“A little tinkering?” Zakota asked, as he walked onto the warship’s bridge.

Spare parts littered the deck like flotsam after a harbor storm back home. Asan stood at the helm, a lone island off to one side of the craziness. Not surprisingly, Chief Hierax, kneeling next to an open panel while wearing a face mask and wielding a welding tool, was at the core of the chaos.

“Making a few minor adjustments,” Hierax said, setting down his magtorch and picking up a mallet. Clangs soon emanated from within the open console.

“Minor.” Zakota walked over to Asan, careful not to step on anything. “What’s our status?”

“Still flying alongside the Falcon, attached via the ships’ locks. We’re about an hour out from the station. Lots of traffic around it.”

A comm light flashed.

“Chief Hierax?” Captain Sagitta asked.

“Can someone answer that for me?” Hierax called over the noise he was making.

“The chief is busy making a few minor adjustments, sir,” Zakota said, wishing he could send a video of the bridge to the Falcon’s view screen, but he hadn’t spent enough time on the ship to know the communications console intimately.

“He’s supposed to be working on my weapons.”

“I believe this ties in with that.”

“I’m at an impasse until I get my new materials, Captain,” Hierax called, his voice muffled. Probably because his entire head and shoulders were in that console.

“We’ll be at the station soon,” Sagitta said. “I’m going to send the women across so you can load them into the shuttles to ferry them over. They’re gathering their belongings now.”

“That shouldn’t take long,” Asan muttered.

Indeed. The women had to be tired of wearing the same clothes every day. Tyrax was a shopping mecca, but Zakota supposed they wouldn’t have money to purchase new gear. He wondered who would be paying for their lodgings. The captain? Putting forty-odd people up for however long the battle took wouldn’t be inexpensive. But Sagitta made the big captain’s pay, so Zakota supposed he could handle it. Also, he probably didn’t send most of his paycheck back home.

“We’ll withdraw the airlock tube before making a final approach to the station,” Sagitta said. “There may be trouble, and we don’t want to be vulnerable.”

Right, neither ship could raise its shields when they were attached by an umbilical cord. But what trouble did the captain expect? At a friendly-to-the-Confederation space station?

“Trouble, sir?” Zakota asked.

“Our scanners show open docking bays on Tyrax.”

“Oh.” Zakota remembered the conversation he’d overheard on the bridge, that the station’s docks were supposedly fully occupied. That was why they had to go through this ordeal of taking the women over in a shuttle instead of simply sidling up and extending the airlock tube.

“Supposedly, they’re reserved.” Sagitta’s tone said he didn’t believe that. “Zakota, I want either you or Asan back here at the Falcon’s helm in case there’s trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, can I go?” Asan asked, turning from his console as soon as the channel closed. “I could use a break from this behemoth of a ship. And I miss the company of people.”

Zakota looked toward Hierax, who was cursing and clanging, his head still inside the console.

“Normal people,” Asan amended.

Zakota snorted. “Go ahead. Send Arkyn over here. Someone will have to man the helm while I’m shuttling the chief and the women to the station.” Talk about a boring job. He hadn’t been surprised when Katie’s lip curled at his offer of letting her inside a shuttle. He also would have found it a disappointing offer if he’d been dreaming of piloting a fire falcon. “Or maybe I’ll have Arkyn pilot the shuttle.”

He grinned at the thought. Then Arkyn could deal with the women and Hierax, and Zakota could relax up here, as much as was possible when the deck and the cot were covered with parts, tools, and removed panels. Maybe he could pull out his scrimshaw kit and start working on a new piece. Since Katie had been vaguely interested, he might make something for her. But what would she like? Not a svenkar; that was for sure. None of the animals in the galaxy would mean anything to her, and he didn’t know what Gaian animals looked like.

Too bad she would have to stay on the station with the other women. He couldn’t get a new piece carved and blessed by then. But maybe by the time the Falcon 8 made it back after the battle… He chose to assume they would make it back. Sagitta had to believe that, or he wouldn’t be abandoning them at the station. Or maybe that was opposite of the truth, Zakota amended silently. If Sagitta felt the battle would go well, would he be keeping the women aboard? The delay to veer over to the station and drop people off had to be grating at him.

But Hierax needed those metals, so maybe the station stop had little to do with the women. Sagitta was just taking the opportunity to leave them someplace safe.

“Yes, sir.” Asan had a skip to his step as he grabbed his kit and started toward the lift. He paused, looking back at the air purifier perched on the helm, and seemed to be considering grabbing it too.

“Leave that,” Zakota said. “My nose implores you.”

“Make sure to bring it back, then. I borrowed it from Ensign Woo. He made me sign an equipment check-out form and a waiver, give him my banking information, agree to late fees, and there was something at the bottom about paying for damages. Engineers are odd people.”

“Not everybody can be as normal as pilots.”

Asan smirked and saluted before trotting off the bridge.

“You two are as normal as a svenkar that doesn’t drool,” Hierax said.

Zakota didn’t answer—he didn’t think he needed to—and instead, ran a quick check to make sure the helm was operating smoothly. He pulled up a sensor display of the system and considered the station ahead of them. It was busy. Numerous ships were coming and going, and many of the docking slots were filled. Some remained open, but it was possible they could be reserved or were down for maintenance.

Still, the captain’s instincts were rarely wrong. When he sniffed trouble in the air, it usually manifested.

Though he was certain Commander Korta had already done it, Zakota made a list of all the ships in the area, placing at the top ones that had weapons that could trouble the Falcon and the Star Stalker. There wasn’t anything in the area as inimical as the Zi’i warship, and few of the visiting ships were from the same planet or fleet, so it seemed unlikely that they would band together to attack the Star Guardians.

After he’d composed his list, he still had time before the women would arrive, so Zakota decided to check in on Katie. He thought about going back down there personally—he felt a little bad about abandoning her to figure out how to turn on the flight simulator herself—but Hierax was too busy to watch the helm. Someone needed to be at the station when the Falcon wanted to untether.

Instead, he found the camera feeds for the shuttle bay and brought up the internal one for the shuttle Katie had claimed. He found an option that allowed him to observe her from a camera placed on the ceiling inside and a few meters behind her. He told himself he was acting as a potential flight instructor—later on, he could offer tips about her performance—rather than a voyeur.

Katie had figured out how to activate the simulator. Even though the shuttle stood stationary in the bay, the wrap-around holographic display showed her cruising through an asteroid field with enemy fighters chasing after her. Either by accident or design, she had jumped straight into an advanced course. She leaned and rose up on her toes as she manipulated the controls.

Zakota watched how she worked through the course, dipping and diving between the asteroids, then using them as cover as she looped back to fire at her pursuers. Huh, most people simply tried not to get hit, at least in the beginning. She used all the dimensions of space—a lot of newer pilots tended to think two-dimensionally instead of flying up and down as well as side to side—and she had an uncanny knack for knowing the size of the shuttle and just how close she could fly to an asteroid without grazing it. Usually, that only came with experience.

She rose up on her toes again, lunging to reach the controls for the shuttle’s meager weapons, and simulated energy bolts streaked out, hitting one of her foes in the nose. The poor woman needed something to stand on to more easily reach everything.

As she was leaning up there, Zakota got a nice view of her ass. Her jacket usually hung down over it, so he hadn’t noticed it before. Or maybe he just hadn’t thought of looking at it before. Either way, it was a nice ass. Firm but round, hugged by those tight blue pants she wore.

She jumped to hit the weapons controls again and jiggled a little as she came down. Zakota felt a stirring in his groin, and he wished he’d agreed to teach her in person instead of leaving her down there alone. Maybe he could have found an excuse to touch her hands, guiding them to the right controls. Or he might have cupped her ass to give her a boost…

“That your guest the captain didn’t not say could come over?” Hierax asked, wiping his hands on a rag as he came up from behind.

Zakota jumped, heat rushing to his cheeks. Hadn’t he just been telling himself he wasn’t a voyeur?

He hadn’t heard the chief walk over and hoped Hierax hadn’t been able to tell that Zakota’s gaze had drifted from Katie’s console to something lower.

“Yeah,” Zakota said, struggling for a nonchalant tone, and shifting his hips to the side to hide the bulge in his trousers.

Not that Hierax, of all people, would look at another guy’s crotch. He probably wouldn’t notice Katie had an ass, either.

“She looks pretty good, huh?” Hierax said.

For a second, Zakota thought Hierax was referring to asses, but he realized Hierax had to mean Katie’s flying.

“Surprisingly so, yes. She said she had military experience flying airplanes on her world, but I didn’t really think… I mean, Gaia is pretty primitive, you know?” Zakota felt a little hypocritical saying such things when his own people lived in huts and fished for their livelihoods, but he fully acknowledged that they, too, were primitive. He hadn’t touched a spaceship or even an airplane until he’d been old enough to sign up for the space fleet and get off-world.

“Yes, I was fairly shocked when Indi turned out to be useful in figuring out the Wanderer transmissions and getting the new gate installed.” Hierax offered a self-deprecating smile. “When I say useful, I mean integral.”

Zakota couldn’t remember him ever giving someone else credit, and it surprised him. Granted, there weren’t that many instances where he wasn’t justified in taking all the credit, at least when it came to engineering, repairs, and solving mechanical problems.

On the camera, Katie cruised out of the asteroid field. A statistics display to her side showed that she had blown up the four one-man fighters that had been pursuing her, but eight others flew out from behind a planet ahead of her. Katie threw up her arms, and, even though sound didn’t come through, Zakota knew she was cursing vehemently. He’d done the same thing when he ran that simulation. It wasn’t truly meant to be beaten, at least not in the traditional sense of coming out alive, but the Zi’i had some funny notions about what constituted a victory.

Katie zigzagged her craft in all manner of directions, trying to avoid the barrage of weapons fire that streaked in her direction from the new armada of ships. A huge green button to the side of the console flashed, inviting her to push it. It was protected by a transparent shell, and she would have to lift it in order to push the button. Zakota doubted she had any idea what it did.

She kept up her evasive maneuvers, doing a surprisingly good job of avoiding much of the fire, but she was vastly outnumbered, and there was nowhere to go. The enemy ships swarmed her and pummeled her from all sides. All power went out in the shuttle, leaving only that green button flashing. She looked at it as the ships flew in close to finish off her shuttle.

Her hands went up again in that frustrated gesture. She gave in and flipped up the case. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed the button.

The simulator showed her shuttle blowing up spectacularly and taking several nearby enemy vessels with it.

As the holographic display of ships and asteroids faded and returned to a view of the shuttle bay, Katie rocked down to the flats of her feet, her body a picture of disbelief. Zakota deliberately didn’t look at her ass—or any other part of her anatomy—since he figured she wouldn’t appreciate it, especially at that moment.

Though he did watch with much amusement as the Zi’i word for PASS came up on her screen, a translation also appearing in Dethocolean under it.

“Is it me,” Hierax said, “or did that simulator encourage her to press the self-destruct button?”

“It did, indeed. That’s what Zi’i warriors do when they’re cornered and certain of death. I’m not sure about this warship—you’d be more likely to know than me—but there are explosives built into those shuttles so that if you press that button, you’ve got a chance of taking out the enemies around you when you self-destruct.”

Hierax snorted. “And whatever friends make the mistake of flying close.”

“True.” Zakota tilted his head, still regarding Katie. “I didn’t expect her to pass the simulator test, self-destruct notwithstanding. Especially not on the first try.”

“Maybe you should train her so she can be a backup pilot in case you and Asan die valiantly when we go into battle.”

He frowned at Hierax. “Do you spend a lot of time imagining my valiant death?”

“Depends on how many repairs your crazy flying has caused for me in any given month.”

“Well, she’s not chipped, so she couldn’t replace us, but I guess we’re about to find out if she can fly that shuttle in a real scenario.”

“Oh?”

“I agreed that she could pilot the women to the station. And you.”

Hierax’s lips twisted into an odd expression. “I suppose the captain didn’t say that was acceptable.”

“He didn’t not say it was acceptable.”

“You’re going to get your ass grounded one of these days.”

“Hopefully not today.”