Chapter 7
Beginner's Luck
Despite being new to the work, Davik was pleased to see that Fia picked up quickly.
With a little guidance, she was hauling and stacking the incoming crates like a pro.
There was a lingering feeling of guilt that he had thrust her into grueling work.
But that guilt waned once he saw her smiling while being ordered around by Carissa.
Davik had been worried that the wariness between the two might be tough to overcome. Fia was understandably nervous around a Sol veteran, and Carissa was anxious being around an unbound Icthian.
Something about having a job to focus on seemed to push past that, though.
There was no time to let that tension fester.
The two women had bonded over a mutual dissatisfaction with schedules not being honored by the delivery company, and there was no quicker way to Carissa’s heart than respecting punctuality.
Once all the crates had been secured, the supervisor of the workers came aboard to finalize the last of the paperwork.
He was a tall and wiry Icthian man dressed in a rumpled orange jumpsuit that, at one point, might have been high-vis.
The gold bangles around the tendrils that framed his face jingled a little, and they matched the golden glint of his Pactbind.
“Alright, who’s the cap?” the supervisor asked, gesturing between the three of them.
Carissa raised her hand, and the man brought her a datapad with innumerable lines to sign off on.
Fia gave the Icthian man a wave, and he gave her a curt nod in response.
Her head had cocked to the side, and she uttered what sounded like a question — sharp, loud, and insistent.
It was hard to make out the specifics. The Icthian tongue was a sonorous thing with no easily discernible breaks between words.
Just a stream of tones and glottal rumbles.
“I don’t—” The supervisor froze, making an awkward gesture with his webbed hands. He barely came a few inches above her, but he shrank down when she spoke. “I don’t speak Teelish. Sorry.”
“I should not have assumed,” she replied in quiet English.
The two exchanged a nod, and Fia slunk off to fidget with a crate. After the inventory sign-off was complete, the man made his departure with anxious expedience.
Davik looked over at Fia and caught a hint of hurt in her eyes.
He swore her tendrils were wilted, if that was even an applicable description.
This might have been the first of her kind she had come across after waking up.
She probably was not expecting to meet one who was so far removed from her roots.
He grimaced and kneaded the back of his neck.
You could have at least warned her that Icthian traditionalists are few and far between in TC. Most are fully assimilated these days.
He wasn’t unfamiliar with the rejection and loneliness he saw in her expression. Unlike her, he always had someone to lean on, though.
When he was young, he had his parents. When his parents passed, he had his brother.
When he was fighting with his brother, he had his friends.
When his friends rightly kicked him out when he was being a self-destructive ass, he had his brother, again.
And now, while he was trying to scrape his brother back off the ice, he had his sister-in-law.
Even when everything had gone sideways, he had someone who would save him. There was always a safety net before hitting rock bottom.
And she is just out here on her own.
Fia’s sullen eyes were locked on reading the inventory datasheet. “We are transporting … dried beans?” She glanced between Carissa and Davik with a cocked brow-ridge, her tone growing brighter. “Is this what passes for crime in Tau Ceti?”
“Lentils look a lot better on paper than stolen augs. C’mon, less yapping, gotta get to work you two!”
The whine of the massive cargo bay doors sealing closed reverberated in the room.
He reached into his pocket to grab a kerchief to tie his hair back before remembering that it was currently wrapped around Fia’s neck.
He felt his lips curl into a little smile at a sudden surge of an emotion he couldn’t place.
Pride, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was incredibly distracting.
“Christ, C. This is a pretty big haul. Melli must love you, or hate you,” he grumbled.
“A little of both,” Carissa said, patting the nearest crate. “We got it for next to nothing because Melli knows it’s screaming hot. It’s been trading hands so fast, nobody wants to be caught dead with it.”
“Mmm. Hidden trackers?” Fia said, striding towards Carissa with a datapad in her hand. “Active transmission, or something that stores telemetry for later retrieval?”
Huh. She picks up quickly.
“Eh, could be both, either, neither. We don’t have specifics beyond ‘it’s hot’.”
Fia nodded at Carissa and set toward a stack of crates, humming softly to herself.
“Damn,” Davik huffed. “Couldn’t get us a comfy first job out of the gate?”
Picking through cargo with a scanner to find trackers was not his favorite activity. It had been the grunt work given to him when he was a little thing doing runs with his parents. Even then, they had usually opted to pick up jobs that were less labor-intensive than this massive haul.
“I’m gonna get us ready to peel out of here as soon as you give me the all-clear. I’ve got to start on logistics for the next pickup,” Carissa said. “And be double quick with it. We’re a mild inconvenience away from being behind schedule. We’ve got less than three hours to depart, chop chop.”
“Alright, we’ll get to … all of this,” he grumbled with an incredulous sweep of the hand. The crates came up to his waist, and they filled most of the cargo bay, other than a narrow pathway between the loading dock and the doorway to the mess hall.
“Fia?” he called, watching her peek her head out from behind a nearby crate. “I’m gonna put a pot of coffee on before we barrel into this. You a cream and sugar gal?”
She blinked a few times. “No idea. Is coffee the bubbly brown drink, or the hot brown drink?”
“The hot brown one. I’ll— You know, we’ll figure it out. Can you just start poking around? See if anything obvious sticks out, start getting the crates unsealed, all that stuff?”
She nodded enthusiastically. He set off for the kitchen, chuckling to himself as he walked.
No coffee? The Rim is even more backworlds than I realized.
By the time he made it back from the engine bay, four of the crates were already cracked open.
Fia was elbow-deep in the one nearest the doorway, half hanging over the edge as she dug around in the container.
He set down the carafe of coffee nearby and watched her struggle for a few more moments than was professionally appropriate.
He might not understand Teelish, but whatever was tumbling out of her mouth sounded like cursing. Hearing that lilting, sing-songy drone peppered with plosives was jarring. He couldn’t help but let out a laugh at the sight of her fighting something in the crate as she cussed up a storm.
“Need a hand?”
“Two. Three, ideally,” she replied from within the crate, not emerging but beckoning him over.
He sidled up next to her, making a quick glance at her backside impulsively.
It wasn’t his fault that he was perceptive, and right now he was perceiving how her thighs were pressed against the crate, making them bulge slightly against the hem of the shorts.
Nope, eyes forward. To the front. Front-eyes. Eyes to the front.
“Y-yeah. Something stuck?” he asked, clearing his throat to hide his creaking voice. He peeked inside the crate and saw Fia’s hands wrapped tight around one canister. It looked like she was struggling to pry it free. The stubborn thing was packed in tight.
Each canister was about the length and width of his forearm, each holding bio-mechanical augmentation floating in sterile plasma-gel. They looked to be the sort of parts that were frequently replaced. High-resistance tendons and joint supports, not dissimilar to what he had in his own limbs.
Augs like that would buy the wearer at least a few more years of mobility, but they weren’t designed for longevity. They were designed for repeat customers, and the makers had a hell of a captive market in Tau Ceti.
At least this way, the corpo leeches aren’t getting a cut of the profits from these. Just us, and whatever cartel stole it from their factory. And whatever backalley fitter ends up installing them.
“Do you have something to pry this out with?” she asked, and he watched as she slid the sharp tip of one of her claws around the flat end of the canister that she was trying to free. It made a faint scratching noise that tickled the back of his brain in the strangest way.
“Hmm. It’s kind of … precarious. Maybe you could grip the cap with pliers, and—”
Fia made a noise of agreement, and she reached towards his tool belt and plucked a multi-tool off a loop without waiting for his response.
He helped her find a good seam to wedge the nose of the pliers she had spun the multi-tool to, and he yanked on the cap as she levered it up.
They both exchanged a few frustrated huffs and grunts, and then the cap broke free with a dull pop.
On the underside of the cap, there were a few pea-sized energy cells. And, to his delight, he could see a faint coil of antennae embedded in the plastic. Fia held it cupped in her palms, making a trilled sound of victory as her tendrils flickered with bright green light.
“Huh,” he said, standing up and staring incredulously at the revealed transceiver. “So you can sniff out blown fuses and bugs?”
“Beginner’s luck,” she stated with an unconvincing shrug.
“You’re going to have to clue me in on how I can get a bit of this luck for myself,” he said with a hoarse laugh. “Mine’s run out lately.”
The sentiment was meant as a lighthearted jab at himself, but the recent streak of failures was hard to make light of. Losing his brother was too intense to stomach as just bad luck.
“As we have established, clues can be exchanged for food. Or equally interesting secrets of your own.” She stuck a hand out to seal the bargain.
“Easiest deal I’ll ever make.” He accepted her hand and gave it a firm shake, nodding assuredly as he tucked the bugged cap into a pocket. “Alright, I’ll get this screaming beastie outta here, get this ship moving, and then: coffee.”
Davik caught Carissa up to speed in the cockpit while Fia snuck off to her shuttle to sleep. Carissa had her eyes locked on the sensor readings before her, but was listening intently to him all the same.
“Wish we had her around back when we were moving all those stolen goats,” she said with a dry laugh, adjusting their trajectory.
“Never want to dig through hay with a sensor probe, ever again. Stepping in manure and getting head-butted the whole damn time, God,” she trailed off and shook her head. “Swept the rest, though?”
He nodded. “Not a peep. We’re sitting pretty.”
Pretty was subjective. They still had to finish the delivery handoff. They had earned a night of respite, though, and that was a rarity. He sank back into the copilot’s chair and gave Carissa a nudge with his foot.
“Hey. How are you holding up?”
“Bad.” Her tone was clipped, and she didn’t turn to meet his eyes.
“Well, yeah, that’s not surprising. Anything beyond bad, though? Anything I can do to help?” he slumped down further in the chair. “I mean, other than rewinding time, un-fucking this situation. You know I’d move moons to fix all of this if I could.”
“Pull a few million creds out of the ether, that’d help.”
“As soon as I’ve got it, all yours.”
Marius took the fall for you. You owe her so much more than credits. This is all your fault.
“That’s going to be a hard baby-shower gift to one-up if you can manage it. My sister just got me vouchers for diapers and nipple cream,” Carissa replied with a laugh. She was perceptive, and he appreciated her injecting the levity that he was struggling to find.
“I don’t know,” he said, holding his hands side by side, weighing the two options. “Come the day of, you might think that nipple cream is more valuable than getting your husband back.”
“Thankfully, we’re going to work like hell so I’ll have nipple cream and my husband.” She nodded and looked forward. “No other options, Dav. There’s no fail-state here.”
He nodded and rose from the chair. “Work like hell. I can do that. I’ve gotta get some shuteye before the next stop. Chirp if you need anything, alright?”
Carissa nodded back at him, and he pressed a kiss to the crown of her head before he meandered back to his bunk.
Sleep never came easily to him. Even with his mighty cocktail of prescription meds to pave the path to slumber, there was no simple way to turn off the planning, the plotting, the analysis of what had gone wrong and what might still go wrong.
A constant stream of mental warning flags, notices, and to-dos.
Every single one pulled him back as he tried to wade into the quiet of sleep.
“Do you usually greet your guests like this?”
The way she had damn near purred that against his ear when she had pinned him that morning. The way she was so close. So close.
Everything else fell away into a heady hiss of static in his mind.
No errands, no itinerary worries, no maintenance to prioritize.
Her words weren’t even what rolled around in his mind, but the sensations.
Her breath rolling across the shell of his ear, his shudder, the point of her claws just barely pressed into his wrists, the firm strength from her holding him flush against the wall.
His hand found the unmet need between his legs.
The memory of her voice alone brought him to the edge, dragging sounds of desperation from his own lips in kind.
The flash of her piercing eyes looking down at him seared through his thoughts before he collapsed into his tangled sheets in a shaky heap.
God, what is wrong with you…