Groundwork

“This is how I see it. If you asked me six months ago what I’d be doing now, I’d have exactly one item right.” Over the past few days, the routine had fallen into Carbon feeding him and then disappearing for long periods of time. She was giving him regular updates on what she was doing in regards to the engines. So far it was mostly cleaning up the damage, with the occasional technical task that went way over his head.

Dinner Conversation

“I cannot understand how so fractured a society managed to reach space.” Carbon shook her head and offered up the straw to the bag of food to him again.

“I hear that a lot.” He took a pull of passable beef stew and swallowed. It had been covered in school, actually. They - the Tslao, Eohm, and Tkt - all had apparently homogeneous cultures. The Tslao in particular had a difficult time wrapping their heads around the panoply of humanity. “Not that specifically, but something similar.”

Working Order

After things settled down and Carbon had departed again, autosurgeon still latched on to her abdomen, Alex managed to get some sleep.

Then he woke up hungry.

Given that his injuries didn’t extend much beyond his limbs, the mediboard should have extruded a feeding tube into his nose and been squirting a food-like substance directly into his stomach. Not exactly a pleasant thing to consider, but it took care of the issue of starvation.

One Good Turn

Carbon didn’t respond to him immediately. She fished the first cannister of drugs from the dispenser tray and loaded it into an injector. She winced as she pressed it to her arm, holding it in place until it beeped empty. When she replied, her voice was ragged and tired, teeth tinged a dark red already.  “Eight hundreds. One thousands. Between.”

Alex didn’t know what unit she was using. Definitely wasn’t Gray, which would have rendered her dead a few times over. Roentgen? Could be. Probably some Tslao measurement he’d never heard of. “That’s a lot.”

Keystone

Alex didn’t find sleep quickly. He spent hours staring at the ceiling, only able to turn his eye far enough to see the clock on the wall. When he did, the dream came almost immediately.

He pushed himself up out the the cockpit of the simulator, blinking in the bright lights of the sim bay. He had a stupid sort of grin on his face, an enthusiasm that permeated the whole of his being. “If that’s what the next generation of Waverider drives is going... I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.”

Debtor

Alex had been pretty sure that that ‘life flashing before your eyes’ thing when you died was bunk. But, there it went. A stuttering slideshow of his life, snippets from childhood to just a few days ago flickered through his mind, the things that had made him who he was. It was interspersed with the weirdest feelings, something like comfort and gratification but decidedly foreign. At least, it felt positive.

Then all of it gave way to darkness.

Puncture Wound

“When can we jump?” Normally Alex would have set up a countdown timer himself, without having to ask the Shipmaster. But that required a purposeful, focused thought. He didn’t dare take his attention away from navigating a still growing cloud of Eohm projectiles.

“Six. Minutes.” The words were, at best, venomous. Shipmaster Tshalen made it crystal clear that usurping her authority over the engines and power plant had not done anything to improve her view of him.

“Super.” Alex rolled the ship out of the way of a particularly dense cluster of projectiles. Truth be told, they probably could have safely taken the damage from a missile, maybe two. It would have peeled off the shields, no doubt about that. Anything else after that would have been a different story entirely.

He shook his head, clearing his mind of second guessing for the time being. They just had to hang on for six minutes. Easy.

The sensors shrieked in his mind and Alex flinched away from the noise, jerking the Kshlav’o out of the path of a superluminal bolt. With the shipboard AI hooked so tightly into his brain, he felt it as it passed. The sensation of something searing hot hovering over his skin, the bones in his shoulder flexing informed him clearly this was not something he wanted to let make contact.

If the Eohm were going to use near instant-strike weapons usually reserved for capital ships, running wasn’t going to work for six minutes. The scoutship was fast and agile in sublight and extremely durable for a ship its size, but it wouldn’t take a hit like that.

A conventional tack would not work, so he cobbled together what he knew about the Eohm and made something unconventional. Alex brought the long range scanners online and killed the main thrusters just long enough to flip the Kshlav'o over and begin a run at the twin Eohm fleets.

The Shipmaster’s channel opened a heartbeat later. Even with the faint digitization, the translator conveyed the alien’s alarm and anger.  “Why have we reversed direction?”

“I’m buying time.” He was distant, eyes searching for a clear path and any kind of missile. The long range sensors moved with his gaze, the wide-band impulse blinding whatever it touched. It only took a few moments for the AI to understand what he was doing and take over. “I’ve got this.”

“You have what?”

It was kind of nice to not hear exasperation when he was imprecise about something, even if she was still really pissed. “I have a plan. I’m going to the only defensible location around here.”

The extra information cooled her temper, her words now just terse. “You are going there through the Eohm?”

Alex flinched again as a railgun projectile skipped off their shields, a hot knife dragged across his chest. “I am going to the Eohm.”

The translator passed along an angry burst of Tsla, whatever she had said not present in the dictionary. “We will not go to our deaths. Change direction immediately, pilot.”

“They won’t risk firing on each other.”

She made a sort of grunt sound that Alex understood as the Tsla’o version of ‘huh?’

“Eohm view other life as dangerous, but their own is sacred. They won’t take the chance.” He hoped they wouldn’t, anyway. No one had ever had the opportunity to test that theory until now.

“By your sight I yield, pilot.” There might have been a hint of approval in there, somewhere.

That wasn’t something he had heard her say before. Alex was still pretty sure he got her meaning. “Thanks.”

The incoming fire had died down as they approached - they stopped firing missiles entirely and larger class projectiles gave way to smaller guns that the shields could shrug off. Three minutes left as they slipped into the space between the two fleets, everything went silent.

Alex opened the comm to the Shipmaster again, a smile creeping onto his face. “Worked like a charm.”

“Hold your pride until we are underway again.”

That was prudent advice. There was still an enormous amount of ordinance pointed at them. “Very well.”

He kept it in check as he jinked the ship around the safe zone. Two minutes. One minute. The SAPRAM sensor went off the charts and Alex started swearing to himself as one of the fleets jumped out.

He made a run for the remaining fleet as thousands of rounds of ammunition lanced out of the myriad guns leveled at them.

Alex was a good pilot. Probably one of the best, in his estimation, but some odds were too long.

Working Relationship

“No, mom. You put the emotion-clause on the front of the statement so they know how it’s supposed to be interpreted.” Alex sat in the darkened bridge, illuminated by dozens of holographic displays. His mother’s image was front and center, bleary-eyed from the early morning call.

“That’s fine.” His mother may have ignored what he just told her. She may just have been half asleep. “Be sure to let the Shipmaster know she’s doing a great job.”