Dey groaned as a spray of sea water slapped her in the face. Her fields could have knocked the spray aside. But rather than using her energy on that, she and Loki had decided in their infinite wisdom to save her K9s for something more important. In case it came up. So far, she was regretting that choice. The engine sputtered behind her and she heard Xee's voice breaking over the howling sound of the storm and the sleeting rain that added to the wash of the waves.
"We're getting some red lights, Dey!"
"I noticed!"
Dey grabbed onto the wheel, locked it into position, then turned and ran onto the deck. If she had thought it was bad in the cabin, she found it infinitely worse in the rocking, tossing waves. She grabbed onto the edge of the
Enterprise
to keep herself from sliding overboard and mentally regretted every leaving Miami. But no, she had to get some
treasure
.
The Cape of Good Hope wasn't the southernmost tip of Africa. But it was the most recognizable landmark out there – but the storms that blew from the pole and along the coast were nothing to joke about. They hadn't been anything to joke about in the 18
th
century, when people had struggled past with nothing but wooden ships and iron souls. They hadn't been anything to joke about in massive steaming dreadnoughts from the first and second Big Wars. Now, on a ship with technology literally light years ahead of those eras, Dey was worried that this storm was going to be enough to send her into the spray.
She pushed herself away. Her feet remained planted on the deck as Loki painted the view in false colors, outlining different things to grab onto in case of a major swell. With those hand holds, she got to the engine and managed to flip it open. She saw the fault immediately. As she worked, Xee handed her tools and tried to keep the rain out of her face – holding up her palms and creating a shimmering warp field that refracted the rain away from the lot of them.
Underneath the
Enterprise
, Sky worked his tentacly best to use his sub – the
Cthulu –
to maintain their course, the connection between the two ships making his engines essentially small backups to the
Enterprise
's primary.
Another sleet of rain slapped Dey in the face.
"Sorry!"
She shook her head at Xee, then shoved a replacement wire home. The engine sputtered to life again, the electrics whirring as Dey shoved the covering back down. She looked up at Xee, grinning fiercely.
"Still better than being a ball and chain," she said.
"I do not understand that reference."
Loki laughed.
Dey looked back over the seas – the dark waters illuminated by flashes of lightning. She half expected to see the beefy form of her current ex-husband beating through the waves. Not that Kuz the Shockpod, a genetically engineered alien supersoldier, was actually her husband or ever had been. A pity victory on the field of battle did not a wedding ceremony make, not in Dey's head. And not according to any law on Earth. And since the Shockpod tribes had become independent from the Yahaag Corporatocracy, the Shockpod's laws had failed to apply to Earth as well. That kind of thing happened when your primary interaction with another alien race was wandering marauders dropping onto your colony worlds, shooting the shit out of them, and general nastiness like that.
Then Dey's brow furrowed.
In the darkness, she swore she saw a boat bobbing on the waves.
"More Titanic hunters?" Xee asked.
"Maybe."
They had bumped into another set of ships making their way to the fabled location of the Titanic-2 – the reason why Dey had left her quiet vacation and set out on a trans-atlantic trip with a bunch of weird aliens. The Titanic-2 was one of those massive historical coincidences, like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or the dual nuking of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. The same designs and the same deck lay out as the original Titanic, with the same mixture of bigwigs and poor, with the same kind of hubristic captain and the same horrible chain of mistakes and tragedies and bloody human stupidity.
Different oceans, though.
Another wave smashed into the prow of the
Enterprise
and when Dey was done blinking, the other ship was gone.
###
Dey groaned as she woke up. Her muscles ached from a night of running, tugging, kicking and swearing. Her face felt grimy with salt and she blinked grit from her eyes as she sat up. Xee was sprawled on the bed next to her. The slender Huntress hadn't taken the storm particularly well, considering the fact that she came from a world where the only liquid was helium-3. And helium-3 didn't rain, or sleet, or splash. It just writhed.
And wriggled.
And...
Dey blinked.
Her palm wasn't resting on the soft curve of a pillow as she pushed herself up.
No. Pillows were not so perfectly rounded and firm. Pillows were also not attached to a pair of shapely alien legs. Dey's hand was resting on Xee's butt. The Huntress was laying face down on the bed, her body tangled with sheets and pillows. Dey had managed to not impale herself on the spines that thrust up from the Huntress' back, each one shimmering with the faint warp field that they used to cool their bodies off. Loki had explained it as a doppling trick. In the same way a freight train's whistle got lower pitched as the train rushes away from you, Xee's suit used warp fields to decelerate infrared radiation down to radio waves.
Something sparked in Dey's brain.
"Mmm..." Xee lifted her head slightly, her palms pushing along the bed. She arched her back and pushed that rump into Dey's hand more. Dey's hand reacted, like any red blooded American's might, when grabbing an alien's butt. By squeezing. Xee squeaked and jerked her head up and Dey sprang away from her as if she was red hot.
"Are we alive!?" Xee asked, scrambling up and looking around.
The cabin looked just as trashed as Dey felt. The
Enterprise
looked like it had been knocked completely ahoo. One of the storage lockers had been knocked open, and supplies were scattered across the deck. One of the windows had shattered outwards and glass glinted along the side of the ship. One of the engine compartments had flipped open and sparks seemed to be flying from it every few seconds. The hatch in the center of the deck opened and Skylar tugged himself out, groaning.
"Do you know what life is like in a paint can?" he asked, sounding dizzy.
"A paint can?" Xee asked.
"You get shaken to fuck!" Skylar pushed himself to his tentacles, tripped, fell to the ground with a thump. He groaned. "I think I'm going to throw up."
Dey hurried forward. It turned out that there were several dozen evolutionary similarities across the known species of the galaxy. One of them was the vomit reflex. Omnivores tended to weather ecological shocks better, and omnivores who could risk eating posion without immediately dropping dead tended to survive to have more omnivore babies. So, everyone vomited. And everyone needed a friend to do something like, well. This. Dey grabbed Sky's tentacles, dragged him to the side of the
Enterprise
and left him hanging over head. His beak opened and a thick spray of grey-green goop dropped from his mouth.
Dey winced.
It was instinctive in humans to want to vomit when they saw someone else throwing up.
Turns out squids were close enough for squishy bits of her brain to start sending up primeval warning signals:
Hey, he's throwing up. Maybe we ate it too?
[Shut up brain.]
I'll tell it to knock it off,
Loki said. Soon, the urge faded.
