Chapter 6 #2
“Komelli understands the importance of urgency with our particular situation. Now, I’ve gotta get going. I’ll be back in three hours, tops.” She walked over to the exit and gave a parting wave, opening the bay doors just wide enough for her to sidle through and out into the station beyond.
Working double-time with half the crew and the riskiest jobs. Marius would have loved this chaos.
The doors closed, and Davik breathed out a quiet prayer to whoever out there would listen.
“Just help us get him home. He deserves to be the one here, not me. Please.”
A beast of a ship as old as The Argent was a reliable thing.
Reliably in need of repairs. Re-sealing, corrosion prevention, maintaining coolant levels.
Even the hydraulics on the doors were prone to seizing without a little love now and then.
They had gone too long between machinery check-ups while they were preparing to spring Marius out of cryo, and now it was time for Davik to give her some much-needed attention.
I need a check-up too. Two hours of sleep isn’t going to cut it with this workload.
Davik was shoulder-deep in an access panel, trying to figure out why he was getting warning pings from this junction when he heard a metallic clink. Then footsteps. A rustle of movement behind him, just beyond his periphery.
A dangerous sense of déjà vu washed over him.
In a heartbeat, he was flung to memories from five years ago, working on a beautiful modern cargo cruiser.
One with proper crew cabins, and a pseudograv drive that didn’t fail every six months.
It was a top-of-the-line vessel that they had saved for years to get.
His pride and joy. A gorgeous, sleek craft.
One that he had been lovingly calibrating while they were docked at a somewhat sketchy station.
Just like the one they had docked at that morning.
He never got a good glimpse of the four strangers.
They were masked, armed, brutally augmented, and they had breached that ship without a whisper of alarm.
All while Carissa and Marius were away. They beat Davik half to death, dropped him off at the docks, and flew off with the ship and their entire cargo load.
And now he was alone on The Argent, with history about to repeat itself. This was all he had left. This was all his family had left. Their only way out of this impossible situation relied on this ship. Relied on him.
You can’t lose it all again.
He gritted his teeth and gripped the wrench in his hand with all his strength. The lines of augmented tendon embedded in his knuckles creaked in protest. With a grunt, he wheeled around to bear down on the intruder with a swing so fast he could hear the whistle of air as his arm soared.
Then his arm met flesh, the wrench went flying, and the blow glanced off whatever he had struck. Before the tool even hit the ground, he was spun around with his face pressed against the aluminum wall, his arms pinned behind his back.
“Well, good morning to you too, Davik.”
Fia was so close to his neck that her surprised chuckle carried a flutter of heat along his ear. A bolt of relief rippled down his spine, despite the fact that he was still in a very precarious position.
“I am so, so, so sorry,” he babbled, mortification replacing his fear. “I thought I was alone on the ship, and—”
“Do you usually greet your guests like this?” she interrupted, her voice low and her hands still holding him firmly pinned.
“Not usually, but my guests are rarely intergalactic women of mysterious and potentially violent means.”
She clicked her tongue disapprovingly as she released him.
He should have felt something other than disappointment at that. He should be embarrassed, not wondering if he could find an excuse to continue the roughhousing.
Great. Getting turned on from being assaulted. By an Icthian. The fuck is wrong with you? You don’t need to add more weird kinks to your list.
“No harm done. You have an impressive swing,” she noted, gesturing to the new dent in the wall where the wrench had flown into it. He groaned, and she hid her growing smile behind her hand. “I will make a note to announce my presence when I stroll around in the future.”
“You know, usually people are upset when they’re attacked by their hosts. How bad were the manners of your old crew?”
“Sparring was a common form of entertainment. So, I am not averse to kinetic communication,” she murmured as she stepped forward, peering into the access port he had been investigating. “Lose something? Or do you just like exploring mysterious holes?”
Was that a double entendre? Do Icthians make double entendres?
“Uh, yes. No, I mean—” He gestured to his datapad, currently displaying a litany of warning messages. “Something’s messing with the coolant systems here. The pressure is off, it’s not circulating right.”
The dark scales along her brow shot up in concern, and she coiled her arms around herself. “This ship is already freezing. You wish to make it colder?”
“Oh, god no. It’s for the engines. The reactor, specifically.
” He gave the wall a little tap. “We diffuse the waste heat throughout the ship. Technically, that actually keeps us warm. But if the coolant gets backed up, or doesn’t move the heat well enough, well …
You’ll be suddenly very, very hot. And then, very dead. ”
“Ah, hardware. Not my specialty.” She uncrossed her arms and swiveled on her heels, looking away from Davik and staring straight up at the pipe that led down the corridor.
It was rude to stare, but he couldn’t help it.
She was distracted, and he was curious. The clothes she borrowed were made for a much shorter and much narrower human.
His eyes traced from her calves up to the swell of her thighs and along the curve of her hips.
He examined with great scrutiny how taut the fabric of her shorts was.
She might have broken a claw trying to pull those damn things on.
He could see exactly where the coloration of the scales on her thighs shifted from a dark green to a lighter, paler color. While she lacked an actual tail, she had a fantastic tail in the less literal sense of the word.
“There is a power failure in this panel,” she murmured, snapping him out of his lechery. “Might that be the problem?”
She’s lost and stranded. Don’t make this weird. You’re making this weird. Reel it back in, man. She’s a refugee. She’s your coworker now, too. Coworker. And a refugee. And Icthian. As in, not human. Not that your track record with human women is stellar.
“What, can you smell grid failures or something?” he said, adjusting his stance to lessen the strain on the front of his pants. He thanked the powers that be that she was too busy staring at the panel on the ceiling to notice.
“Something like that,” she murmured.
Despite helping her walk around the day before, he didn’t realize how tall she was until now.
He usually needed a crate or a ladder to fuss with the ceiling panels, but she could reach them without even getting on her tiptoes.
She had been in various stages of slumped over, hunched, or half-dead during their last few interactions.
It hadn’t really registered. But now she was a tall figure of grace.
She reached up with one hand and pried the panel open with a jerk, and an immediate cloud of dust showered both of them. She swatted it away wildly, and they both fell into a fit of coughing and laughter.
Okay. Not too much grace. But definitely tall.
“Sorry! I should have warned you. This ship needs a lot of housekeeping.” He offered her a rag to dust herself off, and she grumbled appreciatively as she tidied up. “Huh. I’ll be damned. That panel does look dark.”
“Mmm. Yes. Those are wires,” she said, looking at the panel and nodding astutely. “Just as I suspected.”
He snorted. “No, see? Those indicators, they’re all dim. Likely a fuse blew somewhere.”
“And if we do not fix this, the coolant system stops cooling, and we boil to death?”
“Best-case scenario, we end up with a locked reactor and are drifting without power. Worst-case scenario, there would be no time to boil. We’d have an asymmetrical failure, and the reactor would melt down and send us out with a bang.”
She turned to eye him, her scaled brow-ridge cocked. “There are worse ways to go.”
Okay, that was definitely a double entendre. Right? Maybe I’m just a pervert.
“Well, I’ve got too much to do to die valiantly just yet. Bang or no bang. Mind helping me swap that fuse out?”
She chuckled, but obliged. He led her towards the part of the panel and showed her what to unscrew, where to pull, what to push, and what to click.
She listened intently as he illuminated what she definitely shouldn’t touch lest she wished to lose a finger.
Fia was a surprisingly deft-handed helper, despite the webbed fingers and claws.
With a final click, she re-seated the panel case. Davik cued up the breaker reset on his datapad and tapped his fingers on his chin as he waited. The panel bloomed back to life with a ding, and his screen full of warnings disappeared.
“Well, damn. That did it. You really gotta tell me what this trick of yours is, because that just saved me a good hour of hunting in all the wrong places.”
“Hmm,” she whispered. “Space pirate secret.”
“I thought you were a cartel princess?” he asked, waggling his brows at her as he started packing his tools back into his toolbox.
“Ah, you have caught me,” she answered flatly. “I forgot the mysterious backstory I was supposed to be going with. You are right, cartel princess secret.”
“I’ll get your secrets one day, Madame Leucifia. How responsive are you to bribery?”
“Incredibly. You may ply me with a continual supply of whatever it is you made last night.”
“I had no idea that interrogation was that easy,” he said with a chuckle.
She matched his chuckle with her own, and she reached forward to give him a tap under the chin with the tip of her claw.
He assumed the gesture was a friendly, platonic, entirely normal Icthian sentiment he was unfamiliar with.
Not the incredibly intimate, somewhat threatening gesture that it would be from a human.
Whatever it was, it made him freeze and swallow hard as the sharp edge of her claw found purchase on his skin.
“Would you mind showing me anything else on this ship that is likely to kill us? I would be very disappointed if I died due to a lapse in maintenance after the journey here.”
He swallowed hard again, pulling his focus back and willing his voice not to break. His words came out cool and collected, despite his wildly thundering heart.
“You want to know everything that’ll kill you on this ship? Oh, you’ll be busy all day. But we’ll start in the nacelles, c’mon.”
The pair had spent a few hours exploring the assorted death traps on The Argent when Carissa’s voice crackled over the ship-wide comms.
“Dav, we’re loading up. Meet me in the bay.”
Davik had been so engrossed in showing off some creative welding repair work that he hadn’t checked the time.
And the time had flown. Fia was happy to hear him prattle on for far longer than he had ever gotten friends to endure.
It didn’t feel pandering, either. She had been engaged with his lengthy demonstration of the custom fitting he had made for his plasma cutter, and he had been trying his best to explain the nuances of welding in a vacuum when Carissa had called him back to duty.
“Well, time to go earn my keep,” he muttered sheepishly. “You’re still getting your bearings, so don’t worry about hauling anything around. I can handle it myself, for now at least.”
“Bearings are foggy, but my legs work just fine. I must earn my keep, as well. But, will this be an issue?” she asked, gesturing to her throat.
He stared intently at the soft, pale green scales along her neck. There were faint, slitted protrusions of gills on the sides. A curious thought popped to the front of his mind.
I wonder how sensitive those are?
Recognition speared through his wildly inappropriate musing as he registered what her concern was. The Pactbind. Or, her significant lack thereof.
“We’ll figure out something more concrete, but for now, this should work.
” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the black and orange striped kerchief he used to keep his hair up when welding.
He leaned forward to tie it around her neck with a loose bow before it even registered how close they were.
Her smile was wide, and he swore he could see lights flickering along her tendrils as she spoke.
“That will do for now. Lead the way, tinkerer.”