Another few days passed, putting Cait’s Chariot about a quarter of the way along the projected route through the affectionately named dead zone. Tensions between Cait and Rhys had eased and their working rapport had reverted to a casual ease where they were able to talk freely with no lingering unease about their fraternisation. Maybe it was knowing that he could approach her that made him less prone to frustration, or maybe he had just been having a bad day that day when she’d let him masturbate onto her. In any case, they were both able to get on with their actual duties, as often monotonous as they might be, without getting on each other’s nerves.

So far nothing had turned up on the sensors with respect to the missing vessel. No sign of the vessel or any debris or chemical compositions that would suggest explosions or escape of gases. For all Cait knew the vessel had simply emerged from the zone late and was back en route, and she had no way of knowing. In the interim she kept diligently performing regular sensor sweeps, which at least gave her something to do besides read or watch movies or exercise in the ship’s tiny gym. Unfortunately, the fact it wasn’t leading to anything interesting did generate some disappointment.

“What’s new?” Rhys asked sarcastically as he drifted into the bridge and peered through the viewport to survey the stars. “I see the constellations are all right where I left them.”

“Hmph.” Cait gave a half-hearted chuckle at the weak joke as she stretched, arching her back and shoulders after floating in one position for too long.

“No news on the other ship?” Rhys continued.

“Nothing. Not even regular radio broadcasts. They’d be old, but they’d at least give us an idea if they were in trouble.”

“You get so into the mindset that your comms are useless that you don’t even think about transmitting a distress signal to anyone who might hear it and at least report that you’re dead.”

“Christ, that’s morbid.”

“That’s the dead zone.” Rhys shrugged.

“So what’ve you been up to?”

“Trying to trick the predictive maintenance algorithms to detect problems that don’t exist.”

“What?” Cait asked incredulously.

“What I do is manually introduce issues into the engineering environment. A temperature spike here, an intake restriction there, and see what diagnoses it suggests to optimise performance again.”

“And?”

“Well, the computer correctly identified the zone the issues were occurring in and then suggested potential remedies and preventative maintenance to stop it happening again. It’s quite robust, though it’s not programmed to say things like ‘remove blowtorch from coolant line three’.”

“You didn’t!” Cait exclaimed, shocked.

“Only for a minute. Don’t worry, the torch wasn’t hot enough to do anything to the conduit.”

“But the coolant…”

“…is specifically for the purpose of dissipating heat.”

“I will give you that, but please don’t introduce fire to any other parts of my ship, please.”

“Aye, Captain.”

There was a moment of silence as the conversation lulled and they listened to the incessant hum of the ship operating, a noise they usually tuned out. The silence grew longer and Cait predicted what Rhys was about to say.

“So…” Rhys said, always the least casual way to introduce a sensitive topic of conversation. Cait tilted her head and regarded him placidly, challenging him to continue.

“I know this might be a little sooner than you expected, but I wanted to feel out how we were going in terms of revisiting your standing offer.” Rhys said, about as smoothly as 60 grit sandpaper.

“I have to confess, I’m slightly sceptical as to how urgent your needs are.”

“Admittedly, the situation is not dire. But I had some thoughts around that.” Rhys began.

“Which are?”

“Waiting too long might not be healthy, for either of us.” Rhys hesitated.

“Explain your reasoning.”

“If we just approached this from a more casual direction and maintained things at a lower level, then we’re not turning to this last resort option once we’re already on edge, and it doesn’t have to become this whole big thing.”

Cait pondered that for a moment.

“I’m not saying your suggestion is without merit, but counterpoint: it’s supposed to be a big thing. Remember that whole explanation I gave about professional barriers? Besides it’s been like four days. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t mean to be harsh but you played your cards too soon. It’s not like you’ve never gone four days before. You’ll live.”

“This is different.”

“How?” Cait asked with an exasperated sigh.

“You don’t know what it’s like for me. I’m in my twenties, my prime, here in this metal crate spending months at a time schlepping between planets and suddenly I’m making this trip sharing my quarters with this beautiful, intelligent woman who floats around half naked…”

Cait raised a finger warningly, cutting him off

“You… asshole.” She said sternly.

“Cait.”

“Don’t put this on me. You’re the one with the self-control issues. You know what the working conditions are, and I was very clear on how our deal would work and how it wouldn’t. You come in here with some sob story about how I make things hard for you?”

Cait raised her arms, clenching her metal fists and blinking back tears as Rhys put his hands up defensively.

“You think because I’m some broken thing that I’m going to fall for some bullshit line?”

“It’s not like that.” Rhys protested.

Cait took a long deep breath to compose herself and lowered her hands.

“Get out.” She said levelly.

“Cait, listen.”

“No. You don’t return to this bridge.” She advanced on him and used her momentum to give him a rough shove to get his mass moving towards the door. Rhys caught the sides of the doorway with his hands.

“No, listen!” Rhys pointed past her to the comms station.

“What?” She turned, noting that the comms panel had lit up and was gently pinging to report a signal. Momentarily forgetting her fury with Rhys she kicked off the door and braced herself at the station, flicking switches to receive the signal. A strained male voice cut in over the intercom.

**…repeating, this is carrier vessel Aspire, we are under attack. They’ve matched velocity and are attempting to board. We do not know their intentions, but assume they’re after our cargo. I don’t know who will hear this but… I hope someone does.**

There was an intense hissing noise followed by a crackle as the radio cut out, and then the signal was gone. Cait was already analysing the signal for metadata.

“That transmission happened almost a week ago, probably smack in the middle of the dead zone.” She pulled up the message her father had sent. “Aspire, that’s our ship. It belongs to Starlanes Transit.”

“They were attacked? Out here? By who?”

“It’s not like there’s any other planets out here, someone must have established an outpost as a staging area and be jacking liners for supplies.”

“And matching speed with liners at top cruising speed? That’s insane.”

“I know, I know, they’d have to get into position and start their intercept course days ahead of time.” Cait moved over to the navigation station and powered up the long range sensors, narrowing the angle to a 30 degree cone ahead of the ship and pumping as much power as she could to the antiquated array. “It’s going to take a few minutes for anything out there to ping, even if we are in range of something.”

They hung in silence for a long minute, waiting.

“We should go back. Report to your dad.”

“With our mass it’ll take us a week just to slow down enough to turn around, not to mention the acceleration time to get back. Going through is faster.”

“Going through is suicide!” Rhys protested. “If they took Aspire they can take us too.”

“Unless they only want whatever Aspire was hauling. Dad said their cargo was classified. That means it’s a valuable target. We tell Fleet about the hijacking they’ll have ships all over this sector looking for that station.”

“Do you want to take that risk?”

“Do you want to make us a sitting duck for whatever’s out there?”

“So we’re screwed either way.”

“If whoever is out there wants this ship, there’s not a damned thing at this point we can do about it.” Cait said, firmly.

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, waiting for a ping on the sensors that would tell them how for in the future their trouble was.

“Cait.” Rhys started, with the air of a man with an unresolved argument to finish.

“What, Rhys?” Cait sighed.

“I’m sorry for what I said. But I wasn’t feeding you a line. I’m not saying I’m in love with you or anything, but however it is you see yourself… I don’t.”

“Rhys, shut the fuck up.”

Cait tapped a few keys then disabled the long range sensors, leaving the passive sensors on to read any return signal from her initial sweep, then turned to Rhys.

“If my sensor sweep didn’t catch anything within four days of here it’s not going to. There’s no sense broadcasting our position to anyone not already waiting for us.”

“Right.” Rhys nodded, watching her expectantly.

“What do you want me to say, Rhys? That I believe you that I’m not just some convenient stress relief for you? You gonna rescue me from myself? Fix my broken soul?”

“I’m not saying that. But this fire inside you. Exactly this fire. You’re cool under pressure. Logical but passionate. And intelligent. And yeah, attractive. You’re hard to ignore.”

“Ok. Ok, I believe you. And here’s your grand prize for seeing past all my flaws.” Cait doubled over, hooking her thumbs into her shorts and pushing them down, kicking them off and gripping the edge of the console with her ass perched on the edge and spreading her thighs to display herself to Rhys. Rhys looked down at her, his eyes automatically drawn to her crotch before looking away.

“What’s wrong?” Cait challenged defiantly. “I thought this was what you wanted? Get in here. Show me how bad you need it.” Her voice cracked as Rhys turned away from her and propelled himself back towards the door. “Where you going? Come on!” She shouted at him as he disappeared down the hall. When it was clear he was gone, she buried her face in her hands and curled into a ball as a sob wracked her body.

—-

It was several hours later.

At some point Cait had cried herself to sleep, and woke up when she bumped against the ceiling bulkhead. With a sense of burning humiliation, she caught her shorts and slipped them back on and pulled herself to her chair. Looking at the sensor logs she confirmed there had been nothing on the long range sweep she had performed. The comms panel had not detected any further radio signals. As far as she could tell they were still alone out here, but knew that couldn’t be true.

With her busywork done she was forced to confront her personal issues. Of course she knew Rhys would leave when she presented herself like that. She could never have respected him again if he didn’t, but all that meant was that she had succeeded in alienating a decent man and her only companion out here, thoroughly humiliating herself in the process. It wasn’t clear to her why Rhys was so persistent in trying to get involved with her, because all the kind things he had said they still rang hollow to her, but she was sure that bridge was burned now. Maybe, best case scenario, she could finish this run in relative peace, call her father from Ganymede, and hitch an express ride back to earth to try and enrol in the academy. She clearly wasn’t cut out for the isolation of deep space haulage.

Taking a deep breath and swallowing her pride she keyed the shipwide intercom.

“Rhys, can you come up here?”

She waited a couple of minutes to give Rhys time to think about it, and she heard a rustle behind her that told her he’d joined her.

“Hey.” She said, her tone gentle. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him yet.

“Hey.” Rhys replied in kind.

“So, I owe you an apology.”

“You know, there’s probably a couple owing each way. Why don’t we just call it even and we go back to how things were?”

“I have something to say, so please just listen.” Cait turned to face him, holding the back of her chair to keep from drifting away. “I know that I have not been an easy person to get along with. I am not trying to blame my entire personality on my father or the accident, but they are some pretty big factors. They make it difficult to trust, they make it difficult for me to not be on guard all of the time. I do not have room in my brain to be vulnerable.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself…”

“But I do. Because even in the best case scenario we are on this ship together for another nine or ten weeks, and our problems are going to stay here right along with us.” Cait sighed, glancing over her shoulder out the viewport. “And worst case scenario, there’s someone out there who is going to stop us reaching Ganymede, and we might not even live to find out why.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“There’s still no change to the plan, at least not in the big picture. We keep going and hope we make it, like always. As to right here, now?”

There was a pause, as Rhys waited for her to conclude her thought.

“I don’t have all the details figured out. But if you wanted, I’d really like to give it a shot.”

---