Chapter Six The Crew
CHAPTER SIX
The Crew
Our guests arrived neither late nor early, but exactly at the most inconvenient time.
I quickly finished reattaching Vee’s pinky, and warned Sian and his creature not to leave the galley for the rest of the day. “No corridors, no nothing. If you go, get Entoo to disable the cameras first, yeah? They’re always fussy on the bottom deck, so no one will think twice. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied easily.
“I mean it. If my dad catches you…”
“I’ll be spaced?” he asked skeptically.
I gave him a level look. “Worse. He knows a few uninhabited moons. No one’ll ever know where you went.”
He paled. “Um—okay. Heard.”
I winked and hurried back to my room to change into my uniform. Did I actually think Dad would maroon him on a moon? No, but Sian didn’t know that, and I was much better at bluffing than I’d thought I was.
I wished I had time to at least shower, wash the city off of me, but there was no time, so I fixed my braid, tucking in the errant curls so I didn’t look like I had run halfway across Coruscant, dodged blaster shots, and found my way onto some weird wanted list.
In the mirror above my dresser, I looked at my reflection and took a deep breath. I was like a ghost of my mom—curly copper hair and pale skin brushed with freckles that grew warmer whenever I was planetside too long. I’d even gotten her hazel eyes.
Audra Quay was beautiful in all the holovids I’d seen of her. She was a descendant of Wild Space cartographers, and it was like the unknown parts of the galaxy had seeped into her skin. She was like a star. She lit up every room she walked into.
Mom had met Dad just before the Galactic Civil War, when the Rebellion was looking for capable pilots and navigators who could run supplies to far-flung bases.
They were teamed up, and over near-death experiences and long hours in hyperspace lanes, they fell in love.
Dad came up from nothing. His family were merchants on Corellia who disowned him the second he joined the Rebellion.
On the other hand, Mom had been the last in a long line of Quays, and so Dad took the name, too.
For him, it was like shucking off a coat he didn’t need in exchange for his favorite one.
And while Dad didn’t have the Quay bloodline, Val and I did.
So it stood to reason that at least one of us would have Mom’s skills.
Dad called it lucky that we both did.
Most ships used droids or a navigational computer to calculate the astrogation of a ship through hyperspace, to ensure that it didn’t collide with mass shadows—the gravitational wells around massive celestial bodies like planets and stars and rather large asteroids.
But my mom?
She had this intuition—this sense—that let her chart the fastest route anywhere. I’d seen her do it a thousand times, disengaging the navicomputer’s autopilot to manual mode and programming in data directly off the charts. She could pick a route, and she’d know it was the right one.
Mom had simply called it wayfinding.
She’d taught me a little when I was young.
The intuition was hard to explain. It was more a feeling than a precise calculation.
I imagined it was like how water-seekers knew where to find moisture on desert planets.
Sometimes, when I sat on Mom’s lap and opened my eyes wide enough and drank in enough of the sky, I could imagine that I saw them—different paths shimmering in and out of my field of vision like ripples in a pond.
“Calm your mind, love,” Mom would murmur into my hair. “Let the stars take you.”
Sometimes I still widened my eyes and tried to sense the stars, that tug of intuition, but there was too much noise in my head now. Too much anxiety about picking the wrong path and astrogating us into the middle of an asteroid field or the belly of a ship or the side of a moon—
Like Mom had.
One number off, one degree too far, and suddenly you were stardust.
Even if Dad hadn’t refused to let me try, I wouldn’t have done it.
Mom died astrogating. I might have gotten her hair and her eyes and her gift, but I wasn’t going to inherit her fate, too. Closing off a small part of myself was worth the safety it gave me.
With one last look in the mirror, I grabbed my uniform jacket from the hook by the door and hurried to the midship turbolift.
Daaric and Maeve were already there, fixing each other’s collars, and Kotti was coming down the opposite corridor with a bag of pipnuts. They crunched satisfyingly between her teeth. She looked refreshed in the starched dark blue uniform of the Starfarer. Meanwhile, mine was quite wrinkled.
“Pinky restored?” she asked as the lift arrived.
“Pinky restored,” I confirmed, trying to smooth out the front of my uniform jacket at least. “And she didn’t even complain.”
“Bless the void for that.” Maeve shuffled onto the lift first, picking a piece of invisible lint off her sleeve.
She was a stout human with grayish-purple hair, fashioned into a tight bun, and calloused hands from a hard life.
She had a gravelly voice and the humor of an executioner, and we all loved her for it.
“Who wants to bet the first guest here is one of those history buff types?”
The rest of us followed her into the lift.
Daaric put on a snobby accent as he said, “Even though my father was part of the Empire, it’s still my history and I should celebrate it.”
Kotti commended him with a polite clap. “Oh! That’s really good!”
“Thank you, thank you, I’ve been practicing.
” He gave a mock bow. Daaric was a very handsome Zabrak, about fifty, with a crown of six small horns encircling his head and faded tattoos across his cheeks and neck, the design like wispy swirls of smoke.
He’d caught the wrong side of a bunch of Corellian smugglers years ago and lost his right eye, so now he wore an eye patch he changed out to match his clothes.
He was the ship’s bosun and purser, and Dad’s most trusted crewmate.
I think if Dad were different, they’d be dating, but he clung to the loss of Mom and Val so blindly that he didn’t see Daaric at all. Which, honestly, was a feat, because Daaric was as subtle as a solar flare.
There was something to ponder there, about loving someone unrequitedly, to the ends of the galaxy, without them ever knowing.
I would feel bad for Daaric, but he did it willingly.
He stuck around because he wanted to, not because Dad pulled him along with the hope of maybe someday.
Besides, I think Daaric loved the Starfarer, too.
I added, “Extra points if they bring up that a Jedi headed the Jedi purge.”
“The both-sides-ism is exhausting,” Kotti agreed. “Even though it wasn’t the Jedi who mass-murdered thousands of civilians and—oh, yeah—blew up a planet.”
“Almost two,” Daaric corrected. “Thank the stars that’ll never happen again.
” He didn’t talk much about the war, but most people didn’t.
It was like this looming shadow they kept facing away from, hoping that if they stopped talking about it long enough, the sun would finally chase the bad memories away.
The main crew all wore deep blue uniforms with our names sewn onto the chests.
They had been the same uniforms for the past twenty years—a structured high-collared jacket with gold epaulets and a decorative chain from the right shoulder to the central jacket clasp, high trousers, and a thick black belt at the waist, along with supple boots.
The uniform, sewn together with golden thread, always felt angular and sleek, formal and yet well-worn.
There were only eight of us in the main crew.
Dad liked to keep a tight ship, and so he hired out seasonal help of about twenty other crew members.
Their uniforms, unlike ours, were a warm yellow and didn’t have all the decorative elements, but honestly they were much more comfortable than our stuffy high-collared prison cells.
We made our way to the main chamber, where my dad was already waiting as the seasonal crew came up from the other turbolift on the dorsal side of the ship, laughing and joking about.
They were all young people like me, but I’d learned that in this uniform and with my dad?
Most of the seasonal crew wanted nothing to do with me.
However, that gave me an idea for how to keep Sian hidden. I filed it away for later.
Telly was the last to arrive from the bridge.
She was a tall Mon Calamari who as chief officer kept the ship running, and I could count on one hand the number of times she had laughed in the fifteen years she’d been on the ship.
She was serious, and quiet, and predictable—the perfect counterbalance for the chaos of Captain Quay.
“Sorry for the tardiness,” she said in her deep, melodic voice, “but there was a bit of an issue with the supplies. Rodents got into one, it seems. It’s fixed now.”
I winced. I bet that was the crate Sian and Noola had broken out of….
“Grand!” Dad clapped his hands as he turned to his entire crew and called everyone to attention. “Now, we’re all here, all accounted for?”
The seasonal crew called that they were.
Then the main crew. We ran through the current itinerary, the food preparation, the entertainment, the guest list, and any troubleshooting we would need over the next two weeks.
Apparently the communications console on the lander, Starstall—a modified RY-280 Commuter with a larger passenger capacity for excursions—was still not fixed, so we’d make a brief stop to refuel on Tatooine and drop it off with one of Dad’s favored mechanics before heading to Geonosis.
We didn’t normally go to Tatooine, but we had added it to the itinerary to drop off Starstall, which caused a little bit of a murmur among the seasonal crew.
It couldn’t be helped. We needed Starstall fixed, and Dad refused to postpone a tour when he could just take a detour.
“As always, like our motto states,” Dad added, pointing to the inscription carved above the entryway, “ ‘As long as stories persist…’ ”
“ ‘So do we who champion them,’ ” we finished, and he smiled proudly.
“Absolutely, friends. Now let’s make this a tour to remember!
” He clapped his hands in dismissal, and we broke apart to our stations.
As one of the main crew—technically Dad’s first mate, after Telly, but I did whatever needed to be done on the ship most of the time—I was part of the welcoming party, so I headed toward the docking bay on the bottom deck.
Dad opened the Starfarer’s ramp, and it unfolded to the ground, spilling the dusky light of Coruscant into the storied hull of the ship.
There were, in fact, at least half a dozen passengers waiting to board, and the moment the ramp touched the ground they started inside, bright-eyed with adventure.
And just like that, the Starfarer’s 643rd tour began.