Post 53

“I need stuff,” you say imperiously as you dump a tablet on Hoshi’s abdomen. He had been dozing in the pilot’s chair, obviously watching the aurora on a nearby planet. “Lots of stuff.”

He makes an oof sound as it hits his stomach, wakes up and scans it. “Laser pistol, armored biosuit, monoblade knife, posttech toolkit, dataslab, metatool, spare parts...Burke, what is all this?”

“Stuff,” you say again, annoyed. “And I need the schematics for Shori. I think I’m almost ready to start integrating the AI at least, which should be pretty straight forward. The ion drive is going to be much more complicated. Where do you keep her schematics?”

Hoshi looks at you blankly. “What’s a schematic?”

It takes you a full minute to process the question. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” You look around the ship. “It’s a document that helps people repair and upgrade your ship. How did you get Web access and all this stuff installed without it? I know you sure as hell didn’t do it. You’re mechanically inept.”

He shrugs. “No idea. I just, uh, help people and they help me back.” He smiles sweetly at you. “You know how it is. Besides, for anything that’s really a problem, I can just grow Shori a new organ. I’ve got a great cloning bed in the med bay.”

“That’s not...Jesus.” You grab the tablet and add more parts and a reminder to yourself to actually make a schematic of Shori, since the brute doesn’t have a clue. 

“Burke, that sounds like it’s going to take a long time. Why waste the effort? Can’t you just drop in the parts and we can head out?”

“No,” you bark at him, revising your design schedule and making notes on the engine specifications that you had hoped to finalize this week. You unconsciously start tapping your fingers in the distinctive 3, 3, 5 pattern that always makes you feel more calm and repeat your favorite kinematics equation over and over again in your head. You didn’t have to do this when you were on Snow, but since someone has made that impossible, you’re stuck with this method of self-soothing again. You can’t help a quick glare at Hoshi with the thought.

“What?” he asks. “I didn’t even do anything to you yet.”

“I know,” you snap at him and stomp back to the engine room in disgust.

“Burke. BURKE, why do you need a laser pistol?” Hoshi shouts after you.

“TO MAKE UP FOR YOUR BAD DECISIONS! NOT ALL OF US ARE PRETTY ENOUGH TO WHORE OUR WAY OUT OF TROUBLE!” You shout back. Stupid Void Dragons have no perspective. 

Shori’s internal skin shudders and turns green-gold--something you’ve never seen before. It’s enough to startle you out of your world of math and equipment specifications. The feeling of slowing down is also unusual. Hoshi likes to keep moving and it’s rare for him to just stop in such a barren stretch of space. You peak your head out of your workshop and head through the engine room towards the command center. Shori’s neurons fire above you in unusual patterns and you can’t help the momentary stab of regret for the crushed vial of Snow that Hoshi took from you. If I was on Snow, I’d be able to map those patterns, you think resentfully. Stupid dragon.

Another ship is prominently featured in Shori’s viewing screen. It’s sleek, efficient, but there are giant burn streaks and metallic craters that make you immediately nervous. No one nice has laser burns on their hull, you think automatically. Hoshi has his hands in Shori’s interface and is communicating with someone on the small console where you can’t see, but you can certainly hear. 

“Daiki, come on now, my heart. Would I do something like that to you? Aren’t we old friends? I’m just saying that I can help you with your little...problems, and maybe you can help me find some equipment. None of the list I sent you is that hard to find. Especially not for a man of your talents. Just give me a few hours and I’ll have you and that crew of fuck-ups right as rain and you can help me get my engineer off my back. Such sensitive little creatures, aren’t they?”

Hoshi’s smarmy tone immediately annoys you and you crane your neck to see who he’s talking to. “Daiki” or whatever his name is looks like a thug. Heavy set, scarred, wearing battle armor as if he actually needs it, his face is set in an unsmiling glare focused completely on Hoshi. You ease closer.

“Hoshi. After the last time, you have the nerve to ring me up out of the cold black of space? You have balls, I’ll give you that.” He pauses, as if weighing the pros and cons of dealing with Hoshi. “Fine. But I warn you, if you try to pull any of the shady shit like last time,” there’s an off-camera sound, a snicker-snack of unsheathed, slicing blades and Daiki flicks one towards Hoshi on the screen, “I will cut you into tiny pieces and drop what’s left of you onto the ruins of your dead planet. Do we understand each other?”

“Of course, of course.” Hoshi holds up his palms in his familiar peace gesture. “I’m just here to help, really. Nothing wrong with both of us having a nice time and getting some benefit out of this, you know. Now, any of your crew have anything in particular I should be aware of?”

“No,” Daiki says curtly. “Same rules as before. Unarmed. No tech. We’ll strip you before you get on the ship.” The big man leans closer to the camera. “And I can do whatever I want to you, right? Same as before?”

If you hadn’t been watching, you might have missed the faint tremor that went through Hoshi’s shoulders. But he smiled at Daiki and nodded. “Of course. Those are the rules. As soon as I’m on-board, though, I’ll be expecting the equipment transfer to Shori. My engineer will take care of it.” Daiki grunted something that could have been an affirmative as Hoshi pulls you in front of him and yanks you down to console level. “This is my engineer, Burke.” 

Daiki looks at you closely. “Not really your type, Hoshi. So, Burke, you like getting fucked by a freak? Or is it more of a business arrangement?”

“Fuck you,” you start to say, but Hoshi covers your mouth and yanks you back, smiling at Daiki. 

“Oh don’t worry about Burke,” he says as you try to bite his hand. He winces as you get a piece of his palm. “Everybody has their kink, you know.”

“Sure. Whatever.” Daiki leans back into his chair and waves at something off-screen. “We’re ready whenever you are.” He gives Hoshi a wolfish smile that you don’t really understand. “Looking forward to it.”

Hoshi cuts the connection and lets you go. You glare at him. “What the fuck was that?” you ask. Hoshi tries to pull you into his lap, you push him away. “Explain.”

“Shopping, my love,” he says in a long-suffering voice and releases you. “We’re too far out from anywhere civilized to get the stuff you wanted, but I happened to know that Daiki works this sector pretty often, so…”

“Daiki works this sector? What, like a merchant?” 

“Sort of.” Hoshi agrees, standing up and stretching, for all the world looking nonchalant and relaxed, but something about it feels off to you. 

“Hoshi, what’s going on?”

“Nothing, Burke. I’m just going to hop over to their ship for a little bit, doctor up their crew and come on back. All you need to do is grab the equipment they drop off.”

You swallow hard and feel a knot of fear. “They’re mercenaries, aren’t they? What happens if they don’t send over the stuff or they try to take over Shori or something?”

Hoshi shrugs. “It’s a risk, pet. You’ll have to think of something.”

You blink, horrified. “But, Shori doesn’t have any weapons. What am I supposed to do? Couldn’t we just wait until we get to a station or a planet or something? It’d be so much safer.”

Hoshi closes his eyes and rolls out his shoulders. You can see faint stress lines etch themselves into his mask. “Burke...the nearest station is weeks away. Daiki is here. Honestly, we’d probably have to deal with him anyway to cross this sector. At least this way, we have a chance to make a deal with him. And maybe if we’re clever enough, we can even come up positive out of the deal.”

It takes a second for you to register his meaning. “Oh my god. Are you going to try to cheat him?”

Hoshi winks at you. “Of course. If I’m going to get fucked this hard, there better be something more in it for me than a lousy toolkit.”

“Hoshi, no. This is a terrible idea!”

“Burke, relax. It’s going to be worse for me anyway. All you have to do is receive the equipment and try not to lose the ship. Lay off, why don’t you?” You can see the worry and something else move across his expression and he suddenly seems very tired. 

After a second’s consideration, you move to the kitchenette and remove a small flask of synthetic alcohol you’d been saving and hand it to him. He looks at you in surprise. You avert your eyes and mumble, “Since you took away my Snow, I wanted something to take the edge off and all you have is nutritional supplements.”

He smiles at you and takes a swig, promptly coughing and gagging. “Fuck, Burke, that’s horrible.” 

You snatch it back and throw down a mouthful defiantly, trying not to vomit it back up. “Shut up! That’s gratitude for you…” but you interrupt yourself by coughing and some of the material backs up into your nose. You can feel your face turn red as all your mucus membranes start to burn.

Hoshi doubles over in laughter and steals the flask back. 

“It helps though, right?” you ask quietly, once he’s calmed down a little.

“Sure does.”

***

You’re waiting at the docking bay. Hoshi has been gone for at least half an hour and no one’s showed up with the stuff. You pace and chew on your lip, gnaw your fingernails, recheck the nets and microfilaments you had Hoshi start growing before this little exchange. You take a moment to rub your face with both hands as you wish it would get on already. 

You hate waiting. Especially for bad stuff.

Finally, finally there’s a little ping against Shori’s hull and the thunk that tells you a boarding corridor has been docked. Your fingers start that 3, 3, 5 tapping against the cargo bay door console without your conscious knowledge and you very deliberately flatten your hands against the interface when you see it. Through Shori’s cartilage window, you can see a metal corridor and a woman’s face now. She juts a chin towards you and taps on the window authoritatively. You swallow and hit the override to let her in. 

She’s very tall. And very bored. She stands with one hand on her hip, a laser rifle attached to her matching black body armor chest plate. There’s a small servo robot behind her with a pallet of what you hope to be your equipment. A pink bubble emerges from her mouth and she snaps it back in with a crack.

You have a moment to feel insulted that she’s chewing bubble gum while you are freaking out, but then she looks around the bay, yawns and pulls a pistol out to calmly shoot you in the chest. 

You fly backwards, hitting Shori’s walls and the breath heaves out of you, confusing your diaphragm and making little gasping sounds come out of your mouth. Shori snaps up the microfilament protein structures you and Hoshi had grown around the woman, constricting her like a bug trapped in spider’s silk as you roll onto your knees, trying to adjust the chest plate you had tucked into Hoshi’s shirt back into place. You hadn’t expected the force of the shot to fling you that far and it takes you a moment to make it back to Shori’s interface panel so you can ask her to add another few protein bands around the mercenary and hold her tighter. 

You grab the respirator on the console, manage to limp over to the woman struggling against the bands and crack the vial Hoshi had given you under her nose. She slumps forward. You clip a carabiner and rope to the servo and winch the pallet into Shori, closing the cargo doors and keeping your respirator on. “Don’t worry,” you rasp to her through the face plate as you start inventorying what they’d actually sent, “I won’t kill you.”

She doesn’t respond. Whatever was in the vial was enough to knock her out thoroughly. You go ahead and cut through enough of the protein to go through her pockets, removing all her weapons and most of her clothes. They would probably fit you, actually. It would be nice not to have to borrow Hoshi’s all the time. You pause for a minute and then reactivate the growth cultures Hoshi had left to regrow the microfilaments, tying her back up while you wait. 

There wasn’t anything in the pallet. It was a dummy. You groan and sit back on your heels. The pile of weapons and clothing from the woman was good, but you had really, actually, almost believed that Daiki was going to send parts and tools. Stuff you needed. It makes you grind your teeth and feel a quick wave of cold nausea for whatever Hoshi was doing. It’s probably very unpleasant. I wonder what happened to him last time? I wonder what he’s doing...you glance at the woman. They would definitely notice that she’s not back yet. What do I do? You’re starting to panic a little. Hoshi was still gone. Someone was going to come looking for this woman. You rifle through her documentation. Zubaida. Pretty name. You were trying to distract yourself so that your brain didn’t drown itself in the panicked circles of indecision you could feel trying to swallow you up. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What do I do? You fish another vial out from one of Shori’s cabinets, crack it under Zubaida’s nose and then start rolling her towards the bay doors.

The boarding corridor is still there. You shove her next to the door and stop, breathless and unsure. What would Hoshi do? Think! 

A sudden ping and a series of thuds against the door breaks into your consciousness. You stand up and look through the window. Another loader servo is running into the door over and over, as if it had been programmed to head into Shori and couldn’t understand why the door was shut. Your fingers tap 3, 3, 5 over and over again until you finally open the door to let it in. With a little whine of gears, the loader droid heads into the cargo bay and you can see it’s weighted down. With a lot of stuff. Too much stuff, actually. 

Someone screams from the mercenary ship and there are two thuds that shake the corridor between both ships and you see Hoshi run/drag himself towards you. 

“Run!” He shouts as soon as he’s in sight. “We have to go! We have to go NOW!”

You roll Zubaida into the docking corridor and hope that it has an automatic vacuum protection system installed as you thrust your hands into Shori’s disgusting organic interface and start up the engines. As soon as Hoshi is inside, you slam the doors closed and pull away from the mercenary ship. 

Hoshi shoves you aside without preamble and takes your place at the interface. You’re almost offended, until you get a look at him. Mostly naked, blood seeping from a dozen wounds, something had smashed his feet and you can see what can only be rope burns on his wrists and ankles. His skin is so pale, you can see what looks like turquoise smoke moving under the flesh, until you realize you’re looking at his circulatory system. You reach out as if to touch him, “Hoshi--”

He hisses at you. Not even real words, just a long, angry hiss. You pull your hand back. Shori heaves as if Hoshi is trying to evade something. You find a reasonably stable spot to sit and wait. There was no way Shori can outrun a merc ship. No way whatsoever. 

An impact of some kind ripples through Shori, making her skin turn that awful green-gray color again. Instead of golden light, her dendrites and cartilage bridges flush red and you can see Hoshi throw his head back, as if in pain. There’s a rushing sound as if she’d been shot and there was a hole vacuuming into space. You clench your arms around your knees and drop your head onto them. We’re going to die, you think, feeling the spasms arcing through the ship and listening to Hoshi’s gasps as Shori wrenches herself side-to-side. 

There was a horrible feeling of falling. Gravitation failed. You are weightless, spinning in the emptiness of the cargo bay as equipment and pieces of Shori slam against you. A couple glimpses of Hoshi show him with his feet literally grown into Shori’s floor, his hands still buried in her interface, and his mouth opened in a soundless scream as everything falls apart.