I woke to the hissing sound of the hatch closing and froze in place. For a heart-stopping minute I thought I was back on Mimir and Holliday’s disposal crew had come for me.
Then I woke up enough to remember that I was on Cassandra now. Holliday was light years away by now and I was as close to safe as I’d been in years. That said, there was still someone in the room with me.
I made a deliberate choice to open my eyes and sit up. “Hello?” My voice was hoarse. I’d forgotten Doc’s advice to drink some water and I must have been sleeping with my mouth open. “Am I in your bunk?” I asked.
“Shoot, I’m sorry.” The person (a short, feminine person with a springy cap of red curls) held up a small stack of fabric. Were those clothes? “I was going to leave these for you. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“What are they?” I fumbled for the light sensor and brushed my fingers over it. The room lit up slowly until I got a good look at my visitor. Her tag introduced her as Elaine Oakes, cargo master and ag tech, she/her. In the light, I could see that she had dark-ish brown skin and startling gray eyes. Her bone structure was delicate, but she had the dimensions of someone who grew up on a planet, despite her spacer’s coloration.
“I printed you some clothes. I noticed you didn’t come aboard with any extra mass and I had some leftover feedstock for the fabber from last quarter, so I thought ‘hey, why not?’ You can feed it all back into the reclaimer for a credit if it doesn’t fit.” Elaine smiled impishly. “Caveat emptor: I might have been hoping to butter you up so you stay.”
“Were the crewshares from the horses that good?” I rasped. My limbs still felt heavy, but there was a tense feeling in my stomach that promised to turn into hunger soon. Fresh clothes, though; that sounded like heaven.
“Even better than what you’re imagining.” She extended the stack to me. “Not to mention, the jackets we got from the Fjord labor board were terrifying. Jack’s kept us tethered here for ages soaking up dock fees rather than hire any of those people. I got the impression some of them are some lifers from the indigent block and Fjord is desperate to unload them on somebody else.”
Good to know the bar had been set low. I’d sort of known already, but it helped some to have a reason why Grace had sought me out with such urgency. After all, I’d been just as afraid of becoming one of those lifers from the indigent block. I took the stack from Elaine and looked it over; it was a blue softsuit with Cassandra’s shoulder flash removed, some shapeless underwear, and socks.
“Thank you," I said.
“Do you want me to show you to the showers?” Elaine asked. “I’ve been in custody before so I can guess a little of what you’re feeling like. The cells on Fjord are disgusting.” She shuddered for emphasis.
The look on my face had to be something because a laugh exploded out of her, sharp and surprised. Then she shook her head, still smiling.
“I know, I don’t look like I’ve ever done anything. It was during a sit-in while I was in college," she explained. “Some Sol sector senators were giving talks here at the time and we were protesting the Indenture Act. We were released the next duty shift without being charged, but when I got back to the hostel I paid for a solid half hour in the shower. It was so gross.”
“Yeah. Gross is a good word for it.” I took my time getting up and to Elaine’s credit she didn’t try and help me. She watched me closely though and seemed poised for action. “Thank you, a shower sounds great.”
“A shower and food too, I bet," she guessed.
“You don’t have to feed me," I told her as I followed her out into the bright corridor.
“I kind of do. Doc’ll be sad at me if I don’t make sure you eat. Nobody wants that. Xe has a long memory.” Elaine led me to an elevator and showed me how to access the department index in its control panel. “Hygiene is on the same level as the ‘ponics so the graywater system doesn’t have to work so hard. If you stay, then I highly recommend getting the biggest fluffiest robe you can find and a hair wrap. Brando won’t let us put dryers in the Works level so it’s a long, damp walk back to crew quarters and the corridors run cold when we aren’t borrowing heat from a station.”
“The heating system has trouble keeping up?”
She shrugged. “It’s better than most ships in our class. We don’t carry passengers so we don’t have to worry about heat gain from the extra bodies and Jack could fit in some auxiliary heaters, but they’re all in the cabins and work spaces. The corridors don’t reap any noticeable benefit.”
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“I hadn’t thought of that.” I’d always served on big ships. If you worked near the core then sometimes you even needed heat sinks. “On the leviathans you don’t really notice the cold unless you’re working near the hull.”
“Yeah? Must be nice," Elaine sighed. “When I was a kid I always wondered why the old spacers all seem to retire to beaches and deserts. After a while the chill just seeps into your bones and won’t leave. I can see the appeal of spending your last years baking it back out again.” She stopped us near a closed hatch with a sign over it that read ‘SHOWERS.’ “This is us.”
Through the hatch was your standard communal bathing facility; showers, toilet stalls, and lockers. Smooth gray ceramic floor, smooth robin’s egg blue ceramic walls, and a ceiling that was one enormous moisture trap. The four shower units were totally enclosed. I was glad to see they were the kind that sealed too. Elaine opened one up for me.
“Take your time. It uses treated graywater and has a recirculating heat pump so there’s no timer. Just don’t try to drink it. You’ll need a crew rating on ShipNet to open the showers, but you won’t need one to get out. ShipNet will only generate an alert if you’re in there over an hour and you don’t respond to a notification, but that’s just for safety in case you hit your head or something. There’s a soap dispenser set into the inside of the door. Ping me when you’re ready and I’ll take you to the kitchen.”
“Thank you again," I said and Elaine gave me a sober look.
“Really, it’s okay. We’re all good people here. Everyone is glad to help even if you decide we’re not for you.” She made an aborted gesture. I suspect she’d started to move to squeeze my shoulder and then looked at my tag. Instead she gave me a thumbs-up. “No lie; we’re a lot to take even on a good day, but when the chips are down we pull together. I really hope you choose to stay.”
“I appreciate the full disclosure.” I returned the thumbs up as best I could with my full arms and was rewarded with a lovely smile. Elaine was pretty enough, but she had a great smile that transformed her into something beyond beautiful.
“Okay.” She waved and left the showers, leaving me alone with the hot water.
I put my clothes, both fresh and old, on a folding bench outside the shower Elaine had unlocked. I set a timer on my ocular as I set foot inside. The water started flowing at once. Jets set into the walls and ceiling hit me from all sides and I almost melted.
I ended up using nearly that whole hour. Elaine was lounging against the wall playing a minigame on her band when I stepped out into the corridor. She spotted me and grinned.
“Feel better?” She asked.
“Hell yes," I replied with feeling. I felt better than good. Some of the cold had left me and I felt almost jittery with excess energy. “My stomach is waking up though. Is that offer of breakfast still good?”
“Sure is. Come on. The kitchen is this way.”
Cassandra had a nicer galley than most. It was further down the Works level from the bathing facilities and had been designed with serving passengers in mind. It had never been a liner, but she’d probably flown chartered flights in her previous incarnations. I got the impression that the workshops had once been passenger staterooms and if I squinted I could sort of see where there had been individual tables bolted into the floor.
“We don’t have a galley crew, sadly. I order bulk meal kits for us, so if you have any dietary restrictions you let me know," Elaine explained as we delved into the depths of the galley’s walk-in ready cooler. “We store about a week’s worth of meal kits in the ready cooler per crew member plus one. Coro, one of the technicians, pulls them from the deep freezer on Friday. He takes requests within reason. There’s lockboxes in the far back if there’s anything you want to stock anything for your specific use. It won’t count against your mass allotment, but you’ll be limited to whatever will fit in one lock box. Brando and Amanda cook meals sometimes and they keep their supplies there. General meal kits are on the shelves up here in front. Anything with a green label is off limits.” She held up one of the kits in question. It had a sage-green band wrapped around its case. The other kits had bands in white and red. “Coro has some specific dietary requirements that aren’t good for anybody else. I think he has internal enhancements that need special feedstocks.”
I held out my hand for the kit, flipped it over, and read the ingredients. They looked familiar, like the sort of thing I took in supplement form for my control board. “He’s probably got an onboard apothecary," I told her as I handed it back. “Those are medical feedstocks. The apothecary must harvest them from his stomach before he metabolizes it. Although if he eats this stuff he probably has an enhanced liver too.”
I didn’t mention this out loud, but enhancements like that were expensive. That was cutting edge stuff, especially to find them already in an adult person. Coro’s enhancements would have had to have been installed when he was a toddler. He must have grown up rich in a family of Early Adopters.
“Oh.” Elaine blinked. “You’re augmented too, right? Is this stuff you’re going to need?”
Bless her heart, she probably had no idea how rare Coro’s enhancements were. I had normal people shit, which at least had the benefit of being reliable, well-tested tech. I couldn’t afford to pay for brand name replacement parts or risk my gear getting phased out in a planned obsolescence, so I’d gone with an open-source ancillary node kit to suit my needs and it had served me well so far.
“No, I eat regular food. My enhancements aren’t sophisticated enough for that kind of passive activity. They wouldn’t know what to do with this stuff and I’d end up digesting it. I send them scheduled payloads injected through a shunt.”
“That sounds complicated. Just tell me what you need me to order and I’ll get it for you.” Elaine took the special meal pack back. “Okay, do you want white protein or red?”
“Red, please.”