Chapter 18 Gods and toasters
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gods and toasters
Garrison
THE NEXT day I did my exercises on my own. The cold, echoey emptiness of the cargo bay was especially noticeable now I knew there was a training room. I was half tempted to use it anyway, to make myself at home.
Did she realise she’d treated me like crew? Not that I wanted to be her tea-boy. Or did I?
My resolve to help Shohari had only strengthened overnight. Staying here felt right. I knew it was an imposition, knew she wouldn’t go for it. But she’d started it by demanding that chrya last night.
Fuck it.
I dressed in a tunic and leggings—which were surprisingly comfortable, even if I felt ridiculous. It couldn’t hurt to look like I belonged.
On ship, the kri’ith tended to go barefoot most of the time, as their soles were so leathery, and I followed suit.
I liked the coolness of the metal beneath my feet, same as I was getting used to the particular smell of the Dorimisa’s filtered air.
It wasn’t as hot and heavy as on a station, and the Galactic Reserve ship was no comparison—I swear we’d just breathed plasma, sweat, and fear for three weeks.
The Dorimisa was almost pleasant, as much as recirculated air could be; there was always a subtle tang of metal, nothing new for me.
I glanced at my wrist-comm. Shohari would almost certainly be on the bridge by now.
The training room was empty, and I shrugged off the memory of yesterday, despite pulling on Shohari’s shorts—I drew the line at running in leggings.
The screen on the treadmill-type machine didn’t respond to me, which wasn’t surprising. “Comnica. How do I activate the running machine?”
“Authorisation from a senior member of crew is required to operate the stepmill. Shall I comm the captain?” the AI said.
“No!” Damn, that would be awkward. “Can you ask Muzati?”
“Acknowledged.”
Lights flashed. “Access granted.”
It was good to run. I could leave problems and worries aside, and move forward, forward, forward.
I had a shower in the small sonic booth and got dressed. Standing in the training room with Shohari’s shorts balled up in my hand, I paused. I should have left them there, but the desire to cling to something tangible was too tempting.
“Attention training room.” Shohari’s voice came over the in-room comm. “Leave the shorts.”
In case she was watching, I spun slowly in a circle, grinning, before kissing the waistband, dropping them into the laundry bucket by the door, and walking out.
The others were already in the mess hall, busy with packets of pancake-type things, running one at a time through a heating machine before adding a prepackaged slice of something on top. Zerena handed one to me, and I brought the plate to my nose. Fruity.
“Roll them up,” she said. “They’re amazing.”
She wasn’t wrong, and we went through three packets between us. Just as we were doing the last ones, though, the machine crackled, dying with a puff of smoke.
“Oh god,” Imani said. “Do you think we’re in trouble?”
“I don’t see how,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of pancake. “I bet it’s just a loose connection or something. It looks pretty old.”
I spotted a pot on the counter with a few tools in it, including a screwdriver-looking one with a pattern matching the fastenings in the machine’s housing.
The inner workings weren’t what I was used to, and it took me back to my teens, when I would take apart and attempt to repair old kitchen appliances—though I’d better be more successful here than some of my earliest attempts.
My friends put some entertainment on the screen, the noise of the soap opera-type show a comforting drone as I worked.
It was a simple enough machine, and the components were a mix of familiar and alien. I couldn’t be certain, but my best guess was the heating element had burned out, so I occupied myself putting it back together.
Muzati and Paiata came in around lunchtime, and Paiata took two mugs of noodles back to the bridge.
Was Shohari avoiding me, or was she busy? Probably a bit of both.
“Hey, Muzati,” I said before she headed out with her own mug. “The pancake machine broke this morning. I found some tools and tried to fix it, but I think the heating panel has gone.”
“Kheh. Not again. And call me Muzi.”
“Okay, Muzi. Again?”
“I’ve fixed it too many times already. Not the panels, yet—graphene panels last for years and years. Except we haven’t used graphene panels in about a century. But it’s Orithian, so what do you expect?”
I played back her fast words in my head until I followed. “I don’t know. What should I expect? New here, remember.”
“Orithian stuff is usually shit, but I do like the flatcake heaters. They’re hard to get anywhere else. Cap gets a crate of the prepackaged flatcakes every time she can; she loves them. And so do we.”
“Crap, we ate loads.”
Muzati gave a full belly laugh, making the tools in her headspines wobble precariously. “Not a galley crate. A cargo crate. We’ve got hundreds. But that’s no use if the heater’s broken. Where am I going to get replacement panels out here?”
Damn. I was really hoping to get it fixed today. “Do you want to have a look? In case I’m wrong, and it’s not that. I’m only used to human tech, though this made enough sense.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, and turned away.
“Hey, humans! This is the remake of Lovers of Lietan and it’s terrible.
I don’t know what they were thinking. Let me introduce you to the best holovid in the galaxy.
Comnica, play season twenty-seven of the Orkri Wrestling League.
Watch out for the Golden Tsati, he’s the best.” She gave me a grin.
“Much better. Where was I?” She pulled two tools from her braided headspines and rolled them round her fingers.
“Orithians insist on doing everything differently. They have to conform their ships to an extent, but the rest of their tech, especially little things like this? Kheh.”
“Maybe we can work together,” I said. “What’s Orithian?”
“Oh gods, I forget that you know less than a nipper in prime academy. And you’re asking me about history?
If you want accuracy, you want Paiata, not me, not that I’m not accurate, but he knows all the details, whereas I know the basics.
You are only after the basics, aren’t you?
” She looked up expectantly as she took a breath.
“Basic is fine.”
“Right, so we—kri’ith, big-ass spiky people who can kick a shaa’s arse from here to Bzhalti—have two homeworlds.
About, what, two hundred years ago, there was a civil war.
The traditionalists didn’t want to get involved with other species or the wider galaxy, and the modernists did.
The first homeworld is called Orith—that means ‘home of the children’—and the war destroyed half of it because it went on for, like, a hundred years. Pass me the small twist driver.”
Amongst the growing collection of tools was another thing similar to a screwdriver, so I held it out.
“No, that’s a crosswrench. The one with a blue handle.
Yeah, that one. So in the end, the modernists left them to it, and that’s us, the Orkri’ians.
We’d already started terraforming the largest moon, so we all skykked off to the shiny new place and called it Orkri just to piss them off. It means ‘home of Kri.’”
“And Kri is?”
“The creator god, from whom all other gods came. Not that we give a shit about the gods. Unlike the Orithians.” She gave an eerie grin that split all the way to her ear ridges.
I sorted through the words before speaking. “So kri’ith means Kri’s children? And you called your moon ‘home of the main god’?”
“You got it.”
“I see why that might have pissed some of them off.”
“Right. And we call it a planet now. Galaxy convention. If you can live on it, it’s a planet, even if it’s a moon.”
“Okay.” Slightly confusing, but nothing I couldn’t get used to.
“Do you want to know what pisses the Orithians off even more? Having to see Orkri in the sky every night, covered in the lights of all our cities, and having to see all the space traffic going to and fro all the skykking time.”
I grinned. “I can only imagine.”
“When I was a nipper, we adopted the second moon too, not to live on, but for industrial stuff. The skykking complaints we got about two Orkri’ian moons lighting up the sky.
I swear it was all my parents talked about for a whole year.
The Orithian government actually sent an ambassador to Orkri, they were so pissed. ”
Her face was even more animated than usual, and I suspected Muzati was as interested in history as Paiata in her own way, even if she didn’t realise it.
I pulled a wire connector out. “So, if the two planets hate each other, why have you got an Orithian pancake toaster?”
“Ohhhhh— Whoops. Did I leave an important bit out?” Muzati slapped her palm across her face. “The Dorimisa is Orithian. So’s the captain.”
“What?” I struggled to get my head round it. “But she—”
“Doesn’t strike you as stuffy and traditional and all that ulthshit? No. She’s been out here too long. She’s an honorary Orkri’ian. Happens to quite a few Orithian traders. Just don’t tell her parents.” She put a finger to her lips in an exaggerated secret gesture.
This was getting confusing. “Wait. She’s out here. I thought you just said—”
“Later. That’s Paiata’s thing, not mine—too political.
Short story is the hypocritical bastards decided they wanted galaxy goods after all, so a few Orithian families are allowed ships, and this is one of them.
” She looked around with affection. “You should have heard Shohari when we first met her. So posh. All ‘it would please me greatly if you would be so gracious as to accept the appointment,’ and ‘the quality of these noodles makes me somewhat perturbed.’”
The conversation with Shohari yesterday flashed to the front of my brain.
My family are difficult.
I supposed they would be. It only made me want to help her more.
With the toaster apart again, I showed Muzati what I’d done and why I thought it was the heating panel. “Except I’m not sure what this board is or what it does.”
“Oh, the nanotube circuit? It connects everything on this section. Except it doesn’t have any self healing components—because Orith—and I’ve resoldered everything at least twice. And I don’t know what the skyk these are.” She pointed to a section similar to a printed circuit board.
“Ah, but I do. This kind of thing is still common on New Earth ’cause they’re way cheaper than the nanotech ones, but they blow regularly.”
Between us, we got the pancake heater going again. Muzati told her comm to find a new graphene panel for when the inevitable happened, and we set it back in place on the gleaming metal side.
I barged her shoulder with mine. “You were calling my culture primitive?”
She knelt down to stow some spare parts in a locker and jerked her head at the pancake heater. “Yeah, it takes one to know one.” Laughing, she looked up at me, merriment dancing in her eyes. “You’re all right, Garrison. Wish you were sticking around.”
So did I.
“What are you doing down there?”
Our heads whipped round to a furious Shohari.
Muzati smirked at her from the floor. “I’m not giving him tongue, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“It wasn’t.” Her voice was cold, but there was something in her face—longing, or jealousy?
“The flatcake heater broke. Again,” Muzati said.
“Did you know, Garrison knows Orithian-style tech better than I do? Not actually better than I do because I’ve been doing it for years and he’s been doing it for a few hours, but the bits I still get confused about, he understands.
Because he’s a bit primitive, you know?” She flashed the captain a scintillating smile, the bright mess hall lights catching her teeth.
“But he was useful to have around. I’m going to head back to engineering. ”
I watched the emotions unfold on Shohari’s face as her engineer talked, then turned to Muzati with a grateful smile. “Thanks for the chat, Muzi.”
“Any time.” She grabbed me round the shoulders, squeezed, shot the captain a pointed glare, and darted off.
Shohari looked ready to burst. I expected her to storm off—it was written in the tension in her muscles, the way her legs were primed to move, her body angled towards the door.
Yesterday had taken me by surprise, and I wouldn’t let that happen again.