job, I set up a timed communications drop to her. Not through the StellarNet, but delivered to her on a data drive. If I’m lucky, she grabbed Jesse - my sister - and high tailed it to a safehouse. Boudya might have more information, and suggestions for who to contact that might actually listen.”
“And then?”
“My best suggestion is for us to figure out where Barstol actually took that derelict.” I scratched my head, starting to pace again now that I was on my feet. “Someone was funding that salvage operation, which means they somehow knew the location of a derelict alien ship far outside known space. Something tells me they’ve got a part to play…besides the obvious of course. In my experience, people that get that kind of information aren’t simple salvage brokers. We need to ask them some pointed questions.”
“Two out of three of those jobs seem like a you thing.” Jophixa returned. “There are three other people on this ship…”
“Four!”
Jophixa rolled her eyes at Stacy’s outburst. “You aren’t technically on the ship, Stacy. But fine, four others on the ship. What can we be doing to move this situation forward? I don’t like sitting on a tratsnack waiting to be useful anymore than you do! You’re going to need someplace to put that relay you were talking about right? Some place relatively secure, at least until Stacy can get the crew back…home… building others. I’ll get Be’tsar Prexiu scanning nearby systems for possible locations. Maybe we can embed it in an asteroid to make it less obvious.”
Nodding, I sat down at the little computer terminal she’d made sure was in my quarters. “As soon as I can patch the relay into the StellarNet, Stacy can explain to the Doc how to access it and dive into the anatomy resources for current Sophont species. Maybe something will jump out at her, something that’d make one of them more resistant to the contagion? Long shot maybe, but best I can think of.”
“And I can help you get that relay set up to be secure in the meantime.” she finished, “You might be an engineer, but I bet I’m better than you at setting up security encryption.”
“No bet. I haven’t forgotten you were the security chief first.” I chuckled, “In fact, I’m gonna have to remember to start keeping my personal log somewhere especially secure in case you decide to go checking on my motives or something.”
Of all things, I had not expected her to blush. Had she already read my personal log?
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
I was not about to broach that topic with Jophixa. There just didn’t seem like any way of coming out of it on the winning side. Anyway, we had work to get down to.
Seemed she was thinking the same thing, as she cleared her throat and reclaimed her composure, “We’ll want to get moving. It’s fair to assume, if your Commonwealth law enforcement is anything like ours was, they may try and trace our signal. We don’t want to be here if they do.”
I nodded, “Good point, and something else to consider with this relay. If they find it, we’ll lose access to communications and information from within the commonwealth. Going to take some thinking on that. For now though, I’m going to check to see if I have any messages from Boudya”
Jophixa cocked her head in a giobhioni affirmative, and headed off to the bridge.
“Hey Stacy?” I asked out loud when she’d left
“Yes Sweet-cheeks?”
“Please encrypt my personal log with the best encryption you can. And please, by all the Stars Light, warn me if she goes snooping in it again!”
Laughter rang out in my quarters as I sat down and got my little Frankenstein comms unit configured for StellarNet access.
It took me two hours, but I finally managed to patch into the ‘Net. I believe I said before that I wasn’t a software or security engineer, right? It was only the fact that an old school friend had shown me a trick for piggy-backing through our school's gateway that let me do it so fast.
Of course, I didn’t use my school’s gateway for this. That would have been something they’d likely check on. No, I tapped in through a random facility I knew of that had a very sloppy I.T. department. And after I was connected, I made sure to bounce the connection through a few other servers. This was a trick that went all the way back to the original internet back in the twentieth century, but it still worked to at least delay anyone tracking you. And we had Stacy to monitor the connections and cut the connection to our relay if needed.
Without someone more versed in StellarNet security, it was the best I could do for now. If Boudya had her life-mate with her and we could meet up with them, they could get things set up better. For now, this would have to do. It would at least let me check the few places I could think where Boudya might drop me a covert message.
First place I checked was her social media, especially Metagram.
I wouldn’t say Boudya was especially vain, not for a benastian. Her appearance was a means to an end, just like with all of them. And that end was the pleasures of the flesh. Boudya’s Metagram account was her way to reel in possible dalliances that caught her fancy. But she also sometimes left sly messages for those already in her life through her posts.
Sure enough, one of her most recent posts, before an out of character absence, was an image of her in a scandalously unzipped coverall, drenched in something bearing a strong resemblance to hydraulic lubricant. The caption read “Thinking of old friends. We sure got into some slippery situations”
That memory. She got my message, and she’d slipped away. Now I just had to figure out where she’d gone, and how to contact her.
I scoured her MyBook, her OpenSkies, even went so far as her HEX and FanService accounts (oh were there a lot of comments about that site from Stacy. Pretty sure she made up her own account the moment she saw what it was.), but I was just not seeing any hints. And yes, I did check the obvious, like direct messages and email. Even checked junk mail folders to be sure, and there was nothing.
“She had to have left me some kind of clue to where to meet up!” I growled in frustration, and was about to close out of FanService, when a direct message hit my inbox from the site’s “manager”.
Staring at it, it had the subject line “Congrats! You won!” with a string of emojis after it. Ordinarily, I ignore such things as garbage, anyone with a lick of sense does. They’re just some kind of promotional garbage to get you to spend credits. And honestly, I had way too much going on right now to be wasting time on a social media porn site.
But something about that string of emoji’s tickled my memory. A spaceship, a bathtub, a mountain…and an eggplant.
“She couldn’t have…”
Figuring it wasn’t like I had much to lose at that point, I opened the message, and the image of a Japanese style hot springs bath, deep in a mountainous jungle. Shining rings circled the planet overhead, as well as three small moons. Candles were set around the natural stones surrounding the bath, setting an intimate tableau perfect for a lover's tryst.
The caption under the image read “A trip to the baths of Yantari 3 is yours, to live out a week that will be etched in your memory for the rest of your life. The perfect place to wash away the stress of life’s mishaps and salvage your sanity.
Join the FanService model of your dreams and find out what favors lie in store for you.”
The memories of a week spent on Yantari 3 with Boudya after we graduated from university flooded my mind and had me sprawling back on my lounge chair. It took Stacy “shouting” at me, directly in my brain to pull me out of my reverie. “Damn, that must’ve been one hell of a memory, Engineer of my Lust!” She said when I finally snapped out of it. “It’d be totally embarrassing if the Commander were to pop in right now”
With a glance down at myself, I blushed, and adjusted the way I was sitting so my reaction to the memory wasn’t so obvious. “It was indeed one hell of a memory! A week in paradise with a benastian isn’t something you ever forget.” I explained. “Nor something that should be forgotten.” I laughed at myself at that point. “The good news though, is I think I know where we’ll find Boudya and my sister, as long as the law hasn’t tracked her there before us.”
I stood up to go give Jophixa the news, but Stacy caught my attention, “Tommy-kins! Wait!” she called, “there’s something here about responding to claim your prize, and one of those link things.”
I swore at myself and sat back down to look. Sure enough, there was a request to confirm a booking, and a link to do so. Normally, again, it’d be a bad idea to click a link in such questionable mail, but since the ship's main computer, and my suits main memory stores were not hooked up to this rig, it wasn’t about to fry anything we couldn’t replace; so I went ahead and selected the link.
The holoscreen immediately started glitching out, causing me to panic and reach for the cables I’d rigged to disconnect power from both devices in case this whole experiment went catastrophic, but then a familiar voice hit my ears. “Aacen! It’s about fracking time! I was starting to think the bastard had killed you!”
Looking back at the holoscreen, I smiled into the gleaming, obsidian eyes of my old friend and once lover. “Boudya!” I let out a cry of relief, ignoring the look of annoyance on her face. “You’re safe! Is Jesse with you?”
“She’s sleeping.” she said, moving slightly, and letting the camera show my sister lying prone on a crisp hotel bed, sound asleep, before taking over the view again. “Getting here wasn’t easy Thomas, and we’re both exhausted. What in the Void is going on, and you better be on your way to pick us up, because while I think I covered our tracks well enough, Enigma Osiris seems to be pulling a lot of stops to track your sister. And that idiot Teberman seems to be buying into whatever pintasa he’s selling!”
“Yeah, I had a Fleetsec officer tell me a few hours ago to submit myself to the nearest starbase for questioning regarding the two of you.” I explained, shaking my head, “and this after I tried informing them that the ship Barstol is hauling back to civilization is carrying an ancient alien plague.”
“WHAT?!”
“Long story,” I said, “And Barstol tried to kill me. Left me to die on the barren planetoid the alien ship was on. That man would be infuriated if he knew what he missed in his haste to leave me behind to die. Oh, and I have someone I want to introduce to your life-mate, is he with you?”
“He refused to stay behind.” she grumbled, “probably for the best though, they’d likely have him locked in a dark room, questioning him on where we went if he’d stayed behind. You still haven’t answered my question though; Are you coming to get us?”
“As long as the Commander of this ship doesn’t object.” I explained. We have a few logistic things to work out before we can get underway. Comms access is a bit…complicated right now, and we’re trying to fix that. Speaking of that; do you have the means to pick up at least a couple of long range communication consoles? I kind of had to cannibalize my suit to make this call.”
“You cannibalized your suit? Comms must be tricky for you to do that.”
“You have no idea, but you’ll find out when we pick you up. Stay alert, and if you spot any Cops or EOsec goons snooping around, I’ve set up a comms address under ‘SexySt@cy-48359’ that will alert the person monitoring it. Just put in the subject line “Wanted: Short Green Bitches that’ll kick your ass”. We’ll know you’re in trouble.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I expect one hell of a story from all this Thomas, and you owe me big time. Remember that!”
“I’ve never forgotten Boudya. I owe you for not listening to you then, and I owe you for now. Just keep your head on a swivel, and we’ll be there as quick as we can!”
“You better be!” she declared, and then the holoscreen glitched out again before settling back onto the previous FanService message center. The previous message about being a winner was nowhere to be seen.
“SexySt@cy?” her inquiry was laced with charmed amusement.
“What? You are, aren’t you?” I got up and hurried towards the door. “Sexy is mostly in the mind after all, and that’s 100% of where you are for me!”
I did so love hearing her laugh.