THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

"It's too weird to hear you say stuff like 'my you' and 'our me' and stuff," Lainey decrees. "I don't like this time travel shit. Science fiction is stupid."

"We live on a spaceship, peach blossom," you point out.

"Yeah, a stupid one, cookie nibs," Lainey points out.

This is a great point. You eat a final crab, then gesture for kid Kadros to take the rest of them because you're full. Eating your way back to target weight is a chore.

"So what'd you come by for?" you ask. "I presume it wasn't solely to try and flirt."

 

You scoff. "I wasn't flirting, that was theoretical. I just don't feel like hanging out with your Pancho any more. She treats me like a tiny precious. You only treat me like a stupid kid, at least that's trollish."

 

You shrug. "She breeds baby critters as a hobby, I suppose she's prone to a categorization error from time to time. Finish your crabs."

While he does so, you chew over extending the offer from the previous morning. Then decide: hell, why not. Kid Kadros might be twice as arrogant as your own dear officer and only half as sensible, but that's likely all the more reason to equip him with as much help as you can possibly manage.

"So," you say, and lean forward. "Have you given any thought to how information transfers from your universe to mine, and presumably might transfer back again?"

 

You look warily at Lainey and then back at Erskin. "Yes, but it's an easily misconstrued conversation."

 

Lainey looks between the two of you, bright eyed and calculating. "Yeah, I think it'd be great for all of us to be clear about shit right now," she says. "Erskin, grublumps, moonlight, toaster oven of my pump biscuit, what are you gonna be doing with this kid?"

"He's some kind of radical back in his timeline," you say. "I figure we could let him in on what we've been up to in ours and see if there's any amount of useful overlap."

"Huh," she says thoughtfully, and eats a final crab. "Yeah, that could work. One issue, though. Kadros, please pay attention."

She takes the pot over to the sink, holds it up in both hands, and then melts it into two fistfulls of white-hot taffy. "If you fuck things up for my darling boy over here you will not be going home, baby Bel. Understand?"

 

For a long moment you're breathless with -- not fear, exactly, but the feeling you get when you miss a handhold but only for a split second, then remember how horribly high up you are -- at the thought of her putting those hands on you. You scowl. "That's so unnecessary. Besides, if I don't go home, your Bel probably doesn't come back, right? And you don't want that, since he's so disgustingly efficient. I mean, I don't want to mess things up for you. If you don't want to talk about this we don't have to." Sheesh. It was his idea.

 

"Yeah, I don't care so much as anyone else here does," Lainey says. "I brought Kadros in to fix the paperwork and mostly he did that fine. I can get another one. Erskin'll be sad but he can get over it-- I just want to make sure you understand that you're not untouchable just because we happen to like your old self. I remember being eight enough to know what a fucking liability I could have been if anyone had ever let me at anything actually dangerous."

"Lainey, leave off," you sigh from the table. "The airlock-talk is very sweet and all but this is still Kadros, he takes the prospect of his imminent demise as a concupiscent aide, not a deterrent."

 

You're studying the ceiling and praying for patience. "I don't know that any information we could give each other would be useful. Our timelines are obviously very different. If it's too much of a risk for you, don't do it."

 

"How likely are you to try to report us to any authorities in this particular timeline, would you say?" you ask dryly. "Should you find any evidence that could lead you to suspect that we were breaking, perhaps, some rules and regulations? Would you give even half a fuck?"

"Obviously he wouldn't, I'm just saying, the big guy's got a noted tendency to go off half-cocked," Lainey says. "How likely do you think the pocket edition is to restrain himself from whatever heroics seem like a great idea at the time?"

"Oh," you say, and chew on a clawtip for a minute. "Lainey, I can just sit on him. It'll be fine. We'll be fine."

"Depends on which part you sit," she says.

 

"What heroics would even --? No, look, nevermind, just. Okay. Fine." You take a deep breath, trying to organize your thoughts. "In my timeline, Galley crashed the Sunslammer into Alternia two sweeps ago," you begin.

 

"Good for him," you say promptly.

 

That loosens the tightness in your stomach considerably. You let out a breath. "Damn right," you agree. "His captain was an abusive horror show, and from what I gather the rest of the crew was pretty toxic too. He was trying to die, but he was the only survivor. My friend Elusca went to salvage the wreck and found him, saved him -- 'installed' him on her tugboat, because he couldn't figure out how to live as anything but a helm -- they weren't the healthiest moirails back then, but they were doing their best with the mess they got dished. She kept him secret for a long time; it was less than a sweep ago she finally sent me a picture. I fell in pity on the spot, like a big idiot. That was the beginning of me going rebel, I guess."

You tell the story as succinctly as you can, but it's still long. You're hungry again when you catch up to the present day.

 

You nod encouragingly at what feels like the appropriate places, and let the kid vent. He's certainly been through a lot more misadventures than you had, at that age.

"Well," you say afterwards. "You're certainly dedicated. I'd like a copy of that network thing you've got, it sounds useful. Doumah and Galley managed to patch together an update packet we push to all the ships that dock with us that gives Helmsmen better control over their own monitoring and communication programming, but I'm sure they'd like to examine what you've come up with. Raid the fridge if you're still hungry and then come along and we'll go visit the shipwright quarters, I keep the sensitive business I don't want older Kadros coming across over there."

 

Of course you're still hungry; you denude his fridge of leftovers, and get started on a tub of isopod salad as you trot along with him. "I can't imagine any version of me being a hardline Imperialist. I think too much."

 

"Oh, he's not, actually, he's just very hard to direct and I'm involved in an operation with very little room for the sort of guns-and-glory heroics Kadros tends to default to," you say, and gesture him ahead of you into the nearest cart. You roll your eyes affectionately as you climb into the driver's seat. "He's very much the 'shoot first and ask questions later and all those questions are "why are you yelling at me"' type, it's caused us a fair spot of trouble around here. He'd put a mewbeast to shame for bringing you the severed heads of enemies you'd prefer he hadn't touched and then and dropping them on exactly the priceless rug you didn't want ruined."

It's possible you sound entirely too fond of the big blue pain in the particulars, but then, you are talking to his larval form. You're fairly sure the fellow can handle the scandal.

 

“He sounds... well, he sounds like who I’d be if I’d never had anything to hide,” you say thoughtfully.

 

"Which is why I've made the very good call to ease him into all this roughly the other side of never," you say cheerfully. "I've heard it's not a real blackrom without a couple good secrets, anyway. Here we are!" You park the cart and lead him into the Helmsman maintenance areas. They're currently dark and quiet and very nearly unobjectionable on the sniff nodes, as you're in between hot cases and anyway most of everyone you've done this sort of thing with in the past is currently dead. You're going to need more shipwrights, soon. That's depressing to contemplate.

The officeblock attached to the main labs is positively dusty. You sit down at the chunky desktop huskportal, sink your claws into the chitinous external membrane, and peel the whole backplate off to retrieve a much smaller, sleeker laptop from between the shell and the guts of the machine. What with one disaster and another, it's been nearly half a sweep since you've accessed the laptop, and it's gone and grown itself a number of useless little legs all over. You snap them off while it's booting up, and nibble one.

Pretty good, actually. You save a second one and give the rest to Bel, who's proving himself a bit of a black hole when it comes to comestibles.

"Here we are," you say, when the computational device has finally deigned to wake itself. "All my notes on the business of rehabilitation and repair of problem Helmsmen: this file is for laws and legislacerators who don't mind being tapped for advice. Here's organizations that help 'rehome' Helmsmen, which can be anything from just fucking eating them and giving their captains a nice tax break, to passing them on to pirates, to putting them out to pasture on a farm planet somewhere, they swear. It's annotated. This file is shipyards ranked by most to least terrible, as well as a list of fictitious yards commonly used for provenance mock-ups. This is executable programs to load into helmsmen as needed, here's just the basic suite they're supposed to come with, so you can check... here's a little tutorial on culturing some of the main strains of bioware you need, in case you get one who needs rewiring. Any questions so far?"

 

Your eyes are perfectly round when he's done. "That bastard," you hiss, "why does he get the genius Erskin?" Tucking a computer leg in the corner of your teeth like a cigar, you lean past him to tap through the files a bit, getting a feel for what he's doing. "Damn," you say occasionally, or, "Holy shit."

Finally you plop back into a dusty chair and shove your hair back with both hands like you're trying to keep your thinksponge inside your head. "What do you actually do with the Helmsmen you confiscate? And I assume Galley knows about this, since it's happening on his ship."

 

"Oh, Galley knows just about everything," you agree. You open up the file folder for the Helmsmen rehomers. "Depending on the shape the equipment is in, we confiscate them one of a number of ways and send them on for a number of purposes.

"If they're underage, we just go 'oh, someone must have lied to you about their provenance, it happens, shady dealers, etc, we'll fix that right up for you' and write them a voucher to pick another Helmsman up from the sort of shipyard who'll want to know exactly where they got that pupa from, and will chew their way merrily up the supply line with all sorts of trigger-happy investigarrotters. We send the pupa back to the Homeworld, if they're stable enough to survive the trip, or there's certain enclaves they can be cared for until they're healthy and old enough to rejoin the fleet as functional adults... that's most of our confiscations, really.

"For ships with dying Helmsmen we just cut them out entirely and let their Captains know that if they wanted to commit suicide there's a number of quicker and less painful ways than letting their propulsion crew get slack or sadistic, and we ground their ship until we can get them a healthier Helmsman in and a less terrible set of crew to care for it. It's in the charter of a troop carrier that we get the final say on whether a ship is fit to fly or not, and obviously ships missing their Helmsman certainly aren't going to go anywhere in a hurry. Most rescue cases can be patched back together with a bit of elbow grease and antibiotics, then turned over to whatever religious charity is nearby for rehabilitation. But the ones that don't seem like they can make it through at least get a quick, quiet death that doesn't take out an entire ship along with them.

"Most of the Helmsmen that come through aren't so badly off, though. We check their internal and external rigging, clear up what cruelty we can, and make sure they can access what they need to. It isn't glamorous, but I like to think it adds up over time. It makes me feel better about... about everything, I suppose, to think I'm making the Fleet a better place, a stronger one, weeding out this sort of self-defeating nonsense a night at a time. There's cruelty that makes us stronger, better trolls, that shapes and hardens us... and cruelty that just eats holes in all our souls. I won't stand for the latter. I'm so bloody tired of the latter."

You sigh, pulling absently at one of your horns, and put the laptop back down on the table.

"...But, Bel, I'm not a genius, fussbug, I'm a grownup," you feel compelled to point out, just a little flustered for both your sake and your juvenile counterpart's. "When I was eight I was sitting on my hind end out in the geographic middle of nowhere, surviving off a single saltwater pond and forgetting how to talk. If your Erskin's any more sophisticated than full fucking feral, he'll have a much better foundation to make something of himself than I had. Give him time. And to Lainey, if you can possibly manage it."

 

"I would if I could, but he's still in love with Cloris and won't believe she was killing him." You shake your head; you don't want to talk about that any more. "Your priority is obviously the ships. You don't think helmsmen are trolls. I don't blame you, and I won't mess this up for you, it's better than nothing. But I don't know if there's anything here I can use. I want to stop trolls being forced into helms in the first place. I think it's horriffic what we do to them. You don't realize it until it happens to one of your quadrants, one of your friends, but my god, the whole practice is the soul-killing kind of cruel."