The Navigatrix

Warp Riders – Chapter 19

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Wind whistled across the cave mouth, sending a deeper hum around the cavern. The Captain tried bending her injured knee again, gently, and it felt fine, totally fine and then– “Fuck!”

“Captain! What are you doing down there?”

She breathed slowly through her nose until the pain spike passed. 

“I’ve fucked up my knee. It’s fine.” Well. “I mean it’s not fine, but it’s… I’m fine. They’re sending a splint, right?”

“Splint, boat, rope, more rope – anything else?”

“Wouldn’t mind a stiff drink and a beach umbrella, actually.”

A snort was just audible, echoing down into the cavern. And then silence once more. The Captain focused on massaging her knee, which had swollen up enough her pant leg was tight around it.

They had enough medical supplies on the ship itself that she wasn’t worried long term about it; short of a full break, they could handle most things in the field. She’d be off it for a few days, but that was fine. She could supervise; no more research trips, stick to repairs.

It did hurt like a bitch, though. Maybe shock had worn off? She was shivering a bit still; maybe it hadn’t quite passed. How long a trip was it back to camp if you were jogging? How fast could the Stowaway run for supplies – and how heavy was the inflatable raft?

The logistics of her own rescue were fascinating, and the Captain was deep in thought about how best to optimize the immediate circumstances when the Navigatrix mumbled something down the tunnel.

“You what?”

“I said it’s – it’s very peaceful on this moon.”

“Besides my peril?”

No response to that, of course.

“No, no, it’s a very peaceful sort of spelunking disaster, my mistake.”

Quiet. Then.

“Captain,” almost too quiet to hear, down the tunnel and into the cavern, “do you miss Lucy?”

Oh, no. No no no. Not now. “Don’t do this, Navigatrix.”

“It’s just, I thought I missed her before, but now we’re here – I just, I really feel it, her absence.”

The Captain flopped back onto her back in frustration. Why NOW. “We all miss her, for sure, but, it’s been a long time–”

“Well, now, no. It actually has been almost no time at all–”

“–that’s not what I mean, you pedantic–”

“I think we’ve had maybe a month of linear time–”

“She’s gone! She’s gone, and we all had that meeting about it, and why are you bringing her up now?”

Wind whistled.

“I just keep thinking that she would have gotten a kick out of all this.”

“She made it clear she didn’t enjoy any of this when she LEFT US.”

“Captain, are you still this mad at her?”

The Captain was overwhelmed by frustration with the Navigatrix; so much, her eyes pricked and she had to blink and blink and whisper “fuck” under her breath a few times.

“I’m not mad. I’m disappointed.”

“Are you sad?”

“Disappointed!”

It was amazing, how audible the Navigatrix’s skeptical silence was down in the cave. The Captain rubbed her face, extremely furious.

“Captain – I’m not going to tell you what to do, but you’re allowed, if you like, to miss your little sister.”

“She doesn’t deserve to be missed.”

Well, that came out of her own mouth, didn’t it. Might as well dig this pit even deeper. “She’s the one who abandoned us! We were a crew. We had a job to do!”

“We all know we’re only doing them for fun now, Captain.”

“They’re still jobs!”

“Well, don’t you ever think about retiring?”

“What?!” Why was she bringing this up? “No! Why! Are you planning to leave me too?” The Captain cringed to herself as her voice cracked. “Because just – just tell me and fuck off so I can find another navigator.”

That got a snort.

“I might be the least likely of this crew to do such a thing, Captain.”

It sounded like a joke, but the Captain heard some of that gentleness in her voice that so often pissed her off. She must be out of adrenaline, because she had to admit she almost felt comforted.

No need to say it aloud, though.

Warp Riders – Chapter 18

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If it was possible for the subsequent silence to be awkward, after all their years in absurd situations together, it somehow was. The Captain felt the silence descend again, so complete that she thought she could make out the subtle sound of deep water draining out of the cave.

She was starting to hear drips, presumably as the cave walls were exposed, and whatever slime grew in an unlit lake shed its water. She could even, she was absolutely certain, hear the Navigatrix breathing, as if the tunnel magnified it into intimacy across the distance.

It was awful, absolutely unbearable. Silence was not an option.

“How, uh, how is everyone?”

“At camp?” The Navigatrix sounded as sulking in a cave was a perfectly normal thing for the Captain to do.

“Yes at camp! Did the Engineer’s cipher work?”

“Oh, her cipher. She revved it up, yes. She was able to start the engines from shore to power it.”

“But did it work, Navigatrix! Could you talk to the Stowaway?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Not even remotely.” The Navigatrix paused as if in respect. “The Engineer said that she may have to do a hard reset on the computer tonight after the shit she put it through today.”

“Goddammit.”

Silence again, with definite audible drips now, torturously echoey.

“Navigatrix!”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What, uh-” Topic, Captain, find a topic, what did they normally talk about? “-what made worried about the Stowaway?”

“Oh, well, I’d be delighted to tell you. Just a moment.”

Scrabbling noises again, the sandy crunch of footsteps receding, footsteps returning, and a flap of what had to be the Navigatrix’s cape, and then.

“Just checking that we’re actually alone, Captain.”

“If it’s this big, why am I only hearing about it now?”

“Well, I did warn you-”

The Captain felt the comfortable irritation returning finally.

“You gave me a cryptic warning and then never mentioned it again! How worried could you really be?”

The drips echoed in the silence.

“Well, my Captain, I wouldn’t like anyone to think I worry.” She sighed, audibly. “But-” she continued, “it was hard to put my finger on for a few days. Hard to be certain without being able to check. I didn’t have any further information for you at the time.”

“Why are you so infuriatingly cryptic!” The Captain returned the audible sigh as loudly as she could.

The Navigatrix did not snap back with some glib remark immediately. The Captain let herself breathe out some of her frustration, however helpful she found it. Then, gently, calmly:

“Feet back on the ground, Navigatrix, and tell me what’s wrong.”

Drips, breathing, a distant glug as some natural drain continued pulling the water away. Gravel skittering down the tunnel and falling into the water as the Navigatrix moved around up there for some reason. This was so much worse than face to face conversations.

“I’m going to need you to let me get cryptic, Captain.” The Captain kept her thoughts about that to herself this time. “It’s been strange times for us, quite literally. And I didn’t pay much attention to our … guest… when they arrived.”

“You were always in the Orb.”

“Yes.” A huff, echoing into the cavern from the tunnel. “Yes, I was always in the Orb. And if I could, now, I think I would still be in there. Time is beautiful, and I miss looking at it.” 

That was a strangely vulnerable statement, and it sounded like it cost her to say it aloud.

“But since I am forced out of the Orb, trapped here, I have been paying more attention to the Stowaway.”

“We all have,” the Captain grumbled up the tunnel. “Have you seen them use a knife?”

“Yes, but that’s not it. Their voice – or whatever it is we hear -”

“Nonsense noises.”

“No. Well. I don’t know. But Captain – they sound like the Orb.”

“They- what?” The Navigatrix did not repeat herself. “The Orb. Navigatrix, do you think the Orb speaks to you?”

“Well I didn’t, but now I’m worried that it might be trying, the same as them!”

“You told me it was inert! Are you saying it’s conscious?”

“No, but…” She sighed. “…what if it’s relaying someone else’s voice?”

That gave the Captain a shiver. She’d gotten so used to weaving in and out of time, she had forgotten how little they really knew about the Orb. The idea of someone eavesdropping on them through it was surprisingly credible.

“We need to get at it. I need you to figure this out, Nav.”

“I know.” The Navigatrix did sound worried, which was actually really worrying. “I know, I know, I know, but if I hold it again it will be very, very hard for me to look away.”

The Captain let that sink in.

“If I have to climb in it and drag you out so you can tell me if we were sabotaged, so be it.”

Warp Riders – Chapter 17

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The Captain was cold, somehow still damp after hours of lying in the dark, headlamp off, trying to conserve battery while she let her knee calm down. Flexing it wasn’t too bad now, but putting weight on it was unsteady and threw her back into the water once already.

Climbing steep cliff walls was no joke with all four limbs; she wasn’t sure how she was going to get up them with only three, but, as she kept repeating aloud, she’d been in much worse scrapes than this before. Now, normally she wasn’t alone for them, but the point stood.

Normally, of course, she would be lectured at length by her crew; she thought fondly of the Bosun’s robust vocabulary of swear words, punchy little four letter additions to the mood, whether tense or triumphant; she could almost hear the Engineer’s elaborate threats and curses delivered in a spirit of motivating dialogue, despite the content thereof. She could remember, so clearly it hurt, Lucy’s stubbornly optimistic listing of all the cocktails and novelty foods they were going to eat once they were out of whatever scrape they’d all fallen in.

She could bring to mind the perpetual absentminded hum of the Navigatrix, some tuneless noise that was annoying in how relaxed it always sounded, as if she never really was worried, no matter how dire the straits they were in.

And honestly, after hours in the echoing dark listening to the kind of silence a huge body of utterly still water made, her ears were starting to hallucinate. It was as if that irritating hum was getting louder, realer, the more she thought about it – and that couldn’t bode well.

And then, blythely, her imagined Navigatrix shouted “Captain! Any chance you’re in this hole?” and, well, what was there to do but to reply?

“Navigatrix, you’re going to need a lot of rope, and an inflatable raft, and a splint, and hurry up!”

“Let me relay that to my guide here -” and then the imagined, or real, or did it even matter? – the Navigatrix could be heard, ever so quietly, talking to someone else. The Captain laid her head back down on the stone, and reached over to the water, to prove she was really awake – and confusingly, the water was farther away than she remembered.

That also didn’t bode well. She bit the bullet, sat up again and switched on the headlamp. Mercifully, the lake was still there – she hadn’t imagined it – but it was at least a foot lower than she remembered.

“Well, Captain, the Stowaway’s heading back for your shopping list, but I think I’ll stay here and keep you company by shouting into this hole.”

“Is it sunrise already?”

“Is it what? Sunrise? I can’t see it over the ridge –” Frustratingly, scuffling noises echoed down the tunnel.

And then silence, long enough for the Captain to return to her prior suspicion that this was all a stress dream, and yet; 

“I’m guessing it’s about half an hour after sunrise, maybe?”

“Ah shit, shit, the tide’s going out in here -”

“Are you … swimming?”

“You’re gonna need more rope.”

“Oh, I’ll tell camp -” and then a very confusing array of beeps and static echoed off the rock walls. A robotic version of the Engineer’s voice could be heard crackling through the static, and she and the Navigatrix had a clipped shouting match about rope and climbing equipment.

Further beeps and then silence, and then further scuffling.

“What are you doing? Don’t come down here and fall in as well!”

“I would never. I’m sitting down in the tunnel so I don’t have to bend over to talk to you.”

“Real brave of you to rest here instead of lug supplies.”

“You sound like you could use cheering up, honestly. Want to play Eye Spy?”

“Fuck you.”

Warp Riders – Chapter 16

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It wasn’t that the Navigatrix was worried about the Captain, but it was very out of character for her to be late to dinner.

The Captain was the one who decided when dinner happened, for one. She was also usually the one to round the rest of them up when the Bosun gave the signal. She also, it turned out, carried a lot of the dinner conversation.

After the third attempt by the Engineer to draw them all into a rousing explanation of the microtransistors she was using in the short-range radio comms, the Bosun slammed the lid back on the pot.

“Why would she stay out this late?” She huffed. “Food doesn’t stay good forever.”

“I’m sure it’s not a personal slight.” The Navigatrix gently lifted the pot lid and served herself seconds. “It’s certainly her loss.”

“You don’t think there’s anything dangerous out there?” The Engineer let only the slightest hint of guilt into her voice.

The Stowaway also, somehow, looked guilty; they rarely wore emotions on their face, and the Navigatrix tucked that fact away for later contemplation.

“I’m sure she’s wrestled worse than this planet,” said the Bosun. “Saw her disable two security bots with one right hook once.”

There was a moment of silence while they all contemplated that feat. Then, one by one, they turned to the Navigatrix.

“Sorry, but I don’t throw hooks of any type.” She folded her arms. 

“Your entire job description is finding things,” countered the Engineer.

“Things in space!”

“We’re all technically in space!”

“Yelling at me won’t make me better at a thing I don’t know how to do.”

The Engineer huffed and sat back. “You want us to all sit here and wait to see if she’s coming back at all?” Behind her, the green glow of the horizon threatened sunrise.

Suddenly, the Stowaway stood up. They looked pointedly at the Navigatrix, and then grabbed a water bottle and walked to the edge of the camp. When the Navigatrix returned their gaze, they tilted their head to one side in a gesture that felt half challenge, half dismissal.

“Well.” She stood up and stared them in the eye a little longer. They didn’t flinch, just stood there. “Fine.”

The Navigatrix picked up a water bottle for herself, and looked at the Engineer. “Did you reassemble those short range radios? I see I’m going on a rescue mission.”

Later, as she and the Stowaway walked away from camp, the silent guest in front, she considered the possibility that this was a way to murder them all, one by one. They were small, yes, but who knew what skills they had besides, apparently, tracking captains through wilderness.

“For the record” she hissed, “I don’t really trust you.”

The Stowaway gave her a withering glare, then returned to scanning for signs of their errant Captain.

Warp Riders – Chapter 12

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No one did anything so rude as to, say, sigh with relief as the Captain disappeared in the distance, but the Navigatrix caught the Engineer and the Bosun exchanging a meaningful look, and the Stowaway sat down and stretched back in a cat-like yawn that almost looked forced.

She had to ask. “She hasn’t been that bad, has she?”

The Engineer snorted as the Bosun raised an eyebrow.

“I’m happy to make her coffee and send her on her way, but yesterday she kept interrupting me, trying to tell me how to wash out the percolator. My percolator.”

The Stowaway was trying to suppress their smile.

“And!” said the Engineer, “AND she started taking my short range radios apart without me while I was eating lunch. She made me explain to her everything I was doing for the whole afternoon.” She huffed. “Set me back by days.”

“She not bothering you?” asked the Bosun, as the Stowaway gave up and started giggling at the Engineer’s expression.

The Navigatrix tilted her head. “Well, she’s certainly around more. I don’t mind her taking an interest in my work.”

“Looked more like nagging to me.”

“Doesn’t get under my skin, I guess. Maybe you could find more joy in sharing?”

The Engineer glowered at her. “I’m happy to share, but she’s been miserable since we got here and you know it.”

“No good at relaxing, I’d say.” The Bosun gestured. “This kid, now, they get it.”

The Stowaway had stretched out, hands under their head, eyes closed, clearly enjoying the breeze.

The Navigatrix honestly thought the pose looked forced, but far be it from her to nag anyone. There were much better ways to spend the day.

Warp Riders – Chapter 9

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They’d crashed on a very accommodating moon, it turned out. The weather was clear, the temperature mild, the air breathable, the flora and fauna both edible and minimally aggressive.

The only discomforting element was the ruins.

They were so well incorporated into the landscape in some places, it was almost hard to notice them. All that was left was stone and metal, but enough of it was there to intrigue the Engineer.

“Just one day trip!”

She and the Captain were arguing while fishing in the briny lake. There was a stone plaza – or maybe a stone roof – that protruded out into the deeper part of high tide and made for good hunting; the construction of it was tantalizingly mysterious.

“We need you focused on getting us out of here, not settling in.” The Captain sighed and started pulling her line back in. “I need you to make the ship livable enough we can get inside and repair it.”

“I just need to collect some data; I can examine it after we leave.”
“No!”

Around the camp stove at dinner, the Captain found few allies.

“They’re creepy,” said the Bosun. “Ruins don’t work like this, so evenly spread out. I say send her out for a day.”

“Don’t you want to get out of here? We need the ship working!”

The Navigatrix raised a hand –

“I agree, we can’t ignore how strange this place is. But if you can’t spare the Engineer, Captain, you could send someone working on less urgent things?”

“Everything is urgent right now! Are you angling for a day off too?”

The Navigatrix gave the Captain a withering look.

“Supervising is not an urgent role, Captain. Why not go take a walk tomorrow.”

The worst part was, everyone else agreed.

Warp Riders – Chapter 8

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The Navigatrix found camp life surprisingly nice. She’d spent most of her life in flight; two or three more days and this would be the longest she’d been terrestrial since a brief stint in her teens.

She loved watching the sunset as they woke up, seeing the green rays turn blue and slide below the horizon; feeling the warmth of the planet glow on her back as the lake rushed in to high tide. There was faunal noise here, random and textural and sometimes quite annoying.

The wind was incredible, pushed around predictably by the solar cycle, but always a little surprising as it pulled at her hair and tunic like a living thing. So different from the forced air of any ship she’d been on. Sometimes if she turned her head just right, it hummed to her.

But none of it drowned out the silence she felt outside the Orb.

The crash had happened when she was out, arguing with the Captain about the computer; no one had been on the bridge at all, and they ended up doing the landing from the emergency controls in the back of the ship instead of trying to rush through all the tunnels and ladders.

And it was good they did, because the bridge took a serious hit upon impact, crumpling from the side in such a way that the sealed doors folded into locked origami steel structures. The Captain’s attempts to get into it while things were still hot had nearly taken her arm off.

So the Orb was, for the moment, locked up, away from the Navigatrix, and she felt like she’d lost a limb – or maybe more accurately, a sense.

Now time was all around her and she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it at all, and oh, how she missed it.

Warp Riders – Chapter 7

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The Orb had come to them about a year after they’d officially started running gigs together – the Captain, the Navigatrix, the Engineer, the Bosun, and Lucy. At that stage, they’d pulled off a few good tricks for some high rollers, and they’d gotten cocky.

Mostly clients communicated via parcel coordinates – they’d send galactic positioning system coordinates, and the Nav’d find them on the map, and Lucy’d pilot the flight, and they’d all have a good nap until the ship dinged and they’d haul in a tiny little box with instructions.

They’d drop off scores and pick up payments the same way; they only went planet-side for the runs themselves, and the occasional shopping trip.

So it wasn’t unusual to pick up a faint signal full of numbers and letters; and it wasn’t particularly hard for the Engineer to decode.

It was, notably, a pretty remote corner to go fishing for a tiny box in, but the Captain’d told them that was how the best clients worked; they were too rich and powerful to know the difference between reasonable requests and inconvenient ones. So off they went.

But it wasn’t a box at the coordinates; it was a small, very small, very dark, very hard to find chunk of an asteroid. Lucy saw it first, noticed its dust trail on the scanner. They’d pulled it in, and the first person to pick it up had been the Navigatrix – and that was when things got weird.

First, she froze. For a full minute, no one could get her attention or pull the rock from her hands.

Then, the rock exploded, sending dust across the common room, larger fragments rattling against the ceiling, the floor, the lockers… when they blinked the dust away enough to see, the Navigatrix had pulled whatever was still in her hands right up to her face, and she humming the way she did when charting a drop, but faster, higher, frantically.

When she finally lowered them, she revealed the Orb.

They’d passed it around; the strange sphere of gas that simply… held itself together. It had almost no weight, but it also had no momentum – they could gently push it from hand to hand and it would simply stop midair if they disengaged.

The Captain had taken it first, eyes wide with fear even after the Navigatrix had woken up and laughed with delight. The Captain stared at it for a minute or two, then scoffed at it with some relief.

Next it went to the Engineer, who mostly talked about its mass and energy and glow.

She hadn’t bothered staring into it particularly; she just pushed it around until she got bored, and then gently shoved it over to the Bosun.

The Bosun cast a skeptical eye across it, shook her head, and handed the Orb, though they didn’t know it was the Orb then, to Lucy.

Lucy smiled, like it was all a fun game, as she caught the Orb and pulled it towards her face; but she grew deadly serious as she squinted into it. There was a hint of awe on her face when she locked eyes with the Navigatrix.

“Is this thing – is this a chart?”

The Navigatrix grinned like a mischievous child.

“If I’m right, Lucy, this thing is a chart of time.”

It took a few creative modifications to the ship, but within a month they were ready for their first trip outside of time. The Captain had brainstormed a list of new possible gigs to try if this thing really worked, and she kept them all on task.

First, they went into warp – as usual – but then came the new part: they went all the way through, out the other side of light speed. Suddenly, they weren’t going impossible fast – they were simply floating motionless in a churning, smearing maelstrom of stars.

Then the Navigatrix sat down at the helm and raised the Orb to her eye level. She shoved all ten fingers into its gaseous form and began to stretch it, pulling it wider, taller, deeper, until it became a huge bubble that she was completely hidden within.

Her voice was muffled as she hummed her busy-thinking hum, and the Orb started to churn in sync with the lights outside the ship — and then the ship began to move, driven by the Navigatrix from deep within the Orb.

And once she proved they could move in and out of time at will, the Captain sent word out that they had new, longer term capabilities, and the real fun began.

The Navigatrix started spending more and more time inside the Orb, coming out to locate more mundane locations on the usual computer, or to eat, or to sleep, but very rarely. She was the first one of them to realize that eating and sleeping had become … optional, essentially.

In fact, a lot of things felt optional after a while. The accounts they’d set up once while a century or two in the past were taking care of most of their material needs, and being outside of time really reduced those to almost nothing.

They still did client work, but more for the fun of it; maybe that was why the jobs they took got so much more dangerous.

Warp Riders – Chapter 4

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The smell of coffee brought the Captain out of her tent as the green sun set. The Bosun and the Stowaway were working in quiet organization around the makeshift stove, and the Navigatrix was pouring herself a mug. No Engineer yet; her sleep cycle seemed to be slightly different.

No one was wearing their uniforms properly anymore. The Bosun had stripped down to her work tank; the Navigatrix had abandoned the ceremonial cape and gauntlets. The Captain would have worn hers, but evacuating the ship had cost her most of a sleeve.

The green light had an uncanny effect on the Navigatrix’s copper hair; sometimes it almost looked black in the light. The Captain thought it gave her a bit of an occult air; pale face and dark hair and those long, long limbs.

She was kneeling as she added spices to her coffee, and when she looked up and caught the Captain’s eye, she shot a wry half-smile through the haze of the stove.

“Guess who just finished the pot.”
“First time you’re awake before me and this is the shit you pull.”

She made her way over to join the Captain, and gestured with her cup.

“Want a sip?”

“The way you spice it? I can smell it just fine from over here.” Cinnamon and cloves, pepper and a pinch of salt and something sweet. “Impressed you got the Bosun to rescue your spice rack.”

“Got her to grab my best mug last night, too.” The Navigatrix nudged the Captain with her foot and proudly showed her the faded logo.

“Navigatrix, you piece of shit.”

The compass rose, sword and skull were all there, framing the cafe name, “Pirate’s Cove”, in melodramatic pink.

“That’s a fucking latte mug from the cafe on Ereb.”
“Oh, it might be!”
“This is when you tell me that you stole a shitty mug -”
“- well, now -”
“- from a cheesy theme cafe -”
“- okay, but -”
“- on the last planet we got arrested on?”

She winked. “You know I love a keepsake.”

The Navigatrix had never been the most straightforward person – folks who read star charts rarely were – but after they’d found the Orb, she’d become fully enigmatic.

The Captain hadn’t had this banal a conversation with her in, well, since they’d first left time. She didn’t trust it.

“I guess I’m glad you still found time to plot a route out of there, in between your thievery and cafe patronage.” The Captain felt herself getting angry. “Let me know when you make any headway on figuring out this novelty-tchotchke-free moon.”

But the Navigatrix never seemed up for a fight when the Captain wanted one, and she nodded as if that was a reasonable thing to say.

“You know, it’s a refreshing challenge, using analogue methods to locate us, both galactically and temporally. The light does complicate it.”

They both turned to watch planetrise, and watched a flock of aerial creatures scatter as the pink rays brought colour back to the landscape.

The Captain tilted her head back, trying to find the darkest part of the sky; between sun and planet, not a single star was visible.

“Talk to the Engineer. Get your equipment up and running. We need to know when we are.”

Warp Riders – Chapter 3

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The Stowaway had shown up after their last gig. The four of them had fled back to the ship after things had gone sideways. They’d quickly battened the hatches and dropped through the warp, back out of time, and it was only afterwards they noticed them hiding in Lucy’s old bunk.

They weren’t a crew that got stowaways; the Engineer had set up very fiddly locking systems on all the doors of the ship, the sort that took a whole choreography of twists and turns to unlatch. So the first thing the Captain asked their guest was how the hell they’d gotten in.

But the Stowaway didn’t tell her. Couldn’t, maybe.

They opened their mouth and made noises, but not noises anyone thought of as, say, words. Noises that kind of slid in one ear and out the other, warped and slippery, without leaving any meaning behind whatsoever.

So the Engineer got them a keyboard to type on, and they frowned and made a good effort, clicked all the keys, and hissed audibly as the screen filled with punctuation and numbers, continuing to add more for a few seconds even after they raised their hands.

So the Bosun pulled out her personal notepad, tore off a sheet, and handed an analogue pen to the Stowaway. They all gathered round and watched as their guest wrestled with the pen, sweating and huffing, failing to make it put anything on the page that resembled a word.

At which point, the Navigatrix threw her hands in the air and called it futile, and they left the Stowaway in Lucy’s old bunk, locked the door, and spent another hour arguing as a crew over whether it was worth the risk to drop back into time immediately and kick them off.

In the end, they hadn’t really gotten around to it, was the thing.

There was always a lot to do between gigs, even without the pressure of time weighing on them. The ship needed repairs, their equipment had to be patched up, and this time, so did the crew themselves.

It didn’t take long for the Bosun to talk the Captain into unlocking the bunk and putting the Stowaway to work in the kitchen; and now it felt almost like they’d always been there, in their terrestrial outfit, silently doing odd jobs in all the quiet corners of the ship.

That was the thing about living outside time; it was hard to be sure of duration.