Hooookay, so! It’s a whole new year. A whole new century, even.

Not to rain on your parade, but the 22nd century does not begin until January 1st, 2101.

Oh, shit, really? That sucks, but uh…thanks, Athena.

Also, we’re not on Terra and you’re not even from Terra so I’m unsure why the Terran new year even matters to you.

We’re on a Terran ship. We use the Terran calendar. We might as well celebrate the Terran holidays, right?

Anyway, my new year’s resolution is to keep a log of events on the ship to help me keep track of things better. Like a captain’s log, except I’m not the captain. I’m the first mate—or as I like to say, the captain’s babysitter. But let’s face it, Jules isn’t keeping any logs, so I suppose it falls to me to, ah, document.

Granted, you wouldn’t want documentation about what happens on a smugglers’ ship under normal circumstances, so I can’t blame Jules for not keeping records. But the thing is, circumstances haven’t been “normal” here in…well, ever, really. So I figure it’s time to keep track, start connecting things.

I was worried at first that it might pose a security risk, but then I realized that if anyone got a hold of our ship, they’d find way more incriminating evidence than just this log. I mean, hell, we’d all be lined up and shot if anyone knew the truth about Athena.

Oh, we’re including that in the log? You’re that confident that you can keep this thing safe?

I wouldn’t risk it except that it’s so ingrained in how we run the ship. I mean, we couldn’t run an FTL ship with a four-man crew without wetware. How would I explain that?

So yeah, I guess it’s going on record that we, the crew of the Adelaide, are running wetware. It’s crazy illegal, literally war criminal illegal, but it lets us keep the crew small without using any neural implants. Besides Athena, it’s just Jules, me, an engineer, and a medic. Oh, and Athena and Jules…well, why don’t I just give a rundown of the crew’s history?

I don’t know much about what happened before Jules hired me on.

And it’s none of your business, considering–

Athena, please. I’m just doing the log, not trying to pry. You promised not to butt in too much.

Right. Keep the natter down. Sorry.

Thanks. As I was saying, before me it was just Jules and Athena. I don’t know how they met. I don’t know what either of them did before that. But for a while, it was just the two of them on the Adelaide. I met Jules a few months ago on Fakir, where they’d stopped to deliver some weaponry. Unfortunately this happened right in the middle of the whole Bloodied Hand business in that part of the galaxy, so anti-human sentiments were running high.

I remember I was sitting in my apartment when I noticed that the light was different than it should have been. An orange cast settled over everything, tinting the chrome walls copper. It was like sunsets I’d seen on video—real, planetside sunsets where the light’s at an angle and everything instead of the simulated stationside sunsets where the light just dims. It was pretty, but I felt a sense of unease right away. I’d never seen that happen before—and on a station where the routine never changes, seeing something new means there’s an emergency.

Within minutes, alarms blared across the station. Sounds, lights, heat patterns, chemosignals, all broadcasting to every available sense that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. In this case, it happened to be fire. Among other things.

I grabbed a backpack I’d packed with supplies in case of this exact event—the news had been nothing but the Bloodied Hand for weeks and I knew tensions were rising, so I’d prepared to run out in a hurry. What I was less prepared for, though, was the bigass puchin standing outside my door, ready to grab me as soon as I made a dash for it.

I know there’s plenty of humans out there who’ve never seen a puchin before, or even any ETs at all, so let me clarify: roughly eight feet of muscle with a humanoid body type topped by a wedge-shaped head full of teeth. Rows and rows of big ol’ fangs. They see with heat, so they don’t have eyes, just these bald pits in their faces. They’ve also got porcupine spines and rabbit ears. Not something I’d make a habit of messing with. They make up most of Fakir’s population, since they’re the ones who built it.

So that’s what dragged me off, blindfolded, to a room full of other—hostages, I suppose? I’m not entirely sure what they planned to do with us. It could be they were holding us hostage to get something out of the Hand, or maybe they meant to kill us later in some sort of public demonstration. My captor shoved me and I feel onto my knees amid a crowd of other humans. I could tell not just by context, but by scent as well. You wouldn’t smell a dog and think it’s a human. Same goes for puchins and humans.

Oh shit, I should probably clarify in case anyone other than me or Athena ever hears this. I know I keep using the word “human,” but I don’t sympathize at all with the Bloodied Hand. I’d be just fine calling us terrans. It’s not a political statement when I say “human.” I’m not ‘refusing’ to use the planet-based species name or anything, it’s just what I’m used to. It’s what everyone on Fakir said, though usually with quite a lot of venom. And it’s what everyone on the Adelaide says besides Jules, because nobody else has had many interspecies dealings. They’ve tried to break us of the habit, but it’s…slow going. In the meantime, to keep us from getting shot like a bunch of idiots, Jules talks to all our ET clients alone.

Anyway, I started to panic. I began to hyperventilate, and I suppose the person next to me must have noticed. A second later, my blindfold slid up just a sliver and I found myself looking into a pair of flat brown eyes, just barely visible beneath the blindfold. My neighbor jerked their head towards the ground, were I saw a written note on a piece of paper.

It said, “Their vision is thermal and also rather poor. They can’t tell if you move your blindfold, and they can’t read what we’ve written. Do be quiet, though. Sharp hearing. My name is Jules. They/them. You remind me of a friend. I will get you out of here.”

I picked up the pen laid out beside it and wrote, slowly and carefully to avoid making any noise. As I stole a glance around the room, I saw that our puchin captors were behind us and facing away from us, towards the doorway. They peered over their shoulders occasionally, but Jules and I were placed towards the back of a crowd of around forty humans, so we had some cover. Thankfully, the pen used gel ink and glided across the page smoothly and any noise my writing made was easily covered up by the general breathing and shuffling of the crowd. I wrote, “I’m Marie. She/her. How?”

“I’ve got a ship waiting in the nearest hangar,” Jules wrote back. “We just need to get to it. Any ideas?”

I felt a surge of annoyance at that. This bastard, acting like they’d take care of everything only to ask me what to do next! But ultimately, Jules had shaken me out of a panic, and I realized soon enough that I was perfectly capable of pulling my own weight in this situation. I knew the terrain better than Jules did, after all.

And I knew our captors better, I realized with a jolt as I recognized a certain puchin. Mnirin, an old friend of mine. Puchins are kind of phenotypically homogenous, but there was no mistaking Mnirin for anyone else—poor bastard had his left ear torn mostly off in a fight years ago. The resulting ragged mess was distinctive, to say the least.

“I am going to take a risk,” I wrote.

I turned around, so that I was now facing our captors instead of the wall. I yanked off my blindfold. I didn’t dare stand up and I didn’t dare yell. I raised my voice as high as I dared but kept it calm. Any aggression and I was sure I’d be shot. I spoke in the puchins’ own language, which is more commonly spoken on Fakir than Trade Standard is.

Roughly translated, I said, “You’d do this to me after all we’ve been through?”

Mnirin turned around at that point. I’ll be honest, reading puchin facial expressions doesn’t come easily to me, but I think he looked the way I wanted him to. Which is to say, surprised and hurt, but trying to hide it from the other puchins in the room.

“Are you listening to me, Mnirin? You know me. We were classmates. We were training partners. We were friends. We went through the fucking institute together, did everything we could to make it out alive—together—and you’re going to throw that all away here? For what? For politics? You know me!”

I hoped to create infighting among our captors by implying Mnirin was a human sympathizer of some kind. It was an amoral thing to do—Mnirin really was a good friend of mine back in my institute days, and there I was saying something I knew could get him killed. But you know. Desperate times.

To my surprise, another puchin turned to Mnirin and said, in a shockingly non-murderous tone of voice, “That one was with you in the institute?”

Mnirin nodded mutely.

“Alright then. Take her.”

Mnirin’s head snapped up suddenly, like he’d been shaken out of a stupor. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. I’ve been there. I know how it is. Take her and go,” the other puchin said.

As Mnirin stepped forward, a path cleared through the crowd of cowering humans, right to me. I yanked Jules up by the elbow. Mnirin had no doubt been expecting this kind of move from me, and he took it in stride.

His friends, however, did not.

“Not the other one,” said the puchin who’d given him permission to save me. I gripped Jules’ arm tighter and fixed Mnirin with a hard glare. I knew he couldn’t see anything about my eyes besides the heat they gave off, but I hoped that somehow the steel in them would carry through anyway. He knew me well enough that it should have.

And it must have, because Mnirin started leading both of us to the door.

“Hey! The other one stays!”

Another puchin spoke up then. “Both of them stay,” she snarled.

Chaos broke out. I’ll break it down as best I can.

At this point, Mnirin wanted me and Jules both out, his friend wanted me and only me out, and exactly nobody else was okay with either of those plans. There were four other puchins guarding us who didn’t want anyone leaving that room. Those four focused their aggression on the two of their own kind who had, from their point of view, betrayed them.

Mnirin decided to make a dash for the door with us. His friend lunged towards the door also, reaching for Jules. Gunfire rang out, but Jules and I were already so close to the door. The two of us made a dash for it as Mnirin and his friend slumped to the floor behind us. They weren’t dead at that point. It takes a hell of a lot more than a couple bullets to kill a puchin.

“Fuck! You shitheads let them out!” I heard someone shout. Then screaming. Horrible, beastly, screaming, fading gradually as Jules and I put more and more distance between ourselves and the gristly scene unfolding in that room. We weren’t pursued. It was…lucky, I guess. But it was hard to see it that way when I knew it was only because the people who should’ve been chasing us were instead busy killing the people who had tried to help me, one of whom was a friend of mine.

That’s when I came aboard the Adelaide for the first time. I asked Jules where the rest of his crew was.

“It’s just us and Athena, the ship’s AI. Athena, this is Marie. Say hi,” Jules said.

Athena said hi.

I raised an eyebrow. “No way in hell are you running an FTL ship of any size, much less this size, with just you and an AI. The number of implants you’d need would kill you.”

“Yes, it would,” Jules said in that calm, disaffected way of theirs. “That’s why I ask our wetware friend here to run the ship.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said. “You have got to be shitting me.”

“Athena, start our launch. And step on it, I’d like to be out of here before the authorities come,” Jules said.

And then, without anybody sitting at the console, without a single crew member touching a single button on the control panel, the ship exited the hangar and jumped to light speed.

I stared at Jules. I stared at Athena’s display screen, which showed a gently pulsating blue ring on a black background. I stared the ship.

Athena spoke up. “Of course,” she said, “We can’t exactly let you off the ship now that you know about me.”

I swallowed. “Pardon?”

“Athena, stop teasing the poor woman,” Jules chastised. “Don’t worry. I would not have bothered to help you if I only planned to kill you.”

“Why did you help me?”

“As I mentioned earlier, you remind me of a friend. Also, I didn’t have a plan to get out of that room. I don’t speak the language so I can’t be sure what you said, but it certainly got the job done,” Jules said. “Anyway. I take it you live on Fakir?”

“Lived,” I corrected them. “I don’t think I’ll be going back anytime soon.”

“Do you have anywhere else to go?”

I was silent.

“I assumed as much. Let’s talk over tea.”

We moved to the ship’s kitchen. While Jules boiled water and set out drinkware, I tried to figure them out. Most of their features suggested that they were about thirty, except for their hair. It was silvery grey and tied back in a low ponytail. Their build looked lanky at first glance, but their movement betrayed a hint of muscle. Their face had sort of a permanent curious look on it, as if they were always staring at a new puzzle they wanted to solve. They made tea in a rather elaborate way by my metrics—instead of simply pouring boiling water onto a teabag in a mug, they boiled water, poured it onto looseleaf tea in a teapot, let it steep, and then poured the finished tea into mugs. They hummed a little tune to themselves as they handed me my cup of tea.

They sure as hell didn’t seem like a war criminal.

Which raised all kinds of questions. Who were they? Why and how did they run wetware on their ship? How had they come to be a one-man ship crew, and how had they ended up on Fakir?

What ensued was a bizarre reverse job interview where Jules told me all my qualifications and I asked them all the questions.

“So you have nowhere to go,” Jules said slowly as they dropped into a chair across from mine. “I have a proposal that I believe will benefit us both. You see, I’m looking to expand my crew, and I believe you would be a good fit for what I have in mind. I’d like someone who has experience dealing with extraterrestrial races, and I’m sure life on Fakir has provided you with plenty. And I’ve already seen how well you do in high-pressure situations. You can, as they say, think on your feet. Aaaand while Athena was only trying to rile you up earlier, I have to say I am worried about letting someone run free knowing she’s wetware. I believe hiring you would be a good compromise between murder and stupidity on my part. What do you say?”

“I say I need a hell of a lot more information,” I said. Or maybe “squeaked indignantly” is a more accurate descriptor. “Who are you and what are you even hiring me to do?”

“My name is Jules, and I’m afraid it’s the only one I have these days. I am a smuggler—in fact my business in Fakir today involved delivering a shipment of illicit weaponry. It backfired a bit, I’m afraid. I was supplying the very group that started the disturbance you and I were caught up in. But besides weapons, I do business transporting everything from narcotics to fugitives to artifacts of various kinds,” Jules explained. “As for what I’d like to hire you for, it’s a rather open-ended position. I’m captain of this ship, the Adelaide, and you’d be her first mate. Essentially, my assistant, my lieutenant, my second in command.”

“Command of who?”

“Nobody at the moment, but I plan on hiring at least two more people. We’ll need an engineer and a doctor of some kind,” Jules said. “In any event, your job would be basically whatever I need you to do.”

I stiffened. “Look, I’ll tell you right now that I’m not going to kill anyone for you,” I said gravely.

Jules’ eyebrows shot up, possibly the first real facial expression I’d seen them make. “Oh goodness, no. I’m a pacifist myself, and I wouldn’t expect a member of my crew to do anything I wouldn’t do.”

I was relieved, both that I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone and that Jules wouldn’t be hurting anyone, either. But at the same time, it confused the hell out of me. “Smuggler” and “pacifist” usually don’t go together. That’s just how Jules is, though. Unconventional, through and through. I’m getting used to it.

Slowly.

Anyway, I was sold. We shook on it.

“Welcome aboard, Marie,” Jules said.

“Thank you, captain,” I said.

Jules’ mouth curled up a little at the corner. Then their face grew solemn. “If you left any family behind on Fakir, we could attempt a rescue,” they offered.

I shook my head. “My mother left when I was young and my father died when I was a teenager. After that I was raised by the institute.”

“The institute?”

I’d forgotten he wouldn’t know about that place. Everyone on Fakir knew about it. “The Hylmir Institute. Most people on Fakir just call it the institute. It’s sort of an experimental boarding school slash military boot camp. You don’t have to be an orphan to go there, but it’s the best option Fakir has for orphans, so we all end up there. It’s…not a nice place.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jules said. “Onward, then. I think we’ll go find our engineer.”

As the Adelaide flew on, Jules showed me to my quarters. Or rather, they showed me to the enormous and overwhelming hallway of crew quarters, from which I was free to choose whatever room I wanted. At fifty rooms with four bunks in each, this ship’s made for a crew of two hundred, and there’s only four of us that have any need for quarters. At this point I’ve taken over a block of five rooms as my own. On that day, though, I just picked the one nearest to where I was standing.

Jules explained the general rules of the ship to me then. They’re basically the same rules you’d expect from, say, a roommate. Anything in the kitchen is fair game unless it’s labeled, your room can be messy as long as common areas are clean, that kind of thing. Jules showed me how I could ask Athena to bring up a map, then pointed out the bathrooms and the captain’s quarters. They turned to leave after that, but stopped in my doorway.

“You know,” they said. “I think the universe had a very good reason for placing us in the same room today.”

And then they left.

Jules’s whole ‘destiny’ thing gets on my nerves sometimes.

They did that to you, too?

Yeah. They’ve said similar things to the whole crew. When we first met, they went on and on about how it was meant to happen. So really, only mentioning it once is an improvement.

Hm. Well, I can’t say I buy into the whole mysticism thing, but I have to admit that Jules and I meeting was damn lucky for both of us.

Well. Real luck would be if neither of you had been taken hostage in the first place.

Maybe. I guess it depends on where we go from here.

Oh shit, it’s getting pretty late, isn’t it?

It’s 0230 hours ship time. Wake-up call is at 0600.

Fuck, I really have to stop staying up this late. I’d better leave off here for the time being. This is Marie Ruiz, signing off.