Chapter 81: First Day Of Training

The air in the fabrication alcove went so still that the faint rhythmic whir of the coolant lines behind the bulkheads sounded like someone drawing a breath.

Leo stood rooted to the deck plates by the open threshold with his arms frozen across his chest and his eyes fixed on Elena.

The midnight-blue silk followed the sharp line of her collarbones, narrowed at her waist and parted along the high slit of the skirt with an effortless elegance that made the whole utilitarian machine corridor look ridiculous.

A heavy suffocating warmth climbed his throat and bloomed into a fierce red that spread across his cheekbones all the way to the tips of his ears.

"Elena..." he started, and his voice cracked on the first syllable before he covered it with a rough, thoroughly unconvincing cough. "That’s... well, you definitely aren’t crawling under an engine block in that."

Elena’s icy blue eyes flared with triumph.

She smoothed the silk over her hip and tilted her chin just enough to let her honey-blonde hair slide across her bare shoulder, and her lips curved into a slow knowing smile that looked too pleased with the damage she’d done.

"Naturally, Captain," she said, her voice smooth and poised and dripping with honeyed condescension. "A proper vessel requires an officer who can represent its command with dignity... I’d hardly expect an uncultured mechanic to appreciate the tailoring of bio-silk, but your sudden inability to form a coherent sentence is... an acceptable substitute for formal praise."

"Hey!" Harper barked, taking a belligerent step forward with her new cargo trousers rustling and her hands planted on her hips, her freckled cheeks flushing with a sharp heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment. "Who are you calling an uncultured mechanic, Princess?! You’re on an assault corvette in deep space, not at some champagne gala on an orbital ring! If an alarm goes off, what’re you gonna do, blind the raiders with your thigh?!"

"Jealousy is remarkably unbecoming on an armory technician, Harper," Elena replied, not even turning her head as she tucked a single golden lock behind her ear. "Though I suppose when one’s entire wardrobe consists of stained cotton and trousers designed for digging ditches, the sight of actual tailoring can be rather traumatic."

"Why, you little..."

"Alright, that’s enough," Leo cut in, stepping between them with a dry exasperated chuckle and both hands raised, before Harper could go looking for an industrial wrench. "Save the fire for the drills... Elena, it looks incredible, and you know it. Harper, yours looks great too, and you know damn well you’d strangle yourself in a dress like that inside twenty seconds."

Harper crossed her bare arms and scoffed loudly through her nose, though the dark glare she shot at Elena’s bare back carried a sharp lingering sting.

Elena only smiled at nothing in particular and let the silk whisper as she turned toward the mirror panel, and the little smile said she’d counted that round as won and was already planning the next one.

Beside the tailoring terminal, Camila watched it all while twisting the hem of her new apron between her bronze fingers.

Her hazel eyes drifted toward Chloe.

The small girl stood barely eight centimeters from Leo’s right elbow, the oversized black knit sleeves brushing his trousers, her green eyes fixed on his profile with an unblinking stillness that hadn’t wavered once since they’d left the medbay.

Through the whole argument over the dress, her eyes had stayed on the pulse beating in the side of his neck.

Camila opened her mouth to say something then she caught Chloe’s eyes flicking to her and Chloe gave her the smallest tilt of the head, a silent little question that seemed to ask what she was looking at.

Camila swallowed the words, smiled weakly and stepped back toward the corridor with a tiny troubled knot pulling at her brow.

’She’s okay,’ she told herself. ’She’s just hungry... She’s always just hungry.’

The artificial dawn cycle of the Wanderer-7 arrived eight hours later with the overhead light runners brightening slowly from amber to cool morning white.

At oh-eight-hundred exactly, the drill klaxon screamed.

BRAAAAAMP!

Harper hit the armory hatch eleven seconds after it started, still pulling her boot on.

Elena arrived at station two fully dressed with her hair already tied, having obviously woken up twenty minutes early to make sure of it.

Camila slid down the companionway rail with her eyes still half shut, and Aoi was in her seat before the second blast of the horn.

Leo stood on the dais with a stopwatch on his armrest and his face completely unreadable.

"Hull breach, Deck Two, starboard," he called out. "Life support’s dropping... Elena, Camila, go."

They went.

Elena’s fingers flew across the auxiliary cutoffs while Camila sprinted to the manual valve wheel below the mezzanine, and the two of them shouted numbers back and forth until the pressure lights on the board flicked from red to amber to green.

"Forty-one seconds," Leo said.

Camila beamed, breathless.

"That’s twenty seconds too slow," Leo said, and her face fell. "Camila, you turned the wheel the wrong way first... Elena, you called the pressure before you’d confirmed it. If that was real, Deck Two would’ve lost a quarter of its air before you sealed it so... again."

They did it again then a third time.

By the sixth run they were at twenty-three seconds, and Camila was sweating through her sweater, and Elena’s perfect ponytail had come loose... and Leo finally nodded once.

"Better... Tomorrow I want twenty."

Nobody complained.

Harper cleared a simulated feed jam with a strip of cloth tied over her eyes and swore so creatively that Jin-Ah wrote two of the words down, and Aoi ran evasion corridors on the hololith until the projected rocks blurred.

By the time the morning shift ended, all six of them were damp, aching and strangely proud of themselves.

Leo left the dais and went down the central service spine to check on the compartments one by one.

His first stop was the armory on Deck Two.

The heavy blast door slid back with a dull hydraulic hiss, and the smell of hot mineral oil, ground tungsten and ozone rolled out to meet him.

The room had been reorganized around the huge CNC ballistic lathe they’d pulled out of the Black Kite.

Its titanium guide rails were polished to a mirror shine, and racks of freshly pressed eighteen-millimeter rail-slugs sat in magnetic locking bins along the bulkheads.

Harper was leaning over a glowing drafting hololith at the main bench with a pencil tucked behind her ear and a smear of dark molybdenum grease across the bridge of her freckled nose.

"Morning, grease monkey," Leo said, leaning his hip against the tool rack.

Harper jumped, dropped the stylus onto the rubber mat and looked up with a sheepish, defensive grin that gave way almost immediately to excitement.

"Look who finally visits the engine room," she said, wiping her hands on an oily rag. "Figured you’d spend the whole day upstairs admiring your chair..."

"The chair doesn’t smell like machine oil," Leo said, stepping up beside her and looking down at the hololith. "...What are you cooking? Those don’t look like our standard penetrators."

Harper’s eyes lit up with the same manic obsessive spark that had possessed her since they were twelve years old, tearing apart rusted lawnmower engines behind Henderson’s garage.

"They aren’t," she said, leaning in so close that her bare arm pressed against his sleeve. "Look at the nose radius... Our slugs are solid cylinders with flat sabots. They hit like a freight train, but when they leave the rails, the plasma bloom around the barrel drags against our own shield envelope. It bleeds off about four percent of the velocity before the round even clears fifty kilometers."

She tapped the stylus against the model and rotated it to show an intricate fluted spiral carved around the projectile’s waist.

"I drew this up this morning after drills," she went on, her voice dropping into an eager rapid-fire pitch. "Tungsten-carbide core in two stages, jacketed in a thin sleeve of the slate-composite we scraped off the raider’s hull... When the coils fire, these helical grooves funnel the plasma around the slug and make a vortex that actually pushes the round as it clears the muzzle! Twenty-two kilometers a second, and zero barrel wear!"

Leo studied the micro-grooves, and his brows lifted in genuine surprise.

He’d always known she was good with a wrench, but balancing a multi-metal round against the brutal crush of electromagnetic acceleration inside those rails took a kind of math he couldn’t do on his best day...

"You did all this in one morning? Between drills and lunch?"

"Drew every millimeter by hand," Harper said, puffing her chest out in proud defiance. "Tuned the lathe’s cutting head to half a micron off its harmonic frequency... So what do you think, Cap? Am I an uncultured mechanic, or what?"

Leo laughed in his chest and clapped his hand against the back of her bare shoulder, squeezing the warm muscle with easy fondness.

"You’re a terrifyingly dangerous nerd, Harper," he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "And you’re a genius... If this works without stripping the barrel, we can punch through Tier-3 shields before their capacitors even register the spike."

Harper looked at the hand on her shoulder, and a bright pink flush cut straight through the grease on her cheeks.

She shifted her weight from one boot to the other, and the bravado drained out of her voice and left something shy and quietly pleased behind.

"Yeah, well..." she muttered, poking the stylus with her thumb. "Somebody’s gotta make sure your crazy flying has teeth behind it... We can’t all just stand around looking pretty in a blue dress, right?"

Leo grinned and gave her shoulder one more pat before heading for the hatch. "Don’t work yourself to death down here... Take a break for lunch."

"Yeah, yeah," Harper grumbled, rolling her eyes, but the wide smile stayed on her face long after the blast door hissed shut.

From the armory he took the service ladder down toward the life support bays, where a short corridor off the mid-deck opened into the hydroponic garden.

The air there was completely different from the rest of the ship.

It was warm and humid and thick with the scent of damp black soil, flowering vines and crushed tomato leaves.

Golden-white grow strips lit the round bay, and the stacked planting beds hummed with the gentle trickle of nutrient water.

Camila was kneeling on a rubber mat beside the third tier in her green skirt and cream sweater with her leather apron dusted with peat and her dark hair tied back with a piece of twine.

A few loose curls clung to her damp forehead while she trimmed leaves from a sprawling vine heavy with fat red tomatoes, humming a soft melody from home under her breath.

"Need a hand, farmer?" Leo asked softly from the doorway.

Camila gasped and dropped her shears into the soil before she recognized his voice then a bright radiant smile swept across her face.

"Leo! You scared me!" she breathed, pushing a curl off her cheek with the back of her wrist and leaving a tiny smudge of dirt at her temple. "I didn’t hear the hatch..."

"You were in the zone," Leo said, walking down the narrow aisle and crouching on his haunches right beside her.

The vines were crowded with glossy green peppers the size of his fist, heavy pods of fat beans, crisp heads of leafy greens and rows of root vegetables pushing their tops up through the soil.

Every one of them had grown from the seeds she’d scraped out of the galley produce he’d cut open a while ago, back when the whole crew still flinched at loud noises.

"The yield is unbelievable, Camila," he murmured, tapping the skin of a deep red tomato. "You did all of this while I was in the tank? One week?"

"My talent speeds up the cell division," she explained softly, and her fingers brushed his knuckles as she guided his hand down toward a cluster of roots. "And it balances the minerals... When we ran the stasis tank’s runoff into the irrigation, the plants drank up the old sediment from the asteroid belt. Look at these."

She pulled back the loose soil and uncovered three big golden-skinned potatoes that practically glowed.

"These aren’t normal Earth potatoes anymore," she said, looking up at him with earnest shining eyes. "They’re packed with carbs and natural electrolytes... If we take them to a port, miners will pay a fortune I think... Jin-Ah helped me run the numbers. If I crate up the surplus, we can pull over two thousand Zuni from this one harvest!"

Leo looked from the potatoes to her glowing face.

She was thinking about none of the things that kept him up at night... She was pouring everything she had into making sure they had fresh food and a way to earn their keep without bleeding for every coin, and the plain tender domesticity of it felt like an anchor holding the cold void outside the hull.

Without thinking, he reached up and wiped the smudge of dirt from her temple with the pad of his thumb.

Camila froze.