Chapter 14 – New Friends
"Um. Risha?" Corso approached her computer station slowly.
She didn't so much as turn to look at him. "Yeah? You need something, Mouse?"
He cleared his throat. "Is there a crate or somethin' I could, uh, use?"
"For what?"
"Well, ah…" He took a careful breath. "We're gonna be, um, transporting some live cargo."
Risha paused, frowning. "Captain didn't say anything about – Corso Riggs, what in the nine stars is that?"
Corso smiled, though it looked a mite uncertain. "This's Scruffy. He's gonna be our new mascot!" He cradled the womp rat a little closer (Scruffy was whuffling around kind of curiously), taking several steps back. "He won't be any trouble, I promise, I just gotta have somewhere t'keep him so's he don't get in your way."
"New mascot?" Risha's smile was thin and predatory. "What happened to the old one? Did somebody accidentally shove it out an airlock?"
"Well, see, I know that he might have a bit of a tendency to - ow! heh - chew on things," Corso squirmed, trying to avoid the wee creature's incisors. "And I know you've done a great job keepin' this ship runnin' smooth, so I figured maybe we could, uh, work together to Scruffy-proof a small part of the ship an' then just make sure he stayed - ow! - there."
Risha narrowed her eyes. "Well if someone wasn't bringing verminonto the ship, we wouldn't have to worry about that, would we?"
Corso held the tiny ball of fluff out toward her. "Yeah but he's just a lil' guy, Rish!"
Scruffy paused in his attempt to gnaw through Corso's gauntlets. He looked up at Risha, snuffled a bit, and then his whiplike tail flicked happily back and forth.
Risha clenched her jaw. She was notgoing to smile. But when she held her hand out and Scruffy nosed at her fingers, then squeaked and rubbed against her, somehow she forgot the resolution she'd only just made, and her expression softened and her lips curved upward.
Corso frowned; something about this seemed awful unfair.
A moment later, though, Risha cleared her throat, stepping back. "Well, you better make sure that your /rat/ doesn't get into my things, Mouse, or you will be buying replacements. Go check with the droid – it knows the ship better than anyone."
With a hurried thanks, Corso rushed toward the exit hatch where C2 was typically stationed. The droid turned toward him, its golden optical receptors flickering in dismay. "Oh dear, Master Corso, what haveyou done to yourself this time?"
"What? Oh, no, it's nothin' – bit bruised, that's all. Here, can you take Scruffy an' put him in an appropriate cage or somethin' until me an' Rish get a more permanent habitat for him? I gotta unhook Grabber an' Ms. Puffs before the Captain's ready to head out again. You know what baby womp rats eat, right?" And without waiting for an answer, he set Scruffy in the droid's hands and half-jogged, half-limped toward the lounge to work on his equipment.
"This is highly irregular!" C2 called after Corso. "I'm not programmed to care for younglings of /any/ species!" But as usual, there was no one listening to its protests. The droid looked at the small animal that was snuffling at the smidges of grease that kept the manual joints operating smoothly, then gave a hiss through its voice modulator that might almost have been a sigh of resignation.