“Oh.”

Jason glanced up from where he’d been comparing the technical manual in his hands, to the banks of machines in front of him. There, standing in the entrance to the engine room, was a particularly small and wiry looking Shil’vati.

Well, small and wiry for a Shil’vati female at any rate.

“You must be Kernathu,” Jason said, standing up as he walked across the metal walkway towards her and extending a fist. “Private Jason Linford.”

The young woman moved to bump it, before realizing that her hands were covered in… something black and grimy.

“I, ah…” she said vaguely waving her hands. “Don’t want to get you dirty.”

Jason just shrugged. He wasn’t personally bothered by a little grime. Lord knows he’d been up to his own armpits in worse over the years. Still, he appreciated her somewhat chivalrous attempt not to immediately smear him on their first meeting.

“No problem.” He smiled, much to her relief. “I figured I’d come down here to familiarize myself with the ship, given that I’ll apparently be helping you around here for the foreseeable future.”

He resisted the urge to frown as he thought of the nebulous status of his training. “I don’t have any formal degrees as such, but I’m pretty familiar with most of the underlying concepts of what’s in here.”

“Ah…” the ship’s resident engineer said, before trailing off, the oil stain on the bridge of her nose shifting as she scrunched her nose up cutely in thought. Jason waited for her to say anything else, and though it was clear she was trying to think of something, no words were forthcoming.

The silence dragged.

“All crew report to the lounge,” blared from the ship’s intercom, Tisi’s voice warped by only the slightest crackle.

Glancing at his wrist-comp, Jason noted that it was time for the all-hands meeting. Looking up at the engineer in front of him, he saw that she was still searching for something to say. Perhaps it would be best to show her mercy by stepping out now?

“Ah, I guess we’ll have to cut this short,” he said, making his way toward the exit. “I look forward to working with you though.”

The woman just nodded as he stepped around her, eyes studiously on some spot slightly to the left of him. Jason resisted the urge to sigh as he stepped out into the hall.

Despite what his experiences in basic training might suggest, he wasn’t unfamiliar with shy Shil’vati. They existed. Which wasn’t all that surprising when one thought about. Given the gender disparity in the race, more than a few of the female’s only point of contact with a male was their father. But of course, society placed a lot of a woman’s value on her ability to find and ‘snare’ a mate.

That meant that when many of these less outgoing Shil’vati finally did meet a man, they inevitably froze up under the pressure. He’d seen it happen plenty of times during training.

So no, the entire race wasn’t comprised of gregarious and outgoing horndogs. He sincerely doubted even most of them were. What he did know was that the ones who approached him were invariably those specimens whose interest in the opposite gender and confidence were each at the correct ratios.

Even Raisha, for all of her adorkable nature, was more of an extrovert than anything else. The same could have been said to have been true of any other member of his little circle of ‘friends’ during basic.

With the notable exception of Freyxh.

With any luck though, Kernathu would calm down a bit after she’d gotten a bit more exposure to him.

“Nice to meet you!” the girl in question suddenly shouted from the entrance to the engine room.

Jason smiled and waved back at her, making her fidget in place, the soot stains on her face fading as her features shifted to blue. She seemed relieved though, likely conceding that she hadn’t totally messed up their first meeting.

…Or, at least, that was his take on things. For all he knew, she was just relieved the primitive ape was out of her engine room.

He was also wondering how long it would take her to realize that ‘all crew’ included her. He momentarily considered doubling back to inform her, but decided that doing so might do more damage to her ego. Better to pretend they both forgot.

A line he stuck with when Kernathu showed up blue-faced and panting to the meeting five minutes after it had started.

----------------------

It was both a humbling and awe-inspiring experience, to watch a storm-system the size of Earth itself, rippling across a gas giant’s surface.

For all that Jason knew he liked to complain about his current circumstances, he could admit that they provided some pretty amazing opportunities. While it wasn’t quite a window, the view from the high fidelity screens on the bridge were no less breathtaking because of it.

“Impressive isn’t it?”

Jason nearly jumped out of his skin as he turned and found the captain standing at the entrance to the bridge. He froze, all too aware that he should technically have been sat at the duty station.

“Relax,” Tisi smiled. “You’d hardly be the first member of the crew I found staring out the window – or worse – while they were on night shift.”

Jason nodded, even as he somewhat sheepishly, made his way back to the console he was supposed to be sat at.

“Where’s Rocket?” the Captain asked as she settled into her chair.

“Bathroom,” Jason said simply.

Something he was kind of relieved about. The shuttle pilot could be fun in small doses, but after a while her talkative presence got downright overbearing. Perhaps that was how she always was, or perhaps it was just because he was male? Either way, her trip to answer the call of nature had provided him a welcome reprieve from the woman’s unsubtle flirting.

In truth, he recognized that part of his discomfort in her presence was because she reminded him of Raisha. Which in turn made him feel guilty about even thinking of acquiescing to her unsubtle suggestions to have a ‘quicky’ to pass the time.

While he’d like to think he’d acclimatized rather well to the Shil’vati notion of having multiple partners, every now and then he found some unconscious hang-ups coming back to haunt him.

“I’ll have to go and make sure she’s not sleeping in there if she doesn’t show up again soon,” Tisi said, more amused than annoyed. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve caught her catching five with her pants around her ankles on the steel throne.”

Jason chuckled at the thought.

“Will you be sticking around for a while then, Captain?”

The woman tilted her head to the side. “Trying to get rid of me, private?”

Jason didn’t rise to the bait. “Hardly, ma’am. Just wondering why you’re… here?”

Rather than in bed, where he’d dearly like to be right now. Unfortunately, the duty roster had him up here for another two hours, before Cerilla and Yoro came to relieve him.

“A little insomnia,” Tisi admitted. “I’ve long learned that I’m better served wandering the ship for a while than lying awake.”

Finished looking over the console attached to her chair, she moved over to the camera feed Jason had been looking at before she’d come in. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

Jason had to resist the urge to snort. The way she’d said it had just been so stilted. As if repeating something she knew to be the case, but couldn’t quite see for herself.

“Yes, it is pretty.” He dutifully repeated.

Something of his amusement must have peeked through despite his best efforts, because the woman flushed slightly before turning back to the massive wall sized monitor.

“Has anyone ever mentioned why we’re out here? What the Whisker actually does?”

That actually perked up Jason’s interest. “Not in so few words. I mean, I know we’re a patrol ship, but no one’s ever actually explained why we’re here.”

Space was big after all. It would take a truly staggering number of ships to cover every approach to any given world. To his mind, it would make more sense to have every ship sit in orbit of the world you actually planned to defend. Sure, that gave you next to no warning when an enemy showed up, but at least you’d have defenses in place to act on it.

Though he could understand why that was also pretty unfeasible. Ships were expensive, and having a fleet of them over every world in the Imperium would be ruinously expensive.

Instead of either of those options though, they’d flown who knew how many light years away from Gurathu and sat in orbit of this gas giant for the last day or so.

“Fuel,” Tisi said simply, clearly more at ease now, discussing practical matters. “The Gravity Drive which we – and the rest of the galaxy – use for FTL requires hydrogen. Copious amounts of it, in order to jump.”

Jason glanced at the gas giant they were orbiting. “And most gas giants are mostly hydrogen and helium, ma’am.”

“So worlds like this serve as good chokepoints in space.” Tisi smiled happily, before it turned somewhat sadistic. “I’m glad you get it without me having to explain. I was beginning to wonder if that line about you having experience in engineering was fabricated when you didn’t show any interest in any of this during the trip.”

“I was slightly busy, ma’am.”

Undergoing Assisse’s training from hell. Or trying not to be sick in the brief intervals between said training sessions. Certainly, he counted himself as being of an engineering mindset, but said mindset had limits. Unraveling the mysteries of FTL travel while trying not to upchuck his lunch was not his idea of a good time.

“Fair,” Tisi admitted. “Has Kernathu been helping you settle in?”

“She’s doing what she can, ma’am.” Jason nodded.

The girl was still stumbling over her sentences around him, but at least she was talking in sentences now. He’d count that as a win.

“Good, I meant what I said about trying to make this time valuable for you.”

Jason just nodded.

“So what happens if a fleet, or pirates or whatever, does jump in?” Jason asked.

“Ma’am,” Tisi corrected politely, before turning her attention back to the ‘window’. “We run, of course. I love the Whisker but she’d last less than a second in a straight fight with any real warship.”

She leaned on a nearby console, crossing her arms. “No, we run as soon as we get a half-decent idea of the size of the attacking force. Given that we’re fully fueled, we’d get back to Gurathu and be able to give the governess there a decent warning, before the attackers could refuel and follow us. In that time, another ship at Gurathu could jump out to inform sector command.”

Jason frowned. “That still gives the attacking fleet a decent window to do some damage before reinforcements show up, ma’am.”

Tisi shrugged. “That’s life out in the colonies. It’s why pirates like the Roaches are still kicking around when we’d squish them like the bugs they are in a straight fight. Unfortunately for the universe at large, the insects can make a decent trade on salvage even before they cash in the Coalition’s bounty.”

She sounded more than slightly irritable at that, and Jason decided to let that topic lie. While the Shil’vati seemed apathetic about the Alliance, the Trade Coalition got a significantly more rabid response.

Not that he didn’t understand why, even through the lens of Imperial propaganda, he couldn’t exactly see a slave trading corporatocracy possibly being a particularly nice place. Especially if they were apparently funding pirate raids.

“Hey Captain,” he started, jostling the woman from her own thoughts. “I’ve been wondering, how would I go about sending someone a message?”

Rather than be annoyed, Tisi seemed rather relieved by the interruption. “Well, normally you’d-”

“Hey Jason! You should see the size of the crap I just…. and the captain is here…” Rocket trailed off from her bombastic entrance as she seemed to shrink in on herself under her superior officer’s glare.

The woman sighed.

--------------------

“You cleaned out the intake filters?”

Jason paused in the act of wiping his arms, which were liberally streaked with black grime. Glancing over toward Kernathu, he noted that the woman was even more streaked with grime than himself, black smears all over her as she clambered out of the guts of the ship’s engines. Which were currently offline while the two of them engaged in mandatory maintenance.

Well, Kernathu did. He’d had precious little to do since he’d come down here.

“I did,” Jason admitted freely, even as he wondered if he might have overstepped. “You didn’t really give me anything to do, so I…”

He trailed off, before gesturing to a nearby terminal.

“You reset the plasma manifolds too?” The woman said, rushing over to the machine in a manner that had alarm bells ringing in his head.

“Yeah,” he said, standing up and walking over to where the woman was almost frantically moving through the computer system’s many diagnostic windows, her black ponytail bouncing about as she moved. “The steps in the technical manual seemed simple enough.”

He felt his heart dropping as the engineer seemingly ignored him, focusing instead on the screen in front of her. Time seemed to drag as the woman’s eyes flitted across the runic Shil’vati text.

“It’s good,” she finally said.

Jason felt himself exhale a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Leaning on a nearby terminal, he felt a relieved smile come to his face. “Shouldn’t it be? I realize I’m not exactly classically trained here, but it’s hardly rocket science.”

He laughed a bit at his little joke, given that it very much was rocket science, but that laugh died in his throat as the diminutive female engineer turned to look at him. Either his joke hadn’t crossed the cultural divide, or she was wondering where he got off ‘taking the initiative’, because if he were to place the girl’s expression, he’d probably have put it at ‘mystified’.

“It’s good,” she repeated tonelessly.

Jason leaned back, now feeling a little defensive. “Well, yeah. I said I followed the steps in the technical manual, didn’t I?”

He didn’t mean to get heated, but her reaction was giving him uncomfortable flashbacks to the start of his Shil’vati engineering course. Professor Geer had been a competent enough teacher, but she had an irritating habit of being surprised when her students proved more capable of understanding Shil’vati tech than she’d been expecting.

And she hadn’t had high expectations, which meant she was often surprised.

Which had annoyed the shit out of him and a few of his fellow engineering students. The notion that the aliens thought humanity too ‘primitive’ to understand their tech when they had working examples of it in front of them.

“Oh no!” Kernathu cried suddenly, throwing up her arms frantically as her analytical engineering mindset switched back to the shy young woman he’d become far more accustomed to. “I wasn’t… saying you couldn’t do it…. I was just surprised!”

She paused as he raised an eyebrow.

“Not, like surprised surprised, but like, normal surprised.” The alien turned away, flushing blue. “I mean, normally surprised. Not because you’re human or a guy… or something like that.”

Now Jason was feeling guilty for his slightly uncharitable thoughts as his ‘superior’ twisted herself into knots as she desperately proclaimed that she wasn’t ‘one of those people’. Which he was pretty sure she was, at least on some level, given that her gut reaction to him performing an incredibly simple task was to double-check it.

Or perhaps he was being uncharitable again. Seeing an unconscious bias where there wasn’t one. Was he unconsciously paranoid about Shil’vati having unconscious biases?

Deciding not to go down that particular rabbit hole, he coughed quietly, in an attempt to interrupt Kernathu’s ongoing stammering.

“I don’t think you are,” he… partially lied. “You were just checking my work, right? Like a supervisor normally does?”

Kernathu saw the out for what it was and grabbed onto it like her life depended on it.

“Yes!” she nodded eagerly. “I was just double-checking your work. For safety.”

Jason smiled reassuringly. “Well, given that my work was up to code, is there anything else I could do to help?”

Maybe it wasn’t exactly the most ideal segue way into getting more tasks, but if this little incident stopped the short Shil’vati from continuing to treat him like an unexpected, and incredibly fragile, piece of decoration, he’d be happy.

“Up to?” Kernathu mouthed, before trailing off as she glanced down at his smear stained hands. It was as if a light went on inside her head, and as she glanced back up, it felt like for the first time she was really looking at him.

“Do you know what a mag-wrench is?” she asked, almost tentatively.

Jason just nodded, deliberately not taking offense at a question that suggested his superior had an almost insulting low opinion of his knowledge base. Plus, it would have been hard to hold a grudge as the alien positively shook with excitement.

“Come. Come over here.” She said, skipping over to an open maintenance hatch. “You can pass me tools while I work on this graviton refractor. I’ll explain what I’m doing while I work. Then you can work on the others.”

Jason nodded as he followed after her, almost as happy as the alien herself to finally be doing something useful.