by C. F. Harris
The human shook her head.
"You've got to be fucking me," she said.
I jumped at that. Was that an invitation? As I looked her up and down I had to admit it was an intriguing invitation if that's what it was. Though this was hardly the best time in the middle of a mutiny when the ship was about to blow up around us, but maybe she thought if she was going to go out then…
Then I remembered something from my xenolinguistics classes in the Academy once upon a time. Back in the good old days. Before I'd been forced to take up privateering rather than going into the family business.
The humans liked to use their mating as a curse for some reason. Why a species would use something as wonderful as mating as a curse was beyond me. Mating had always been enjoyable to me, but maybe it was painful for the humans.
Either way the teachers at the Academy had never bothered to explain the origins of that curse. They had merely noted that it was the human custom and told us that if we wanted to sound like a real human then that linguistic quirk was something we’d have to get used to.
“I’m afraid it’s quite true," I said. "We are all about to get, fucked? Is that how you say it? We are all about to get fucked if we don't figure out a way to stop the autodestruct or escape.”
"Something like that," she said, though she seemed amused by how I stumbled over the swearing.
“Did I say something incorrect?” I said. “I’ll admit it’s been some time since I’ve had to make use of Terran idiom.”
“It was fine,” she said, walking over and patting me on the cheek. “It just sounds weird when you try to swear. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
“Fuck,” I said, rolling around the word in my mouth to test it out and see how it felt.
Now that I’d used the word in the same capacity as the Terrans I could understand some of the appeal. The word in my language took several syllables to get across, and it conveyed the sense of making sensual love to someone in an effort to prolong the pleasure and arrive at a successful mating.
The word in Terran was far more succinct and to the point. Fuck. I could see why such a word would become as versatile as the xenolinguistic people said it had.
“So we’re fucked,” I said, getting a feel for the Terran word. “But we can still get out of here. There should be an access panel that will allow us to get into the ship proper and make our way to one of the escape pods.”
“No way,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s all well and good that you want to leave your ship behind after it’s been taken over by mutineers, great job on your hiring practices there, but I’m not leaving my crew behind.”
Amazing. The ship was going to blow around us in a little less than an hour and all she could think about was rescuing her crew?
“You’re serious?” I said.
“Well duh,” she said. “Sure I’m probably going to die in the middle of saving their asses and sure it’s not like I even like half those assholes, but I have to do something about it don’t I?”
I shook my head. Every time I thought this Terran woman couldn’t surprise me any more, she came up with something new that left me staring at her in astonishment.
“You okay there buddy?” she asked. “Because your mouth is hanging open and it’s not a good look for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a surprise.”
“Yeah, well if you’re going to help me then help me. Otherwise you can go out there and die a glorious death firing your plasma gun at the assholes who took over your ship and I’m going to use that access panel to try and get to my people,” she said.
“Right,” I said, pulling myself back into the moment. “I’ll be going with you, thank you. The access panel is in the corner up there.”
“Of course it is,” she said. “Standard Shipyards.”
I wasn’t even surprised as she pulled the access panel down and hoisted her way up into the thing. The Terran woman stuck her head back out of the conduit.
“Are you coming or not? I’d rather not be on this bucket of bolts when it eventually blows.”
I sighed and followed. I told myself it was because she was correct, and not because I was very interested in following behind her in the repair corridors and enjoying the view she was giving me.
This mutiny on a self-destructing ship just got a lot more complicated, but at least the scenery had improved.
15
Rachel
I quickly realized that I was at something of a disadvantage on this bungle through the access conduits.
I snorted as I thought about how this was the one plot hole ancient humans from the twenty-first always complained about, and yet repair conduits were one of the first things that’d been added to real spaceships when they became a going concern and not things that occasionally blew up going in and out of orbit.
It turns out repair crews needed to be able to get to the soft chewy center of a spaceship’s interior for repairs, and the best way to do that was with conduits like this that went to areas that were difficult to get to, which was just about everywhere in a densely packed ship.
I’d seen some of the old arguments between dorks in VR museums of the early Internet and couldn’t help but smile at some of the ancients’ naive thoughts about what space travel would look like. Though they’d been oddly spot on about how many species out here were essentially humans with ridges or different colored skin.
Vrath tapped me on the foot. I waited until we came to a cross corridor before I let him catch up to me, and even then the quarters were close.
I wasn’t worried about him doing something to me. He could fry my ass, literally, any time he wanted with that plasma pistol. No, if he was going to kill me then I figured it already would’ve happened.
If he’d wanted to have a little fun ala those assholes who were trying to peel me out of my little hidey-hole behind bars back in the brig then he could’ve joined in instead of fighting those assholes off.
No, I was more worried about my reaction to this alien hottie. He loomed over me in the confined space of the crossway, and that painful awareness manifested as a longing that twisted my stomach and had me going weak in the knees.
“We need to go this way,” he said, pointing in absolutely the wrong direction if we were going to make it to the cargo bay and rescue my crew.
“Like hell we are,” I said.
“Like the land of wind and ghosts we are?” he asked, frowning. “I don’t understand your meaning.”
I sighed. There were times in xenolinguistics when getting across some concepts in human potty mouth were difficult since there wasn’t exactly an equivalent in whatever language your alien conversational pal came from.
“In earth mythology hell is a place where people go if they’re bad in life where they’re tortured for all eternity,” I said. “At least there were a bunch of religious nutjobs with sticks up their asses who believed that once upon a time. Really metal stuff for a bunch of religious assholes with sticks up their asses too.”
Vrath frowned.
“What does metal have to do with anything?” he asked.
“It’s an idiom referring to a form of classical music on earth that… Y’know what? We really don’t have time for this right now,” I said.
“Clearly the xenolinguistics people at the academy don’t know half of what they were talking about if this is the poor education they gave me.”
I reached out and patted him on the cheek. Hit him with a smile.
“It’s a good thing you’re so cute. Otherwise you might be in serious trouble.”
He looked even more confused. It was a good look for him.
“So do you want to tell me why you’re trying to get us to go to the escape pods after I told you we’re rescuing my crewmates first?” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise. Then off in the direction he’d been pointing. Then back to me. He looked for all the world like some of the kids I used to babysit back home for
extra spending money back before I enlisted and got assigned to glorified interstellar phone repair.
“How did you know that?” he asked.
“Come on,” I said. “This is a Standard Shipyards hull, and from the feel of things you’re using modified Neotrinium Shipyards X42 engines. I’m guessing you need that for overtaking ships you want to hunt down and outrunning the authorities when you need to. Point is, I probably know this ship better than you do.”
His eyes got wider and wider as I listed off everything he had on this baby. I’d like to say I actually had the ability to get all that information just from feeling how the bulkhead vibrated under me, a ship at faster than light could be a girl’s best friend on those long lonely nights between the stars, but the honest truth was I’d seen all of this when I was perusing that open console in the hangar bay.
Not that I had any intention of telling Vrath any of that and ruining some of the mystique. Sometimes it paid for a girl to have a little bit of mystery, after all.
“Amazing,” he said. “But you do realize we’re going to die if we spend any more time on this ship? Look around you.”
I looked around at the flashing red lights. They even had them here in the repair conduits on the off chance there was some dumbass doing repair work when some asshole activated the self-destruct. I looked back to Vrath.
I hoped my stare was as flat and unyielding as it was when I was dealing with contract negotiations with the old man back in earth orbit while he was trying to screw us over.
“Your point?” I said. “Because it sounds to me like you want to wimp out. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to let my friends die on your ship because you can’t remember the password to turn off the self-destruct.”
“It didn’t happen like that,” he said, slamming his fist into the bulkhead and causing a display readout for this particular junction to spiderweb.
I decided to ignore that reminder that he could literally break me in half, and not in all the ways I’d been thinking about since I first laid eyes on him. I sort of had the upper hand, for a change, and I was going to use that.
“Whatever,” I said. “The point is you lost control of your ship. I understand. That sucks. Doesn’t change the fact that my coworkers are the ones with their asses in a vice stuck in a cargo bay they can’t escape being guarded by mutineers in a fight they don’t give a shit about, and I’m the only one free enough to save those asses so I’m going to do it.”
Vrath sighed. “I’m not trying to reach the escape pod to run.”
“Then what are you trying to do? Because it looks an awful lot like you’re trying to run.”
“Those loyal to me are likely still on your ship,” he said. “If we’re going to rescue them then we need to get over to your ship where Vlox no doubt stranded them as part of his plot. He wasn’t planning on me coming back early with you.”
I grinned and he made a disgusted growl in the back of his throat.
“If we’re going to get to them and get help that could actually lead to us retaking this ship before it blows up then we need to get out of this place sooner rather than later,” he said, spelling it out when I didn’t act like I was coming around to his way of thinking with sufficient speed.
“Yeah, and there’s not a chance that’s happening until I’ve freed my crew and they’re on those escape pods too,” I said. “Don’t know how many ways I have to say that.”
I could tell my new alien friend wasn’t happy about that, so I decided to throw a little bit of something in there for him.
“Look,” I said. “I have a lot of experience working on old hunks of junk like this.”
His eyes went wide at that. Clearly he didn’t care for me calling his ship an old hunk of junk. Men. They were the same no matter what species they came from. I rolled my eyes. They all acted like you were insulting their mother or their girlfriend or something when you insulted their ship.
“No insult intended,” I said. “I’m sure this thing is modified to the land of wind and ghosts and back so you can sneak up on poor unsuspecting bastards who have no idea what kind of firepower you’re putting out. The point is I’ve worked on these things before, and if you get me to a main console I might be able to do something about your little problem.”
He grinned. “Now that sounds like a deal, Terran.”
He said it sounded like a deal, but from the way his eyes ran up and down my body I got the feeling there was something else he was thinking about. Maybe a way he wouldn’t mind sealing the deal.
I blushed as I thought about what might be running through his head, keeping up interspecies relations and all that, because it was getting a hell of a reaction out of me as well.
“Right,” I said. “We should probably do something about breaking out my people and getting to that console. The sooner we do that the sooner we can get your ship back in your control and maybe we can part ways from there.”
Of course I had no intention of doing that. This alien might be hot, but it didn’t change the fact that he was a privateer who’d attacked us in Terran space. I had a feeling if he got his ship working again he’d take advantage of the opportunity to continue the plundering where they’d left off.
He’d probably succeed. Even if he was running a reduced crew complement because of the mutiny. I’d just have to make sure we took care of as many of them as possible before I handed his ship back, and even then it’d have to be disabled until we were well out of range.
Not that I had any intention of telling this hot hunk of alien about the double cross until it was already well underway.
16
Vrath
“So you’ve trained creatures that are evolutionarily similar to you on your world to do basic tasks?” I asked, trying to wrap my mind around the concept the Terran woman was trying to explain.
She sighed and pulled away from the console she was tapping away at. We were still in the repair conduits, and I guess Vlox was overlooking this particular avenue of attack because so far we hadn’t run into any patrols.
Which was a good thing. In these confined spaces there was no way I could guarantee the Terran’s continued safety if things went bad.
“It’s a phrase,” she said. “A monkeywrench is a kind of tool back on earth, and throwing one in the works means screwing things up. It doesn’t have anything to do with actual monkeys, so forget I even mentioned them.”
“It is forgotten,” I said.
To be honest it was difficult for me to focus on much of anything but the curve of her body as she held herself close to the screen and occasionally let out one of those inventive Terran curses as she made her way through the ship’s various systems and subroutines.
At least she was trying to make her way through them. I surmised from the volume of swearing that she wasn’t having much luck with her attempts to break through whatever idiocy Vlox had committed that got him locked out of the ship’s computer in the first place.
“Are all humans this skilled with Standard Shipyards systems?” I asked, a small grin coming to my face.
From the way she slammed her fist against the screen and then turned to glare at me she didn’t appreciate my humor. Then she saw the smile and hit me with a little smile of her own.
Her face lit up when she smiled. That, coupled with the way her body curved as she contorted herself in these repair conduits, prompted a stirring between my legs that I didn’t need while we were in the middle of a potentially life-threatening situation.
Sure there was still plenty of time until the ship actually blew up, Vlox was so incompetent he couldn’t even accidentally blow up a ship properly, but that didn’t change the fact that time was counting down towards our sure deaths if we were on the ship when that autodestruct reached zero.
“Actually not all of them are as versed as I am,” she said. “It turns out there are only so many ways to entertain yourself on a ship out in the middle of nowhere when you’re not interested in fucking any of the gu
ys on said ship. I ended up spending a lot of time tinkering with Standard Shipyards stuff.”
“And when you talk about fucking your crew mates you mean that in the literal mating sense of the word, and not in the sense of causing them distress?” I asked, hoping I had the concept right.
Her cheeks colored. Even that was alluring. Maybe it was that I was in the middle of a mutiny and there was a good chance we would both be dead before this was all said and done, but I couldn’t stop thinking of everything about this woman as dangerously alluring. I couldn’t stop thinking about having one final enjoyable moment with a woman before that death came to us.
“Something like that,” she said. “Like I said, there’s not a lot to do on a repair ship making a circuit of the outer systems doing repairs, and there are only so many times I can tell Dirk to get fucked before I voluntarily confined myself to quarters to avoid him.”
“And when you’re saying you told this male to ‘get fucked’ that is in the negative sense of the word and not the fun sense?”
Her eyes ran up and down my body and had me standing at attention. I’m not talking about standing at attention in the sense that instructors at the Academy would think of it either.
“Exactly,” she said, patting my cheek and sending fire pulsing through me with that touch. “You’re starting to get the hang of this!”
I actually felt a flush of pride at that. Before I realized that I was an idiot for feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment at being able to speak an enemy tongue like that.
“Okay,” she muttered. “Getting back to work here. This ship isn’t going to unfuck itself.”
She busied herself with the console, and so I decided not to ask her about the linguistic significance of that word as she’d just used it. Instead I watched with a growing sense of wonder as her fingers danced across the screen and she jumped through systems faster than I would’ve thought possible.