Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
ELAINA
The moment her boots hit the station floor, Elaina sensed that something was very wrong here. The disturbance was a shiver under her skin. She cleared her throat in the stuffy air. Filtration was definitely compromised. She’d have to take care of that first.
It almost took her mind off Cyan, disembarking behind her. He made her think in a way nobody else had before. Was it him, or was it just that she was making an effort not to shut down and let herself connect with someone? Was that what it was like?
This is trouble.
Elaina looked around, searching for the distant voices raised in frustration. First Officer Bor Petters was waiting for her at the shuttle bay exit.
“Fairan,” he said, urgent. “You need to come with me.”
She fell into step beside him as he led her to the bridge, trying to ignore the sudden feeling of weightlessness as she was hit by the station’s artificial grav. She felt as though she would lift off, though obviously her feet were firmly planted on the floor. Each stride was lighter, longer.
Cyan’s footsteps echoed behind her, along with the languid clicking of claws on metal, occasionally punctuated by a small stumble as the warg surely also got used to the unique sensation.
They entered the primary command center, then went right through to the tech hub, where the station’s systems were housed.
“The most critical thing broken right now is the ox filtration system.” Bor told her what she’d already guessed. He pointed her to a terminal in the corner. “That’s the debugging entry point. I’ve set up the access codes, but you’ll need to be quick. The system’s been offline for the better part of the sol.”
Elaina had just landed on a station with one of the worst problems imaginable: breathable air. She glanced back at Priad, who was gazing expectantly at his master as Cyan spoke to another officer, muttering something about quarters. If she had already sensed the diminished airflow, it’d be even worse for the warg’s smaller lungs. She had to get to work. Now.
Elaina plopped into the rolling seat at the terminal, tucking one foot under her thigh as she opened up the debugging datacore and plugged in, getting to work.
A few seconds later, she remembered herself.
“Hey, Bor, can we get another chair for—” She glanced over her shoulder to beckon Cyan over, only to find both him and Priad gone. She shrugged, turning back to the display in front of her. A familiar current tugged at her fingertips, and she was ready to dive into it.
Hours later, the ox filtration system was pumping at optimal volumes again, and Elaina had moved through sanitation, solar shields, and radiation monitoring systems. Unlike her last stay at the station, this time most of the damage was more… well, graceful was the only way to put it. Last time she was crawling all over the ship, rearranging wiring and soldering PCBs and other onboard components. Now most systems could be restored remotely, which one would think should make it easier.
It was not. Whereas physical damage was easily diagnosed and repaired, this was trickier—firmware issues. And each system she went into manifested the problems slightly differently. Each component was harder to debug, harder to repair. By the time Elaina got the critical systems back up, her brain hurt.
She rubbed her eyes and spoke into the mic installed at the comms station: “Bor, go check the airlock doors in Portside Two now. The leak should be sealed, I hope.”
“Roger.”
Elaina tensed at a new voice behind her: “How are you getting on?”
She turned her head slightly, speaking over her shoulder. “Good, thanks.”
As Cyan approached, the warm, rich smell of spiced labba stew filled the air. The scent of slow-cooked meat, tatt roots, and a hint of earthy herbs made her stomach rumble despite the stress of the sol. She looked up as he set the containers down beside her.
Elaina had realized she’d gotten used to seeing Cyan in his armor. The white shirt that was loosely fitted around his broad torso and had a series of actual physical buttons instead of magnetic clasps made him look so casual somehow.
Elaina cleared her throat and eyed the chunks of labba marinating in the steaming bowls.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I’m a vegetarian.”
“Oh, right.” His face fell a little .
“But I’m not that picky,” she resigned despite herself. “I’ll just eat all the other good stuff. Maybe Priad wants the meat?”
“You sure?” Cyan leaned on an empty spot at the bench, crossing his arms over his chest. The sleeves of that old timey shirt were rolled up to his forearms, and she noted the faded ink markings running from his wrists and underneath the fabric.
“Yeah. Thanks for getting it.” She pushed her keyboard forward to make space for the bowl, and as the scent hit her once more she wondered if maybe she should reconsider her vegetarianism just this one time.
She was starving.
“Did they get you a cabin?” she asked casually, blowing on the spoonful of hot stew that she was dying to put in her mouth.
“Yes.”
“Not portside, I hope. I haven’t patched that airlock yet.”
Also, her cabin was always on starboard. Not that it mattered, of course.
“Actually, yeah. They told me to clear out for a bit. But I had work to do anyway.”
He said his work was about these tech glitches, and that work was being done here. By her. What other work did he mean? But it wasn’t her place to ask. She barely knew the man, or what he did.
“Where’s your giant sword?” she asked instead. Or was that too personal too?
Cyan turned slightly, exposing the massive weapon strapped to his left hip. It definitely did not look practical, but who was she to judge a man’s sword?
“Right… I don’t know that you’ll need a sword here. You may as well not drag it around,” she said .
Cyan adjusted it on his waist, then patted the hilt. “It remains with me always.”
“ Always? ”
He arched an eyebrow. “Okay, it remains with me almost always.”
Elaina focused on her stew.
They ate in silence, Elaina devouring her food much faster than he did—she hadn’t realized how hungry she was while so focused on her work. In fact, she hadn’t eaten since breakfast planetside that morning, and that was nearly a full sol ago.
“Can I give him these?” She tilted the bowl toward Cyan to display the leftover pieces of labba she didn’t eat.
“Sure.”
Priad’s furry ears perked up when she approached him with the bowl.
“Tell him to sit first.”
Elaina raised a finger and looked sternly at the warg, whose tail was now flopping back and forth enthusiastically. “Priad, sitka .”
The beast cocked his head to the side, tongue lolling out.
“ Sitka ,” she repeated.
Another second later, Priad’s butt plopped firmly on the floor in that funny way he had, his expression unchanging as he stared between her and the bowl in her hand.
“Good boy!” Elaina praised, then looked back at Cyan, who nodded. She set the bowl on the floor, grinning as the warg tucked in with wanton enthusiasm.
“So tell me about the glitches,” Cyan said once she was back in her seat, watching the screen running diagnostics on the critical systems she’d already repaired.
Elaina groaned at the red lines flicking past a sea of white and green. The ox filtration was acting up again .
“Crap,” she said. “Hold on, let me look at this.”
“Can I look too?”
“Sure,” she said absently as she propped a foot on the chair and hunched over the keyboard.
The nape of her neck prickled as Cyan leaned over behind her to look at her screen. This was the closest they’d gotten. She hadn’t noticed before, but he had a subtle spicy, woody scent to him. Elaina bit her lip and tried to focus on the display as he leaned closer and reached one arm over to prop himself against the table, bracketing her in. His breath on her skin made focusing harder than it should’ve been. The proximity was distracting, making her stomach flop in a way she wished she didn’t like so much.
Elaina cleared her throat.
“This isn’t a glitch,” she said as her fingers picked over the keyboard.
“What?”
“You said to tell you about the glitches. This is not a glitch.”
She navigated into the system’s flux component, accessing the firmware code and scanning for the telltale signs of the pattern she’d noticed.
“Then what is it?”
“Of course.” She groaned. “It’s changed again. Every time it’s different.”
The tension in Cyan’s voice was palpable. “What’s different, Elaina?”
She’d noticed it before, and her initial hunch had been confirmed throughout the sol. At first it looked like random runtime code corruption. Memory addresses missing, null pointers leading to nowhere. Like something had fucked with the firmware at random. But each time she tackled a new system, the corruption grew more sophisticated. Too sophisticated to be a bug .
Elaina marveled at the way the affected code-point had been modified at runtime to inject an intermittent flux surge at escalating intervals until the system overloaded. Once she narrowed it down and excised it, bringing the ox filtration system back to optimal capacity, she leaned back in her seat, Cyan’s presence even more palpable behind her. He rose and watched her, a frown knotting his brows.
“It’s a virus,” she said.