Profit & Peril

by Charissa Dufour

  “Bit is wasted in the galley and, by the dead look in her eyes yesterday, she’s hating every minute of it.”

  “Well, we don’t always get to do what we want.”

  “Jack… she was forced onto this ship.”

  The captain looked up from his pad, shock written all over his face. Oden was the last on the ship to call him by his first name, and he knew it, giving him the advantage of surprise. It had genuinely gotten Jack’s attention.

  “You, at least to some extent, chose to become a freighter captain. I chose to pursue piloting, same with Calen. Forrest, and even Dirk, chose to become engineers. Bit has never gotten to make that choice. If she’s miserable in the galley, don’t leave her down there.”

  Before Jack could respond, Randal entered the bridge. “Got a sec, Cap?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about Bit.”

  Jack let out a long sigh. “When is it not about Bit?”

  Randal glanced between Jack and Oden, uncertainty on his features. “Bad timing?”

  Oden covered his mouth, trying to hide his smirk.

  “What about Bit?” Jack asked.

  “I want her on my security team. I’ve been thinking about it for a while actually, and the way she handled herself on the EINS ship confirms it. I lost my communications tech and I want to replace the position.”

  “Yeah, but with Bit?” Even Oden could hear the doubt in Jack’s voice.

  “Bit is intuitive. She has no bad habits, so we can train her specifically for space fighting. And she learns from her mistakes.”

  “How will she feel about working with Blaine again?” asked Oden.

  “I think in exchange for getting out of the galley, she’ll deal with it,” replied Randal.

  Jack threw up his hands. “What is wrong with the galley?”

  “She hates cooking, she’s hella bad at it, and she isn’t challenged by scrubbing pots,” explained Oden.

  Jack considered it for a few minutes. He preferred Bit in the galley, where she couldn’t cause any trouble between the men in his crew, but they now had Kat to drool over. Then again, Katrina would chop the balls off any man who annoyed her. Piss her off and she’d shove said balls down their throat. Jack wasn’t worried about Kat.

  Bit on the other hand, while she had shown moments of fight and backbone, mostly appeared to be a scared kitten. Then again, working more with the security team might be just the thing to further stiffen her spine.

  “Fine. I’ll put her in your charge, but one incident with the crew because of her and she goes back into the galley.”

  “Don’t punish her if the men misbehave,” countered Randel.

  Jack nodded and motioned for Randal to preceed him out of the bridge.

  After being intercepted by the Earth ship, Bit had been spending more and more time in the galley. She scrubbed her hands under the faucet, as she did every morning before starting her work in the galley. She leaned against the sink. Vance kept his space pristine, and that meant she couldn’t bring in any dirt or grime from outside. Bit scrubbed her hands a little harder. The steward was already elbow deep in dough, working the sticky stuff over and over again.

  “Why don’t you grill up the dinner sausages?”

  “On… on the stove?”

  “Where else did you expect to do it? Don’t worry, I’ll watch your every move. Go ahead and turn the burner on.”

  Bit shuffled to the stove and flipped on one of the electric burners.

  “Too high,” Vance sighed, as he usually did every time she tried to use the stove.

  She made the adjustment and got the enormous pan off its hook.

  “Let it heat up for a few minutes,” he said before Bit could fill the pan with meat.

  Bit watched him for a moment before speaking, “You’d think there would be an easier way to make bread.”

  Vance tossed her a smile over his shoulder. “There is, but some things are best done the old-fashioned way.”

  “How else can you make bread?”

  “There are fancy machines that do it all. You just have to put the ingredients in and wait ‘till it dings. But trust me, it doesn’t taste as good.”

  Bit didn’t have a response, so she turned back to her hot pan and began tossing in dinner sausages.

  “Don’t forget to move them around. You don’t want one side burned and one side to be still cold.”

  “Let me guess, there’s a machine that could cook meat for us, too?” she asked, a little extra sarcasm in her voice.

  “Biiit,” he sighed, drawing out her name. “This is an old ship. That means an old galley.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Maybe when we complete this mission, the captain will spoil us with a few upgrades.”

  Bit didn’t respond. She had trouble getting excited for a new bread maker or a new stove. She frowned as she considered her discontentment. With her past owner, she had no room or time for discontentment. Everything about her life sucked, and so she just dealt with it. Now, though, as things improved, she was amazed at how quickly she grew to expect the good stuff. Even if necessary, Bit doubted she could revert back to only one meal a day, even after just a few months of being well fed. And she loathed the idea of going back to a hard palate for a bed, but perhaps the most frightening thought was going back to an owner who chose to beat her.

  Bit forced her focus onto the sizzling meat, suddenly aware that the underside of the sausages had already begun to burn. She wasn’t going back. She had no reason to fear a regression in her life. Jack was a kind man. He wouldn’t beat her and he wouldn’t sell her. Bit wondered where her negative thoughts had come from. There had been no changes in Jack’s behavior. He was still just as overprotective, yet distant.

  As she pushed the links around the greasy pan, she realized where all her uneasiness came from—for the first time since joining the crew, she was comfortable enough to feel bored. She wasn’t being challenged. Well, that wasn’t true either. She found everything about cooking to be challenging, but it wasn’t a skill she felt particularly inclined to master.

  Marksmanship, on the other hand…

  “How’s it going with Blaine?” Vance asked out of nowhere.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you forgiven him yet?”

  “Blaine never needed my forgiveness. But that doesn’t mean I want to be around him.”

  Vance shook his head as he draped a thin cloth over the kneaded dough. Bit watched him put an enormous pot of water on the stove next to her pan. From the dry-goods pantry he produced an air-compressed package. Opening it over the pot, two pounds of dry noodles poured out from the packaging.

  Bit glanced back at her pan, suddenly aware that she had ignored it, again. She had to work to scrape the sausages off the bottom of the pan, half of them breaking apart from her efforts.

  “Bit,” Vance exclaimed. “How did you manage to ruin dinner sausages?”

  Bit jumped out of the way as the large man grabbed the pan and pulled it off the heat. In her backward movement, she tripped over Vance’s step stool. Her flailing arms caught a tray of dessert pastries fresh baked for the coming meal. The tray flipped off the counter, the pastries flying in all directions—two landing in the noodles and one in the greasy sausage pan.

  She held her breath as Vance took in the damage. This wasn’t the first time she had ended up on the floor with food spread out as far as the eye could see. The last time had involved a ten pound bag of flour.

  Just as Vance opened his mouth to speak, they heard the sound of boots pounding down the staircase. She and Vance broke their staring contest as Randal and the captain entered the galley. Before they could say anything, the two newcomers broke out into a chorus of laughter.

  “Does this… prove my point?” gasped Randal.

  Jack nodded.

  Bit rolled her eyes and climbed to her feet, careful not to knock anything over. “You two done giggling?”

  “Almost,
” sighed Jack at the tail of his last laugh.

  “Is there something we can do for you?” Vance asked, always the professional, as he began picking the pastries out of his simmering noodles.

  Upon seeing the soggy pastries, Randal and Jack burst into another round of laughter. Bit tried not to feel the sting of their laughter, knowing it must appear funny to an outsider. To her, though, it was just another embarrassing moment of failure.

  “Aaaah,” Randal sigh as he finished laughing again. “Thank you, Bit, I needed that.”

  “Always glad to help. Now what can we do for you? We’re obviously very busy…” She waved across the enormous mess.

  This brought on yet more laughter.

  “Oh for pity sake,” Vance said, using an adage she had never heard. “Out. Both of you. We’ll join you in the mess hall.”

  Vance waved for them to leave, and they obeyed, still laughing. Vance and Bit followed them into the mess hall.

  “Now, what is it you need?”

  Jack wiped a tear from his eye. “We were wondering how you would feel about parting with Bit… or would you like to keep her as your under steward.”

  “Take her! Please!”

  Bit cringed at how ready Vance was to dismiss her.

  “Great!” exclaimed Randal. “Bit, you have just been promoted to my communications officer.”

  Bit blinked, too shocked to speak.

  “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to magically produce a dinner out of that mess.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bit stretched, tilting her neck to one side, as she emerged from her little room—once an old closet tucked under the stairs. She didn’t mind her room being nothing more than a closet. It was a huge step up from the palate on the floor she had slept on back on Earth. Still, the hard training with the security team left Bit hurting, and she was beginning to find the hammock uncomfortable. The six days since her elevation to the security team had been especially difficult on her battered body; sleeping in a net hung from the walls didn’t help.

  “Hey Bit, you okay?” Oden asked, exiting the shared crew quarters used by the men.

  “Yeah, fine. Isn’t it Calen’s shift? What are you doing awake?” Oden had given Calen the day shift after Calen guilted him into it—healing arm and all.

  “We’re nearing Nye Space Station. I’m taking over piloting since Calen’s arm is still not one hundred percent. You should come up and see the planet before you head down to breakfast.”

  Bit nodded and followed. Jack and Calen waited for them.

  The captain stared at her for a second before speaking. “What are you doing here?”

  “I brought her up so she could see the approach,” Oden explained before she could open her mouth.

  “Fine,” Jack said, his voice just as firm and distant as it had been for the last two weeks.

  Calen rose from the pilot’s chair. “I’m going to get food. I’ve seen Ceres. Not that interesting.”

  Oden slipped into the pilot’s seat and, as usual, made adjustments to the controls and fuel usage. Once he had the controls just the way he liked, he flipped on the forward display.

  Bit gasped as she took in the small planet, the giant Jupiter hovering in the darkness beyond.

  “Do people live on Ceres?” she asked, too in awe to censor her questions.

  Oden chuckled. “Yes, though it is one of the few terraformed planets that hasn’t reached its population limit.”

  “Oh. Why did they terraform such a small planet?”

  “Good question,” Jack said, jumping into the conversation for the first time. “Mostly Ceres acts as a launching point to search the outer half of our galaxy. Also, there is a lot of stuff worth mining in the asteroid belt. And the space station is already at capacity, so they needed somewhere for more people to live even if it is comparatively small. On top of all that, the Planetary Coalition has a growing presence out here thanks to Ceres being terraformed.”

  “Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

  “We can’t stop and be content with what we have. Not with the population increases,” Jack added.

  “I guess I should get some breakfast before Randal needs me,” she finally said.

  Bit pulled her eyes away from the sight and left the bridge, the men already deep in conversation about the approach Oden would take. She hurried down to the mess hall, where she found Randal, Blaine, Reese, and Nathyn in the mess hall, already doing pushups despite those still eating.

  “You’re late,” Randal grunted as he bobbed his body up and down. “That’ll cost you thirty pushups.”

  Bit dropped to the ground, forgetting her breakfast entirely, and began her workout—or punishment depending on one’s outlook. It’s worth it, she chanted to herself. She knew that her new strength and skills would one day help her save her niece or nephew. Her sister had once been seduced by their owner, who had impregnated her. Bit’s sister died in childbirth and the child—and its resulting debt—had been sold off.

  You’ll find him, Bit told herself as she struggled to push her body up yet again. You’ll find him.

  Bit had no idea how she would find Douglas Zandri, the man who had shipped her family off to the ends of the universe, much less how she would convince him to tell her where the child was, but somehow, someday she would manage it, and each push up, each aching muscle, each practice shot at the gelatinous dummy would make her better equipped to unite herself with the only family she had left. And Bit was anything if not determined.

  The men were just finishing hand-to-hand training when she pushed her body up for the last time, her spindly arms shaking with the effort.

  “Thirty,” she panted before flopping over onto her back, wincing as she hit one of her tender bruises.

  “I think she needs a break,” Blaine said from the other end of the room.

  Blaine’s condescending tone was the only thing that could have gotten her off the ground. Bit rolled over and climbed to her feet, wincing with each pinch of her sore muscles. She stood before the men, determined to stay on her feet.

  Randal gave her the faintest hint of a smile, his head turned away from the others. “Reese, you’re training Bit today. C’mon men, we have plenty of other work to do.”

  With that, Randal led Nathyn and Blaine out of the mess hall.

  “Why don’t we just do firearms training?” Reese suggested. “You look ready to fall over.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Bit, you’re not up to fighting weight yet… and if you’re wincing is anything to go by, I bet you’re bruised to high hell. You don’t have to prove anything to me. Never mind what the jackass Blaine thinks.”

  “You’re upset with Blaine?”

  “I don’t like to see him treat you like some breakable piece of china.”

  “But you don’t mind doing it yourself?” Bit asked, widening her stance in case Reese decided to smack her for that statement.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, Blaine made that statement indicating I’m weak, and then you suggest we skip my scheduled training… doing the exact same thing as Blaine. Push me, dammit.”

  “I do push you.”

  “Not like Randal does. He has no mercy.”

  “You want me to have no mercy.”

  “Yes, ‘cause our enemies won’t. You think that Commander Asher would have any mercy? Haven’t you had to fight when you were already injured?”

  “Yes, of course, but you’re not me.”

  “No I’m not, but only because people like Blaine and you hold me back. Is it a woman thing? You just think a woman can’t fight as well?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then stop babying me… or at least stop being mad at Blaine for doing the exact same thing.”

  Reese let out a long sigh. “Fair enough. Then let’s begin.”

  They spent the next hour working through different combinations. By the time Reese called them to a stop, Bit was dripping sweat, and her arms
and legs were shaking.

  “That’s it. Go sit down. I’m getting you some water and food.”

  “No,” she protested. “I can keep going.”

  “Bit, there is also a point where you’re being stupid. You push yourself too hard, too fast and you get injured… especially with a body that has endured malnutrition for so much of its existence. Sit your ass down!”

  Bit swallowed the sudden lump in her throat and found a seat. Reese returned with two large glasses of water and a plate of breakfast leftovers. Bit chugged half her glass and dug into the food, suddenly remembering that she had skipped breakfast.

  She glanced up at Reese, her mouth full of reheated pancake, her eyes settling on his scars. “What did they do to you?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Oh, about my scars? No, go ahead and ask. It’s good for you to know, and probably good for me to talk about it.”

  “Well, what exactly did they do to you?”

  Reese took a deep breath to steady himself. “Well, they punched me a lot, cut me—shallow to make sure I didn’t bleed out before I could speak—and they electrocuted me a few times. Finally, they threatened to cut off…my man parts,” he said, blushing crimson.

  “And that worked?”

  Reese continued to blush. “Threatening to cut off a man’s privates is pretty much the worse threat you can make. Most men will give in at that point.”

  “Why didn’t they just start with that?”

  He took a deep breath. “All the other stuff, the beating and the electrocution, was proving that they meant business. It proved that they would actually do what they threatened to do if I didn’t talk. And so I did. And I will never live down that shame,” he said to the table.

  “You have no shame, Reese. No one else would have handled what you did and not spoken.”

  “Randal would have.”

  Bit chuckled. “That who you’re comparing yourself to? No wonder you’re coming up short. None of us can live up to the example Randal sets. And no one is upset with you.”

  “I know.”

  Bit cocked her head to the side. “Do you? You don’t act like you know it.”