Chapter 47: Sick

"...So."

Leo’s voice broke the warm spell sounding dry and flat as a sheet of ice.

"You’ve got a mothership... You’ve got an agricultural deck... You’ve got Elena’s mother, twelve hungry kids and a ship full of spare parts, that sounds like paradise so why are we still standing in my hallway?"

Ren turned back to him and the easy smile came right back without a hitch.

"Straight to the point," he chuckled, scratching the back of his neck with an amused shake of his head. "I respect that, Captain. The truth is... we’ve got a logistics bottleneck... A big one."

He nodded back toward the docking sleeve, and his tone turned serious and practical.

"The mothership’s three light-hours out, right on the edge of the system’s gravity well...To get there from here, both our ships need a sustained sub-light burn our deuterium reserves can’t support so we’re practically running on fumes."

Elena frowned and stepped forward. "Deuterium? Why can’t we synthesize propellant from the cometary ice we surveyed?"

"Water ice only gives you low-efficiency cold-gas reaction mass, Miss Sterling," Ren answered smoothly. "A Tier-3 frame like the Kite burns high-density energetic fluid... Out here, past the civilized sectors, the only reliable source of high-yield propellant is biological."

"Biological?" Harper’s brow furrowed. "What does that mean?"

"Void Beast blood." Ren’s dark eyes swept the group. "The hemolymph of a Level 2 entity... though not every kind. Some of them carry blood saturated with dense volatile bio-polymers... Run it through a catalytic refining centrifuge and it cracks into high-grade chemical rocket fuel that’ll power a sub-light burn for three weeks."

Everyone went still.

"The Shroud Ray..." Camila whispered, her eyes going to the viewport. "Its body is still drifting out there! Right along our stern vector!"

Ren shook his head with a rueful smile.

"We scanned it on the way in. A Ray’s blood is nothing but salt water and static. It won’t burn and even with the right beast, you need suction lances, cryogenic vats, a cracking manifold..."

He glanced around. "Does this corvette have that kind of industrial hardware?"

Every eye turned instinctively to the ceiling grille as there were two seconds of silence.

BEEP!

[No.]

It dropped into the hallway like an iron weight and Ren let out a soft sympathetic sigh, like he’d expected nothing else.

"Figures," he said lightly, crossing his arms and leaning back against the doorframe. "A Tier-1 corvette’s built for short-range patrols, not deep-space processing but the Kite is fully outfitted. We’ve got the lances, the vats and the centrifuges."

He paused, and his eyes drifted slowly up the corridor... over the polished composite, the smooth blue runners, the floating holo-consoles of the bridge behind Leo.

His head tilted with faint curiosity.

"You know," he said, casual and conversational, with an unmistakable razor edge under it, "a ship that gets seeded with a Captain grows to match that Captain. Its tier, its hardware, its capabilities... they’re a direct reflection of whoever’s holding the neural link."

He looked around the bridge one more time, and his lips curled into an amused slightly patronizing half-smirk.

"Tier 2, huh?" He let it hang there for one heavy beat. "...What kind of Captain did they give you?"

It landed like a slap.

Aoi flinched and her eyes dropped to the deck.

Elena looked straight at Leo with her chin lifted in that familiar haughty disdain that screamed I told you so... Even Camila and Jin-Ah cast quick uncertain glances up at the dais, the little seed Ren had tossed in the dirt already taking root.

Leo didn’t move.

He stood in the doorway of his bridge with a face carved from cold stone and watched the spider spin his web, Ren caught that unblinking stare once again.

’I don’t like him...’

The charming smile bloomed across his handsome face again.

He uncrossed his arms and took a casual half-step back toward the tube with his hands open and harmless.

"Don’t worry, kid," he said, with a friendly condescending wink. "We’ll handle the hard part."

A few minutes later, the blue light of the bridge caught the sharp edge of Ren’s jaw as he leaned against the auxiliary rail.

He’d shed the vest and rolled his sleeves to the elbows like a man relaxing in his own living room, radiating a calm elder-brother confidence that settled over the cabin like a sedative.

BEEP!

A thin grid of blue laser lines snapped across his shoulders and tracked down his silhouette from collar to boots before cutting out with a harsh squelch.

[Biological scan complete... Sub-dermal tissue reveals an alarming concentration of refined carbohydrates and performative charm. Vocal cadence displays an eighty-six percent deviation toward sociopathic deflection. Furthermore, this unit notes that the guest’s hair contains an unnatural quantity of chemical styling pomade for an alleged deep-space scout... Truly, the vanguard of terrestrial civilization has arrived, and it smells like synthetic sandalwood.]

Leo sat forward in the throne and watched Ren’s face however Ren didn’t flinch.

A quiet chuckle rolled out of his chest instead as he shook his head and ran a hand through his neat black hair with a wide self-deprecating grin that made him look completely disarming.

"Fair enough," he laughed, looking up at the vent with an amused tilt of his brow. "Guilty on the pomade... A guy has to keep some standards when the world ends, right? But hey, I respect a ship that protects its crew. Even if the computer’s got a bit of an attitude."

Elena let out a sharp aristocratic scoff from the engineering console and waved a manicured hand at the terminal.

"Do not waste your breath on the calculating apparatus, Ren... The machine is fundamentally defective. It was coded to emulate a cynic and it is merely programmed to be loyal to the stray. It defends its master’s territory with the blind mindless tenacity of an untrained terrier."

A ripple of small amused chuckles ran across the deck.

Camila giggled into her hand at the bottom of the dais, and even Aoi let out a soft breath of a laugh, looking at Ren with soft unconditional adoration however Leo didn’t laugh.

He sat rigid in the throne with his hands flat on the cold cradles, watching the way Ren’s smile deepened every time Elena spoke.

It was effortless.

Every time the ship or Leo pushed back, Ren turned the friction into grease and let them all slide one centimeter further down the slope.

’I feel sick...’ Leo thought.

...

An hour later the galley was crowded.

Leo had spent forty-five minutes over the range... thick potato pancakes fried shatteringly crisp with dried chilies and wild chives from Camila’s beds, and a heavy pot of pinto beans and pork in dark savory broth.

Ren sat on the middle stool between Aoi and Camila. He took a bite of pancake, chewed slowly and let out a low appreciative hum.

"Man," he said, wiping his lips with a napkin and nodding across the counter. "That’s good work, kid... Seriously. On the Kite, Voss usually just throws frozen protein bricks in a microwave until they stop clinking. Having a real cook on board makes a hell of a difference."

"Camila grew the potatoes," Leo said evenly from where he leaned against the pantry door with his arms crossed. "She did the hard part."

"And she’s an artist." Ren gave Camila a warm brotherly wink that dusted her cheeks pink. "Reminds me of our first week out past lunar orbit... We were short on water, and Dekker decided he was going to build an emergency moisture trap out of an old scrubber and a bucket of hydraulic seals."

Harper’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

"A hydraulic bucket? For drinking water?"

"I swear to God." Ren leaned his forearms on the counter, his eyes sparkling with animated practiced warmth. "He wired the wrong solenoid... Voss walks in for his coffee, hits the manual purge, and forty liters of pressurizing foam blows straight out of the ceiling vents! Voss looked like a two-meter abominable snowman. He stood there three full minutes blinking foam out of his beard, holding an empty mug... and then he picked Dekker up by his belt and shoved him headfirst into the laundry chute."

The table exploded into bright rolling laughter.

Harper howled and slapped the counter until the plates rattled, Camila doubled over wiping tears from her eyes, Elena laughed behind her napkin with her shoulders shaking, and Aoi was glowing, leaning her shoulder against Ren’s as she laughed along with him.

Leo stood by the pantry holding his warm mug.

The food on the plates was still steaming and the potato cakes were still crisp but nobody was talking about the meal anymore.

Nobody was looking at the stove... Ren had taken the whole room and wrapped it up in a funny story about people they’d never met, and Leo’s cooking had turned into background furniture.

’I feel even more sick...’

Twenty minutes later the airlock chimed.

Dekker stood at the hatch of the docking tube, his thin frame twitching with nervous energy and his fingers drumming on his belt.

"Miss Bell?" his reedy voice rasped through the collar. "Captain Ren said you’re the one who keeps the ordnance feeds running... If you’ve got five minutes, I can show you the fabrication lathe on the Kite. We’ve got spare high-frequency coils for your tools, if you want a look."

Harper’s eyes went wide. She looked at Leo, then at Ren, her freckled face alight with sudden eager curiosity.

"Go ahead, Harper," Ren said easily from the galley arch, waving a hand. "Dekker’s a mess, but he knows his lathes... Take whatever you need to balance your armory."

She didn’t wait. She bolted down the hall and slipped past Dekker into the dark sleeve of the tube.

Forty minutes passed before she came back.

When she stepped back through the airlock she was practically glowing, her bangs tucked behind her ears and her arms wrapped around a sealed case of military-grade tungsten driver pins and three high-output magnetic capacitors.

Leo was waiting in the junction corridor, leaning against the conduit bulkhead.

"What did you see over there, Harper?" he asked quietly, his eyes dropping to the case.

She stopped.

The excitement on her face hitched as a prickly defensive stiffness crept into her shoulders and her jaw clenched as her eyes met his.

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"It’s a simple question." He kept his tone level and his hands open at his sides. "You were on their ship for forty minutes... What does their setup look like? What kind of weapons are in the racks?"

"They have an actual armory, Leo!" she snapped, hugging the case against her ribs.

’Why does he have to ruin everything?’ Something frustrated and angry burned behind her chest. ’Dekker showed me real tools... He looked at my tuning and said my coil balance was textbook. He said the people on the mothership don’t have anyone who can calibrate ballistic feeds like me... and Leo’s just standing here treating them like criminals.’

"They have precision lathes," she went on, stepping past his shoulder without looking at him. "They have replacement solenoids... Dekker spent half an hour showing me how to stabilize the recoil on the turret so the brackets don’t crack next time. They’re trying to help us, Leo so stop looking at them like they’re waiting to slit our throats in our sleep."

She marched off toward her quarters with her boots striking the runner hard and angry, and the hatch hissed shut behind her before he could say another word.

Leo let out a slow breath and turned back to the bridge.

At station three, Jin-Ah sat rigid behind her terminal with three data slates laid out in a neat geometric row in front of her.

Ren had handed them over without a second’s hesitation when she’d coolly asked for verification of his claims.

Her fingers flew across them, cross-referencing telemetry, jump coordinates and supply manifests.

’It has to have a discrepancy,’ she thought, her eyes racing down the columns of green data. ’Eighty survivors require sixty-two thousand calories a day... Their water bus would demand a minimum of four hundred liters an hour, The burn vectors from Earth’s orbital graveyard to that Lagrangian point must account for gravitational drag...’

She ran it once, twice and even three times however the numbers didn’t fail.

The fuel logs matched the mass of a Tier-3 raider to four decimal places... The ledgers accounted for everything down to the last kilogram.

It was consistent and it was mathematically flawless as well.

’Fuck.’

Jin-Ah sat back and pressed her fingertips to her temples as a strange cold knot twisted in the pit of her stomach.

There were no errors but underneath the data, her instincts... the cold silent logic that had run her whole life... felt something humming.

An invisible sickening tension, like a bridge whose blueprint was perfect, but whose steel groaned in the wind.

Her eyes darted to the command throne, where Leo stood looking out through the glass.

She opened her mouth.

What was she supposed to say? The math is correct, Captain, but the numbers are too perfect..?

Leo would understand but the rest of them would demand proof.

Elena would call her incompetent and Sensei would look at her with wounded eyes.

’N-no...’

Jin-Ah closed the slates and stacked them with neat precision, and she kept the feeling locked behind her teeth.

’What if I’m wrong...?’