Where was I? Oh, right. Alec.

We set a course for Demali.

A couple months earlier, sixteen people had died on the space station Darwin when the life support system in their module failed. When the station admins investigated, they found a ton of poorly made knockoff parts being used throughout the station. One of them malfunctioning caused the accident. Darwin’s budget for repairs and parts was big enough that they should have been able to afford the best parts anywhere in the galaxy. They figured someone in the engineering department must have been buying cheap parts and pocketing the difference.

Problem was, the engineers didn’t keep any real records of who was responsible for what. They went wild accusing one another, but nobody could prove a damn thing. Security footage showed who installed each part, but of course anybody caught on tape claimed that someone else had bought it and they had no idea it was junk. After a few weeks of running in circles with this investigation, the station just up and fired the entire engineering department. All two hundred engineers.

They dumped ‘em all on Demali and told them to arrange their own rides home. Jules figured most of them didn’t have a home outside the Darwin. The station was built on Terra back when it was habitable and that’s where an awful lot of the crew came from, so those folks had nothing to go back to. Jules decided this was our big chance to grab a skilled engineer on the cheap. After all, only one or a few had done wrong. The rest were some of the best engineers in the business, not a damn thing wrong with them except they had the bad fortune of working with a thief or two.

Demali was a big deal when it was first discovered because it’s naturally fit for human life. The oxygen level, climate, gravity, and so on are perfect. It’s covered in plants but has almost no animal-like life aside from a few tiny pollinators here and there. So, bugs. Colonizing it was relatively easy—no need to terraform, just have to deal with pathogens and the like.

It was the in place to be for a while, but that was all before I was born. These days it’s…seedy, to say the least. It’s full of organized crime, is what I’m saying. I suppose I can’t judge, given that I’m presently involved in disorganized crime. And I can’t complain, either, since it made our arrival there much easier. Being a smuggler and all, Jules can’t go through the usual security measures most stations and inhabited planets have. Normally their clients set up a way in—that was how they got onto Fakir, for instance: by having a guy on the inside. That kind of thing can be tricky to set up—cops sometimes pose as buyers and claim they’ll get you in, so there’s a bit of risk involved. On Demali, though, you just have to pay off the mob wherever you plan to land.

Athena brought the ship into orbit over Demali and Jules called up the local mob boss. I noticed that they didn’t haggle at all. The price of entry was non-negotiable.

Once Jules had transferred the money, we landed in what appeared to be an abandoned corn field.

Alec says everything on Demali just looks wrong if you’re used to Terra, but to me it looked almost exactly like pictures I’d seen of Terra. Trees, grass, and all that. It’s even got one moon like Terra, which loomed overhead like a face peering down at us, half visible even in the daylight. The only major difference I could see was the sky, which was pale, creamy yellow in stark contrast to Terra’s famous blue.

Having been a station dweller my whole life, I was immediately distracted. The air smelled fantastic; alive with vegetation and fresh water somewhere nearby. I knelt down and ran a hand over the bristly dead stubs of old corn. Then I dug a finger into the greyish soil. It felt silkier than I expected, and surprisingly warm.

“Is this your first time planetside?” Jules asked a little incredulously.

I straightened up, embarrassed. “Not my first time,” I said, “The institute brought us planetside now and again to get us used to it in case we were ever needed there. But I’ll admit I didn’t get off-station much.”

“There’s no shame in that,” Jules said. “I don’t spend much time planetside myself. I believe the longest I’ve ever gone at a stretch is a month.”

“Did you grow up on a station, too?” I asked.

“No, I was born in space,” Jules said. I assumed they meant on a spaceship, but I didn’t have time to ask for clarification before they announced that it was time to find our engineer and started walking.

After what must have been nearly a mile walk, we reached a small town. Fairly generic, as far as human-made towns go: storefronts shoulder-to-shoulder along a main street, trees lining the roads, little ranch houses with lawns guarded by the ethereal blue glow of laser fencing.

Jules paused on a street corner outside a deli and stroked their chin in thought. “Now, if I were a disgraced engineer with a dead home planet, where would I be hanging about?” They muttered.

“The bar?” I suggested.

“Oh, goodness, no,” Jules said, wide-eyed. “Non-locals don’t tend to enjoy the bar scene here. The locals are somewhat less than accepting of foreigners in their drinking establishments, and while the occasional bar fight is undeniably invigorating, I doubt an engineer would go looking for that sort of trouble.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Extolling the virtues of brawling, are we? Weren’t you a pacifist a few hours ago?”

“I abstain from both violence and alcohol these days, but it wasn’t always so,” Jules explained.

“Right,” I said. “Okay, no bars. Could we…ask at an inn, maybe? Look, I’m gonna level with you, my entire strategy here is based on fantasy RPGs.”

Jules shook their head. “I’m afraid most real-life innkeepers deal in room and board only, not information. We’ll simply have to find our engineer the same way I found you: wait for fate to–”

The sound of nearby gunfire cut them off.

“Ah. I believe that’s our cue,” Jules said. And as they ran towards the gunfire, I began to question for the first time whether accepting their offer of employment had been a good idea.

I followed anyway, of course. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, but I didn’t know Jules all that well at the time, and—you know what, putting it like that makes it sound like an even worsedecision.

My point is, I thought Mx. Pacifist was going to run off and get themselves killed, so I, a well-trained product of the institute, would have to dash in and protect them. I couldn’t tell you how I planned to do it, given that I was completely unarmed and without an institute-trained partner, but I guess I just hoped my training would kick in.

I was starting to think this was a little too much like the way Jules had found me when the gunfire stopped. I caught up to Jules and stood beside them at the mouth of a dead-end alleyway. At the other end of the alley, two gun-toting men lined up cans on the rim of a dumpster. Realizing it wasn’t a gunfight, I started to relax.

Until Jules called out, “Pardon me, gentlemen,” and those two ‘gentlemen’ pointed their guns at us. I put my hands up and took a couple steps back, but Jules looked completely unfazed. For all the tension in their body language, they might as well have been chatting with their next door neighbor. “I do believe you’re on the wrong side of town. I could escort you safely out…for the right price.”

The taller of the two men laughed. “The hell you think you’re gonna do, pretty-boy? You ain’t armed.”

“I am armed with knowledge—which, incidentally, is the currency I’m trading in today. You answer a few questions, and in exchange I won’t use my dying breaths to call up Mr. Morgan and let him know where you are,” Jules said. They were strangely chipper for someone attempting to use blackmail while at gunpoint. I think that’s when I really began to wonder if Jules was crazy.

Is that the point of these logs? You’re recording observations to figure out what’s wrong with Jules?

I…okay, honestly? It’s far from the only reason, but that is part of it. When you say it like that it sounds bad, but I want to know if Jules is okay, you know? If they need help, I’d like to do what I can to getthem help.

Athena? Are we good?

I don’t know. I don’t like that you’re speculating about this behind Jules’ back.

Look, it’s probably nothing. From what I’ve seen so far, Jules is probably just…very eccentric. And that makes sense based on what I know about them. Like how they were born “in space.” Being raised on a spaceship can make a kid pretty weird, you know? It’s an isolated environment, only a handful of people and all that. Social norms are hard to learn in those conditions.

And I know it has been so far, but it’s not going to be entirely behind Jules’ back. If I start seriously thinking that something actually iswrong with Jules, I will bring it up with them. In person and everything. Right now I just want to keep some notes so I know whether or not I should be concerned. I don’t want to waste Jules’ time nagging them about every little quirk they have.

Fine, but if you say anything I think Jules should know, I’ll tell them myself. That applies to anything you say about anything, not just log entries about this in particular.

I understand. Uhhh, where was I, where—guns.

So the tall guy had his gun pointed at Jules and I was staring down the little guy’s barrel, when suddenly tall guy glanced over at little guy and they made eye contact and put their guns down. Sort of down, anyway. Still at low ready.

“What d’you need to know?” The tall guy asked, eyes narrow.

“Anything and everything you know about the former crew of the Darwin,” Jules said.

The two guys looked at each other again, but this time they were delighted. I swear, their eyes lit up. “If you’re lookin’ to get yourself an engineer, we’ve got a pair of ‘em available back at headquarters. ‘Course, once we get there, you’ll have to deal in more than information to get ‘em.”

“Fair enough,” Jules said.

And so we set off, leading two thugs through town.

At the time I had no clue how Jules pulled that off, but they explained it to me later. They’d recognized the sound of the specific brand of gun those men were using, which is apparently the weapon of choice for a particular gang that controls the uptown area. We were downtown. If the downtown boss, Alexander Morgan, knew uptown guys were on his turf, they’d be dead in minutes.

We walked a specific path Jules knew would keep us out of trouble. Away from prying eyes. For someone who doesn’t spend much time planetside, Jules knows that town really well. Maybe that’s where they spent their month, or maybe they have some way of researching it thoroughly. Either way, they picked their way through to the uptown guys’ base without incident.

It was an inconspicuous brownstone in a row full of inconspicuous brownstones. “We’ve got a buyer for those Darwin dolts,” the tall guy shouted was we walked in the door. The whole place reeked of tobacco smoke and sweat and, distantly, blood. Half-rotted floorboards complained loudly under our tread.

“Finally. I’ll bring them up,” called a voice from beyond the foyer.

Jules and I waited on an uncomfortable velvet sofa under the watchful eye of the men who’d brought us there. Jules was totally composed. They sat with their legs crossed ankle over knee, hands folded. Their face was as calm and attentive as always. Their eyes moved around the room with interest, brushing smoothly over the worn-out carpet, the bookshelves, the heavy desk in one corner.

I, having realized we were now involved in human fucking trafficking,was in a bit of a state. I picked nervously at the upholstery while darting uneasy glances at our thuggish chaperones. I glanced over at Jules periodically, which only made me more agitated wondering how they could be so relaxed in a place like this. Every small detail I noticed seemed to speak of some terrible deed that had been done in that house—the suspicious stains on the wallpaper, the huge battery on a nearby table that looked like it belonged in some kind of vehicle, the yellow rubber gloves neatly folded over one another sitting on top of a bookshelf.

After a few tense minutes, a pair of miserable humans in engineers’ jumpsuits shuffled into the room, shepherded by someone who wore a bulky environmental suit that made age, gender, and even species difficult to determine. All I can say for sure is that they were generally humanoid in size and shape—but since that’s true of what, four out of five known sapient species?

Just over nine in ten, actually.

Yeah. Doesn’t narrow it down much. If you assume they wore the suit because the conditions on Demali would be harmful to them, that narrows it down plenty, but for all I know it could’ve been a human in there just hiding their appearance as an intimidation tactic.

Which worked. I just about shat myself when I saw that coming at me, all shiny visors and old, yellowed body armor. The engineers they brought up looked scared out of their wits, too. Though I guess the suit wasn’t what did it for them. They were afraid of us. I tried to convey somehow that we weren’t going to harm them. I hoped our looks hinted at good intentions, but I quickly realized the opposite was true. I was wearing the same tank top and jeans I’d escaped Fakir in. The once-white tank top was marred with scorch marks and one very obvious bloodstain on my hip that I somehow hadn’t noticed before. Jules’ clothes were more presentable, but they looked far from harmless. Their brown leather flight jacket, embroidered silk shirt, and chunky solitaire ring spoke of wealth, and on Demali only the dangerous could acquire wealth.

Jules made a big show of inspecting the engineers, prodding at them and looking into their mouths. The two of them suffered through it wordlessly. As Jules examined them, they made the occasional complaint. “This one has a broken wrist. They’ve both clearly been without proper exercise for quite some time; this is nowhere near the muscle mass a space station engineer should have. I assume they’ve been held in tight quarters? It’ll take ages to get them in working shape again. How much exactly are you planning on charging?”

The suit-wearer quoted a per-each price and a price for the pair. It was more money than I’d ever had, yet still less than I’d expected a human being to sell for.

Jules let out a low whistle. “That much? Oh my. Now, I’d expect that sort of price for a pair this age if they were healthy, but they are in very poor health. Listen to the rattle when this one breathes. I guarantee you, that is pneumonia.”

“It’s just a little cough,” the besuited seller insisted.

Jules shook their head as they ruffled the hair of one of the engineers. “If pneumonia is just a little cough, I suppose you’ll also tell me that these head lice are just dust?”

I couldn’t read their face through the visor, but something in the seller’s silence told me they were getting flustered. Jules must have noticed, too.

“Now, handling these issues could be a decent investment considering the reputation of the Darwin crew…but certainly not for that price. Knock off some to treat the pneumonia, some for the attention this wrist will need, a bit more to deal with the lice, and a little extra since I’d have to pay another engineer while these ones recovered, and I’ll consider it,” Jules said. “Oh. And a touch more for the risk.”

“The risk?” The seller repeated, irritated.

“The risk that one of them may have been responsible for the deaths aboard the Darwin, of course,” Jules said. “You simply can’texpect to sell them at the price of a skilled engineer when one—or even both of them—might be a thief.”

“I’ll cover the medical expenses, but forget the risk,” the seller said. “You wanna buy Darwin engineers, you already know that’s the risk you take.” And with that they quoted a final figure.

Jules accepted and transferred the money via comm. Our thug friends walked us to the door with our new purchases in tow.

“Not a word until we’re back on the ship,” Jules warned me once we were outside.

We walked in silence. I’d forgotten how long the trip back to the ship was. The engineers started hobbling pretty early on, and by the end Jules and I each had one leaning on us. Once the ship’s airlock closed, the silence broke.

“Well. Now that we’re out of there,” Jules said, “My name is Jules and this is my first mate Marie. You’re aboard the Adelaide. And you’re free to go. We’ll drop you somewhere if you like.”

The engineer whose arm was around my shoulders perked up. “Wait, seriously?” He said. His voice was hoarse, but optimistic.

Jules smiled and nodded.

The engineer let out a whoop and tried to pump his fist in the air, only to yelp in pain. He was the one with the broken wrist.

“We can take care of that as well,” Jules said. “Incidentally, what are your names?”

“I’m Alec Bauer,” said the engineer who’d leaned on me.

The one leaning on Jules did not respond.

“He’s Nick Glass,” Alec said. “Nick, buddy, you okay? Hey, cheer up, we just got bought out of slavery!”

Nick remained silent, aside from his labored, rattling breathing.

We rushed him to the medbay.

Jules worked quickly, laying Nick out on the cot and checking his temperature and heart rate. Alec and I looked on from the doorway. We tried not to get in the way, but in the end there wasn’t much to get in the way of.

“It’s the pneumonia. I hadn’t thought it was severe, but I suspect the lengthy walk did him no favors,” Jules announced. “We don’t have the medicine we need to treat this. The best we can do for now is keep him stable while we find a doctor. Athena?”

“Already on it, Captain,” Athena said. It was the most mechanical I’d ever heard her sound. The effect was jarring. In hindsight, I suppose it was for Alec and Nick’s benefit. No need to let people know you’ve got wetware if they might only be temporary guests. “The nearest qualified medical professional whose information I can find is Frances Young, 1.23 miles away. Would you like me to contact her?”

“Yes, put me on a call. Audio only,” Jules said.

Five minutes later, Frances arrived on a jetbike. She’s probably the scariest-looking doctor I’ve ever met. Actually, she’s very specifically not a doctor, since she never got any kind of formal degree, but the point still stands. She’s well over six feet tall, covered in tattoos and brands, and I’ve never seen her smile. Her eyes are both cybernetic and you can tell by the scarring around them that the originals were removed violently.

Despite all that, she did seem professional. Her dark, curly hair was braided back in a neat, clean style. She wore soap-green scrubs that looked cleaner than anything else on the planet, and she carried a suitcase full of well-organized medical supplies. Jules showed her to the medbay and the rest of us got the hell out of the way.

We ended up in the kitchen, where Jules started making tea for everyone. “Well, Ms. Young may be our only option, but I suspect we’re rather fortunate to have her,” they said as they lined up three mugs.

Alec’s brow furrowed. “Wait, Ms. Young? Not Dr. Young?”

Athena chimed in, broadcasting only to the kitchen. “Frances Young has no formal degree, but has over ten years of experience as a quote-unquote ‘mob doctor.’”

“It’s more impressive than it sounds,” Jules assured him. “Pneumonia is nothing to someone who treats gunshot wounds on a daily basis.”

“If you say so,” Alec said. He sounded unconvinced, but did seem to relax a little after that.

“Now, Mr. Bauer, was it?” Jules began.

“Just call me Alec. I’m too young to be a ‘mister’ to anyone over the age of ten,” Alec said.

“Fair enough. Alec. Do you have any notion of where you’d like to go?”

Alec bit his lip. “Uh…I don’t have anywhere, really. My whole family’s still on Darwin, and before that I lived on Terra.”

My heart twinged a bit. Terra’s degradation had been going on since the industrial revolution, but it reached its critical point so suddenly. Assuming Alec’s family left Terra shortly after the Darwin was first built, they couldn’t have known that they would never be able to return to their home planet. Between that, the engineering cock-up, and his little brush with human trafficking, the poor boy has some terrible luck.

“Not to worry. I have an offer for you,” Jules said.

Alec cut in before they could continue. “I’ll tell you right now, I won’t do anything involving children or animals.”

Jules looked perturbed for a moment before they caught the shit-eating grin on Alec’s face. They sighed and shook their head. “I believe I can still find something suitable for you,” they said. “We are in need of an engineer to take care of this ship.”

“Okay,” Alec said. “I can do that.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re not going to ask what it is we do here? Or about the pay or anything?” I asked.

Alec shrugged. “I mean, I definitely wanna know that stuff, but it doesn’t change my answer. I’ve got no better options, and you didjust buy me out of slavery so you can’t be that bad.”

“Very well,” Jules said. “Then I have just one question before I officially welcome you to the crew.”

“I’ll bet I know what it is,” Alec said. “But go ahead and ask me anyway.”

“Were you the one responsible for the incident on the Darwin?” Jules asked.

“No. And I don’t know who was, either,” Alec said.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” Jules said. “Welcome aboard.”

Nick survived. Once he regained consciousness, he mentioned he had family on a different, slightly less seedy part of Demali, so we dropped him off at the hospital in the city he named.

Frances stayed on board and splinted Alec’s wrist.

“You’re dehydrated,” she told him sharply as she worked. “Not to mention malnourished, and your muscles have atrophied. You’ve got a long recovery ahead, and a spaceship is a shitty place to recover in. Especially one with no doctor and such a poorly stocked medbay.” She gestured wildly at the shelves and cabinets around her as she spoke. “I have to recommend that you stay at a real hospital and get treated by a real doctor.”

“Aww, but I just got a job here,” Alec whined.

“A job’s no good if you’re not alive to do it,” Frances snapped.

“I have a solution in mind,” Jules announced.

“Oh, of course you do,” Frances snapped. “Let me guess: I stay here and work in your shitty little medbay because you know I’ll come cheap, just like this fresh-out-of-college kid you purchased.”

Jules opened their mouth to speak, but Frances cut them off with a wave of her hand.

“Well, fine. You’re just lucky things on Demali are such shit right now. Whatever the hell this operation is, it’s got to be less of a mess than what I just came from,” she said. “But I hope you’re ready to shell out for some real equipment in here. My goddamn coat pocketsare better supplied than you are right now.”

Jules smiled. “I can arrange something.”

As we left Demali, Jules and I left the other two in the medbay while we stood in the bridge letting Athena do all the work.

“How do you think they’ll react when they realize you’re running wetware?” I asked.

“I imagine that, like you, Alec took note of the discrepancies between crew size and ship size immediately. No doubt he deduced the reason before accepting the job,” Jules said. “As for Ms. Young, I couldn’t say. I hope to earn some degree of loyalty before she has that revelation.”

And just like that, we were out in the black again.

We went on a few small trips for supplies, then Jules found a new job. We’ve been en route to our pickup site on Thyris ever since. The trip’s long and boring enough that we’ve settled into a routine. Frances has been working on getting Alec back into good health. He’s upbeat, but he’s not an easy patient—at first, he kept making himself sick by eating too much, too soon. Then later he hurt himself by trying to work out before he’d recovered enough.

Jules was right about Alec figuring out the wetware thing, so we had to swear him to secrecy. He thinks it’s “cool.”

I am cool.

Sure, but the massive violations of human rights that led to your current state aren’t.

Point taken. Still, it’s nice to be appreciated.

I worry a little about Alec’s maturity, but he’s proven himself to be a capable engineer so far. I’ve spent the past couple months scurrying around the ship finding problems for him to look at, and he’s recovered enough to resolve some of the less physically demanding issues.

Meanwhile, Frances still doesn’t know about the wetware thing. It’s easy enough to keep it from her. She stays in the medbay, the kitchen, or her quarters most of the time; far from the bridge. As long as she doesn’t see me and Jules at the same time while the ship’s flying, she’ll assume one of us is doing the flying. Athena’s getting tired of hiding it, though. Whatever sign of loyalty Jules is looking for, I hope they see it soon.

Well, that about catches us up to the present. Just in time, too. We should be landing on Thyris in about 30 hours, so I might actually have something to log about. For now, this is Marie Ruiz, signing off.