by Scott Baron
Chapter Six
“Mmm. Oh yeah, that’s perfect.”
A pair of strong hands traced the curves of Daisy’s body under the hot water. While a good scrub was an enjoyable side effect of the attention, that was most certainly not their primary objective.
Vincent pressed close from behind, one hand grasping her hips while the other cupped her breast, gently teasing her erect nipple before sliding down between her legs once more.
He had received her impromptu message, and after giving her a little good-natured grief about only using him for his body, he joined her in the shower for a break in his morning engineering shift. His coveralls lay tossed in a pile on the floor with Daisy’s discarded sweats, the clothing blending together, entwined, just like its owners, as they moved in unison in the steaming water.
One of the great things Sarah had pointed out early on, was that the efficiency ratings of the Váli’s moisture recapture systems were exceptional. It even drew humidity from the air as they exhaled. That, combined with its wastewater recycling and hydrogen collection arrays pulling in molecules as the ship passed celestial bodies, all meant that lengthy, steaming showers—heated by the drive engines with no added energy expenditure—wouldn’t cost the ship one drop of water. For lovers of shower sex, this was a wonderful bit of news.
“Oh, God, yes!” Daisy groaned as Vince kept up his steady, grinding rhythm. His stamina was impressive, but even he could only take so much as Daisy shuddered with bliss, pressing hard against him as he thrust.
“I’m getting close,” he whispered in her ear with a straining breath. “I-I don’t know how much longer I can hold back,” he groaned, his grasp on her hips tightening.
Of course, that put her right over the edge.
Their bucking increased in unison, both of them crying out in pleasure, orgasms ripping through their bodies as they came together, embraced in a cloud of steam and the wet caress of hot water. Legs weak, they stumbled into the wall, off-balance, as the post-coital giggles took hold.
Lucky for the rest of the crew, each of the ship’s two bathing compartments not only had sturdy airlocks, but they were also quite soundproof.
“I can’t feel my feet.” Daisy shuddered as the trailing remains of her climax washed over her, then slowly subsided.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Vince murmured, arms tight around her as he held her close, nuzzling her neck, tasting the sweat mixed with flowing water. “Damn, woman, that was intense.”
“You’re telling me?” She chuckled, sensation slowly returning to her trembling extremities.
“Seriously,” he said appreciatively as he caught his breath. “I was thrilled when you called me on the comms to come join you, but wow. I mean, you just really went right after it today. No foreplay. Nothing. You didn’t even slow down to go down on me like you usually do, and I know you enjoy that nearly as much as I do.”
She cast an amused look at him. “Oh, I do, but babe, I told you, while shower head sounds great in theory, the reality of it is much more like waterboarding. Only with more dick.”
He snorted a laugh. “Noted.”
Daisy watched appreciatively as he pulled his uniform back on. Damn, how did I get so lucky?
“Hey, you wanna watch some more old anime tonight, or do you feel more like one of Harkaway’s old sci-fi movies?” Vince asked as he opened the inner airlock door.
“Either works for me,” she replied.
“Okay, I’ll just surprise you. Until this evening, then.”
“See you, space cowboy,” she called after him as the door cycled shut.
There were no hydraulics in Daisy’s shoes, but she had a noticeable spring in her step as she walked down the central passageway.
“Hey, Sarah, you ready to get crackin’ on Starboard Nine?”
No reply.
“Sarah, come on already.”
“I’m sorry, Daisy,” Mal chimed in on open comms. “I am not reading Sarah’s signal anywhere on board.”
“Aw, hell. All right, Mal, thanks. I think I know where she is.”
Daisy veered left and grabbed a hold of the cool smoothness of the inter-deck ladder, gently sliding the whole length to the lower deck. It was down there that Sarah had been working on the sticking airlock mechanism that controlled the long shaft that plunged through the entire ship all the way down to the shuttle mounted on its belly.
It was possible to climb down to it in a straight shot through the floor-mounted access airlock from the main deck, but the lower airlock door had been experiencing a lag in its opening sequence. Nothing major, just a few seconds of inconvenience, but Sarah always loved an interesting side project. Plus, the mysterious scribblings in the Narrows were much more interesting down there.
A tool bag Velcroed to the wall next to the open access panel on lower deck central passageway Pod Six confirmed Daisy’s guess.
“Hey, Sarah!” Daisy shouted into the dimly lit, claustrophobic crawlspace. “Saaaaraaaaah!” Still no reply. “Damn. So much for an easy shift.”
Daisy leaned forward and hauled herself into the Narrows and began crawling. If Sarah couldn’t hear her, that meant she was most likely off on one of the side branches rather than the main crawlspace.
Left or right? Daisy mused as she reached the first junction a good fifteen meters in. Eeny, meany, miny… ah, fuck it, I’m going left. With an uncomfortable twist, Daisy rounded the bend and began the long crawl. Twenty meters later, she saw a brighter light shining from one of the even smaller side junctions containing the ship’s dense crew cabin sensor arrays.
“Sarah!” she called out.
A muffled clang.
“Shit, you startled me, Daze,” Sarah’s voice drifted from the shaft. “Why didn’t you just call me on comms?”
“I did, but one, you’re not jacked in, and two, Mal lost you on her scans before you even climbed into the—Hey, are you wearing suit three?”
“Yeah, why?”
Daisy stared at her, amused eyebrow cocked.
“Oh, right. Suit three. I forgot about your mods. No wonder Mal lost track of me. I guess it shields from more than EM pulses. But I did plug my comms in at the junction.”
Daisy looked, and indeed, the hard-line was plugged in, but there was no signal. One more thing to repair.
“We can fix that some other time. No one ever comes down here but you anyway. I don’t know what you find so fascinating.”
“It’s all these notes and drawings,” Sarah said. “I mean, have you ever really read them? Some of the things they wrote don’t sound like the graffiti you’d expect from the construction crew. Like this one over here.” She crawled forward a few more feet. “Hang on, where is it?”
Daisy scanned the smooth walls of the crawlspace, noting the occasional jottings of those who’d traveled its lengths before her.
“Dark in here, isn’t it?” She laughed.
“What do you mean, Daze? There’s plenty of light.”
“No, on the bulkhead. Someone wrote that. ‘Dark in here, isn’t it?’ I wouldn’t want to be stuck in here if the power went out. That’d be a very dark and very uncomfortable crawl back out.”
“Don’t creep me out, it’s claustrophobic enough as it is,” Sarah grumbled. “Ah, here we go. Check this one out. It says, ‘Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.’ Sounds to me like someone wasn’t too thrilled with Mal sending them off to do repairs our resident supercomputer couldn’t do herself.”
“Well, we’ve seen what can happen when relays go wonky. Mal still isn’t fully in control of all parts of the ship.”
“It’s nothing major,” Sarah replied.
“Yeah, sure. At least that’s what you keep telling me, Ms. Life Support Expert, but little things still keep glitching. I mean, you’ve crawled as much of this ship as I have, and the damage and wear seems far worse than you’d expect from our short little hop back to Earth.”
“Freakin’ space debris nearly killed u
s, Daisy.”
“Yeah, sure, we took a big hit, and probably a few smaller ones that auto-repaired, but sometimes it feels like the Váli was ready to fall apart before we even woke up. Why didn’t Mal keep things in perfect running condition?”
Sarah pulled her legs tight and wriggled around to face her friend.
“How brilliant can a super-genius computer really be when she’s small enough to fit in a box?” She paused and looked closely at her friend.
“What? Is something on my face?” Daisy asked.
Sarah smiled. “You’re glowing. And not the radioactive kind. Someone got some action!”
Daisy blushed. “Shut up.”
“No, really, good for you. But one thing, does he have multiple speeds?”
Daisy felt the laughter welling inside.
“Stop, I don’t want to hyperventilate in here.”
“Okay, but you can’t blame a spinster for asking.”
“I am so setting you up with Barry,” Daisy chuckled.
The duo turned in the confined space and began the slow crawl back to the main passageway access.
“So, did you at least get the sticking door working while you were here, or were you too busy reading the words of wisdom of sweaty construction workers?”
“Seems to be working now. I just don’t know why we use a shuttle that’s such an outdated model. No AI whatsoever, and the components are an absolute pain in the ass to maintain.”
“Yeah, not having an AI on it is kinda strange,” Daisy agreed. “I mean, they’re designed to be swappable from ship to ship, after all. Sure, they probably lose a little something by being so portable, but once they’re plugged into a new command cradle, everything should work perfectly. Not like they don’t have specs and control configurations of every ship ever made tucked away in those massive brains of theirs.”
“So why a ‘dumb’ shuttle?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy admitted. “Maybe Mal didn’t want to have a competing intelligence on board. Not like they could disconnect her and offline the entire ship while they carried her to the shuttle anyway. Though gravity would be off, so I suppose moving her would be easier.”
“Life support would be off too, Daze, so there goes that idea.”
“Well, speaking of zero-g, we have to get up to Starboard Nine and knock out the captain’s busy work,” Daisy said with a groan.
“I still don’t know why you hate that pod so much,” Sarah said. “It’s fun.”
“Zero-g is not fun. Maybe outside the ship during an EVA, but then at least you have a horizon line from the ship’s hull. There’s an up and a down, even if you can’t feel it. Now that Starboard Nine is totally empty, it’s just too easy to get disoriented in there.”
“Nah, it’s fun, you just have to be open minded and embrace it. Me, I love floating in zero-g without needing to wear an EVA suit. It’s liberating.”
“It makes me feel sick.”
“You just have to let go of the notion of up and down. There is no up or down, just the direction you’re going.”
Daisy laughed grimly. “Sure, that’s all well and good until gravity kicks in unexpectedly and you find yourself upside down on the ceiling. Then it would really help being right-side-up. And I mean proper right-side-up.”
“You’re such a downer,” Sarah said.
“No, just a realist. You want to talk about a downer? Did you see the note on the bulkhead up in the upper deck Port Thirteen Narrows?”
“I must have missed that one. What did it say?”
“Lots of doom and gloom stuff in that one,” Daisy replied. “Like someone was really not having a good day. Hang on, I copied a few of them.” She wriggled to her side and pulled a small pad from her pocket. Even in space, pens and paper—a plasitcene/paper matrix, to be precise—were invaluable. Tablets break, batteries drain, but paper lasts.
“Okay, listen to this one. They wrote, ‘Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has already got there first, and is waiting for it.’”
Sarah was silent a moment. “That’s kind of messed up, Daisy.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
She stopped crawling.
“Hey!”
“Hang on a minute,” Daisy said, then pulled a fresh pen from her pocket and scratched out a message of her own, then started crawling again.
“‘Without a little darkness from time to time, man would forget that he dwells in the light,’” Sarah read. “Who said that one, Daze?”
Daisy continued her crawl for the exit.
“I did.”
As expected, Daisy felt her stomach flip after only a few minutes in Starboard Nine, but work was work, so she forced down the bile and focused on the panel in front of her.
“It still smells in here,” she grumbled.
“Oh, come on, Daisy. Even after Mal purged all that nastiness into space, this pod was cleaned and scrubbed top to bottom. It’s all in your head.”
The zero-g pod had been one of Tamara’s fertilizer experimentation lab spaces before the mishap. It was a smaller chamber, only ten meters long, but the tubs of decomposing plant matter and racks of condensed nutrient fluids had been more than enough to create a disgusting cloud of rotting nastiness when the pod’s gravity had abruptly ceased functioning several months prior.
Barry had helped, able to ignore smells as easily as turning off a switch, as had Vince, and even Finn, when they weren’t busy with engineering tasks, but the bulk of the cleanup had fallen to Sarah and Daisy. Compressed air was used to blast every seam and riveted joint where debris might have lodged itself, an attached vacuum system sucking the bits of waste into a disposal bag before they could contaminate anything further. The process had taken weeks, but Sarah was correct, the empty pod was as clean as any compartment in the ship. Maybe cleaner, even.
“I can’t wait till we reach Dark Side. Let the maintenance crews do all this dirty work while we head home and sip margaritas on a beach.” Sarah smiled at the thought as she changed out a temperature regulator. “Okay, that was the last one. You wanna join me for a night session of Tai Chi? Maybe we could practice in zero-g. You seem to have acclimated.”
“I’m actually training with Vince tonight.”
“Oh, that’s what you call it.” Sarah flashed a mischievous grin.
“Ha-ha. He’s been showing me some fighting stuff. I guess with all the wrestling around it was only natural, eventually. Anyway, I’m gonna get a quick scrub, then go track him down. I’ll see you at dinner, though.”
“Sounds good. Don’t let him beat you up too badly. I would hate to have to kick his ass for you.”
Standing in the galley kitchen, Vince smiled down on his handiwork. Not bad. Not bad at all.
“I still don’t get why you won’t just let me do it for you,” Finn said as he slid a tiny tray into the modified heating unit he’d jury-rigged in his workspace.
“I told you, man, I know the replicator can do it, but it just means more if I make them myself.” Vince measured a teaspoon of vanilla and poured it into the ceramisteel bowl in front of him, folding it into the thickening mixture.
The eggs were in a pourable container, with no hens on board to lay shell-covered ones, but the other ingredients lay strewn about the counter much as bakers had done for millennia. Flour, butter, sugar, white and brown, baking soda, baking powder, chocolate chips. Even some pressed, rolled oats the food replicator had managed to produce despite Finn’s proclivity for having the machine provide the steel-cut variety.
“She’s gonna flip. I mean, coming from you, it would be expected, but me baking cookies for her? And by hand, no less? That’s gonna to sweep her off her feet.”
Finnegan laughed as he wiped down the counter.
“Seriously, Vince, you’re gonna get some anyway, cookies or not.”
“Well, duh. But it’s not about that. We’re stuck way out here
, a bazillion miles out in space, so that kind of limits the nice things I can do for my girlfriend, ya know? But this? This is something I can do.”
“With my help.”
“With your help, obviously. I mean, I’m a pretty terrible cook, normally.”
“I know. We all know.”
“Zip it,” Vince said with a laugh. “Anyway, I really do appreciate you helping me out. Even just a little bit of romance goes a hell of a long way in making a woman feel loved and appreciated.”
Finn’s smile faltered ever so slightly.
“Oh, dude. Why don’t you just tell her?” Vince urged.
“You’ve been talking to Daisy, I see.”
“No. Well, yes. But no, that’s not how I know. It’s obvious you like Sarah, so why not make a move?”
Finn popped a few chocolate chips in his mouth, slowly chewing as he sought the right answer.
“The time isn’t right,” he finally replied. “Not yet. But soon.”
“Okay, man, it’s your life. I just wouldn’t want you to wait too long.”
Finnegan just smiled, then pulled the first of the small trays from the food reheating unit he had modified to help his friend on his quest for cookies.
“Oh, those smell amazing,” he said. “Even if it was you who made them.”
“Ha-ha. Thanks a lot,” Vince joked.
“Don’t mention it. Though once we’re on Dark Side base I’ll have a proper oven at my disposal. Then I’ll show you how it’s really done.”
“I look forward to it. For now, just find me a box to put these in. I’ve got a hot date.”
Chapter Seven
A few months prior, Vincent had introduced Daisy to an unusual sport he’d discovered on a media chip containing athletics documentation spanning several centuries. It was an obscure practice, but one that caught his eye.
Chessboxing.
The rules were simple enough. Alternating rounds of five minutes with the winner decided by either checkmate or knockout. Its origins seemed to have been either Germany or Russia, and really, either would have made sense given the nature of the contest.
