Chương 17: Settling In

After Kyra had calmed down from the emotional ride of their shopping trip, she and Felix made the decision to stop off for supper. While the time with Kyra had smoothed the edge of his frustrations with the rest of the crew, he recognized he still wasn't prepared to sit with everyone for a meal. The stop provided the extra space he needed to be ready to be civil, and Kyra took the opportunity to share more about the Magpie's upgrade trees.

Together, they'd come up with a plan to tackle the handful of deficiencies caused by Heigel's one-track focus on cargo capacity over anything else. Eventually Magpie would gain some real teeth. Night had fully engulfed the spaceport pad by the time Felix and Kyra arrived back at the Magpie. A handful of lights around the pad cast a gentle yellow glow around the freighter, while its own exterior lights fought back with their bleached white.

A pair of vehicles sat away from the ship, at the very edge of the landing apron: one, a flatbed cargo carrier in noticeably better condition than the one Kyra had brought, and the other, a mobile crane. As they drew near, a seam split near the base of the Magpie's right wing, spilling out light from the cargo bay as the ramp lowered. Backlit by the cargo bay, a figure rode the ramp to the ground, unrecognizable for Felix until Kyra's headlights revealed a smiling Mitch Bates.

Kyra swung the truck around and backed to the ramp as Bates walked along the driver's side, slapping a hand on her door when the back was in position.

"Welcome back," he shouted over the fan belt which had decided to start squealing again.

"How'd it go?" Kyra killed the engine and popped the door open, the truck shuddering to silence.

"Obvious matters aside, Captain Felix here is going to be great for Magpie. How're things?" Bates grimaced, likely thinking of his own part in what Felix was coming to call 'The Entrapment.'

"Quiet. Misty was beginning to wonder if you two would be back tonight, or if you—" he looked over at Felix, "—were still too angry for it." He looked away.

"I wouldn't blame you a bit." Felix slid out his door, into the crisp night air. A chill crept through the zipper of his flight suit.

"I think our little shopping adventure helped me put at least some of it in perspective. I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't still angry, though. Just not enough to take a swing at anyone." He looked Bates up and down, then cracked a grin.

"Not that I'd do much to you if I did."

"Well, I appreciate that, uh, sir. For what it's worth, I'm sorry I didn't say anything; I should have at least warned you."

"Thank you, Mitch. Not interested in captain yourself?" Despite his own earlier misgivings, a man Bates' size could make a fairly intimidating leader, if he cared to be one. Bates looked disappointed.

"Don't have the prerequisites. System wouldn't give it to me if I wanted, at least not without some crippling penalty."

"Well that's not very kind of it," Felix said. The amount of unwritten lines between System protections and where it seemed to allow people to fall into traps was beginning to get under his skin. Notably, it again seemed to choose not to defend itself. Kyra clapped her hands and rubbed them together, her breath beginning to form a small cloud.

"It's getting a bit chilly out here, how about we get this new equipment inside." Felix gripped the edges of the truck bed to climb up, but Bates put a hand on his shoulder.

"You should head in, sir. Kyra and I have this, you've got captainy things to do."

"If you're sure." At Bates' nod, Felix instead mounted the ramp, scaling it into the warmer interior air of the ship. Gavin was waiting just inside for him.

"Sir." The man stood straight, but actively avoided looking directly at Felix.

"I saw the deduction from the accounts for the trip to get repair parts. Six hundred and fifty thousand credits is substantially more than the petty cash fund I gave our engineer. In fact, it was a very significant cut of the remaining funds from our salvage sales today." Felix gave what could have been charitably be considered a smile, though the way his lip curled on one corner removed any hint of friendliness.

"Hello, Gavin, good to see you too. Why yes, it has been a long day, and I am coming to terms with the crippling debt you've kindly saddled me with." Apparently, his anger wasn't nearly as settled as he thought; perhaps it was the criticism for the purchase, or perhaps it was that he'd come to understand Gavin's role in The Entrapment. Gavin winced and continued to look away. Some of his authority seemed to visibly melt away.

"My apologies, sir. We should have shared the…extremity of our situation with you much sooner."

"Damn right you should have." Felix's officer hindbrain tugged on his leash in warning. He was not ready for this conversation, and he needed to get out of it before he did something stupid. Like it or not, he needed Gavin just as much as the crew needed him.

"We're not going to finish this conversation right now, understood?" Felix pointed back down the ramp with his thumb.

"As far as that goes, I approved the purchase. My understanding is we got a good deal." He pulled out the list and data chit from Al out and tossed it to Gavin, who caught them; the one from Miranda would wait until he had opportunity to review it.

"We also got a discount for agreeing to make a run for Al."

"Yes sir." Gavin looked at the list and blanched.

"This is high-end equipment, it's not going to be cheap…and Misty isn't going to be happy with the extra load…"

"I guess we'll figure it out, like I told Al. And unless I'm supposed to just be a figurehead, I do believe you all decided to put me in charge here." Gavin's shoulders heaved as he sighed.

"Yes sir. You are."

"Perfect. We can talk more tomorrow. In the meantime, I'd like to get some sleep because I've had a very long and not exactly great day."

"Of course sir," Gavin said.

"We've…removed Heigel's effects from the captain's suite, so it's ready for you." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Excellent. I'll see you at breakfast." Felix didn't wait for an answer before he left the bay.

The captain's quarters felt wrong. It went beyond just being an unfamiliar space. Admittedly, Felix had not yet visited the quarters belonging to any of the other crew; he'd not even looked into the cabin he'd originally been given when he came aboard. He had instead chosen to spend his time sequestered in the capsule, which had served as a sort of safe anchor after waking up in the new reality. But that was gone now, servicing a debt that he didn't know he even had.

His crew—still a strange, strange thing to think about—had expected he would move into the old Captain's quarters, and it made a certain amount of sense. He would be only a few steps from the command deck, and symbolically they were the Captain's Quarters. This is where captains lived, and he was now the captain, for better or worse. Perhaps that was the wrong part. Invading a space that shouldn't have been his.

"What have you gotten yourself into…" he muttered, absorbing the room. A single lamp was lit above a desk in the far corner on the right wall, beside the wall of empty shelving opposite the entrance door. Between it and where he stood at the entry, there was another door leading directly to the command deck.

A compartment set out from the wall in the corner nearest served as a closet, and on the left wall a bed, something close to what he would have been known as a queen-size back home, jutted out toward the center of the room. One actually would have to walk around the bed to cross the room to the desk. A third door, on the far side of the bed and also on the left wall, led back to a restroom, which included some sort of shower. How long had it been since he'd done more than a field-wash with wipes?

Felix waved his hand across the light-panel beside the door, and the overhead strip brightened, driving the shadows back under shelves and furniture. The room smelled faintly of mixed musk and disinfectant, as if someone had attempted to clean it, but their heart hadn't been in the work. Dust balls, something his brain somehow still clocked as being strange in a spacecraft, congregated in the corners, abandoned by whomever had tried to clean.

The bed mattress was a surprise, however; that appeared to be brand new, along with a basic set of white sheets and a grey blanket folded on the very end, still sealed in packaging atop a pillow. His handful of bags, retrieved from the pod before it was pawned to whatever wealthy collector had taken it, were stacked at the foot beside the new sheets. Whomever had done the work to prepare the room, while not great at cleaning, had made at least some attempt to prepare it for its new occupant.

Old rituals, impressed upon him by habit more than any active memory, took over as he settled into the room. Making the bed took a minute, as it was large enough he had to walk around it several times to tighten all the sheets and smooth out the grey blanket. The personal clothes bag included shorts and a t-shirt for sleeping, which he laid out on the bed before emptying the rest—just a bunch of blue NASA jumpsuits and undergarments—into the closet.

The personal bag went onto the shelf as an unopened whole, beside the tablet left out to ask Kyra about a charging adapter and the folder with Ana's picture; that, he took a moment to find something in the desk's supplies to secure it to the wall. Once placed, he stepped back for a moment. The newest memories came back, sweet with her covered in honey and nugget residue, and that familiar feeling of frustrated love… … And then he frowned. Something was wrong. Something else was there, in the memory.

A melancholy, a sense of loss, accompanied by a question. If Ana was his daughter, and he was caring for her here… Where was her mother? The answer was on the tip of his tongue, formless, nameless, waiting for him to find it and he followed that thread back into memory, back into… The System's Wall. The infernal machine guarding his brain didn't bother to give him a warning, it just sat stoic, unwavering as it kept him away from his memories. Rage built up and he pushed on it, demanding an answer. My memories!

My life! How dare you keep that from me? The System did not answer. Again. He pulled the data chit for The Lord of Neo-Tokyo from his pocket and set it next to the computer terminal set into the desk, then explored the bath. The toilet was a vacuum operated system, which made sense since there was plenty of that to work with where Magpie tended to live.

The shower, meanwhile, appeared to be a hybrid water/sonic system, made to give that clean feeling while conserving the ship's water supply and reduce the load on the reclamation system. However, with Magpie connected to ground services… Felix took the time to luxuriate in the almost scalding water, letting it burn away the past week's accumulation of sweat, stress and disappointment.

Someone had provided hotel-style bottles of toiletries, still sealed and their slightly floral, sweet scent suggested that their origin, an operation called Nebula Cruise Lines, was higher-end. He had his own gear at least to give himself one more clean shave, but tomorrow he'd need to go back into town to get the various sundries people took for granted at home, as well as some new shoes and a few more pieces of clothing. Reemerging into the captain's quarters, the room no longer seemed quite so alien.

Smelling fresh, feeling fresh, a fresh bed calling… No. First, work. Then sleep. The desk chair wasn't the most comfortable, the cushion being long since worn-in by a captain who must have spent more time here than on the command deck, but it was adequate for his purposes as he slid into the desk. It took a few moments of poking at the controls, but soon he'd gotten the screen to activate. A simple prompt greeted him.

WELCOME CAPTAIN CONWAY He tentatively reached out to tap the screen, which immediately resolved into something resembling the captain's station he'd seen on the command deck. It lacked ship controls but instead had a few extra options for getting on the local world's network as well as the various tabs for the ship accounts themselves. He glanced over at the data chit Miranda had given him, then shrugged. Hopefully there wasn't anything malicious on there.

Felix shoved it into the appropriate looking slot in the desk, and a new window opened. A giant lizard stomped across the screen, blowing what had to be blue nuclear-powered fire across a cityscape which resolved into a title screen for The Lord of Neo-Tokyo. At the bottom of the screen sat three options: PLAY, SCENE SELECTION, SPECIAL FEATURES. The last blinked, as if it desired his attention.

He poked the button announcing SPECIAL FEATURES, which pulled up another menu, two pages of different segments featuring a member of presumably the cast or crew, except for the last two items. One, "SPECIAL EFFECTS" had a portrait of the lizard, and the other, stacked crates tagged as "SHIPPING INFORMATION""Clever. No one ever watches the special features." The last selection opened into a simple text document, only a handful of lines long.

Sign/Countersign: Discernment/Enlightenment Location: Akron, Rust – Ohio System Felix made a face. While he'd not managed to remember where he was from yet, something about Ohio made his stomach turn. Pickup: Uncle Hedge's Books, 4221 42 nd SE and Barker. Cargo: Live (Class III Glitch) Delivery: Return to Buffalo. He leaned back, crossing his arms and rubbing his chin. A glitch? Isn't that what Doc had been saying he was?

If it was a person like him, that was a line he wouldn't cross even if it meant giving up a lead to get back home. Perhaps, though, they could make that call in Akron; if this 'Class III Glitch' was a person, they could just turn them loose. Of course, there was a bigger question. Would the crew be willing to check on this, since it could lead to them losing their pilot? The chair creaked back with him as he thought, letting him recline further than he expected.

As soon as he dipped too low, the screen flipped back to the SPECIAL FEATURES menu and he sat back up to scroll back to the directions. This time the SHIPPING INFORMATION selection was absent. The giant lizard danced through the city in the bottom of the display while in the background a ship burned upward into the sky.