29. Full Capacity
TWENTY-NINE
FULL CAPACITY
Charlie had flagged it in the Niblet habitat three days ago.
The enclosure's ambient warmth was running slightly above the parameters Selowen had established for the juvenile colony, and Charlie wanted to recalibrate the thermal regulator before the variance compounded.
It was a small fix that would take twenty minutes, max.
Reyna had denied the request.
But she didn't deny it because the fix was unnecessary.
There was a perfectly valid reason. The habitat wing itself was undergoing a scheduled systems check and Reyna had locked all non-critical modifications until the check was complete.
Nothing personal, just protocol. The kind of reasonable, by-the-book decision that a captain makes fifty times a day.
But Charlie had submitted the request again. So, Reyna had denied it again. Then Charlie had submitted it a third time with a three-page technical justification. Instead of playing this game of approval tag, Reyna called Charlie into the habitat corridor.
After twenty minutes, they were still standing outside the Niblet enclosure, the conversation having escalated past the point where either of them was using their indoor voice.
"Sometimes you can be so stubborn!" Reyna's voice echoed off the corridor walls. "And arrogant! And a real fucking pain in my ass."
Charlie turned around quickly. "Stubborn and arrogant?
! Well, listen here, Captain." The title landed like a gauntlet.
"I'm stubborn because I'm right, and I'll so much as die first before I let anything go wrong on my watch.
And arrogant? Same fucking reason, because I'm right.
So, forgive me for being stubborn and arrogant about the god-damn Niblet habitat so the little space potatoes don't fucking die! "
She was breathing heavily. Reyna's eyes were wide, watching Charlie, her own chest heaving.
Charlie stared into her eyes, her frustration and exasperation turning to something else.
She watched as Reyna's eyes grew dark. Charlie's breathing didn't slow as she felt desire begin to lick against the edges of her anger, rapidly turning into something entirely different.
That's new.
The quiet of the corridor was suddenly deafening.
They were so close that Charlie became entirely too aware of the heat radiating from Reyna's skin.
She realized she knew this already, the way she always had when they were this near.
But this time the heat was different, sharpened by anger and adrenaline and months of pretending this wasn't exactly what Charlie was trying to control.
Suddenly, her control was slipping.
Until Reyna's face softened. Her jaw unclenched and her brow smoothed while her expression began to morph into something Charlie didn't expect.
Laughter.
Reyna started laughing. And heartily, it seemed.
She hadn't heard Reyna laugh like this for a long time, and Charlie realized how much she had missed the sound, the laugh Reyna allowed when a whole situation was so absurd that even the Captain couldn't hold her composure.
She realized now how much her laugh had come to mean to her, causing her frustration and anger to evaporate like steam off a hot engine.
And then, Charlie began to laugh right along with her.
They stood in the habitat corridor, outside an enclosure full of alien creatures that looked like potatoes with legs, laughing so hard that Charlie had to brace herself against the wall and Reyna had to press a hand over her mouth.
Neither of them could look at the other without setting off another wave.
"The little space potatoes," Reyna managed, tears in her eyes. "You called them little space potatoes."
"They look like potatoes!" Charlie shrieked through her laughter.
"They are a protected species, Charlie," Reyna deadpanned, her laugh only slightly diminished
"Well, then they're protected space potatoes and I will die for them, apparently."
And then Reyna laughed again, that precious, impossible laugh, and Charlie felt the last of any anger dissolve into something warmer, something more dangerous. And then it was a single thought, in one single moment, when Charlie realized she was in real, deep trouble.
I would fight with you every day for the rest of my life if it ended like this.
Reyna approved the temperature fix that afternoon.
Two days later, the emergency rescue alarm went off at 0600, and Tavi was already knocking at Charlie’s door by the time she’d pulled her boots on.
“There’s been an accident,” Tavi said, already talking as she opened the door.
“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, turning to him as she pulled her utility belt on.
“Sylpha Canopy. It’s a jungle world in the Threshw Reach.
It’s an area that’s all forest with no ground to speak of and the whole biosphere lives up in the trees.
It’s a Coalition-protected canopy. Nobody is ever supposed to fly cargo through the atmosphere at all.
But of course someone had to be dumb, and a hauler took the shortcut overnight.
Which of course means he hit weather and came completely apart on the way through the atmosphere itself. ”
“Jesus. Are there any casualties?”
“The crew was able to get off ship. They’re fine.
In a shit ton of trouble, but that’s not the problem.
” Tavi was bouncing on his heels. “The hauler was carrying composite netting, kilometers of it, and it all came down into the canopy. The Canoplyn Gliders live up there. Little ones, only about this big,” Tavi then held his hands about a single foot apart.
“Their membranes are like flower petals, and they launch off the branches to glide between the trees. It’s the one and only way they can get anywhere.
And now there’s a net across four hundred meters of their glide corridors.
The little guys keep launching into it.”
“And every one that hits it—"
“Makes it worse, yeah,” Tavi answered. “The net’s tangling tighter and tighter with every animal that launches into it, gets stuck, and struggles. The count just keeps climbing. So far, there are forty that we can see but, it’ll definitely be more by the time we get down there.”
He was already walking down the corridor as Charlie closed the door to her quarters and jogged to catch up with him. “The team is already prepping the shuttle. Torvax is carrying the mission with the leaders on the bridge. Cael’s going to run the approach sequence.”
The corridor outside Engineering was busy with crew members routing around each other with the efficient urgency of a team that knows how to handle an emergency mission.
Maren was already standing at the shuttle bay junction, waiting for Tavi and Charlie with her datapad in hand, her shimmer active while she processed the environmental data from her datapad of the debris field.
Two Engineering assistants were beside her running final checks on the containment equipment they would use to collect the Gliders.
As Charlie and Tavi approached, Maren fell into step with them as they all approached the shuttle, the two assistants tagging along with the containment equipment.
Then Tavi stopped in the middle of the corridor, took out his datapad, and held one finger up. Everyone stopped.
“Everything okay, Tav?” Charlie asked
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve just been... working on something.”
“Tavi, we have forty animals stuck in a net that need our help,” Charlie said.
“Forty-one now,” Tavi said as he tapped the datapad.
“Even more reason to—"
Then the corridor speakers came alive, and the opening of “Back in Black” by AC/DC hit the walls like a door being kicked in. With the guitar’s four notes punching a hole in the air, every head in the corridor turned.
Charlie turned fully and stared at Tavi, who had a grin plastered on his face.
“You found AC/DC.”
“I did.”
“And you...?”
“I found inspiration,” Tavi said, his chin coming up, and a look in his face Charlie had never seen on him before. She realized it was pride, and it may have been the first time that it wasn’t about a system he’d fixed.
“You told me there was a difference, Spark Plug. That there’s music for pushing through the problem and music for letting the problem come to you.” He shrugged with his whole small body. “This is my push for the first kind.”
Charlie stared at her friend, in a corridor on a spaceship forty light-years from the basement where she’d first heard this song and understood that her music had gotten out into the universe and gone completely feral, belonging not just to her, but now to so many other beings, species from all over the galaxy.
“Shall we?” Tavi asked, his grin staying where it was as he began walking to the shuttle.
Charlie turned on her heel to watch him walk, his stride definitely moving to the beat.
And so she started to walk, falling into step beside him.
She looked around at her team as they moved down the corridor.
Tavi beside her, all three feet ten inches of absolute confidence displayed, Maren on her other side, shimmer blazing, seeming to match the energy of the moment.
And even the two Engineering assistants flanking them.
The group of five people walking down a corridor on an alien rescue vessel toward a shuttle that would take them to a jungle world, cutting forty flying squirrels out of a net, and here was AC/DC, a rock band from Earth, scoring the walk like the universe had sent Charlie Wickett into the void to find the equivalent of her people in the vastness of space.
Charlie grinned, her smile spreading across her face as she looked over a Tavi. “Nice.”
“I know,” Tavi said.