Chapter 82: Checking On The Girls

Her breath hitched sharply in her chest, and her hazel eyes locked onto his.

The skin under his thumb burned with sudden heat.

She leaned into the touch for one fleeting breathless second with her eyelashes fluttering and her lips parted on a silent little gasp, and the grow lights hummed on above them as if nothing in the world had changed.

"You work too hard, Camila," Leo murmured, his voice dropping into the quiet baritone that made her heart skip. "Don’t forget to eat some of this yourself. We need you healthy..."

Camila swallowed hard and bunched the fabric of her skirt in both fists as a deep rose blush spread across her cheeks and down the side of her neck.

"I... I will, Leo," she whispered, barely louder than the grow lights. "I’ll make sure there’s always fresh food on your plate... Every single day."

He gave her a gentle smile and patted her knee as he stood. "Keep at it. The ship smells a hundred times better down here than anywhere else."

He walked back toward the hatch, and Camila stayed kneeling in the dirt with her fingers pressed to the place on her temple where his thumb had been with her chest rising and falling in quick fluttery breaths as his broad back disappeared down the corridor.

Then she looked down at the potato in her other hand and realized she’d squeezed it hard enough to dent it.

"Ay, Dios," she whispered to the tomatoes, mortified, and buried her burning face in her sleeve.

On his way back up toward Deck One, Leo took the dorsal access ladder to the weapon cupolas along the ship’s upper spine.

The maintenance bay for the point-defense lasers was narrow and cramped and smelled of capacitor fluid.

Elena stood on an aluminum staging platform in grey work trousers and a fitted white undershirt, having wisely traded the midnight-blue dress for something she could sweat in.

Her honey-blonde hair was pulled into a high ponytail that bared the slender line of her neck, and she held a diagnostic wand against the cooling jacket of the port battery while faint iridescent ripples of her Mechanical Attunement pulsed around her fingers, feeling the current move through the heavy copper bus.

TAP-TAP!

Leo knocked his knuckles against the ladder rung.

Elena stayed perfectly still then she lowered the wand at her own pace and turned her head to look down at him asher expression cooled at once into a mask of poised indifference.

"Captain," she said, level and detached. "I trust the command deck hasn’t collapsed in my absence..."

"Everything’s quiet," Leo said, climbing the last two rungs and leaning his forearms on the safety rail beside her. "Just making rounds. Checking on our new lasers..."

Elena turned back to the housing and ran the tip of her wand along a pressure coupling, her posture stiff and upright.

"Your concern is unnecessary," she said smoothly, her chin tilted at its familiar proud angle. "The magnetic shunts are integrated into the main distribution grid... The thermal discharge curves are stable, and the recharge cycle is shorter by eight point four percent. The work is flawless and it doesn’t require your oversight."

Leo leaned closer and studied the hand-soldered silver bypass lines she’d woven through the raider’s crude factory wiring.

Every joint was immaculate and polished clean, laid out with the careful geometry of fine jewelry.

"I’m not overseeing anything, Elena," he said, quiet and plain, and completely unmoved by the ice. "I’m looking at it because it’s damn good work... A little bird told me you spent four hours upside down in this conduit balancing the regulators so the core wouldn’t trip on a double pulse."

Elena’s fingers tightened around the wand.

She stared fixedly at the coolant pipe and refused to look at him, but a faint betraying pink bloomed along the shell of her ear and gave her away completely.

"That little "bird" is prone to dramatic exaggeration," she murmured, fighting to keep a tremor out of her voice. "I merely corrected an offensive lack of symmetry in the wiring harness... A Sterling doesn’t tolerate sloppy conduits on a vessel she travels on. It was a matter of professional pride and I didn’t do it to collect compliments."

"Harper’s the one who told me earlier," Leo said mildly. "She was impressed."

That stopped Elena cold.

For a second she simply stood there with the wand hovering a few centimeters from the coupling, and he watched her try to fit that fact somewhere it would make sense... Harper Bell, crawling up to this cramped little bay to look at her wiring and then going down to tell the captain it was good.

"She said that?" Elena said slowly.

"She said, and I’m quoting here, ’the princess solders like a surgeon, don’t tell her I said that.’"

Elena made a small strangled sound that might have been a laugh in a less dignified woman, and her ears went fully red.

"Well," she said, after a moment. "I suppose she has a functioning eye after all..."

Leo chuckled and stepped half a pace closer, until his shoulder almost brushed hers, and looked out through the narrow viewport at the stars drifting past the dorsal hull.

"You gave this ship real teeth, Elena... When those raiders came at us, your lasers cut their command modules in half before they could even launch. You saved our lives up here."

Elena stood motionless for three long seconds.

Slowly, her shoulders lowered and the rigid tension melted out of her frame.

She turned her head and looked at him through her lashes, and her eyes softened into something vulnerable and sincere that she so rarely let anyone see.

"We’re a crew, Captain," she said quietly, with no mockery in it at all. "I promised I’d hold my station. I intend to keep that promise and I’m sorry for what I did before."

He held her gaze for a beat and nodded, and then gave the laser housing a light approving slap.

"Carry on, then. Just don’t electrocute yourself."

Elena let out a soft exasperated sigh, though a faint, dazzling smile curved her lips as she watched him climb down.

"A Sterling doesn’t electrocute herself, Captain... We leave the amateur blunders to the mechanics."

At lunch he passed through the galley, and found Chloe sitting on the counter.

She’d tucked her boots up under her crimson skirt and pushed her long sleeves back to the elbow, and she was watching Camila now stir a big pot of beans and peppers with the solemn attention of a judge at a cooking contest.

Chloe couldn’t eat a single spoonful of it, however she’d been coming to every meal anyway, ever since Camila had first made her a mug of hot water with a slice of lemon in it "so you have something to hold" and nobody had ever asked her to explain why.

"Taste..." Camila said, holding out the wooden spoon.

Chloe leaned forward and sniffed it, very seriously, with her eyes half closed.

"Too much cumin..." she said.

"You can’t even eat it!"

"I have a nose," Chloe said. "It’s a very good nose. It’s better than your tongue..."

Camila sputtered, outraged, and then took a small taste herself and frowned at the pot.

She tipped half a cup of water into it without a word, and Chloe swung her boots in quiet triumph.

Leo leaned in the doorway with his arms folded and felt something in his chest unknot a little.

In the medbay, Chloe had barely spoken except to him... Now she was sitting in a kitchen bullying the cook, and the cook was letting her.

"You two are trouble," He said with a grin.

"She’s trouble," Chloe said, pointing at Camila with one sleeve. "I’m quality control..."

Camila laughed and flicked a bean at her, and Chloe caught it out of the air between two fingers without looking, sniffed it and dropped it back into the pot.

Leo glanced at the table.

Five bowls were set out... Aoi’s and Jin-Ah’s already had steam rising from them, and Elena’s had a folded napkin placed beside it with geometric precision.

"Harper didn’t come up? I told her to take a break for lunch."

"She said to save her some," Camila said with her smile faltering slightly. "She came up after drills for about thirty seconds, grabbed a bread roll and ran back down... She said she had to test something while the idea was still hot."

Leo’s brows drew together.

"Test what?"

"She didn’t say." Camila hesitated. "She looked really happy, though."

Leo looked down the corridor toward the companionway.

Harper had been awake since before six, running drills since eight and bent over a bench all morning.

Happy, hungry and exhausted was exactly the state in which people made stupid mistakes with heavy machinery, and he’d told her to take a break...

’I’ll talk to her after I check Jin-Ah’s charts,’ he told himself, and filed it away.

Behind him, Chloe had stopped swinging her feet.

She was looking down the same corridor, her head tilted slightly, as if she were listening to something none of the rest of them could hear.

By mid-afternoon, Leo was back on the main bridge.

The command deck was empty except for Jin-Ah, sitting cross-legged in her swivel chair with her geometric bob lit cold blue by three floating data windows.

Her slate rested on her thighs, and her fingers flicked across it with clinical speed as she cross-referenced the Black Kite’s decrypted star charts against the local drift.

"Still staring at numbers?" Leo asked, resting a hand on the back of her chair.

"The numbers are our survival margin, Captain," Jin-Ah said without looking up, though her voice was relaxed and free of the defensive edge that used to guard every word. "I’m mapping the gravity pockets around the first jump corridor... If we meet a syndicate patrol, we need escape routes calculated in advance that don’t depend on high-G burns."

She swiped, and the map widened into a broad web of glowing points scattered across the next three systems.

"I’ve also started on this," she went on, and a subtle proud tilt touched her chin. "The Kite logged every port it ever docked at, refueled at or was refused by... Mining hubs, salvage yards, waystations, a few places marked only with warnings. I’m sorting them by distance, by Federation presence and by how likely they are to ask questions about a seeded ship with no papers."

Leo leaned over her shoulder.

Dozens of stations hung in the projection, each tagged with her neat annotations in three colors.

Some were struck through in red, a few were circled in amber and the shortlist at the bottom was still growing.

"You pulled all this out of a terminal that was half fried in the middle of a battle...?"

Jin-Ah’s fingers paused on the glass.

She turned her head slightly and looked up at him through her sharp bangs, and a faint warmth touched her pale cheeks. Her lips pressed together in a rare self-conscious line.

"Data is meaningless unless it serves an objective," she said softly. "I’m... glad my calculations are useful to your command... I should have a recommendation for you by tomorrow morning."

"They’re more than useful," Leo said, smiling down at her. "They’re keeping us one step ahead of the grave so keep it up."

Jin-Ah gave a small composed nod and turned back to her screens, though the slight pleased bounce of her shoulders said more than her face would ever allow.

Then came the blast.

BOOM!

A deafening concussive detonation tore through the mid-decks and shook the fifty-meter corvette from stem to stern.

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

The bridge klaxons exploded into shrill pulsing bursts, and red hazard lights strobed across every bulkhead!

Leo’s head snapped up toward the ceiling.

"Vela! Report!"

[Overpressure event, Deck Two armory... Fire suppression engaged and hull integrity holding.]

"The armory?!"

His heart slammed against his ribs like a dropped weight as he was already moving before the word finished leaving his mouth.

SLAM!

He vaulted the mezzanine railing, hit the deck plates in a dead sprint and tore down the companionway stairs three at a time with his boots hammering the steel risers.

Aoi burst out of the cartography alcove right behind him with her face gone white, and Elena came sliding down the dorsal ladder with her palms burning on the rails, while from below Camila came pounding up out of the garden corridor with her pruning shears still clutched in one fist.

Chloe was already there.

She stood in front of the armory blast door with both small hands pressed flat against the steel with her nostrils flared and her green eyes gone wide and very bright, and she turned her head toward Leo as he skidded to a stop.

"Blood," she said. "Hers... It’s not a lot but it’s hers."

Leo grabbed the emergency release lever with both hands and hauled.

HISS-CLANK!

The heavy door ground open, and a thick choking cloud of grey chemical smoke and vaporized copper rolled out into the corridor, reeking of scorched propellant and burnt insulation.

Leo plunged into it with his arm over his mouth, coughing against the acrid haze, his eyes streaming as he swept the gloom for the fabrication bench... and found it.

Harper was sitting flat on the deck plates a meter and a half from the lathe, slumped against a stack of ammo crates, and she wasn’t moving.