The Captain's Heart CH 105

Jeremy contacted his friend with as little thoughts put into it as he could. There had been three aborted attempts because he’d tried to

Jeremy contacted his friend with as little thoughts put into it as he could. There had been three aborted attempts because he’d tried to plan how he’d do it, and the programming had picked up on enough to send him into a panic spiral.

This time, he was just doing it.

“Hey,” he said as soon as he received the connection-established signal.

The reply was slow in coming, and when it did, it was filled with hesitation. “Hi.”

“Sorry, you’re not busy, are you? I don’t want to disrupt your work.”

“No, no, I’m not.” More hesitation. “I just wasn’t expecting you to contact me like this.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s been a few days since we’ve arrived, and I thought you’d be done with most of that work.”

The chuckle was heartfelt. “Oh, I’m going to be busy with what we found for a while. We also picked up—”

“Yeah, I heard about him.”

“You don’t sound interested.”

“I’ve been around humans my entire life. One more isn’t going to mean much. You know where the Engineer’s at? The sense I get from the others is that he doesn’t enjoy leaving the ship.”

Another heartfelt chuckle. “Alix hates anything that takes him away from his reactor, but the one on the ship needed being seen to. That it’s taking him this long is telling of how much work it needs.”

“It’s a human design?”

“Yes, so he…. Oh, I’m sorry. It never even occurred to me to see if you could help. The Engineer’s always the one who deals with those situations.”

“It’s okay.” He pushed the hurt down, then added, to make it easier to endure. “And without knowing whose design it is, there’s no telling how much use I’d be.”

“I thought Earthers made everything the same.”

“Once a design is approved. We currently have seven designs actively in production. One of mine is part of that,” he added, unable to keep the pride out of his voice. “But there have to be close to a hundred designs still active dating back to when we discovered how to harness anti-matter power. Only those deemed unsafe were removed from their ships before there was a reason to retire them. We like to build things to last.”

“When I see Alix, I’ll check if he can use you help with it.”

“Thank. Have you learned anything useful at this point?”

Another silence before the reply, but there was no hesitation when his friend spoke. “Nothing that helps yet. What we’ve got points to the technology coming from others and being integrated, but that isn’t giving us answers yet.”

The programming wasn’t latching onto this, so Jeremy pushed. “Can you send me the scans? I might recognize something.”

Another pause. “I’m sorry, this is Hunter business. I can’t share it with civilians.”

“Right.” He would have liked seeing the tech that had done this to him.

“Speaking of, how is your training going?”

“Isn’t she reporting to you? You are the one who arranged for it, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I figured you needed to learn to defend yourself after what happened. But it’s your training, she doesn’t send me reports. She did mention when we hung, out a while back, that you were making progress.”

He chuckled. “If you call being taken down by a group of kids progress, sure I am.”

His friend chuckled. “We start exercising earlier than you.”

“That’s pretty much what the guy she left in charge said. Although is entertaining watching them get in each other’s way, until they stop growling and hissing at each other. I didn’t know you did that.”

“Cubs do that. It’s childish behavior.”

The silence stretched while Jeremy tried to think of something else to talk about.

“I need to go,” his friend said. “Like I said, I’m not done with this.”

“No, of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you contacted me. I hope you do it again.”

“I will. It was good talking with you.” He ended the connection and smiled. He’d done it. He’d managed to speak with—

The programming jumped on the thought, and nightmares swallowed Jeremy.

*

“Well, well, well,” Technician Asherik Toreborek said. “Look who finally decided he was good enough to work with us.”

A look over his shoulder showed Jeremy Thuruk, heading for his board. He made sure the readouts were stable and headed for his friend.

“Should you be working? Shouldn’t you be with your mate after so long on that ship?”

Thuruk chuckled. “I returned two shifts ago. Me and Nir have celebrated multiple times. And I hope to never set foot on an Earther ship again. How you can stand such cramped spaces….” His friend shuddered.

Jeremy looked around. “I might have problems with them now. What did they have you do? Sorry, you probably can’t talk about it.”

“Sort of what we do here. Making sure nothing the Engineer did caused something on the ship to explode.”

“Does he do anything that drastic?” Nothing Jeremy had witnessed lead him to think that, but—

Thuruk laughed. “Never with his reactor. He’s always careful, but, from hearing him curse, that reactor didn’t give him much choices.”

“But he has it running?”

Thuruk shrugged. “He was still cursing it with visits from Tutecamongartin when my stay ended. I’m sure that once he’s back, the Engineer will be happy to tell you what he thinks of Earther tech.”

“I so can’t wait to be told just how much better his design is than anything we’d ever make.”

“I doubt it’s going to be that bad.”

“I’ll find out when he gets back. Until then. Your board waits for you. Technician Shebitan Korial Semirian, you can return Technician Thuruk sel Minial’s sectors to his board. He has returned and is ready to work.”

*

He whirled, not caring about the looks he received. This time, he saw enough of the gray, white, and black fur before the guy darted back to recognize him. Having done that, he focused on his breathing. His agent, the programming whispered, trying to take control.

Maybe. That man had been stalking him for a while now, although it had started before he’d been tortured. But it had increased afterward. Jeremy wished the guy would just tell him what his problem was. He certainly wasn’t chasing him through the ship. He had better things to do.

Outline section 

Thuruk... doesn’t get the reference, but “movie” is all he needs for it to click... isn’t exactly sure what to tell Jeremy. They were on an information hunt, found their target, but came to the decision with the target that his position was compromised. So he’s currently a passenger; Leiha helping with his debriefing, while Alix and the doctors are going over some technical schematics he had for them.

Before Jeremy can probe more, Thuruk says that isn’t the big thing. Leading Jeremy to one of the recreation decks, Jeremy finds human media playing... not one of the recent movies or even a public broadcast, though. This is an old but not too old broadcast from Earth; everything is understandable, but even after such a short time there has been an accent drift from the English he currently speaks.

When asked, Thuruk will explain the informant they picked up is a deserter from they human military. He’s been spending his time in deep space “harvesting” old broadcast signals from Earth, reconstructing their media from before the propaganda when out of control. He has sixteen satellites strewn across a five lightyear box of space, all pointed to the Sol system and waiting for when Earth would be on this side of the sun. This particular position is currently receiving broadcast from [insert number here] years ago, but he’s been at this for years so he has built up a lot of data. When he receives his cut from Xenial on the distribution of these recordings, he’ll be able to set himself up anywhere in the Federation with at least modest comfort. And that is ignoring the data disks.

Which of course raises the next question from Jeremy, what data discs?

Addition 

Jeremy has a voice converstaion with Gralgiran.

This turned into a really short chapter, because some of the stuff in the outline for it was addressed before and some can’t be addressed until later.

This will almost certainly be expanded in the second draft, since then I’ll have a better idea of what can go here.

The last part, which should be the continuation of Toom being pissed at Jeremy at a distance, is there because I finally remembered that’s taking place. I really need to go back and add more of those.