two
"Shit!"
Kat stuck the tip of her finger into her mouth and sucked. The taste of copper caressed her tongue. She should have been wearing gloves, but she'd worn through the sensitivity of every last pair of Real Fingers she'd brought with her and her suit gloves were too thick for delicate work. What she needed were gloves with integrated circuits.
"Dream on."
They cost more than pseudo-skin.
Tapping her omni-tool, the bright blue glow of her specialist upgrades rendering the usual orange a sickly shade of pale brown, Kat muted the wild vocals of Belt Force Five and then reached up to activate her comm.
"Watcha cookin' Finch?"
"Who says I'm cooking anything," returned a basso rumble only slightly flattened by transmission.
Kat pictured dark-skinned, meaty arms crossing themselves across a massive chest, the light of Finch's omni-tool flickering as it appeared to be crushed by the big bear of a man.
"You better be cookin' something. I just stabbed myself in the finger again and I'm hot and sticky and pissed at this asshole job at the shit end of the galaxy. Why the fuck did I take this contract again?"
"Coz you thought it would make you rich, but you keep spending all your credits on gloves." A pause. "How hot and sticky?"
Despite her mood, Kat chuckled. "Hot," she said, her voice as breathy as she could make it, considering it had to pulled apart and reassembled before Finch heard it, a bare instant later. "And sticky," she continued.
It was inevitable they'd hook up. She liked men, he liked women, and they were the only two souls in fifty million klicks of empty space. They'd met the day they shipped out and had fucked twice by the time they locked their magnetized boots to the deck of the Bataille. Once had been inside their own suits. Hands and frustrated body parts. End result was the same.
They worked opposite shifts. Jormangund wanted the Bataille operational in eight weeks. That meant fifty-six days, twenty hours on, four off. Ten hours alone, each, four together in one cramped bunk or the other, bumpin' and grindin'. Sometimes they talked. Last night they'd cuddled. Kat had been tired and Finch had been accommodating.
Rather than let her thoughts wander toward what cuddling meant (or the inevitable question of whether they would they stay in touch when the job was done), Kat said, "Make us something spicy, eh?"
"You got it, Sunshine."
He couldn't see her grin, the way a little sun bloomed inside her chest. Just as well. It was a stupid reaction to a stupid name.
"See you at twenty-two or there abouts."
"Mind the traffic," he replied and clicked off.
Dead air hissed over the feed for a second until Kat tapped ear again, closing the channel. "It's a bitch of a commute," she murmured.
They were quartered in the first space they'd reclaimed, a small crew bunk at the ass-end of the Bataille. Toss in a gravity generator, fabricator, coffee pot and a crate of ramen and it was right homey. The crawl through skin of the ship, between the inner and outer hull, took about an hour, bunk to cockpit. There wasn't enough power to turn on environmental controls for more than two, three rooms at a time. Bunk, head, whatever section they worked in that day. And gravity generators were fucking heavy. So a suited crawl was the fastest route from A to B. Lots of handholds in the skin. Crawling felt more like swimming or flying with no sharp turns, inconvenient extrusions or bulkheads to block the path.
Sometimes Kat wandered through the derelict frigate, boots clamping down with an imagined sound that echoed through her thoughts as she studied the archaic design and odd junctions. Why Jormangund wanted this wreck, she had no idea. Wasn't her job to ask. They were here to rewire six hundred circuits, by hand. Fucking weird job, but it paid well, glove expense aside.
"Damn compartment is going to depressurize next," she muttered, feeling cheerfully fatalistic. Her suit would cut off her hands if she wasn't wearing gloves. The bubble of her helmet might stop her eyes from popping, if it activated in time.
She daubed a last glistening dollop of solder to the board, then activated the holographic overlay. Connections flickered to life, light chasing dark through a complicated maze. Her omni-tool vibrated happily, a preset signal telling her the board had synced with the other repaired circuits. She shoved it back in its hole and began collecting her tools, plucking each one out of the air around her.
A hum tickled her inner ear.
Instinct begged Kat to turn and look at the panel she'd just repaired. The loop wouldn't be complete, the system offline, until the job was done and some egghead from Jormangund input a special code sequence. The embedded organic circuitry had creepy implications, though. The sync mechanism.
"Don't ask, Sunshine," she whispered. The nickname didn't have the desired effect. She didn't feel the comfort of a large pair of arms, or the afterglow of fantastic sex. A chill descended her spine as she noted the flicker of light surrounding the panel. "Nope." Not good.
She reached for it without stopping to think and a shock traveled through her bare finger tips and up her arm. Fire licked along her veins, an icy burn like the scour of sand. An involuntary moan left her lips as memory took hold. The expected euphoria did not follow the creep, however. She had not dusted up, she'd merely been shocked, and it fucking hurt.
And she couldn't pull her damned fingers back off the panel.
Invisible hands wrapped around her ribs, squeezing the air from her lungs. Black spots danced across her eyes, blotting out the glow of the panel. Were lights rippling along the floor and wall seams? Kat yelled and shuddered and tried again to pull her hand away. Was like peeling a warm tongue from an icy damned pole.
Her bones ached, her skin felt as if it might rip from her skeleton. Gritting her teeth, the clench of her jaw sending a shock of a different kind through her skull, Kat inhaled through her nose, the scent of burnt skin and fried electronics working into her psyche. She pulled again, feet braced against the wall below. Her cry echoed dully within the sealed section of corridor. Sharp and anguished. Then she fell back, suddenly, as if she had been flung off a bucking bronco. Her head connected with conduit. Stars fought with the black spots and then won. And then lost. She heard someone groan. A buzz tickled her throat. Then it was lights out.