Gateway to the Stars

"Are we going to find out about it sitting here?" Esiar shot back.

"We could. Run some scans, maybe launch a probe and take some readings." Lia mused.

"Great! You do that, I'll take the MinerPod and go grab some stuff." Esiar hops up from her chair.

"There could be other scavengers - other ships in the area." Arven says.

"Then you better sit on the Chug-gun here and cover me." She flips on the nearby panel. "You see any incoming vessels, you give me a shout and cover me till I'm back inside."

"But with Arven, Chet and I on the ship, who is going to fly the second MinerPod?"

Esiar gives you a big grin.

"Who do you think?"

###

After a brief but spirited debate, Esiar leads you down to the equipment room, filled with lockers filled with gear.

"It's about time you and I get a little girl time together." Esiar announces, pulling a metallic mesh net out of a compartment and shaking it out, revealing two wrist tubes and a skull cap. She gives you a flirty look, tossing her brown curls over her shoulder.

"I was beginning to think you were avoiding me." She sets the mesh pieces down on the bench next to you and returns to the locker for another item.

"Oh no, I just haven't had a chance..." you begin but she's already chattering.

"I get it, why talked to the lousy Trelkzies with great tits when there's big brooding Arven there ready to get all sweaty in the cargo bay with you?"

"I don't think..." She sets down a glowing metal diamond, about the size of a coaster, next to the mesh pieces.

"Well, let me tell you, he may appear to be a man, but that Fletcher doesn't hunt fish, if you get my drift. Or at least, not any gender or species I could find."

She pulls out a second set - mesh and coaster., and then gently pulls on the mesh cap and glovelets, which mold against her body.

With one smooth movement, she pulls down the zipper on the front of her jumpsuit revealing an amble set of breasts contained by a black stripe of cloth. Your mouth drops open as all the thoughts immediately vacate your head.

She takes the coaster and taps the side. It changes color to a bright orange. She affixes it between her breasts where it almost clicks into place - extending a pair of wires up towards her head.

She plugs those wires into the skull cap and the mesh pieces light up with the same orange glow.

Esiar turns to you. "The MinerPod's are ridiculously easy to operate - a child could do it. Although, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure they were designed with child labor in mind." She gives a wry laugh.

"Fucking OmniTech." She helps you pull on the glovelets and attach the skull cap.

"These plug right into your nervous system, so you think about moving, and they move."

She leans in close, running her finger tips on the neckline of your top. You give her a playful smile and pull the shirt down enough to give her room to attach the chest piece, and to give her a good view of your chest.

Delicately, she places the device on your chest - it whirs and hums like a windup toy and then glows bright orange.

"The pod itself has more than enough life support for you, just sit back and let it do the work for you." She leads you down a narrow hallway to a deadend. She punches in a code into a hatch and it pops open to reveal a small cockpit.

"Just follow my lead, keep an eye out for anything moving and we should be back before mealtime." She says with a prizewinning smile.

You open your mouth to speak but she cuts you off.

"I feel like I've been doing all the talking, do you have anything to add?" She asks.

You plop yourself into the seat and look up at your energetic new friend.

"Just that you were right."

"About what?" She asks, hitting buttons on the side of your pod, lighting up the interior displays and warming up the engine.

"You do have great tits." You answer. She blushes.

"Oh, I think we are going to get along great." And with that, the pod snaps shut between you, sliding the hatch closed as it goes.

"Do I need to..."

VOOM! The bottom falls out of your stomach as the pod is forcefully ejected out into space.

###

"WaaaaHOOOO!!!" Esiar's voice crackles over the comm link as her miner pod does several summersaults in front of you, twirling towards the nearest hunk of debris.

"Esiar, this is an open line." Lia chides from the Silent Leopard. "Anyone who is out there could hear us." You picture yourself walking forward and your pod chortles after Esiar's into the hulking wreck at a respectable pace.

"Look around, pricklebritches, this place is a boneyard. There's nobody here but us and a bunch of OCC ghosts. And they are probably so boring, they only haunt you to fill out the appropriate forms and bylaws."

Off to your right, you can see the pinprick of light from the anomaly, blue bright and vaguely pulsating. Up ahead, the looming wreckage. Esiar leads you inside what looks like the gutted remains of an engine section, with three decks ripped apart in twisted metal. She slows down and putters down one of the corridors, just narrow enough for the two of you to enter.

"So how did you end up here running around a dead end data center?" Esiar asks as she rounds a corner and reaches a gutted turbolift shaft. With one mechanical arm, she reaches out and wrenches the doors open, sending twisted bits of metal floating through your headlights like drips in a lava lamp.

"Well, it wasn't actually planned. My boyfriend set up a portal and then disappeared. I jumped through it to follow him but it looks like it didn't send me to the same place it sent him."

"Boyfriend, huh?" She asks playfully as she floats up the turbolift shaft.

Clank, bang! You hear something rattle behind you. You turn your head, causing the miner pod to rotate in place but your headlights see only the drifting debris from the turbolift doors, bouncing off the bulkheads.

Turning back, you follow Esiar, rising up the shaft.

"Don't get too disappointed. I've also got a husband and a pretty lengthy list of lovers." You reply with a laugh.

"haHA! Truly a woman after my own heart!" Esiar replies. You hear a faint crackle from the comms, as if someone on the Silent Leopard was going to reply but nothing comes out.

"So before ending up here, what did you do planet-side? Wait... don't tell me, I want to guess." Esiar reaches her destination floor - ENGINEERING the bulkhead reads - and pries the doors open.

"You were... a school teacher." Esiar calls out.

"Nope." You follow Esiar down this corridor as it widens into a large engine room filled with oversized panels of controls and large factory equipment.

"A healer?" She tries again.

"Nope." The comm crackles.

"An explorer." Lia guesses. Well, sort of, with your recent work on all the portals and the alien metal but you haven't really thought of yourself as an explorer.

"Not really."

"Oh! A farmer!" Chet's voice comes through.

"Really, Chet?" Esiar answers. "Have you seen her hands? Her curves? Brenna is not a woman of hard manual labor. She's a lover, not a settler."

You laugh.

"Chet, I actually have a pretty nice garden at home. We grow fruits and vegetables and can them to help us through the winter. But no, I don't really think of myself as a farmer."

Esiar extends the grabber hands and starts pulling at one of the larger pieces of equipment, tugging at it to no avail. With an irritated grunt, she rotates one of the pod hands revealing a laser cutter and goes to work slicing the piece free.

"How about a caretaker of children?" Lia asks, the dialectapedes working overtime on an idiom.

"Just my own two kids." As you float in a small orbit around the cavernous engineering room, your thoughts turn back to Rowan and Silas. You've been trying to keep the time frame straight in your head but they should be on their second or third full day at the beach and for a moment your heart is filled with incredible longing - to be home with them.

You take a slow breath, trying to steady your heart. They are in good hands, with Ryan and your family, and Michael needs your help. You are where you need to be.

SKITTER CLATTER! Something jumps across your vision. You swing your pod around, your headlights searching, trying to find the movement.

"There! Got it!" Esiar prys free the piece and with the metal hands, maneuvers it into the miner pod "backpack" storage on the back of the pod. "One Prydanian transfuser. One of the newer models too. Come on - let's see what else we can get."

Finding nothing but dust motes and metal shavings, you putter after Esiar down the large hallway.

"Well, you are not a mechanic, that's for sure." Esiar chides. "No one who spends that much time with machines has a lengthy list of lovers."

"Hey!" Chet says.

"No, that's fair." Lia responds with laughter.

"An artist." Arven rumbles over the comm. You smile despite yourself.

"Yes, Arven, that's right. I'm an artist." You answer. "I take pictures, paint, knit and create pieces that I sell at festivals and markets."

"Wait, the Bolaheld got it? Damn." Esiar retorts.

"What does that mean?" Arven bristles.

"It means that when it comes to people, you're about as perceptive as a rock, metalgrip." She snarks.

"Oh, and suddenly you are expert on people?" Arven answers. "Miss 'If I can't fuck it or rob it, I don't care?'"

"Woah!"

"Damn!" Lia and Chet both jump in but your attention is drawn to something, movement, on the bulkhead.

There, on the wall, something black was writhing on a hole in the side of the corridor. It was a black ichor, wet and filled with needle-like protrusions, eating away at the metal of the ship. As you shine your headlight at it, it thickens and gathers in that spot, as if coiling to strike.

"Uh, Esiar?" You call out. "You know what this is?" She pulls up next to you, adding her spotlight to yours.

"Ew, what is that?" She asks.

SPAT! A blob of ichor jumps, hurtling through space straight towards your headlight.

"SHIT!" You shout and jerk back, sending your pod crashing into the opposite wall with a CLANG. You hear a sizzling melting sound above your head and one of your headlights goes dark.

"Hold still Brenna!" Esiar shouts, extending a metal arm and spraying a white foam at the top of your pod. You look up, desperately worried about cracks in the ceiling of your pod but none appear.

"Okay, it's okay." Esiar says. "I think I got it." She peers at you through her pod, her face awash with concern.

"Yeah, I'm not seeing any of it left up there. I think you are good." She says in a way that is not nearly as reassuring as it should be.

You give her a nervous smile and the two of you continue on down the corridor.

"So, an artist, eh? No wonder you've got a husband and a boyfriend. All artists are perpetually horny." Esiar laughs as the two of you pry open the doors to the medbay.

###

Working in tandem, the two of you methodically clean out their medicine supplies, big crates of Cydane fluid and smaller boxes filled with vials and injections.

You are just finishing up when you hear the comm crackle with alarm.

"You guys, I've got two OCC ships on the long range scanners. It looks like they just dropped out of Gyrospace on the opposite side of the system and are making their way here at sublight." Lia says, her voice tinged with concern.

"That's our queue." Esiar says as the two of you scoot out of the medbay. Esiar turns right, taking a different path back, through a rift in the bulkhead floor and up two decks towards an open cargo bay.

You picture yourself running and the pod picks up speed, jetting into the cargo bay...and almost into a giant black web.

The entire space is covered in the black ichor, dripping from the ceilings, the needle-like protrusions hanging in drippy tentacles across the space forming a giant interconnected web.

"Oh fuck." Esiar swears, doing a quick turnabout looking for an exit. The entire network of ooze pulses with life, moving and shifting like a sea of ants.

"Uh, back the way we came?" You ask, your headlights awakening the ichor wherever they land, causing them to vibrate with irritation.

"Yes. Yes. Do that now." Esiar says.

SPAT. SPAT SPAT. Blasts of black ichor launch at your pod, like darts from a gatling gun. You jerk back, your pod heaving backwards, spiralling back towards the way you came.

"Nope, that was a whole bunch of nope right there!" Esiar says, hot on your heels. You don't even bother looking back, frantically flying through the hallways and shooting down the turbolift.

"You guys? The OCC is almost within range. And that anomaly? It's getting noisier. Did you all do something? It suddenly started putting out a big burst of radiation."

You jet your way through the turbolift doors and back the way you came. SCREECH! Your pod grinds along the bottom of the hallway but you wrench it free and shoot out of the wreckage of the ship, Esiar hot behind you, hurtling back towards the Silent Leopard.

Now, your destination in sight, you finally hazard a glance back to see a seething mass of black ichor coating the hallway where you just were, the needle-like protrusions writhing and twisting in the flickering light of the anomaly.

"Hit the dock button Brenna!" Esiar shouts. You look down at your lap at the big orange button with some sort of seat belt icon on it. Seeing no other options, you press it and the pod immediately starts moving out of your control, lining up with the Silent Leopard automatically.

Clank HISS! The pod docks and the hatch slides open in front of you. You unstrap yourself and hop out, Esiar already slapping the speaker next to your hatch.

"We are good, go go go!" She shouts. You feel the ship lurch, Esiar tumbles into you, her face inches from yours as the ship's engines howl in protest. She gives you an intimate smile, not moving from your sudden unexpected embrace.

"Well that was a little bit exciting, don't you think?" She grins.

Phew! That was scary! And that's a super tough decision, all of the above! Could I do 1 then 3? If not, just 3? I don't want to keep Esiar hanging though, I feel like I've been doing that, could I give her a little something before I go? 😙

"If you think that was exciting, just wait till next time we hang out." You give her a saucy look. "I think we can definitely top it."

"Oh, you're going to top me, are you?" She bites her lip. "Well, in that case, I better..."

"Hey you two!" Chet pops his cherry head around the corner. He's wearing a grey workman's suit and carrying a toolkit. "Did you guys get some good loot?"

Esiar rolls her eyes, untangling herself from you.

"Yep, got some good stuff. Check it out, Chetters, I'm going to hit the DeconTube." and with that, she saunters off, giving you a fantastic view of her butt as she goes.

Chet looks mildly sheepish. After she's out of earshot, he apologizes.

"Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt." He says, kneeling next to you to flip some switches on the pod access panel.

"No, no, it's fine." You wave away his concern. "I"m sure it's just Esiar."

"Yeah, she's pretty much always like that." Chet answers.

You kneel next to him.

"Anything I can do to help?" You ask.

"Sure. Hold this." He pops the panel out with a sudden hiss of compressed air, granting him access to a slender crawl space next to the MinerPod.

He shimmies inside on his hands and knees, giving you the second fantastic view in the last five minutes before standing.

"Oh man, looks like you guys got some serious scraps on her."

"Yeah. Sorry about that." You say.

"No big deal, these pods are built tough. Here, pass me my TritainBuffer. It's the long handled blue one." You slide the tool over to him. There's a crackle of electricity.

"So, we are safely away - the OCC ships didn't see us?" You ask.

"We're in Gyrospace now. As long as we stay clear of any HavenConduits, we should be good." He hands back the TritainBuffer, asking for a DSpan-6, a red minivac sort of thing with a wet brush like attachment.

"What's a HavenConduit?" You ask.

"Superhighways of the universe. That was the pitch anyway. Back when the PolyCorps were just getting set up, the Space Guild built a network of slipstream drives throughout the galaxy. Easy to use, they didn't require any faster than light engines, so for a small fee, you could enter one and be propelled through to the next gate. Suddenly, anywhere near a HavenConduit became a very popular location."

He gave an affirmative noise.

"Whole systems changed in a generation, evicting millions of residents to become tourist destinations or hollowing out their moons to cheaply export resources. The construction of a HavenConduit meant the end of a whole way of life for some folks - and the beginning for others."

"So when we are steering clear of them..." you begin.

"Right. So lots of traffic means far too many eyes and ears. Especially OCC on the look out for some escaped saboteurs. So that's why we are taking the long path to Tsee Bon. It might mean a few more days of travel but..."

BZZASshhhhhhh. There's a mechanical crackle and then a gust of released air from within the crawlspace. Chet gives an alarmed cry as the hiss of air gets louder in intensity.

"JamIt! Now! The purple shit at the bottom!" He shouts to you. You rummage in the bottom of the kit and find a wad of purple taffy, the size of your fist.

"Here!" You shout, handing it in. There's a squishing noise and the hissing slows and then stops. He hands back some of the putty.

"Everything alright?" You ask, concerned. He pops his head out of the crawlspace.

"Yeah, yeah. It looks like we got a little microfissure right next to the top of your pod, probably some of the debris floating around punched a hole in the hull right before we jumped to Gyrospace. Or maybe some erosion, the metal looked pretty deteriorated in that area. Anyway, I got it."

He stands up in the hallway next to you, his eyes suddenly somewhat attracted to his shoes.

"Hey, I don't know if this is out of line or nothing but I was wondering..."

"Brenna?" Arven strides into the hallway where the two of you are. "Are you alright?" His deep voice is warm with concern. "I heard the decompression alarm..."

"I'm fine, thank you Arven." You say.

"Good." He gives you a curt nod, then continues, "In that case, would you be willing to join me for dinner tonight in my quarters? There is something I wish to discuss with you." His expression is unreadable but you like the sound of dinner in his quarters.

"Sure! Yes, just tell me when." You answer. He gives the briefest of smiles.

"In two hours, I'll call you." He gives Chet a head nod. "Chet." he says and then turns and leaves.

"I'm fine too, you know. Thanks for asking!' Chet calls after him.

"What were you going to say?" You ask. Chet shakes his head.

"No big deal. I'll catch up with you later." He gets back into the crawl space and you push his tool kit in with him, catching his hand as he grasps the handle. He looks up at you in surprise.

"Well, if you remember, we've got a few more days of travel to Tsee Bon and I'm not going anywhere." You watch a blush blossom across his cheeks.

"Thanks." and with that he disappears back into his work.

###

The hatch to his quarters slides open and you descend, as gracefully as possible, down the ladder into his room.

"Thank you for coming." Arven says, greeting you as you reach the bottom of the ladder. "Would you like a glass of wine?" He's dressed in a work shirt and simple black trousers, his mechanical arm splattered with something brown and smelling vaguely of rosemary.

You accept it gracefully as he goes back to cooking and you survey his space.

While it is marginally bigger than your own bunk, it has the feeling of a cramped studio apartment. Still, Arven has clearly put a great deal of care into the space. Long, polished wood beams have been installed along the walls, next to hung furs and a drum with intricate knotwork. In one corner, a green ash in a simple clay pot grows next to a carved dinner table with two chairs. Arven is working in the other corner, stooped over a blue and black mechanical device about the size of a plastic tote. A portable cooking unit - you see, as he lifts a stewpot off a heating element and places it on the table.