She returned to the workstation, wishing for a glass of actual water. None of the others understood her yearning for water, as though the idea of hydrogen and oxygen creating something so glorious never crossed their minds. Their lizard DNA prevented them from enduring the forge’s heat for long, meaning she often worked alone. Most of the time, she didn’t mind it, but, tonight, the loneliness crept in. The calendar she kept for herself, measured in Earth units—an archaic method of time-mapping since Earth no longer existed, but one she’d learned on the ship and kept to—marked the twelfth year since she and her brother were separated and the fifteenth since they’d been sold. Still, she kept faith.
Sometime later, a shadow fell over her workstation. One of the nyx, in its titanium suit, stood in the doorway, a mess of strange sounds coming through the speaker in the center. Shadi narrowed her eyes. In her captivity, she’d learned to read the nyx through these odd noises, which she’d used to piece together a language. The hisses and gurgles were all she knew, and since these creatures were incapable of facial expressions, they were all she had. After a moment, it turned back around as though to leave then swiveled back toward her. She supposed they needed her. And when they needed her, something was usually broken.
***
She hadn’t expected a ship, at least not one so…pieced together. An old Class-II scorpion-tail cruiser that might’ve held two people and a small captain’s quarters, it appeared to have been converted somewhere along the way, upgraded in ways that didn’t matter in the end. Certainly lacked any sort of cosmetic upgrades. The patchwork hull sported plenty of dings and pockmarks from space debris, and the windscreen needed replacing as soon as possible, though she could probably reseal it and make it last long enough for the pilot to reach safety.
Curiosity got the better of her where the pilot was concerned. If ships required her expertise, they belonged to traders the nyx leader wanted to impress. Regardless of her ignorance concerning their language, she’d learned to associate the ships with the traders. This was not a trader ship.
Or a slaver ship.
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the scorpion, she looked around for the pilot but found more nyx and a couple of her fellow slaves preparing to bunk down for the evening. As she worked, the guard grabbed a luminary and flicked it on. The tiny machine whirred to life and perched on her shoulder, providing more light than anything else she’d seen. “Thank you,” she said.
The nyx gurgled a response that she hoped was, “You’re welcome.” No sense in being rude.
After a few minutes of searching, she located the issue—a cooling coil that had gone bad and caused a blowout through the rest of the engine. Not a difficult fix, but it’d be time consuming. She sighed and rolled her shoulders. Time to get to work.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
~A Note from the Author~
Desert Tryst (1Night Stand) Page 5