Out in the Black Ch. 08

This is a book-length work, so not every chapter will involve sex. If you're just looking for quick wank, this probably isn't your story.

Thanks for reading!

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I woke up confused, with a cottony mouth and a pounding head. It had always struck me as extremely unfair that they pumped us full of these self-replicating, microscopic robots that could clean our teeth, keep us from getting sick, make us heal exponentially faster, and do the lion's share of the work in recycling organic waste, but hangovers were still a thing. It had to be intentional.

Knowing I was on my own for this, I rolled to the side and sat up. As I waited for the room to stop spinning, I noticed the mug holding the dregs of yesterday's coffee on the table and realized I was in my bed. Alone. Rubbing the ridge above my eyes, I tried to think through the pain. I was pretty sure Rusty had been here when I passed out. He was telling me some story about a terran kid who tried to join his crew and then - I just had a hazy memory of falling asleep next to him. The end of the story was lost in the fog as well, but I felt a looming dread, as if a terrible mistake was lurking in the gloom.

Oh, right, the video. But that wasn't it: my specific execution may not have been the best option, but getting out of celebutainment was definitely the correct choice. Rusty's reaction had surprised me, but we patched things up. Or I thought we had. Surely he wouldn't have stayed with me, lay in my bed, if he had still been that angry with me.

Though this felt closer to the cause of my foreboding, it was still like poking your tongue around the area where a tooth has gone missing. I could almost feel the edges of the thing and knew if I was brave enough to investigate the hole itself, touch that exposed nerve, I could surface the memory. As it turned out, I lacked the courage. At least before coffee.

Rusty didn't come to the office. He even managed to stay in the blind spots of the cameras in engineering. After the first few glances, I didn't check for him again until late in the day. He had made his point. I filtered another round of messages, keenly aware of how I was betraying the trust of my crew. The contracts they all signed permitted this and more - whether they realized it or not, they had basically signed away any expectation of privacy once they took their jobs - but it was never my intention to make use of it. In fact, I had made it a point to be as transparent with them as possible from day one. And then I did this the first time all of that open communication became inconvenient.

The self-loathing lit a fire under my determination to find a solution; as I reviewed my options, I became aware that my blunder with Rusty underlined the fact that I really was not equipped to guess how the crew would receive the news I needed to deliver. Forcing myself to wait until most everyone had retired for the night before going to his door was my compromise between the belief I truly was trying to do the best thing for my people and the suspicion that I was just conjuring up reasons to see the engineer.

I knocked quietly, if slightly louder than I had that first night. Counting back, I realized it had been less than a tenday since whatever this was between us had begun. Life was a lot like space in that way: a lot of empty nothing with scattered clusters of everything. To continue the metaphor, since my first night with Rusty, I'd been stuck in an asteroid field, desperately trying not to crash and burn.

When there was no answer, I rested my forehead against the cool material and waited. I stood outside that room longer than I wanted to, but I choked down my pride and stayed put. I didn't knock again - if he was in there, he had heard me and he had the right to ignore me. My hands clenched with how desperately I hoped he wouldn't.

There was only a moment of warning - some small noise - before the door slid open. I managed to just get my head clear before he was there in front of me, staring down with those inscrutable dark eyes. He had already shed his jumpsuit and I could feel the heat from his exposed skin even as I refused to allow my gaze to roam. "Hi," I said. It wasn't meant to be a whisper, but that's all the volume I could muster. Rusty didn't respond. Finally, he stepped aside and allowed me to enter. The door slid closed, but the absence of the latching chime shattered a small piece of me. It was a tiny thing, but a clear signal that it was different now. We were different. An aching emptiness began sucking away the limited confidence I had managed to gather, shredding it against jagged edges.

Turning to face him was more than I could manage, so I spoke to the tousled bed. "I owe you another apology. I don't ever let myself get like that and I shouldn't have done so last night. Thank you for taking care of me and I'm sorry for putting you in that position." I paused but Rusty stayed silent. Fine. "I know I fucked up how I handled the video, and I get that you're still angry with me, but I would really like to have your input on what comes next."

Rusty snorted. "I know," I said, soldiering on, "that it's rich of me to ask for your opinion now, but it's what I got."

There was a deep sigh behind me followed by the soft tread of bare feet on the deck. Rusty sat on the edge of his bed, arms crossed over his chest, and looked at me skeptically. "Tell me what you're thinking and we'll see."

I shifted and scrubbed a hand over my face. This was not going to be pleasant. "So, I have another confession." This time he let out a single, humorless bark of laughter, as if he had expected nothing less. "I get it, I'm a shit person. We know this, so can we please move on?" Internally I was screaming at myself, demanding what the fuck I thought I was doing. The guy had just agreed to listen to me and I was losing my shit on him already? But it hurt, knowing he thought so little of me, and I've never been great at not lashing out when in pain. Rusty made a go-ahead gesture with his hand. I thought maybe there had been a bit of regret on his face for a moment, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. Probably just wishful thinking.

Rubbing my eyes, I resigned myself to everything blowing up in my face and told him about filtering the crew's messages, censoring their news. "That actually makes a lot of sense," he said. "I wondered why nobody was talking about it."

"And you didn't say anything?"

He looked offended. "I wouldn't do that!" Not fun, right? Someone thinking the worst of you.

"That's part of what I wanted to get your advice on," I continued. I needed to find a way to tell the crew about the scandal while letting them know I was a bigger jerk than they thought and had been going through their mail. There was also the whole needing a new way to pay the bills thing.

"Okay," Rusty said thoughtfully. "Okay. The XO doesn't know, right?" I shook my head. "Didn't think so. The way she was up my ass before, no chance she wouldn't chop off my balls first and ask questions later. So I think - "

"Wait," I interrupted. "What do you mean she was up your ass?" He told me about the flak she'd been giving him, though he tried to shrug it off as nothing. "Damn. I've been all kinds of trouble for you, haven't I?"

Rusty gave me a crooked smile. "There have been some benefits." Running a hand back through his short hair, he laughed a bit. "Fine, stop giving me the puppy eyes and get in here." I just stared. With one eyebrow raised, he shrugged and slipped under the sheet, lying on his side facing me, propped up on an elbow. My paralysis broke and my magboots and jumpsuit were on the floor in moments. I was about to leave them there when I caught sight of Rusty shaking his head in exasperation.

"Oh, right. Yeah, it took me a bit to find everything this morning." I shoved my jumpsuit into the wardrobe and latched the door, finishing up by lining my magboots precisely next to his. "Very 'a place for everything and everything in its place.'"

"Spacers learned early on that it's better to take a few extra seconds now than be decapitated later."

"You make a strong point," I admitted. Rather than climbing beneath the sheet, I sat cross-legged near his feet so I could look at him while we talked.

"As I was trying to say," he cleared his throat pointedly, "I think your first step is to fill Li in. Everyone on the crew either respects her, is scared of her, or both, so if they see she's solidly behind you, they'll be quicker to follow." I realized I was gaping at him. It was easy to get distracted by his rough exterior and forget there was a sharp mind inside. "What?" Rusty asked, looking embarrassed. "I know stuff. And maybe I've been thinking about this a bit. I didn't know about the mail thing, but I had a pretty good idea about the rest."

"You are so fucking hot." The words just fell out of my mouth. My eyes went wide and I covered my face with my hands. "Fuck. I'm sorry. That was inappropriate." My voice was muffled by my palms. I peeked between my fingers to find him smirking at me. Taking a deep breath, I dropped my hands and forced my mind back to business. "Okay, what else?"

I slept in Rusty's bed that night. It wasn't something we discussed; we just curled up together and dropped off when our yawns became more frequent than our words. I got up early and slipped out quietly to prepare for my conversation with my XO. Dread pooled in my stomach as I showered and dressed. I loathed the idea of losing my best friend's respect. Getting involved with the engineer had been bad enough as far as she was concerned. I could picture the look she was going to give me when I told her about the video.

The office was crowded with the three of us, and the clear animosity between Rusty and Li weighed on me. The XO and I sat in our usual places and Rusty stood near the door, legs apart, hands at the small of his back. It made me nervous, like he was expecting a battle.

"What's up, Mac?" Alix asked, slouching in her chair. "Why the muscle?" She cocked a thumb at the engineer. I barely kept from rolling my eyes. She and Rusty were like magnetic poles: the more formal he got, the more casual she became. It was like the two of them were conspiring to drive me up the wall.

"There's something I need to tell you. I'd ask that you let me explain before taking my head off. In answer to your other question, he's here because, after you're done yelling at me, I'll need help from both of you to fix this." Dropping the act, Li sat up in her chair and looked at me attentively. She even managed to mostly do as I asked, only interrupting a couple of times to ask me what the hell I'd been thinking. Surprisingly, she shrugged off the video itself, but she became very still when I revealed that I'd been quarantining the crew's communications. I wanted to babble on about my reasons, give her all my justifications, anything to get her to stop looking at me like I had become a stranger. Instead, I stiffened my spine and absorbed everything she threw at me, knowing I deserved that and worse.

All in all, there was less yelling than I had expected and the three of us managed to come up with a plan to handle the crew. Shockingly, she and the engineer actually agreed that the larger issue of finding new employment could wait for another day. Of course, neither of them had seen my most recent message from Phobos letting me know that our services were no longer required. That had been followed by communications from the other stops on our schedule saying more or less the same thing and effectively clearing our calendar for the foreseeable future. I couldn't remember a time in my life when I hadn't had a deadline to meet or somewhere I was expected to be. It was a heady feeling even as I quietly panicked about finding a way to keep us in the air.

And so I found myself standing in front of my gathered crew at 15:00, jumpsuit zipped to my neck, hair slicked back rather than falling over my face in my usual intentionally messy style. That had been Rusty's idea: he said it made me look more humble. Well, his actual words were "like less of a cocky bastard." I wasn't sure what to think about that, but if it would help me get through this, I was willing to try. Looking out at all those eyes staring back at me, I experienced my first case of stage fright since secondary school. Only the presence of Alix and Rusty behind me - she to the right, he to the left - kept me steady as I opened my mouth to speak.

~*~

He was nervous. I could see it in his posture, in the slight movement of fingers against leg. I was pretty sure it wasn't enough for anyone else to tell - well, except for the damn XO - but I knew. I leaned against the counter behind him and tried to radiate strength, hoping I could somehow lend some to him.

Like the night when we'd watched his latest interview - hell, probably his last interview, now that I thought about it, and wasn't that a kick in the balls? - the crew was crunched into the galley. The alert had just said there was a crew meeting, so people were joking and relaxed as they entered. The tension was infectious, though, and it wasn't long before silence fell and apprehension rose. When the doc rolled in, she stopped her chair just inside the door and, for a second, I thought she might roll right back out again. Siobhan Walsh didn't go in for drama, which made her one of my favorite people on this ship. If I had to fall into bed with a crewmate, why couldn't it have been her?

I glanced back at the captain and watched his throat move as he swallowed, immediately feeling guilty about the thought. There had been something between us since the moment I stepped on the ship. I knew it and I'd bet he knew it, too. I'd had plenty of chances to shut it down, keep my distance, and I didn't. Maybe I liked the way he looked at me, and maybe I liked that someone like him wanted me. And I suppose it was possible that Kells spoke some truth when she talked about rules becoming prisons. Even that first night, he'd given me an out, but I had opened the door. It wasn't fair to act like all this was just something that happened to me.

A couple more people squeezed in after the doc and then we were all there. Bailey was the last to arrive and stayed standing in the doorway, his bulk effectively blocking us in. Throughout the room, eyes flicked between Cap and me and Li on his other side, trying to figure out what the hell this was about. By the time the captain started talking, I'm pretty sure everyone thought he was dying or going to space the lot of us or some shit.

"I have something to show you," he said, jumping straight into it. The video in the tabloid Kells had sent me popped up on the wall display. I was glad Cap took my suggestion about his hair: the cocky guy on screen oozing confident sexuality was nowhere to be seen in the somber, buttoned-up captain in the room. His mouth was set in a grim line as the voice-over took a wrecking ball to his reputation and, by extension, his career. The crew's reactions varied, but there were more than a few appraising glances that made me bristle. Focusing on keeping my facial expression neutral, and perhaps even seeming a little bored by the whole thing, allowed me to ignore the surge of possessiveness as well as that fucking voice in my head - the one that was starting to sound disturbingly like Kells - that urged me to examine just why I suddenly wanted to knock in a few teeth.

"That video - which, as you can see, was leaked from our own internal camera network - was made public the day we left Shangri Las Vegas. When it came to my attention, I was at a loss and, unfortunately, reacted poorly. My immediate concern was keeping it from all of you, which led to me filtering your messages. I sincerely apologize for this breach of trust and all of your communications will be delivered once we are done here. As you may suspect, my clients were not pleased with the situation and have canceled our upcoming contracts, so we will no longer be docking at Phobos. I will understand if any of you feel you cannot continue serving on the Marzipan Dream. Should that be your decision, please notify me or the XO by 08:00 tomorrow so we may divert to Luna. We will be sorry to lose you and will provide you with the full cycle's pay and a positive recommendation."

Cap's voice shook a bit as he reached the end, but he kept his back straight as he faced the prospect of losing an unknown number of his crew. I felt a surge of pride and affection for the man standing in front of me. He was made of sterner stuff than I had originally thought. Still, I was happy we'd argued him out of telling the crew the entire truth. The video was enough of an explanation for his screening of their communications; the XO and me had agreed that nothing good was gonna come out of him announcing he had leaked the vid as an underhanded way of getting free of a career he hated. It took both of us arguing together to convince him, though, and the generous severance plus the rec was the compromise.

Part of the captain's big "win back the trust" plan was removing most of the cameras on the ship and reassuring everyone that we were beefing up our security to prevent future leaks. I could tell it bugged him to bend the truth like that, but it ain't like it was a complete lie: we were increasing our digital defenses and we didn't want people getting their hands on footage from our ship, even if there hadn't actually been a breach this time. Since we were all gathered in there, he had me make a show of taking down one of the galley cameras. We'd be moving the second one to get a better view of the room as a whole so it could act as a security cam, but that wasn't something we could do with the entire crew smushed in there.

Immediately after the captain stopped talking, even before the whole camera deal, Bailey had disappeared from the doorway. I figured he went back to the bridge, but I didn't know the guy all that well and his face wasn't giving nothing away about what he thought of the captain's announcement. As I unfastened bolts and clipped wires, a part of me started to worry, wondering what we'd do if our fucking pilot left, but most of me focused on trying not to borrow trouble. Some of the crew followed Bailey's lead, but a good number still hung around, likely trying to get an idea about how everyone else was feeling before taking a stand. It was hard to tell with my back to them, but my gut said we'd be making that stop at Luna.

The captain took off as soon as I got to work. He did a good job, making it seem like he was just waiting to see his plan started before getting back to doing captainy things, but I could guess he wanted to get away from everyone as fast as he could. I mean, knowing the whole system had seen you grabbing yourself and observing your crew watching you do it were very different things. Still, he was good at his job and I followed him out of the corner of my eye as the doc stopped him and pulled him down so she could whisper something. He leaned over easily enough and gave her a smile when he straightened up, one that looked genuine from where I was standing.

Everyone dispersed eventually. A couple people thought to get more information out of me or the XO, but the looks we gave them sent them scurrying on their way soon enough. After how things had been between us over the last tenday, it was strange to be on the same side of something. On top of everything else, Cap had no patience for our bullshit. He ordered us to work together on the whole camera project and cut us off when we tried to argue. Like I needed removing an entire system from my girl to be a bigger pain in my ass.

As far as that went, taking down the cams was a much simpler process than moving them. Despite wanting to get this over with as fast as possible, we'd decided to take it in two steps. Assuming we were stopping at Luna, we'd spend that leg going through the ship and doing the first part, then make a second pass to get the rest all fixed up after we got wherever we were going next. The bridge seemed as good a place as any to start. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Bailey at the controls like usual, head bobbing to whatever music he was listening to. He acknowledged us with a nod and then kept his eyes on his screens while we worked.