Chapter 50: Issue With The Crew

The thrum of industrial centrifuges came through the docking sleeve without stopping as a dull mechanical pulse echoed hour after hour...

Across the forty-meter gap, the Black Kite was processing the kill.

Thousands of liters of volatile orange blood drawn out of the cryogenic vats, split apart by cracking manifolds and distilled into dense liquid propellant.

It was slow heavy work, and the raider’s exhaust vents spat intermittent plumes of acrid sulfurous steam that drifted past the Wanderer-7’s viewports like pale ghosts.

Leo stood by the port console on the bridge with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his flight jacket.

He hadn’t touched the cradles in five hours... Without the link humming in his spine the bridge felt hollow, stripped of the living pulse that usually tied him to the frame.

The runners along the baseboards were dimmed to a low-draw cycle.

FLICKER!

A tiny voltage drop rippled across the auxiliary displays as the star chart over station two hitched and its blue lines shivering before they snapped back into place.

It was nothing... A minor harmonic imbalance in the secondary bus, logged twenty minutes ago by the ship’s own diagnostics.

Before Leo could tap the reset breaker, the hatch hissed open.

Ren walked onto the bridge with a small calibration driver tucked behind his ear with his grey tunic open at the collar and a small sheen of sweat at his temples, moving with that easy confidence that made the whole deck feel like his private workshop.

"Got that secondary bus stabilized for you, guys," he announced, wiping grease off his thumb with a rag.

He reached past Jin-Ah’s station and tapped a bypass relay tucked into the lower harness.

CLACK!

"Primary coil had a microscopic phase shift... Nothing serious, but if it jumped another two millivolts during a high draw, your display bank would’ve browned out."

Jin-Ah looked up from her slate and blinked.

"I had already queued the re-routing for twenty-three hundred hours, Captain Ren."

He gave her that warm disarming smile and leaned his hip against her console.

"No reason to let a brownout hang over your head while you’re calculating fuel burns, Jin-Ah... You’ve got enough numbers to juggle. Better to put the wrench to it early."

Elena, sitting at the weapons station with her long legs crossed, let out a soft approving sigh.

"Professional maintenance... What a novel miraculous concept. If we had waited for our resident stray to notice, the starboard array would have caught fire before he finished his nap."

"Thanks, Ren!" Camila beamed up from the bottom of the dais, where she was trimming basil into a basket. "You’re a lifesaver!"

She glanced over at Leo, still standing at the port console with his jaw set like an anvil, and wrinkled her nose with a playful affectionate giggle.

"See, kid?" She stuck her tongue out a little. "That’s how real captains take care of their engines... You should take notes!"

It landed in the quiet bridge like a small flat stone dropped into cold water.

...Kid.

It was the third time she’d said it today.

Ren had dropped it every twenty minutes since the eel hunt... casually and always wrapped in a soft layer of teasing... and now it was slipping right into Camila’s mouth like the most natural joke in the world.

Leo didn’t answer.

He kept his eyes on the blank glass of the canopy while his fists clenched inside his pockets until the leather creaked.

At the astrogation table, Aoi didn’t join the laughter.

She kept her fingers on the glass with her eyes on the chart lines, but her shoulders were lighter than he’d ever seen them, the tight terrified lines around her mouth smoothed away.

’He fixed it because he cares,’ she thought, watching her brother lean over Jin-Ah’s terminal and explain bus resistance in small patient words. ’Ren has always been like this. Taking the grease on his own hands so nobody else has to. He had to grow up so fast while I was gone... and Leo is just making it so hard for himself by refusing to see it.’

"Gotta run down to the airlock." Ren pocketed his driver and slapped his thigh cheerfully. "Dekker’s finishing the line balance on the transfer pump... We should be ready to start pumping refined propellant into your belly tanks shortly."

He turned, caught Leo’s eye on the way to the hatch and gave him a friendly respectful nod.

"Hang in there, kid... Almost ready to roll."

PSSH.

The hatch slid shut behind him as Leo stood motionless for three seconds then he turned on his heel and walked off the bridge.

He didn’t take the main companionway.

He took the narrow maintenance ladder down into the transit spine, moving in total silence with his boots making no sound on the runners as the cold prickling static in the small of his back pulled him toward the starboard airlock corridor.

He came around the corner by the environmental manifold and stopped as the hallway was dim, lit only by the faint amber runners at the baseboards.

Three paces from the open hatch of the docking tube stood Dekker.

...Alone.

His back was to the corridor, his thin body angled toward a maintenance panel set into the wall... the access hatch over the main fiber-optic trunk line that ran from the bridge straight down to the life support bus.

His bare twitchy fingers were running slowly along the upper seam of the panel, feeling the shape of the locking pins one by one with his head tilted like he was listening to the hum behind the plating.

His other hand was buried in the deep side pocket of his flight suit, clutching something small and hard and rectangular under the fabric.

"What are you doing, Dekker?"

Leo’s voice came down the hallway flat sounding as cold as a frozen lake and Dekker jumped.

CLATTER!

His boots skidded and he whipped around with the violent frantic startle of a rat caught in a spotlight.

His watery eyes jumped from Leo’s boots to his throat, his chest hitched... and then his face split into that wide greasy grin.

"Captain!" he wheezed, yanking both hands out of his pockets and holding them up at chest height. "Mercy, kid, you move like a ghost! Don’t sneak up on a guy with bad nerves!"

"I asked what you were doing to that panel..." Leo took one slow measured step forward with his eyes boring into those twitching fingers.

"Admiring the build, Captain! Just admiring the build!" Dekker laughed with his fingers drumming on his thighs. "This Graventhal... Station Nine never worked with hyperalloy this grade... The molecular alignment along the seam is incredible, I was just feeling the tolerances. Ren said your ship was a work of art, and he wasn’t lying."

He slid an awkward step backward toward the collar with his eyes never resting anywhere for more than half a second.

"Pump’s running smooth! Just waiting on the last centrifuge run... I’ll get back to the Kite. Didn’t mean to trespass on your pretty bulkheads!"

He spun around in a hurried scramble of magnetic soles and slipped into the dark accordion folds of the tube while Leo walked up to the panel and knelt down.

He ran his thumb along the edge where Dekker’s fingers had been as the locking pins were untouched and there was no physical damage at all.

But near the corner of the data port, there was a greasy smudge of conductive paste but it hadn’t been there two hours ago.

He’d walked this corridor himself after all, Leo’s jaw locked immediately.

’What are they planning...?’

...

Five minutes later he stood right in the middle of the bridge, leaning over the astrogation table where all six of them were gathered.

"He was casing the data port," Leo said. "Dekker was alone in the starboard corridor, feeling the seams around the main trunk line to life support... He had something in his pocket, and there was conductive paste on the housing."

The reaction was instant.

Elena let out a loud exasperated groan and flung her stylus onto the table.

CLATTER!

"Oh, for heaven’s sake!" Her face flushed with furious disgust. "Are we truly doing this again?! Now you’re accusing their maintenance technician of industrial espionage because he touched a WALL?!"

"He wasn’t touching a wall, Elena." His eyes flashed. "He was inspecting the access pins on the main life support bus... An engineer doesn’t run his fingers over data seals unless he’s looking for a way in, don’t you understand?"

"He was admiring the Graventhal!" She yelled back, her icy eyes blazing with contempt. "Because unlike you, Dekker is a trained orbital mechanic who recognizes rare high-tier craft when he sees it! You are so pathetically insecure that you cannot tolerate another man even LOOKING at your ship without imagining a grand conspiracy... You are inventing phantoms, Leo! You’re manufacturing lies because you cannot stomach that Ren’s crew has more competence in their little fingers than you have in your entire body!"

"Elena, shut up for one second," Leo warned. "I know what I saw... maybe if you weren’t so blind, you could have seen it too but then again, you trust anything."

"Fuc—"

"...Leo."

It came from Aoi.

It was cold... freezing and sharp, with every scrap of that warm gentle affection that had always lived between them stripped right out of it.

She stood behind the console with her hair immaculate and her glasses catching the hard glare of the ceiling lights, looking at him with deep disappointment... the look a teacher saves for the hopeless delinquent who won’t stop causing trouble.

"Stop this," she said, flat and icy. "Stop it right now, Leo."

His throat caught.

"Sensei—"

"I told you," she cut in, slicing straight through him like a scalpel, "that Ren is my brother... His men have shared their tools, their fuel and their medical supplies with us. They killed the beast that would have crushed our hull. They are offering us a path to eighty human survivors and a permanent mothership."

She took half a step forward with her eyes hard as flint behind the glass.

"And you have done nothing but sneer, run away and throw childish accusations at them since the moment they arrived... I have tried to be patient... I have tried to understand that you are young, and that this command is heavy but this petty paranoid hostility ends now. You are acting like a petulant child who refuses to share his toys."

Her voice didn’t waver once. "Do not speak another word against my brother or his men on this bridge... Am I clear?"

The silence was absolute.

Leo stood frozen with the breath backed up hot and suffocating in his chest.

He looked at her... At the woman whose hand he’d held to his cheek in the dark last night... The woman who’d wept on his shoulder when the Earth died.

There was no warmth left in her eyes.

"Hey..."

Harper’s voice broke the silence, stepping right into the gap.

She came up to the edge of the table with her bangs falling across her forehead and her freckled face tight with discomfort, looking from Aoi to Leo.

"Look, Sensei," she said, rubbing the back of her neck with a nervous grimace. "Maybe... maybe Leo’s being a little jumpy, but he’s not crazy. He’s the Captain... It’s his job to watch the corridors. If he saw something weird with Dekker—"

"I don’t need you making excuses for me, Harper!"

Leo’s head whipped around, and every bit of raw wounded frustration in his chest detonated before he could bite it back.

Harper froze.

Her mouth fell open a little, her grey-blue eyes went wide with the breath knocked straight out of her like she’d taken a punch to the jaw.

His eyes were wild and bloodshot and burning with the cornered desperate fury of something lashing out at whatever was closest.

"I don’t need a translator! I saw Dekker at the data port! I don’t need you standing up here patting me on the head and telling everyone I’m just ’jumpy’! If you think I’m jumping at shadows like the rest of them, then just SAY it!"

The color drained out of Harper’s face.

’I was trying to help you...’ A sharp agonizing lump lodged in her throat as a wave of burning humiliated hurt flooded her eyes. ’I stood up to Sensei for you... and you just bit my head off.’

Her jaw clamped shut and her freckled cheeks flushed a deep wounded crimson.

She didn’t shout back.

Harper just took one slow step backward with her arms wrapped tight across her chest and her eyes on the deck between her boots.

"Fine," She whispered. "...Handle it yourself, Cap."

She turned on her heel and walked down the companionway stairs, and her boots disappeared into the lower deck without another sound.

Leo stood alone in the middle of the bridge with his fists still clenched at his sides.

The silence that settled over the deck was colder than hard vacuum.