Chapter 17
Maiden Voyage
Tanks of water were typically a comforting sight, but this one had Fia fighting a conflicting alchemy of emotions. She was sinking back into familiar waters. She was serving her purpose as a Sentu, striking at the enemy from within the electrified depths.
The danger of joining this conflict did not frighten her. It was her lack of fear that made her stomach churn.
I need to enjoy these last moments of peace. I cannot take this gentle human where I am headed.
She had tidily folded the pile of her clothes on a nearby chair, and Davik was doing his best to keep his eyes on the datapad while she made it up the ladder and into the tank.
Typically, she would do this nude, but human culture had stipulations about nudity in public spaces that she had learned to respect.
The ladder rungs were cold on her hands and feet as she rose to the platform at the top, and she stared into the slowly circulating water as she took her final breath of air.
The surface of the water barely rippled as she sank beneath it.
Any disturbance was purely psychological.
Everything around her was tepid and neutral.
Other than the oscillation that made her tendrils shift, her world had gone still.
The bowed plexiglass warped her view of the cargo bay, and Daviks’s stretched-wide face gave her enough of a comical surprise to dim her stirring worry.
In this moment, he was her touchstone. Her anchor. He may not understand how much he is helping her, but she would tell him. One day.
She gestured a thumbs-up towards the warped silhouette of her engineer and braced for the wretched sensation she knew was coming. There was a brief sound of crackling as the current flowed, and she closed her eyes to accept the wave of electricity that would follow.
It began as pinpricks at first, as the electricity found a path to her nerve endings. This was the first challenge: taming the input. Finding the right muscles to tense and relax, finding the harmony to allow it to flow through you, and not just spear pain into your flesh.
It was not a challenge easily overcome, especially without the usual cocktail of hormones and stimulants used in the Fleet. There wasn’t a tank technician here to dose her, so her only support was her own roaring adrenaline and the stimbeads she had tucked in her cheek.
Find your footing. Brace, but do not be brittle. Accept some pain, reject what you cannot muster. It will quell. It will quell. In time, it will quell.
Brace, but do not break.
The words and mantras she recounted blurred together.
Her intent was true, though. She could do this.
She had done this before. The pain arcing through her body was profound.
Even the sheaths of dense muscle along her flanks were spasming in protest. But this was just friction.
Like the tiny gears in Davik’s little trinket-things. She needed to find how to mesh with it.
A stinging lance of electricity threaded into her skin, but she did not buckle to it. She visualized it as a spinning, many-toothed wheel to which she would offer the strongest parts of herself. To find the alignment, to find the right way for her mind to accept the input.
The world went bright pink with blinding green blooms of light that cascaded across her vision. And then it retreated. A slow pulse timed with her own internal rhythm replaced the irregular stabs of pain. Her own heartbeat led the way now.
No friction, no grinding sharpness. Just strength.
Enduring and taming the signal only let you survive. The real challenge was in reaching out with this terrifying synthetic grasp and swallowing whole the glut of sensory data without suffocating yourself in it.
Start small. Start near. Start simple. Reach for your anchor.
Her anchor was standing three feet away, with a hundred gallons of water, a few inches of plexiglass, and a spectacular amount of electrical current between them.
She slid one of the stimbeads out from the crook of her cheek and split it between her molars.
The rush of mint, cold and sharp, melted on her tongue, and she immediately felt the surge of buzzing invigoration.
It would be a short-lived burst, but she would use this edge to follow the beacon. Her guiding light.
That golden-warm coil of his voice was difficult to find in the sea of waves and jagged noise.
But she could do this. She had done it before, and she would find him again.
She flexed her hands in the water, locking her eyes on a tangle of signals.
The stimulants were making everything louder, but she was stronger. Sharper.
She found the thread, a waveform. It was a gently undulating frequency of voice, paired with a small amount of transmission meta-data.
It was in her grasp, and she reached out through the fabricated extension of her mind, through the mesh of connections in the tank, to the comms board of the ship itself.
She was on the ship. She was in the ship. And with a gasp of recognition, she was the ship.
The slow pulse of power from the engines was an inexplicable part of her. She used the ship’s own hardware to listen, used the emitters to send her reach out even further.
Too much, too soon. Keep focused. Follow the thread to the receiver, back to its source.
The source was a small comms implant nestled in Davik’s ear. She had found him.
“Davik…” she whispered, through a voice that was not hers.
“Fia!” she heard, echoing through The Argent itself.
She found her anchor.
Despite her exhaustion, Fia entertained as many questions as she could in the mess hall between ravenous spoonfuls of food.
Davik had found some edible glitter in the scullery, and he insisted they have a celebratory dinner after her “Maiden Voyage.
It was still their usual fare of rice and beans, but this time, with pizzazz.
“So what, you can mind-fuck the ship now?” Carissa asked, gesticulating with a pair of chopsticks.
“Far less sensual, but yes,” Fia replied, her voice shaky.
The stimbeads had done a fine job giving her the edge to manage her inaugural journey in the tank, but now she was paying the toll for it. She had chills, a minor headache, and the dangerous urge to just snap another one between her teeth to suffocate those symptoms with a fresh dose.
No wonder these things are so popular.
Davik rubbed her shoulders through the blanket he had draped around her. He was beaming with pride. It was his creation that had ferried her through this journey. He should be proud.
I should show him how proud I am of him. Viscerally, and with plenty of skin contact. With him naked, splayed out on his bunk, with nothing but a trail of red-hot lovebites heading down his chest towards…
“So, what feedback do you have for me? Does it have enough power, water warm enough? Is the array oriented in a good spot?”
He was almost bouncing. He was so precious. She needed to get her mind out of the heady swirl she had been falling into lately. With what was on the line, this was a dangerous time to be playful.
He is playful, but he is not mine to play with. And what cruelty it would be if I dragged him into a tryst, just to leave him behind when duty calls? He is not a thing to be toyed with. He deserves more than that.
“I was thinking,” he continued, and she had to shake her head and sit upright to actually focus on his words.
To actually listen, and not just stare at the little protrusion of his canines peeking out whenever he spoke.
Again. “Since you have your own personal fabrication engineer on hand, no reason we have to keep that thing stock standard. So, c’mon, Fi.
Lay it on me. What are the pain points?”
She nodded slowly to give herself time to actually process the question.
“Memory,” she responded matter-of-factly.
“I need a…” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, reaching for the word in English.
Her head was still a swarm of words in dozens of dialects.
Returning to this one was harder than she realized.
“A data buffer. If possible, a large one. That way I can focus on seeking and retrieval as I dive, and decryption and processing afterwards. The tank operates perfectly, though. You have done a phenomenal job.”
Carissa quirked a brow and took a hefty bite of her rice as she stared intently at him, and Fia took advantage of whatever context she was missing to spoon more food greedily into her mouth. She hadn’t mastered the chopsticks yet, and tonight would not be the night to learn.
Fia was ravenous. It felt as if she had just run for miles, watched three years of virtu-reels compressed into a blink, and bruised every muscle she could name. She planned to finish this debrief and then sleep like the dead for at least half a day.
“Look, Dav, all I’m saying is you don’t give yourself enough credit for being good at what you do. You really should try to get back into engineering work,” Carissa tutted.
“Yeah, what a lucrative line of work that was,” Davik balked.
“The Argent is a black hole. She bleeds us dry for repairs the moment we have coin. Maybe if we strike it big with this mission, we can all go legit and stop moving stolen goods and contraband. Or, maybe you can retire and just be cozy at home playing Caverns and Cryptids.”
Carissa snorted and tossed something at Davik, and they shared a brief battle that Fia’s eyes were too heavy to follow.
“Alright, we’ll talk hopes and dreams of abandoning a life of crime another night,” Davik finally conceded.
Fia rose from her seat, pulling the blanket around her shoulders snugly. “Sleep. Mmh,” was all she could mumble. The pair gave her a nod of recognition before they returned to chattering about something related to equipment or modules.
She wasn’t able to follow their conversation any longer.
Her capacity had been exhausted, and she had earned her retreat for the night.
She walked past Davik on her way out and found herself filled with a primal urge to sink her fingers into the collar of his shirt and drag him back to her shuttle.
To curl up into him for warmth. It wasn’t even sexual.
She just wanted the closeness, the comfort.
I’m acting like a nesting, broody fool.