Chapter 8: Chapter 8; Relationships

“I think I can safely assume what happened next.” Agent Coreance says flatly but he cannot feel himself falling the five or so pegs in the respect that Alex had raised him up since everything had started, because no matter what he says next the tone of his voice insured to her that he already got it completely and utterly wrong. “You obviously told Lerra to stop and they removed her from your quarters, later you found a time to attempt to kill her for her transgressions.”

She had risen him up so high in her expectations only to have him fall like a stone in a still lake, and with all the grace of a rag doll dropping from a skyscraper. “Is there only vacuum between those plates that make up your head?” She snaps angrily.

Agent Coreance looks across the table at her with the purest look of confusion any member of his species has ever displayed. “That wasn’t what happened?” The look would make perfect sense, or it would have had Alex taken a moment to take a breath and remember her comparative exo phycology. Loraigans took mates in fights of dominance after complicated rituals like that of birds or insects, sometimes even the female fought as her own champion, but she wasn’t really thinking about comparative mating rituals with her anger ringing in her ears and pounding in her skull.

“If that had happened why would I have been in a shuttle with her giving her the only breather while I sent out as many distress calls as I could before I passed out from the O2 spilling out into the black.”

“Then what happened?”

“You seriously have to ask me that, are you really that stupid?” She snaps, her voice a growl. “We had sex you moron! I thought that was obvious. She kissed me and I kissed her and we had sex, do you want me to tell you everything that we did so that you can understand what I’m telling you or are you smart enough to extrapolate what happened from incomplete date?”

To his credit Agent Coreance doesn’t go off at that instead he takes a moment to fill his lungs with a full load of air and allows himself time to cool, to calm himself, and the time to rearrange his thoughts before continuing with the Alliance script of questions. “Was it a singular act or did you do it multiple times.”

Alex lets go of a sigh she had been holding onto since he had started this line of questioning, but to her credit she does not shrink away from his gaze or his question. “We had sex a few times, that night alone, we didn’t get much sleep that night but it was the most relaxing night I had had since the Iowa Incident. After that we became close, we tried to pretend that we were just becoming friends, being the only two girls on the ships, more or less. James picked up on it though, he was observant like that.”

“What was it like when he confronted you?”

It happened when we were both alone in the cockpit about a week, maybe a week and a half after we left the corridor. He was busying himself imputing the course corrections I had calculated from the sensor inputs we had gathered the day before given all the rouge astral bodies in that sector of space. I was busy adding the new sensor data into my H.N.I. so I could update our course if I had to as well as checking our progress along the way.

He leaned back in the pilot’s chair when he was done but didn’t look at me even as he spoke to me. “So you want to talk about it?”

I stopped checking my data and the courses I had plot in the beginning of the trip and comparing them with our actual course and looked at him sitting there gazing at the stars. “What do you mean, all the course corrects we’ve had to make, because I can tell you what happened. A pair of rouge commits collided not too long ago and the debris is scattered all over this sector, had we left on this run a month or so earlier we might have actually seen the collision.”

He turned his head to look me in the eye with one of his and sat there for a moment making me flinch before he answered. “You really suck at playing coy, and you’re even worse at deflecting the subject.” He said. “Besides you smell like her.”

“I smell like who, Arthur? Cause he spilled some oil on my when I went to check on the engines yesterday. I guess I could smell like Lerra, cause she let me use her soap to try and get the shit off but I might have missed some.” I remember trying to look for the oil stains that where there only because Lerra had hugged me in her oil stained coverall since Arthur had spilled the oil on her not me and James knew about that. Thankfully he didn’t seem to know that Lerra pulled me into the shower with her to wash off the oil and have a bit of fun in the process, after I tried to keep her from hugging me in the first place.

“You know that’s funny cause I remember that Arthur only spilled some oil on Lerra yesterday. I know she had to take a shower to and we only have one on this ship besides the one in my privet john. And more importantly what the hell is a navigator doing in the engine room?”

“Maneuvers in Gray Mode do some serious wear and tear on engine parts,” I explained or tried to in a simple way to cover up what I was doing with Lerra, neither of us had told anyone about us but we didn’t want to until we had to but when we did we both knew it would be for the long run not a short fling, “you should know that since this ship is yours.”

“Yeah I just fly her,” James admitted resting further in his chair, “I don’t fix her, and enough with changing the subject. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you and Lerra went all the way, all the more power to you this isn’t the twentieth century, but you’re a contractor not a member of my crew and she is a part of my crew so if you’re just having fun okay but don’t string her on like this is going to become something serious only to leave her when this is all over and done with. I won’t have you hurt her like that, all rumors aside most of her people mate permanently, at least at her age they do, they don’t go and have flings.”

“How old is she?” I asked, but even know I still don’t know.

“Young enough to be interesting and old enough to get angry if you ask her.” He told me simply.

“What if I join your crew,” I offered, “after the end of this mission of course.”

“Think long and hard before you ask that,” James told me somberly as he held my gaze in both of his eyes with all the strength and intensity of a black hole, “maybe at the end of this trip we’ll talk again, and if you still want to join my crew then we’ll talk.”

“So that is not a no to joining your crew?” I asked coyly, proving to him that if I wanted to be I could be as coy as the best person, or at least I thought I could be.

“Not exactly,” James explained to me but thankful he took his eyes off of me to look back into the blackness of space, “it’s a definite we’ll talk.”