Local Star by Aimee Ogden (ebook reader online free txt) 📕

Hedgehome, and it’s not exactly sticking on a hard turn, but it’s not exactly not, either. If you could just get in there and change the calibration of the—”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job.” She scratched off the rest of the note in shorthand, signed it, and stormed across the wrenchworks bay to thrust the tablet at Kalo. “It’ll take me forever to get this thing spaceworthy. How long is the Fleet here?” Longer meant more time with Casne; it also meant more chances for head-to-head collisions with Kalo and the shrapnel of their former relationship.

It was supposed to be fun. Kalo was supposed to be fun. Until he’d neatly snipped things off right before the Fleet left for Hedgehome: no reasons, just a polite this-isn’t-working-is-it, just shy of nine cycles after Casne had enthusiastically introduced them—almost a whole year together, reckoning by the local star. But no great surprise there: they’d been skimming that event horizon for a while already. Triz had found herself starting idle fights whenever Kalo was back on-Hab, finding annoyances in little things that hadn’t bothered her before. They’d had a screaming fight when the Hab got ‘port footage of the destruction of the CFS Graithe and the Iuelo outside Ceebee territory. Just as well he’d ended things not long after that, because gods, was it annoying to ask someone to give a shit about you as they flew blithely off to their untimely death!

At least Casne crewed a whaleship, one of those practically Hab-sized behemoths with just enough engines attached to nudge them through space. Whaleships were built to withstand fire, cradling their heavy-fire tactical arrays, providing a safe haven for their battered swarms to return to after battle. Whaleships always came home . . . almost always. With Light Attack Swarms, the odds weren’t so good. And when they did come home, it might well be in pieces of a size suitable for packing in a mealcase.

He’d left her. And now he was back here, in her ‘works. Trying to be friendly. If Kalo noticed her taut silence while scanning through her notes, he didn’t reach out to strum it. He scrolled upward several times to get through her full report, and he whistled low when he reached the end. “Gods of Issam. I really should be dead.”

“Better luck next time.” She poked his hand that held the stylus, and he dashed off a signature. The tablet chirped politely, and an invoice estimate winged its way to the Fleet bursary at Centerpoint. “Maybe next time, don’t burn so hard on a wing you know is busted.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job.” Kalo tossed the tablet back to her, and she caught it low, just a few inches above the ground. “Thanks for the lookover. The Fleet’s parked here for three days while we refuel and wait for Centerpoint to stop shitting their pants over what to do with the Ceebees and actually send usf new orders. If you don’t have the time to fix me up altogether, at least get things started so the techs on the whaleship don’t have to start from scratch.” His mouth twisted in that familiar half-smile she couldn’t help but love to hate. “Or if you’re short on time, you can skip making it spaceworthy and just set up a feedback loop in the coolant line so I blow up halfway between here and Centerpoint. That’ll save both you and the techs a lot of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t.” Dragging a clearance hose, she retreated back under the Swarmer, as much to put some space between them as to start working. “Casne would know it was me, and I’d never hear the end of it.”

He followed her over to the repair bay and leaned against the good wing with one arm. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want my murder to cause you any inconvenience. Besides, you’d miss me if I was space dust.”

The hose was heavy; Triz bent her knees to get under it and tried not to look like she was struggling. He might do something really hideous, like offer to help. “The only way I’d miss you is with a lancet gun. And not more than once.”

He ducked his head under the fuselage. “And yet here we are, alone in the wrenchworks. By your plan, by the way, not mine. Not that I’m objecting. If there’s anything you wanted to say—”

The metallorganic seal on the hose suctioned itself onto the gaping wound in the side of Kalo’s Swarmer, and Triz flipped the switch on the pump with her foot. The vacuum clattered twice then roared to life, slurping down the coolant spillage and its unwanted fumes. “We’re all set here,” Triz shouted over the noisy belching of the pump. She wasn’t sure if Kalo could hear her over the noise and didn’t especially care. The vacuum spoke for itself.

He yelled something back at her and gestured to the pair of lifts that stretched through the Hab. The wrenchworks made up the bottom of the station—or at least what everyone agreed via the consensus of artificial gravity counted as “bottom,” in deep space—and the lift started here, then crossed the recycling and recovery levels, the living quarters, and the Arcade, ending in Justice at the very top. Maybe he was asking where to go now? Triz couldn’t pick just one of the seven hells, so she shrugged and slipped her earmuffs from around her neck to cover her ears. Finally, Kalo gave up and disappeared into one of the lifts.

Triz gave it two minutes to make sure he was really gone, then collapsed against the battered Swarmer. Intellectually, she knew the fighting between the Ceebees and the Confederated Fleet had been ugly. She’d seen the vids of dead alien intelligences after the Ceebee commander’s attempts at rapidfire terraforming: lifeless mounds of iridescent tendrils and broken segments of carapace, poisoned by the introduction of atmospheric oxygen. Sitting beside the newsport, she’d listened to the rolls of names