Rogue Instinct

by Elin Wyn

  “Your pipe joints beg to differ,” Orrin replied.

  I lifted my chin and laughed. “You got me there. I’m shit with pipe joints,” I admitted.

  “You should go and get some sleep. If you’re laughing at my bad jokes, you must be suffering from exhaustion,” he said.

  “You have a point,” I grinned, even though the exhaustion weighed down my bones. “You should sleep, too.”

  “After we’ve both gotten some rest, would you like to go into the city with me?” he asked. “I need to pick up some supplies for the ship.”

  “Sounds fun!” I grinned. “Count me in.”

  Orrin

  Qasar Station—a massive station nearly as large as the city of Katzul itself. We’d be able to find everything on my increasingly lengthy list, once we hit the market.

  Maris and I had already made plans to go aboard the station and find a parts dealer, or three, to replenish some of our missing inventory, as well as maybe find some components that we could use to make more modifications.

  Unfortunately, I’d only had time for a brief nap before the captain and the chief called a crew meeting, so neither Maris nor I were likely at our best.

  Dejar was the first to speak. “I want to start things off with by saying thank you to our engineering team, especially Maris and Orrin for not only keeping us off anyone’s sensors, but for finding a way to work together.” He cracked a smile. “This is going to make our lives a bit easier from here on.”

  “Not to mention we can run from the Dominion without being found,” one of the men yelled out as the others started clapping. That brought about a round of laughter on top of the applause.

  Maris acknowledged the applause with a small curtsey that I had to believe was a bit sarcastic.

  I just nodded, too tired to get fancy.

  Dejar continued once the noise settled down. “Very true, Labec. Although it might be nice if we didn’t need to run from trouble quite so much. Speaking of which, Qasar Station, as you’ve all seen, is a massive place where you can easily get lost or into trouble, or both.”

  “I prefer the trouble, especially the female kind!” another of the men shouted out. Several men laughed at his joke, most of the women rolled their eyes.

  I just dropped my head in disappointment.

  “Yeah, about that,” Dejar said, a hand in the air to regain control. “Aavat and I will be working with the rescued women to get them new identification papers, so we’re going to be here for a few days. You are allowed to leave the ship to enjoy some shore leave, but do not, I repeat, do not get yourselves into a situation where we have to come to your assistance.”

  Aavat stepped up to finish the statement. “Because we won’t. It’s as simple as that. If you do something stupid enough to get into trouble, that’s on you. If you jeopardize this ship, this crew, or what we’re doing, we’ll leave you here to deal with it on your own. Is that clear?”

  No one questioned it.

  Aavat had already proven, when he ran his own crew, that he would do exactly what he had just said.

  It was rumored he’d even turned in his own lieutenant for crimes the idiot thought he could get away with just because the station they were visiting wasn’t very affluent.

  I had no doubt that Aavat would do exactly as he said, and Dejar wouldn’t contradict him.

  With no one arguing the point, Aavat continued. “The Dominion very rarely comes out here, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t. Qasar has their own fully-armed, fully-staffed security force that is big enough to take us all down without blinking, so don’t piss them off.”

  His gaze searched over each member of the crew. “If you are a Terran female and you decide to explore, you must take a Shein member of the crew for backup, and you must ask permission from Kalyn. She’ll know if you have the language skills necessary to blend in and if you need help with your disguises. This isn’t to make you prisoners, we’re just trying to keep everyone safe.”

  Murmurs passed through the women, but most seemed to understand, even if they weren’t happy about the restrictions.

  “Finally, as I used to say with my own crew, if any of you are finished with what we’re doing and no longer wish to be part of the crew, this is your stop.” Aavat waved towards the door. “Pack up and leave. It’s been nice working with you, hope you do well, but if you’re done, get off my umbba ship quickly. Enjoy your leave.”

  As everyone else made their way to do whatever they were going to do, Maris and I headed over.

  “What’s the plan?” Aavat asked as we got close.

  “We need to get some parts and supplies,” I answered. “I’d like Maris to come with me. It’ll make things easier if she can see the options we have herself.” I bumped her with a hip, unreasonably pleased by her exaggerated look of annoyance. “Otherwise I’ll have to return things until I come back with the exact piece of metal she’d been thinking of.”

  She sighed, but I knew I was right. She’d want to see everything, figure out some crazy way to put it all together.

  And it would probably work.

  Dejar tilted his head. “I meant what I said, thank you. If it weren’t for the two of you finally figuring out how to work together, we would be having problems.” I heard the sarcasm in his voice.

  What he really meant was, if he hadn’t given Maris permission to work on the converter, which was a subtle way of telling me to pull my head out of my hurg, we’d still be limping along, and I’d be trying to live off of thirty minutes of sleep at a time.

  Not that things were much better yet, but soon there’d be a reasonable amount of rack time in my future.

  He kept going. “Everyone’s nerves were getting too close to explosion for comfort, so thank you.”

  Maris answered before I did. “No problem, sir. Just glad we were able to get the job done.”

  “Good. Don’t go crazy with the money, but make sure we can fix her up if she gets broken,” he said as he shook our hands.

  They walked away to deal with the rest of the women.

  I turned to Maris. “Can you apply your makeup by yourself, or should you wait for someone to help?”

  “I’ve got this,” she nodded. “Can’t be that hard, compared to what we’ve been doing.” With a quick turn, she headed back to the interior of the ship.

  Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, looking remarkably like a Shein woman.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  I held out my arm in what I hoped was a cross-species gesture of gentleman-like behavior and she took it cautiously, careful not to smudge her shimmery makeup.

  “With pleasure, my good sir,” she answered in Shein, with just a trace of an accent. Her smile and exaggerated shrug of a shoulder made it funny. Possibly funnier than it should have been, but we were both punchy.

  We exited the ship and our senses were immediately bombarded from all sides.

  The dock that we had been directed to opened up directly into a massive market. The sounds of vendors calling out to prospective buyers, advertising their wares, and negotiating deals mixed with curses from dock workers, children screaming and laughing as they raced around, and an overhead announcement system calling out names, providing news, and announcing the latest changes to flights in and out of the station.

  I looked around, then back at the Rogue Star.

  She was a fairly decent-sized ship, but sitting in dock with other craft around her, she was miniscule to look at. The station itself seemed both a marvel of ingenuity, invention, and stupidity.

  The station was covered in domes. In the long hours of the trip out, I’d done some research.

  I liked to know what type of engineering was supposed to be keeping me and mine alive. Each dome was made up of honeycomb-shaped panels connected to one another with steel, hyper-insulation, and, surprisingly enough, a sealant made back on my homeworld.

  Each panel, if done smartly, should be several meters thick in order to prevent breakage from common weapons
fire. From this distance, I wasn’t so sure that the panels were that thick.

  They looked exceedingly thin to me. That meant that the smallest crack in just one panel would result in that section breaking away and then the vacuum of space sucking everyone and everything out.

  I found myself walking uneasily, unable to shake the thought. Each dome was a different size, connected to one another through a tunnel-like network of bridges. The smart move would be if each individual ‘tunnel’ could be sealed to prevent damage to that dome if another dome was compromised.

  Nothing I’d read gave me an indication of how that safety system would work. I rubbed my eyes. More research time would have been nice.

  Eight smaller domes surrounded one large dome, which held the primary hub of the city. The central dome was where most people lived and was definitely looking better than the outer docking dome we were in now. The buildings here, while well built, seemed to be more for function than aesthetics, while the buildings in the middle, at least from what I could see, looked to be designed more for aesthetics and comfort.

  “Any particular direction you want to head in first?” I asked, but before I got the words out the smell of what seemed to be dozens of food booths struck me.

  My stomach grumbled, and Maris laughed.

  “Hungry?”

  “A bit, but maybe we should try to get some work done before we eat. Earn our meal, so to speak.”

  She nodded. “I like that. Uh,” she looked around, taking everything in. Then she pointed to the left. “Let’s go that way, get our bearings, see what we can see. If we don’t find anything soon, we’ll just ask someone for directions.”

  “Very well,” I responded, happy to be stretching my legs. I could have gone with any of the other members of the engineering team, but it was nice to spend time with Maris without us both being elbow deep in parts.

  “What could it hurt?”

  Maris

  “You’re carrying an awful lot.” Orrin appraised the tools and other bits and pieces in the basket I held with both hands. “How much of that is on our list?”

  “Most. Some,” I grinned, and shrugged a little sheepishly. “About half.”

  The long hours with the auto-tutor were paying off. I’d been willing to put in the work to read Shein, so that I could devour the specs for the ship. Speaking Shein hadn’t seemed as important initially since everyone on board wore a subdermal translator, but if that was the key to my freedom to explore, I’d take it.

  “And who’s going to pay for the other half?” Orrin teased.

  “I am,” I declared, already eager to play with my new toys. “I’ve been saving my earnings from work.”

  “You sure you don’t want to use it to buy something fun?” Orrin asked.

  “What could be more fun than buying a bunch of stuff to experiment with?” I asked. “I hope you don’t mind sharing the workbench with me. I’ll be tinkering there for the next week.”

  “I don’t mind,” Orrin offered me a kind smile that caught me off guard. I expected lots of things from him. Brilliance. Stubbornness. But not kindness. Something about it startled me.

  Luckily, he didn’t notice. “In fact, I’d be interested to see what you come up with. I can’t count the number of upgrades and enhancements I want to implement on the Rogue Star now that I have an extra set of hands.”

  “Good thing we’re on a space station specializing in ship repairs, right?” I nudged his arm.

  “It’s fortunate,” Orrin agreed. “I thought about buying some parts on Katzul, but the chances of them being illegal or stolen were far too high.”

  “Why would that be an issue?” I asked. “It’s not as if a few illegal parts are going to make the Dominion hate us more than they already do.”

  “In theory, you’re right,” Orrin agreed. “But the Rogue Star deserves better than illegal parts from shops with no quality control.”

  “You make a good point,” I nodded, amused. “You really care about the ship, don’t you?”

  “Where would we be without the ship?” Orrin replied.

  “Dead icicles floating through the void,” I replied. “What I meant was, you care about the Rogue Star beyond simply doing a good job.”

  “I’ve served on a lot of ships in my life,” Orrin said. “The Rogue Star is by far the best.”

  “In what way?” I asked. “She’s a fine ship, to be sure. It’s not like I know anything about alien spaceships, though.”

  “It sounds strange, but the Rogue Star has a fantastic personality.” Orrin almost looked embarrassed by his answer. Seeing a giant alien look embarrassed was not something I’d ever thought I’d see. It was kind of…cute.

  He was kind of cute, now that he wasn’t being an asshole.

  Huh.

  “It doesn’t sound strange,” I smiled. “We didn’t have ships or anything like that on Persephone Station, but we did have transport pods. I definitely had my favorites. Some were more cooperative than others, some were just a pain to work on. Some made me bleed every time I took a wrench to them.”

  “I’ve always thought it has something to do with the person who built it.” There was an odd spark of enthusiasm in Orrin’s eyes. “I’ve worked on ships built by beings that cared for nothing but money, what the profit margin would be for every voyage. Those ships were never easy to work with. Always throwing temper tantrums.”

  “I know just what you mean!” I groaned, remembering. “There was one transport pod that we never used because no matter what I did, it’s main hatch wouldn’t stay closed. I replaced the hatch at least eight times, replaced the hinges more times than I could count, and replaced the locking mechanism at least once a month, yet that fucker would spring open with a lot of force whenever it pleased. It almost broke my jaw once.”

  Orrin tossed his head back and laughed. It was a great sound, unbridled and full-bellied. Hearing it was enough to make me smile.

  I kinda liked it.

  “I worked on a ship that had a tendency to launch cooling gel at random whenever the Captain pushed it past a certain speed threshold,” Orrin replied. “Got me right in the face one time. To this day, I have no idea why that happened.”

  “Glad to know some things are universal,” I laughed at his scowl.

  “I can’t think why the Dominion classified the Terran System as non-evolved. From what I’ve seen, you humans are just as intelligent as the majority of species in Dominion space.” Orrin’s brows drew together, lips twisting to one side.

  “I thought the Dominion made that assessment based on the resources a system possesses,” I recalled what Kayln had explained.

  “Intelligence counts as a resource,” Orrin replied. “Though, from what I’ve heard, your space travel tech leaves much to be desired.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” I snorted. “A one in four chance of dying every time someone travels by Flosh drive isn’t anything to be proud of.”

  “Didn’t you have to travel by Flosh drive to get to your station?”

  “Yup. We all did.”

  I felt a twist in my gut.

  I wasn’t afraid of much, but I was afraid of traveling by Flosh drive. I still remembered the pure terror I felt when I was strapped into the transport pod.

  “Despite the risks?”

  “Most of us didn’t have the option to say no,” I replied softly. “The people who sent us to Persephone Station had already decided our lives weren’t worth much. They didn’t have to face the results of the gamble.”

  “I’m sorry.” Orrin placed his hand on my shoulder. His hand was so big that his palm covered the space between the bottom of my neck and the downward slope of my shoulder. He was steady.

  Safe.

  “It’s fine. I got lucky.” I looked down at my basket filled with mechanical goodies, forcing myself to focus on them and not see the pod closing over me, sealing my fate. “Do we have everything we need?”

  Thankfully, Orrin took the hint.

&n
bsp; “Everything but a new shock absorber for the second bay. One of them is wearing a bit thin, and I’d prefer to replace it before it becomes a problem.”

  “I have just the thing for you,” a watery voice spoke. I whirled around to find what looked like a large blue and green slug, tall enough to look Orrin in the eye.

  Giant slugs. Not my favorite new species. I knew I’d promised I’d work on that whole snap judgement thing, but really.

  Giant slugs.

  A gelatinous arm materialized as the shopkeeper pulled a product off a shelf.

  “This is the ShockEater Version Six,” the merchant declared proudly.

  I tried not to snort at the terrible product name. Maybe it was the result of a far too literal translator device, but nothing else was coming out so badly.

  Maybe that’s just what giant slugs thought was exciting branding.

  In one shapeless hand, he held up what looked to be nothing more than a thin metal spring with large bases on either end. “State of the art in every way.”

  “May I?” Orrin extended a hand. The shopkeeper hesitated for the briefest moment before passing Orrin the ShockEater.

  “Seems light,” Orrin said, tossing the spring from hand to hand. The shopkeeper watched him like a hawk, unblinking. “I’m installing this in an older ship. Are you sure this will withstand that level of impact?”

  “You could throw the entire Qasar Station against this thing and it could handle the impact,” the merchant bragged.

  I smelled a rat.

  Maybe a slug.

  “It’s made from a rare metal harvested from Uptial, an uninhabited moon orbiting Ketlar Zel. Lucky for us no one lives there.” He drew his gelatinous form further upright. “We were able to discover the properties of this special metal before anyone else. You won’t find anything like this anywhere in the galaxy!”

  “It feels like standard Starbarite to me,” Orrin commented.

  Since I’d started working on the Rogue Star, I’d learned that Starbarite was the equivalent to Terran iron. Common and useful, but mostly unremarkable.