by J. M. Page
“Sit with us,” Torak said, gesturing to the seat next to him.
Mara looked at the chair as if it were covered with poisonous barbs and then glanced down the long table with officers interspersed along its length.
“Thanks,” she said with a brisk nod. She turned and picked a seat far down the table, where there was no one on either side of her or across from her for a few seats in every direction.
Torak’s temper began to bubble. Why did she have to be so difficult? Why couldn’t she behave like a normal crew person? And why couldn’t he look at her like one?
Sande chuckled beside him and it only made Torak’s anger hotter. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Sande said, sounding smug.
Torak said nothing. He finished his meal and his drink within the next ten seconds and shoved off from the table in a great surge of energy.
Who did this girl think she was? And why did he care? Why did he ever think this was a good idea? Why did he delude himself into thinking she could be different than the others?
His angry outburst drew eyes from all corners of the dining hall, but Torak didn’t care. He just stalked off toward the flight deck, leaving the curious glances and thoughts of amber-eyed beauties behind him.
Chapter Six
Mara
The whole lunch debacle wasn’t even the end of Mara’s troubles that day. She didn’t know what exactly she’d done to make the Captain so intensely angry, but everyone sensed it as he stalked out of the dining hall. And everyone turned to her.
She’d only been on board this ship for a little over a standard day and already she’d caused a whole host of problems for the crew and herself. If Mara couldn’t find some way to make herself useful, she didn’t know what hope there was for her mission to find the truth. If she kept being a nuisance, surely the Captain would just drop her off at the nearest outpost and wash his hands of her.
Mara’s stomach twisted at that thought. What would she do then? Where would she go? She wouldn’t know her way home, she didn’t have a cred to her name, and she didn’t think she could rely on the kindness of strangers to get her through a difficult time.
No, if Mara wanted to ensure her future on this ship, she’d have to prove to everyone that she belonged and could be helpful.
After finishing her meal — and earning more than a few quizzical looks from people at her table — Mara headed off into the ship searching for a task. Even if it was running parts or cleaning up spills, she didn’t care.
But every time she asked someone for a job it was met with the same response.
“Hmm… Yeah, no. Though Dannis in Sector F might need some help. You should check with him,” the plump gray-haired woman said, scratching her chin thoughtfully. She was fifth in line to give Mara the same response, almost verbatim, each person passing her off to another like a dirty old rag no one wanted to touch.
Mara sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing around here that you need help with?” she asked, glancing around at the few crew members hard at work, screens full of orders flashing alarming colors as they fell behind in productivity. “Looks like you guys are a little backed up. I’m really good at detail-oriented tasks,” she said, pleading with the older woman.
There was a commotion from the conveyor belt behind them and the gray-haired lady’s face paled before she turned around. “That’s because you’re wasting my time. Go bother someone else,” she barked, shooing Mara out of the room. The door closed with a finality that cut off any of Mara’s further protests.
How was she ever supposed to redeem herself if no one would trust her with a job?
Mara sighed again, her head hung low, her shoulders slumped. Maybe she shouldn’t have blown off the Captain at lunch. Maybe this was retaliation for that.
Maybe she shouldn’t’ve tried this crazy thing at all.
The only good thing to come out of the pointless wandering from one end of the ship to the other was that she’d gotten pretty good at finding her way around, finally. There were still confusing names and labels for corridors and walkways and rooms, but she was beginning to make sense of it. That was progress, at least.
Mara highly doubted that Dannis in Sector F was going to be any more welcoming to her, but she didn’t have any other leads, so she headed that direction. By the time she got to Sector D, the dinner bell sounded and the ship was alive with activity again.
For a moment, she considered skipping the meal to avoid any further embarrassment. She could just head to her room and start fresh the next day.
But where would running away get her? Everyone would assume that she’d let their treatment get to her, that she was weak and wouldn’t last long. Mara wasn’t going to let a little thing like a bad day break her spirit. Not today. Not when she had much more important things to think about at the end of this journey.
Bolstering herself with a great deep breath, she proceeded toward the dreaded dining hall. At least if she got there early enough maybe she could find somewhere to sit?
It was a small glimmer of hope, but at that point she was ready to latch onto just about anything.
After getting her tray of food, Mara scanned the large open space, silently praying for an open table.
“Hey! Sleeping Beauty!” someone called, and Mara winced, remembering how the engineer had teased her about sleeping in late that morning.
She decided to ignore the voice. Better to not let them know they got to her.
“Hey! New girl!” the voice called again, now more insistent.
Mara stiffened her shoulders and looked straight ahead. What pleasure could they possibly derive by bringing her down even further? It was despicable. But what did she really expect from ruthless blood-thirsty pirates?
“Hey!” the voice cried, totally adamant now. “Mara!”
At the sound of her name, Mara finally took pause and turned toward the voice. A few tables away, Delta half-stood from her seat, her arm waving wildly in the air.
“Come over here!” the head engineer said, motioning Mara toward their table. Mara hesitated, narrowing her eyes, trying to figure out what game they were playing.
Still, it was her best — and only — option for a place to sit. Unless she wanted to bank on being invited back to the Captain’s table. No thank you, she thought. Better to just head over to Delta’s table and see what she wanted.
“Hey,” Delta said as Mara neared their group. “Sit down.”
When Mara still hovered near an open seat, unsure, Delta’s eyes hardened and she pointed forcefully. “Sit.”
Mara sighed, still curious about this whole thing, but dreading it at the same time. Nothing about her time on this ship had been remotely redeemable and she wasn’t naive enough to think it was going to start being good and fun now.
She didn’t want to make more waves than she already had, though, so Mara did as Delta asked, digging into her food before anyone said a word. Maybe she could just finish her meal quickly and get out of there before there was any more embarrassment.
Delta linked her fingers together and rested her elbows on the table, leaning her slender frame forward toward Mara. “I wanted to apologize to you. For this morning.”
Mara’s fork clattered to her tray, the thoughts of food all but gone from her mind. “I beg your pardon?”
Delta huffed, blowing a fringe of copper hair from her forehead. “I let my temper get the best of me and I’m trying to work on that,” she said, sounding almost pained as she did. “The patch really wasn’t that bad after all. I just overreacted a little.” The scaled guy on her right snort-coughed and Delta glared at him. “Okay, maybe more than a little. Once Eddi here got to working on it, it was actually way more solid than I thought.”
Mara stared at her food, not sure what to say, her heart stuck in suspended animation waiting for the sucker punch to blindside her. No one had been this forthcoming or nice to her since she boarded this forsaken pirate ship. It was disconcerting.
“So…” Delta
said, pointedly looking everywhere but at Mara. “‘Msorr,” she muttered under her breath, the words unintelligible. The guy next to her — Eddi — nudged her with his elbow and Delta winced, shooting him a dirty look.
“I’m sorry,” she said more clearly. “I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that and I shouldn’t have embarrassed you in front of the whole Sector. That was poor management on my part.”
Mara really didn’t know what to say to that. She nodded and gave Delta a little smile. “It’s okay, I get it,” she said. After a few bites of food, she slumped forward with elbows on the table. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve felt like a complete failure from the moment I stepped on board.” Her stomach did a flip-flop as she admitted it out-loud, but she felt some sense of connection to them now. More than she did with anyone else on the Affliction at least.
Someone to her right giggled — a willowy woman with purple flesh and shimmering silver hair that flowed past the back of her chair. “You shouldn’t. My first day I was supposed to stock the escape pods for emergencies. I got through three quarters of them before I realized I wasn’t hitting ‘lock’ after each one, I was hitting ‘launch’... and they’d already spiraled into the nearby star.”
The table burst into raucous laughter. “Torak was pissed about that one,” Eddi said.
“Who could blame him?” Delta said, swiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “All those pods and the fresh supplies gone.”
The purple lady laughed and nodded. “But he’s forgiving, our Captain. He called me down to the flight deck and said ‘So I guess we need to find you another job,’” she said with a mock-deep voice that did nothing to replicate Torak’s captivating lilt.
“That’s it?” Mara asked in disbelief. “No punishment or torture?”
Everyone at the table stared at her like she’d grown an extra head. Then Delta laughed, deciding she’d made a joke and everyone joined in with her.
Mara laughed too, but hesitantly, with a burning curiosity making her wonder again if all her preconceived notions about this crew were totally wrong.
“You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” Delta said. “It takes some getting used to. When I first joined up, I was out of commission for a week with Warp-Flu. At least you’re handling that alright.”
Mara nodded. “Our ship back home didn’t come anywhere close to warp speed, but I guess I’ve spent enough time flying for it not to bother me.”
“Lucky,” Delta said, looking slightly green at her memories. “It’s not a fun time. I thought I was dying.”
There was more laughter and people around the table shared their stories of being new until Mara felt much better about everything. After they finished eating, no one was in a big hurry to leave since most of the day’s work was completed. Mara realized how exhausted she was and yawned with a big stretch.
“So where are we actually going?” she asked Delta after most of their group cleared out.
“We should be there in about twelve hours or so. Just one of our normal supply route drops, nothing exciting or hairy for your first trip.”
Mara nodded, yawning again. Delta stood from the table and took Mara’s tray for her. “You should get some sleep while you can. The planet we’re heading to is past a dense asteroid field and there’s always a chance things can go sideways in those and we’ll need all hands on deck.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer to go around the asteroid field then?” Mara asked, pushing away the small glimmer of pride that came from Delta implying she’d be one of the hands ‘on deck.’
Delta shrugged. “Yeah, it would be safer, but we don’t exactly have all of our paperwork in order, if you catch my drift. The GTC will confiscate all of our cargo if they get their grubby bureaucratic hands on us.”
Mara nodded and Delta took both their trays over to be washed. She didn’t say anything, but Delta’s little comment about paperwork and the GTC only reinforced Mara’s perception that they were pirates and bullies and criminals. Delta didn’t say what kind of cargo they were delivering, or to whom. For all Mara knew it was probably drugs and weapons or something terrible she couldn’t even think of. She had no idea what kind of outfit she’d gotten herself involved in, and even though things were starting to look up, Mara knew better than to be too optimistic about the whole thing. These were the people who tried to conscript her father into laboring aboard the ship.
Mara thanked Delta for inviting her to sit with them before they separated and went toward their own quarters. It had been a long day and it had given Mara a lot to think about. About herself, about her own worth and about this ship and its crew. She wasn’t sure what to think about much of any of it, but she felt far less hopeless than she had the night before.
She made it to her room, only sort of getting lost along the way when she missed a particularly poorly-lit sign. Still, it was a vast improvement to the previous day and she couldn’t complain about that.
“Another night’s sleep and you might almost feel at home here,” she said, rolling her eyes at herself. That wasn’t likely, but maybe she could come to tolerate — even appreciate — the Queen’s Affliction.
When Mara woke again, she wondered how long she’d been asleep. She never heard the bell for breakfast, but then again, she slept through it last time too. She climbed out of bed, took a dry shower, got dressed and headed off to the flight deck to see how close they were to port.
As she walked through the ship, it was apparent that something was strange. She didn’t cross paths with anyone on her way to the flight deck and didn’t hear any of the normal sounds she now associated with the ship. The machinery hummed along, whistling air pushing through the vents, the whirring vibration of grav pumps keeping her feet planted on the ground.
But no sounds of people.
At least, not until she neared the flight deck. It seemed that everyone was there, hard at work, staring at monitors and gauges, barking orders and communicating in harsh clipped words. Outside, through a vast unobstructed solar shield, Mara saw a lush green planet, covered in swirling white clouds.
She stood in awe, gaping at the beautiful orb filling her field of vision. Her heart swelled three times its size in her chest, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. It was so majestic. So enamoring to the girl who’d been sequestered all her life. She could stare at it for hours, but that wasn’t going to happen. The planet grew closer and closer with every passing moment.
No one noticed her appearance to the flight deck. No one turned in her direction, addressed her, or even looked up from their work. Everyone was preparing for landing and Mara had no place in that routine.
She spotted Delta giving the Captain constant updates on the system diagnostics. Occasionally he would ask for more information from her, but otherwise he didn’t acknowledge the numbers and figures Delta rattled off.
Torak stood in the middle of the flight deck, hands clasped behind his back, looking off toward the planet that grew ever larger in their field of view. Mara’s gaze was drawn to him, pulled by that magnetic confidence that oozed from his every cell. He radiated calm authority, in complete command of the million moving parts around him.
Mara still wanted to be wary of him. She wanted to stay cautious and suspicious of the man who’d suggested she “service” the ship. Even if she had misread that situation, which she wasn’t completely convinced of.
But it was impossible to ignore him. Especially in his element. He had at least a dozen people shouting incomprehensible things at him — none of it meant anything to Mara and it was overwhelming — but he seemed unflappable. Totally unconcerned at the information being hurled at him. He gave orders and communicated with the crew on the ground all while staying on top of every update and status report shouted across the flight deck. He made it look easy.
Mara watched the well-practiced dance with awe; she couldn’t imagine ever being so confident and sure of herself. Even things she thought she was good at gave her trepidation and anxiety. She
couldn’t even do a patch job right — no matter what Delta said to make her feel better.
“Positions everyone. Brace for gravity,” Torak said, his voice rippling through Mara.
Crew members scurried around to the edges of the room, strapping into seats that folded out from the wall. Mara looked around, still shocked that no one noticed her standing just inside the doorway and found that she had no idea where to go or what to do. Everyone seemed to have their own specified seat and she was left without one.
Panic gripped her for a moment. Was it safe to not be strapped in? She’d never been on a ship of this magnitude. She’d never experienced the sudden jerk of gravity sinking its jaws in and sucking the ship down. With Bertha, it was always a somewhat gentle transition.
Mara didn’t think there was anything gentle about the Affliction.
