Weekly Drabble #372: The Adventures of Scamper, Part 5 (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from Donald Chase with "hey look a quarter (of quarters)" and brings us back to Skyler and her recent arrival on the good ship Pequod, I mean Valerhas. Enjoy!

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Part 5:

“Quarters” certainly described the room Skyler had been assigned. As in, it wasn’t just a place where a member of Valerhas could rest, but it was also probably a quarter the size of any of those other rooms.

“That sounds like a waste of space. Your people don’t need much room, do they now?” the ship’s quartermaster had grunted when Skyler noted that her quarters on Gohenghist had been larger, and that had been a mining ship where every cubic meter was at a premium.

It was hard to argue with that; compared to her former crew of Workers and Kobold, Broken were small. She could easily duck between the legs of the latter and was probably outweighed by the tree-thick arms of the former. Still, being assigned to what felt more like a service closet than actual quarters felt a little insulting. In fact, it probably was. She was an unexpected and most likely unwanted addition to the vessel.

Skyler knew she should be grateful; Valerhas had saved her life and, given the attitudes and comments some of the crew had already made, she didn’t think Ehaaayd’s decision to do so was a popular one. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially beggars who relied on the goodwill of others to avoid being spaced. If they were lucky, the particulate remains of Gohenghist would be found and identified. If they were not, then Skyler’s home of the last six years and every soul aboard would be listed as ‘missing, fate unknown’ and left as a mystery no one would ever care enough to solve. There would be no way to tell that one Broken was or was not part of all that drifting wreckage, so if she became problematic to keep around...

At least I have clothes now, Skyler thought to herself as she surveyed her new domain. It wasn’t exactly a maintenance closet, but it wasn’t far off from that, either. It was a cramped little dormitory chamber with a round bed shoved up against the far walls that looked like it had been either dragged from some deep-storage chamber or hastily fabricated and dumped in the room by the quartermaster’s annoyed underlings. There was one blanket; the very one she’d been recently wearing as her only set of garments. That was a statement, too.

The rest of her new abode’s furnishings were a desk that had barely enough room to sit at in front of the bed and a banged and dented closet directly across from it. The only other notable feature was a tiny adjoining wet bathroom, where sink, shower and head all shared the same space. On Gohenghist, the water usage had been tightly rationed. Because Kobolds didn’t bathe like most other species – in fact, water uncontaminated by high concentrations of dissolved solids and toxic levels of heavy metals caused blisters and painful rashes to form on the softer tegument between their chitinous plates – Skyler had had to shower with the Workers on Gohenghist. And no, the jokes and barbs never got old.

Someone inform security, there appears to be a lost child in the showers. It appears quite malnourished; parts of its chest are sagging. Ho ho ho. Never heard that before, except every single time.

Ironically, it had been the Kobold members of the mining ship’s crew that she’d been closest to. Travis had been her best friend on Gohenghist. He’d saved her life, probably more times then she could count. She’d never gotten the chance to repay him once, let along for everything. Now, she never would.

“I am just a drone. One of many. A splinter of a line. Not a royal or emissary. My life is to be spent in service of the hive, the great hive and the Compact, the over-hive. But you, Scamper. You are unique and worth preserving.”

“So are you,” she’d told him, staring into compound eyes the size of a human lung, her hands resting on the mandibles that could slice her in half, but had also picked her up with the greatest of care. “We all matter.”

“That is not how it is. The hives need, and we serve.”

Skyler didn’t know who her room’s former occupant had been; a faint alien smell lingered inside, but it wasn’t one she could easily identify. Probably someone else who’d been deemed not to need much space. Skyler wondered where they were now. In fact, she wondered where the crew itself was; just like its command deck, Valerhas seemed to run light on personnel. She’d seen only a handful of personnel so far, which surprised her. Freighters could get away with a minimum of crew. Even titan-scale transports had tiny complements compared to vessels a hundredth of their size. You just didn’t need many people on a ship that was mostly cargo space, but from what little she’d seen of Valerhas, it wasn’t a run of the mill transport. It should have a lot more crew, so where were they?

Sitting in a chair that hadn’t been made for a Broken’s posture, the woman examined the ship’s schematics. Valerhas had a vaguely triangular cross-section; a narrow upper hull that ran along the dorsal spine and a larger, wider secondary hull beneath that ridge. The command deck jutted out into space like an isthmus above a large mission pod shaped like the blade of an axe. She wasn’t familiar with this design, but it appeared semi-modular; the pod under the command deck could, with a little more effort than truly modular hulls, be swapped out. Additional cargo space, passenger quarters, weapons and shield systems. Valerhas’s prow section appeared to be stacked with sensors and, she guessed, that cloaking systems allowed it to hide from Gohenghist, their claim-jumper killers and the... the thing that had eaten them in turn.

The woman shook her head to clear it. She didn’t have the mental bandwidth to process that right now. She needed to figure out the basics first. That was her engineer’s training kicking in. Triage the situation. Focus on your immediate needs. Once you got that situation stabilized, then you had to time to worry about everything else. A reactor running too hot was a problem. A bulkhead about to buckle and throw you into space was an immediate problem.

Valerhas was five hundred and forty-seven meters long, the size of a light cruiser or heavy escort. Under the ridge of the primary hull there were two other modules. The first looked like cargo; from the manifest it appeared to be provisions, spare parts and raw material for the onboard synthesizers. There was enough food to last a good-sized crew a very long time and lucky for her, most of it was rated as edible for humans. That had always been a problem on Gohenghist; Kobold food wasn’t edible by many other species, and while Workers and Broken shared the same general nutritional requirements, they couldn’t subsist for an extended period of time solely on each other’s normal diet. It was expensive and difficult to get hold of human food so far from Rally, so Skyler had had a small stockpile of supplements, vitamins, minerals and digestive aids in her quarters on Goheghist.

Leader Ar’Vansma hadn’t been willing to invest in the dietary needs of someone one rank away from being classified as equipment rather than crew, but he had grudgingly allowed her to bill the supplements to the ship instead of charging her out of pocket for them – and only because he could have the quartermaster write the expenses off as necessary for the well-being of the crew.

Two years ago, Gohenghist been on an extended deployment and Skyler had run out of supplements. She’d had to eat nothing but the Workers’ rations and she’d lost more than twenty pounds in just under two months before Gohenghist returned for a general resupply – a decision aided by the Kobolds’ threat of work stoppages and even the hint of mutiny if Ar’Vansma didn’t do something. That had forever endeared the big bugs to Skyler, but cutting their deployment – and the bonuses they’d been earning – short had made her a permanent enemy of the rest of the crew.

Well, not all of them. She’d made her share of friends among the Workers too. Trusmor, Orramec, Luskire and Pellamhic were... had been... her closest acquaintances among them. To celebrate the end of the work week, they’d played cards every Ostkein evening. They’d taught her how to play baron’s decree. She’d taught them poker. It had even caught on with the rest of the Workers, despite them knowing it was a Broken game.

Some days she’d thought about leaving Gohenghist. She wasn’t a prisoner. Her contract didn’t allow her to resign during active operations, but she could have walked off the ship at any port and no one would have stopped her. She’d been the only human on the crew, caught between the Workers and Kobolds. The food was terrible, the temperature was always too warm, the gravity too high. The pay had been good, but not enough to stay. What had kept her there was her love for it.

On Rally, her psychometric profile and social assimilation testing had deemed her unfit for a command track, but she’d been enamoured with space. Seeing things no one had ever seen before, going places no one had ever gone. That was why she’d jumped at the chance to transfer from George Carvein to Gohenghist. A mining prospector? A ship whose sole purpose was to explore (and make a little bit of money along the way)? Absolutely.

But it wasn’t just the love of the job that had made her stay. Even as a Broken, she could have found another berth. If that didn’t work, she could have gone back to Rally or one of the other tiny handful of human settlements and gotten a job working on one of their ships. She’d stayed for the friends she’d made. Trusmor, Orramec, Luskire. Pellamhic. Travis. Anthony. James. Shahid, and more.

All of them were gone. All of them murdered by someone who themselves had run afoul of the very thing she and the rest of Gohenghist would have been devoured by.

Skyler blinked, trying to clear the tears from her eyes as she stared at the small screen in front of her. She realized she was still looking at Valerhas’s schematics. The aft most section was an engine pod, part of the superstructure. Between that and the storage pod was another large module, but she couldn’t see what was in it. The schematic said nothing and when she tried to bring it up on the computer, it demanded a leader’s clearance code from her.

What in the Triarchs’ domain...?

What was this ship carrying that it needed to hide?

Every moment Skyler spent on the Valerhas kept bringing up more questions, but not a single answer. She chewed her lip for a moment, resting her elbows on the desk. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten for nearly a day. She’d just gotten up and been about to report to the mess before her morning shift when Gohenghist had been attacked.

Triage, she reminded herself. Focus on what you need in the now, then worry about the future. Skyler got up and left her quarters, heading to what the schematics told her would be Valerhas’s own mess. She’d have something to eat and maybe then, she could get some answers.