Alternity Chapter 8 -Trance

Alternity - Chapter 8

Trance

"Playtime is after you get your work done."

The one thing they always had plenty of on the Maru, thought Trance Gemini Harper, was work. And she supposed she should get started on some. She walked back to the berthing compartment and rummaged around in her locker until she found her sewing kit, then gathered up the clothes her husband had ripped while working in the engine room. Harper was always ripping something.

She took clothes and sewing kit into the common room and sat down at the room's single table. If the pilot's chair on the command deck was the brain of the Maru, the table in the common room was its soul. It was a simple rectangular table, perhaps five feet in length and about three fourths that in width, with one of the short sides butted up against a bulkhead. There were two bench seats along the long sides of the table. It was at this table were meals were prepared and eaten, letters written, books balanced, and the crew gathered to play cards, or just sit and enjoy a cup of coffee. When lowered, the extensions inserted, and the cushions from the benches placed upon it, the table made an acceptable bed. She and Harper had used it more than once when Beka was off the ship; it was actually larger than the bunk they shared in the crew's quarters. At present it was being used as a sewing table. Trance pulled a length of thread from one of the spools of thread in her kit, broke the thread with her teeth and proceeded to thread a needle. Tuning the common room's entertainment set to one of the local entertainment channels, she began her repair work; her tail twitching in time to the music coming over the channel while her mind drifted planning out tomorrow's shopping expedition.

"OWW! #$%$# @%# #$% ^*^@#." Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of Harper's voice letting lose a blistering stream on incentive over the intraship communicator. From the sounds coming over the intraship communicator, she guessed that her husband had just burned himself with the nanowelder. From the amount of cursing she knew he wasn't seriously injured.

She had never intended to fall in love with him, and definitely had not intended to get pregnant, but they both had happened, and both by accident. It had been shortly after the Gerentex incident when she first had sex with him. The ship's engineer had been nice enough, handsome in a boyish sort of way, was obviously trying to be a friend, and the constant sexual innuendos he sent her way weren't to be taken seriously. It had seemed a simple, totally rational decision, have sex with the ship's engineer and strengthen her position in the crew. Love wasn't supposed to enter the equation. But the earthquake of emotions and feelings their sexual activities had created within her had been totally unexpected, and had given lie to her rationalizations. Sex became lovemaking and friendship became love. And then there was a baby on the way and, as Harper put it, a shotgun wedding.

She felt the baby move within her and wished there was someone she could talk to about her pregnancy. Beka and Harper were clueless, and her visits to the clinic on Kingfisher were equally fruitless, the staff there simply saying that the child seemed to be developing normally. She would have liked to contact her parents, but didn't dare. They would demand that she terminate the pregnancy and cease her relationship with Harper. She had no intention of doing either, and since her family had ways of enforcing their will she couldn't ask them for advice.

She had repaired two of her husband's shirts and was partly finished with a pair of pants when the ship-to-planet communicator crackled to life.

"Eureka Maru, this is Beka. Over."

Her tail still twitching in time to the music, Trance walked forward to the command deck and keyed the mike. "Beka, this is the Eureka Maru. Go ahead. Over."

"Trance, you don't have to put the oatmeal in the tofu loaf. I'll be sleeping planetside tonight."

"Alone?"

"That's none of your business. You can expect to see me tomorrow around noon local time. Beka, Out."

"Eureka Maru, Roger. Out."

Trance extended her perceptions outward, attempting to examine the probabilities, looking for a vision of the most probable future for Beka. She found it and smiled. Her employer would not be sleeping alone tonight.

Beka had a man in every port, but she never talked about any of them. The only man she ever mentioned was her old boyfriend Bobby, who had left the Maru before Trance had signed on as a crew member. She had tried to ask Beka about him, but the older woman refused to talk about her old flame, only saying that they had broken up after a run had gone badly awry. Her husband wasn't any more communicative. He had served with Bobby for a short while, but the only thing he ever said about him was that "he was a real jerk." Nonetheless, Beka still kept some of Bobby's old clothes and had a picture of him in her cubicle. Trance suspected that the older woman was still carrying a torch for him.

From a hint Harper had dropped, Trance had deduced that the run that had gone wrong was a smuggling run. Beka tried to stay on the right side of the law, but when funds ran low she was perfectly willing to "assist others avoid customs duties" as long as what she was carrying wasn't armaments or narcotics.

She keyed the intraship announcing system.

"Harper, Beka called, she won't be back for dinner. Would you like me to make you a couple of PB and J sandwiches?"

"Is the alternative tofu loaf?"

"It is unless you want to go hungry."

Even under the best of circumstances Trance was not much of a cook. Beka had once stated that Trance could burn water. The best her husband had been able to muster in her defense was 'she's not that bad.' And these were not the best of circumstances. If she didn't go shopping soon they would be eating the threatened tofu loaf laced with oatmeal.

She put the sewing down and started to prepare the sandwiches. A few minutes later she had a tray laden with sandwiches and two cans of Sparky Cola, and was heading for the engine room.

It took a couple of moments to locate her husband. While the Maru's living quarters were small and cramped, the engine compartment was huge. The engine capacity of the vessel was far in excess of what was needed to propel the ship, but the Maru had been designed to tow ships much larger than itself, and sometimes every bit of the excess engine power was needed. She found him working underneath the starboard engine and sat down on the deck waiting for him to emerge from under the engine. It was an interesting comment on Harper that while he needed to be reminded to change his shirts when they became soiled, and that he scattered personal belongings everywhere throughout the crew compartment, the engine room was spotless.

"How's my glorious grape goddess?" Harper asked as he clambered out from under the engine.

She gave him a brief kiss. "I thought you were working on the attitude thrusters."

"Already done. It's the cooling tubes on the engines I’m concerned about. They need to be completely replaced and that's going to take about ten days even if we had replacement tubes, which we don't."

Time and spares were two things the Maru had too little of. A day tied up to the docks was a day's worth of port fees and no compensating income, and as for replacement parts, Trance didn't want to think about them. The memories of Carlisle and what he had forced Beka to do, and, if the rumors were correct, what Harper had done in retribution, still made her feel ill.

Beka refused to volunteer a word to either her or Harper about what had transpired between her and Carlisle after he had forced her to prostitute herself for repair parts, and had sternly rebuked her crew members' questions with a sharp 'nothing you need to know about', when they had asked her about it. But Trance's hearing had been acute enough to hear the sobs coming from the other side of the privacy curtain, and for the first week afterwards Beka couldn't seem to get clean enough, taking five or six showers a day. Beka never mentioned the incident again, but by unspoken agreement neither of her crew members ever brought up the subject of replacement parts in her presence again.

Trance placed the platter of sandwiches in a safe place then moved behind her husband and began massaging his neck and shoulders as he ate. His back was heavily scarred from a caning he had received when he was a boy living in the refugee camps on Earth, and the muscles in his back and neck tended to tighten up easily.

She had been appalled the first time she had seen him without a shirt. When she had asked him about the scars, he had only told her that each scar contained its own nightmare. Eventually he began to feel secure enough about their relationship to tell her how he received them, and about life on a planet that had been conquered by the Nietzscheans. He hadn't been exaggerating about the nightmares; two or three times a week he awoke her with his screaming. Beka had once told her that she was a good influence on him, that his nightmares were coming much less often now that he had taken up with her. Trance couldn't imagine what his nights must have been like before they met.

She kneaded his neck and shoulders until he began to relax, and then began to nibble gently on his neck and ears. After a moment he began to nibble back. She stood up and began to pull him to his feet.

"Beka said no playtime until the work's done. Well, if the thrusters are calibrated, work's done."

She led him to the table in the common room. It really was more comfortable than their bunk in the crew's quarters. The perfect future she was seeking would come at the appropriate time. For now she was satisfied with the present.

Chapter 7

Chapter 9