Mettle, Pt. 1

CH.1_OverAndOver

Seven laps and still no sign from Nick; Leru pushed herself into number eight. She leapt up the ladder in the flickering light of the cargo bay, to the catwalk that followed the three walls opposite the two-story bay door. The dented, jagged grating rattled in its frame as she made her way to an open man-door in the wall to her left, darting sideways into the ship’s maintenance halls.

The tactical programming on the interface implanted between her central nervous system and her brain did its best to outline the darkened hall based on whatever information it could gather from the rest of her senses, providing ghostly blue surfaces hovering in her vision, jerking about with each heartbeat or particularly heavy footstep. She closed the program with a thought — navigating Perseverance by memory alone would be easier by this point. She bounded off the far wall where the hallway abruptly angled right, thundered past the kitchen and flight deck on her left and right respectively, spitting on the grating to keep from breathing it into her lungs. It wasn’t like anyone was going to be doing maintenance down there anyway.

Well, Hep might.

She blinked hard, shaking sweat from her eyes as she pushed right down the opposite maintenance hall; the final stretch. She focussed her breathing, measured and slow enough to absorb the maximum amount of oxygen according to the interface readout floating in the darkness below her eye. She leapt through the man-door opposite the first back onto the catwalk in the cargo bay, legs shaking.

She jumped at the end, kicked off the wall to her left, and vaulted over the railing, grabbing it on her way down to the cargo bay floor. She fell face-first, letting go of the handrail then catching herself on the catwalk floor with shaky fingers and burning forearms.

She landed with her arms out to her sides and chin on her chest, flexing the muscles in her abdomen out of startled habit to avoid having the wind knocked out of her as her. Her fingers were sore, but she’d avoided tearing her pale-blue skin though she could feel the beginnings of deep grey bruises on her back.

She rolled over onto her stomach and pushed off the floor, still heaving in breaths as she held her core rigid between her shoulders and the tips of her toes — her heart rate was still dangerously high according to stop cold, and she wasn’t about to risk arrhythmia. After thirty-some repetitions she collapsed onto her back, heart slowly returning to a resting pace.

Sweat dripped down her face, soaked the sleeveless white shirt she wore tucked into her baggy, multi-pocketed pants. She looked over her heaving chest at the man-door by her feet and imagined Nick stepping through with his natural, lanky swagger, looking her over with mild surprise under his shaggy black hair — no, scratch that. She gave her fantasy-Nick a haircut, imagining him sweeping his bangs over his left ear as he shut the man-door behind him.

He would approach slowly before kneeling down by her side. He’d run a hand over her cheek and she’d bite at it, forcing him to move to her collarbone and soaking, white shirt.

“Hi Leru,” Hep mumbled as if checking off a to-do list.

She snapped her knees together, still panting, “Hi Hep.”

His booted feet tapped softly past her through the man-door, grey eyes fixed on the air somewhere between himself and the floor as he rolled it loudly open and closed; The silent, hairless mechanic came and went as was his way.

“One more broken thing on the good ship Perseverance,” Nick’s voice rang out in her head. “She attracts them like a magnet. Sometimes I wonder who saved who.”

Leru sat up, running her hands over the shaved sides of her head and down the dark silver, shoulder-length ponytail. She was breathing normally by the time she stood, eyeing the catwalk on the opposite side of the room and chewing her lip. She let out a breath, turning instead to the man-door directly opposite the large bay door and making her way to the crew quarters beyond. She found hers near the end of the short hallway beyond and undressed as she transitioned the one-by-two-meter compartment into a shower — Nick called Hep broken, but it was only thanks to Hep their water purifier replenished itself with ice-particles from the void. Nick hadn’t even known the ship was capable of such a thing, none of them had.

She stared with her eyes closed into the stream that spat from the seam where the wall met the roof, letting the water wash away her doubts about Nick before cascading over her skin and into the grating below. She’d long since grown used to the mettle grating digging into her bare feet, but it kept the experience from being entirely comfortable.

Nick’s voice echoed through the rushing water, “Broken people, in a broken ship, in a broken society, in a universe that wasn’t built.”

Leru turned the knob on the wall and increased the pressure, angling her eyes down away from the stream. She placed her hands on the segmented walls around her as the wide jet splattered off her head onto them, careful not to pull any of them open as she rested her fingers on their latches.

Nick was too far away to emphatically feel, but she could still remember the feeling of his determined resignation. She punched the wall beneath the shower, gritting her teeth and growling beneath the rush of the water.

The intercom by her door sputtered something inaudible from beneath the rushing water. She turned the knob and set the flow slowly sputtering to a halt and stood dripping in the dim LED strip over the door behind her, watching the water disappear down the smooth panel beneath the grating.

“Leru? Hello, Lary?” Their pilot called over the buzzing speaker.

Leru opened one of the small, square compartments with a satisfying clunk that reminded her of the lockers at her old private security firm. She removed a threadbare towel barely big enough to wrap around her torso from the compartment beyond, and began drying her hair as she pushed the wobbly button beneath the speaker. “What’s up, Jarett?”

“We’re starting to see some activity in Estermere’s security system, I think they might have flagged your fake ID.”

“Great,” she replied through the towel as she dragged it from her face down to her breasts. “Keep me updated for when I actually need to do something.”

“Yikes, someone’s antsy. You want to talk about it?”

Leru leaned her head against the wall, tossing the already soaked towel over her shoulder. Finally she pushed the call button. “Yeah, alright. Give me a few minutes, I’m just getting out of the shower.”

“Oh, lucky you. I’m in the bath.”

She shook her head with a smirk. “Gross, Jarett.”

“Yeah, you’re telling me. I’ll see you in a few.”

CH.2_Running

Nick sat with his long legs crossed on the barren office floor, cobalt-grey captain’s jacket splayed out behind him amidst shreds of carpet and gutted chair cushions. His nose curled upwards as his gaze drifted idly. Moments ago this had been a quaint, yet state of the art little office. He liked it better this way.

He lifted the dark purple cube he’d found to his eye, briefly admiring the translucent material before standing and dropping it down his jacket’s cavernous pocket. He left his little ceramic knife beside its shattered blade, and readied himself for the short trip out of Estermere Orphanage and Boarding School, giddy enough to jump off the station’s edge and orbit the planet below. Crime didn’t pay as well as tending bar did, but it sure was a lot more fun.

As he reached for the angled handle on the synthwood door, it turned, and the 3d printed contraption began to swing towards him. Vester, a round-faced, male-identifying ohma and headmaster of Estermere, stepped one foot into his office. “I apologize, Mr. Harte, but there’s been a… security…” His voice grew higher in pitch, faltering before finally trailing off and leaving him agape in the doorway.

Nick yanked the door inward. He kept his grip on the handle so it didn’t bang against the office’s inner wall, but his sudden motion had achieved the desired effect:

Vester stumbled into the room as the door was torn from his grasp, and Nick caught him with a knuckle to the solar-plexus. He squeaked as his diaphragm collapsed, eyes wild and hands clutching as the wind was knocked out of him.

Nick laid him down on the girded floor amidst the detritus. “Sorry about…” He waved around the room before closing the door behind him and jogging back towards the foyer. He floated over the thick, green carpet, one hand on the dark purple datachit in his pocket. He remembered passing two intersections and taking a sharp left when he’d followed Vester to his office.

A thickly-muscled arm flew at him as he approached the first of the intersections, barely skimming his forehead as he ducked under the attempted clothesline. He sped up to a run without missing a step as a second ohma positioned themselves at the next intersection, their broad shoulders walling off the way forward atop two solid columns of leg muscles. Their entire shape was made of hard, obtuse angles, including a square jaw, rigid brow, and limbs thicker than some of his own ship’s support beams attached to an upside-down mountain of pectorals and abs.

Nick squared his own shoulders, locking eyes with the ohma and leaning into his run: he quietly thanked Leru for pushing him to join her on her workouts, but the ohma ahead looked like they could break him in half with one hand regardless. The ohma smirked cockily as they flexed in the tight hall.

Nick met their smirk with his own determined grimace as they settled into their stance, placing one foot half a step behind their bulk. Nick pushed himself into a full-force sprint as the distance between them closed, a low growl beginning in his chest and rising to his throat in a defiant shout as he bounded across the final couple of meters in a mid-air kick.

The guard’s smirk showed teeth, falling into a grimacing frown as Nick fell to the carpet centimeters before making contact with them.

Nick’s forward momentum pulled him between the guard’s wide, braced stance with enough inertia to bring him back up to his feet on the other side with a grin wide enough to feel the breeze in his teeth.

He burst into the foyer/common room, eliciting gasps from the staff who dotted the maze of coffee tables and lounges — he’d timed his visit to take place while the estate’s charges were in class, leaving the space mostly empty.

More thickly muscled guards made their way towards him: two around the edges of the room and three more weaving around the furniture through the room proper. The latter were closer and moving directly towards him, though the large, circular, pamphlet-laden table near the entrance where they’d started meant they had to do so at an angle.

Nick could feel the massive guard he’d slipped under closing the distance behind him as well, the floor beneath his feet trembling harder with each step — they’d be on him in a matter of seconds. He took one final breath, a bracing step backward, and leapt:

His right foot landed near the edge of one of the low, synthwood coffee tables. The centerpiece rattled, but the furniture maintained its position thanks to being part of the entire 3d printed structure as Nick continued onto the back of an empty chair. He made a rude gesture at a nearby guard as he leapt over them from table, to chair, to table out of reach, soaring over the final few meters between himself and the larger, darker table near the entrance.

His foot landed just shy of the table’s center as he realized too late that this was a genuine piece of carved wood. He slid across the surface on a stack of pamphlets titled Proper Self-Punishment as it tilted, threatening to dump him right into the arms of the approaching guards behind him.

He heard a scream of wordless rage, and managed a quick glance back as he slid past the center of the table — Vester had entered the room just in time for the table to begin tilting in the opposite direction, slamming back down to the floor with a crack as it continued his slide towards the exit, pamphlets toppling and spinning through the air around him. The table deposited him neatly on his feet a couple meters from the door, then went thudding back the opposite way as he stepped off. Motors in the walls whined as he crashed through the large front doors, briefly overshadowing an out of sync, yet tastefully quaint creaking sound from some unseen speaker as he stepped onto the tarmac beyond.

CH.3_Leaving

Leru entered the bridge through the man-door directly above the crew quarters. Stars dotted the segmented window that domed the ceiling as the station they sat on began to rotate away from the sun.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jarett started before she’d come more than two steps into the room. “Why does the captain keep risking our lives committing petty, profitless crimes?” His voice was muffled behind the pilot’s mask attached to the large, segmented pillar in the center of the room that was the pilot’s seat.

Leru folded her arms and let out a breath, “go on, let it out. I’m sure you’ve been working on this since we landed.” She began to circle the pillar, idly checking the emergency seats folded into the walls while Jarett vented. The bridge was nearly spherical, akin to the interior of a many sided die — a something-hedron, though she couldn’t remember the correct prefix.

“Sure, he’s not very smart,” Jarett continued, “or compassionate, but surely he must at least care about his own time and well being. But why, then, would he waste every last professional connection you have just to land us on a station owned by the largest corporation in the galaxy, when he — and by extension, us — are already wanted criminals?” The pilot’s mask slid up, revealing his glistening, stubbled face. He would be roguishly handsome, if he could lose the doughy jowls that clung to his chin no matter how thin their rations got. His wispy, light-brown hair clung to his forehead as if he’d just left the shower. “The answer is actually quite simple: Nick just isn’t very smart,” he concluded as Leru came full circle to where she’d started.

“You already said he wasn’t smart.” Leru continued pacing back and forth rather than circling Jarett in the pillar.

“The more interesting question, I think, is why you haven’t realized it. He’ll get you killed just as surely as me or Hep.”

“He wouldn’t do that.” She stopped, rattling the flat, grated floor that cut bisected the room about a third from the bottom, but couldn’t bring herself to meet Jarett’s gaze. She hated the pity emanating from him like a doting ghost, but dampened her empathy before she could turn her hate toward him. “He knows what he’s doing, or at least there’s logic to it.” She met his gaze, his mouse quirked to one side with the opposite eyebrow raised. She looked away, “even if he doesn’t always… explain it to me.”

Jarett leaned his head back. “Have you asked him what exactly he’s hoping to find in there? the place is 90% abandoned children, I know the estate itself is worth more units than the planet it orbits but we’re hardly equipped to-”

“He found a lead that there would be dirt on Radiant Dawn Intergalactic. It checks out, the orphanage is owned personally by their CEO through a string of shell companies.” She mirrored his raised eyebrow. “And it’s primarily a boarding school, the orphanage is secondary.”

“Same difference. Still…” Jarett sank into the pilot’s seat until his shirtless torso began to disappear into the metal enclosure, folding his doughy chest into a pair of sad eyes atop the frowning curve of his belly. “Since when are we set up for corporate espionage?”

Leru leaned back against the cargo bay door, staring at the circuits and wires beneath the grating.

Jarett sighed, “I get it, really, but he’s bad news. I just…” He shook his head. “He’s shifty — and I know, we all are, but he’s….” He was silent til she looked up, then held her gaze. “I don’t know what he’s running from, but I think we’d best get away from him before it starts chasing us too.”

Her eyebrows convened over wide eyes. “After all you went through to get an interface, you’d give up being a pilot just to get away from the Captain?”

Jarett’s mouth formed a thin line, eyes darting to one side. “I’m suggesting I use my position as a pilot to get away from Nick.” He smiled weakly, “Captain.” His gaze went distant and he sat back up in the pilot’s seat, mask sliding down over his thinning hairline. “We’ve gone from red flag to full on alarm — they’re trying to take over our engines.”

Leru threw open the door to the catwalk. “Start preparing for takeoff, they’re going to figure out sooner than later that we drive manual.”

“Come at me, you pampered dandies,” Jarett growled into the helmet as the ship began to thrum, pumping quantum-layered fuel to the four engines at its corners. “Combustion beats induction, every time.”

Leru held her tongue, running along the catwalk and leaping over the railing. She landed deftly on her feet this time, tearing through the man-door she’d fallen in front of earlier and turning the heavy latch on the exterior door in the maintenance hall beyond. She slid it open just far enough to peek out at the tarmac, getting a clear view of the entrance to Estermere.

The building was what she’d grown to consider “old-earth-chique” as a child on the ohma flotilla: lots of red bricks and windows framed by synthwood beams. The whole was awkwardly melded with the repurposed green-grey metal of the fleet ship-turned-space-station that it sat on, making it what Leru considered a garish misunderstanding of aesthetics.

She punched the intercom button next to the door. “Combustion beats induction until you run out of fuel and need an induction ship to tow you home.”

The intercom crackled with what she assumed to be a blown raspberry echoing behind Jarett’s mask. “Induction engines are just fueled with labour, you classist.”

“The entire crew share’s equal parts of the work to charge the engine, and that way you don’t set the place you were on fire just to get somewhere new. It’s called a community, it’s literally the opposite of classism.” She scanned the windows on the front of the building, trying to get a glimpse through their privacy filters — warbles and waves in the mirror-like glare hinted at commotion, but the details were impossible to make out.

“That’s so reductive, Lary — it’s a process of conversion, the stuff you “set on fire” doesn’t just go away.”

Leru rolled her eyes. “So you convert quantum-layered propane into what, and then how do you turn that back into propane? I’ll even spare you explaining how the energy required for the quantum layering process doesn’t leave you at a net loss.”

“What do I look like, a chemist?”

“You mean quantum physicist? And no, you look like a lump of darkwhite too big to fit in the fryer.”

“Ouch… but fair. And also, delicious.” There was a slap of skin on skin over the intercom. “Tell me you wouldn’t take a bite out of this if you could.”

Leru laughed through her nose as she continued scanning the front entrance: The two broad-shouldered ohma attendants at the front entrance’s double-doors glanced at each other before quickly ducking inside. “How are the engines warming up?”

He paused before responding, joviality gone. “We’re ready to leave on your order, Captain.”

Her smile fell like wet meat off a tilted dinner plate.

“Hey…” Jarett’s voice was timid in the silence that followed, “don’t change the subject. Doesn’t the extra physical labour required of the crew to charge an induction engine require a higher-calorie diet?”

Leru shook her head into the present. “Are you trying to argue that food isn’t a renewable resource- Hold that thought.” She smiled unconsciously as Nick burst through the double doors less than a hundred meters across the tarmac. “Get ready to light up.”