Talleriah was a no bullshit kind of woman. She wouldn’t threaten to cut someone’s balls off. She’d cut them off. Luckily, there weren’t any individuals on the Second Prize who’d needed genital removal surgery. The grease monkeys in her command were a tight unit even if they lacked the social graces of a well oiled IF crew.

  She wouldn’t have taken the job if she hadn’t served with Stryker in the IF. He was the only nonasshole from her first and last assignment in Earth’s military. Her mouth prevented her from ever really being part of the IF. She didn’t like calling shit anything more than it was, shit.

  And the Second Prize was in a whole heap of it. A panel burst in engineering that also happened to be holding a stash of a LSD, Ecstasy, Cocaine hybrid called Blaze. The previous owners of the ship left all sorts of surprises for her to clean up. Due to the arosoling nature of the explosion, she had to send all her techs to Eleven Backward so they wouldn’t lick machinery while they were high off their asses.

  The only reason Talleriah didn’t think she was David Bowie flying through a starfield was the fact that she was taking a dump when the explosion happened and was able to get her PPE on in time. She came back to a room full of grease monkeys who thought they were Frodo Baggins, and the Curve drive was Mount Doom.

  Now, because of the ridiculous, bullshit order by the captain to keep the ship juicing, she barely kept up with making sure the ship didn’t go up in a fireball. She hadn’t even had time to call it in to Stryker, who’d probably get his dick in a twist for not letting him know. Lucky, the first of the second shift crew was arriving in their hazard suits as she instructed.

  Technician Manson was the first to show in a bright yellow suit that made him look like the Tour De France during Pride parade. There really wasn’t anything different about the uniform other than high visibility coloring and the personal force field generator/atmosphere converter attached to his belt.

  She handed him a sonic wrench and said, “Every time it redlines, turn that valve, a half a turn. HALF A TURN. No more.”

  “Yes boss,” he said and walked over to the wall with a display that was dangerously close to red lining. He pressed a button on the wrench and a light beam gripped the pipe. Most tools used tractor beams and force fields to manipulate objects, but the geeks who invented them were big Dr. Who fans so almost any handheld tool that could manipulate objects was called sonic despite not using sound waves in the slightest. Except for the sonic sonic screwdriver that used noise to vibrate a screw free, that’s not to be confused with the sonic screwdriver that uses a tractor beam forcefield combo.

  Another tech arrived and she set him to work reconfiguring chips. It was the 24th century, and the engineers still had to reconfigure chips from a panel in the wall. No one really understood why pulling out chips and putting them in different slots would solve problems, or why they just weren’t in their propers slots to begin with, but it always seemed to work.

  Talleriah didn’t know how the damned thing worked, only how to fix the damned thing. The eggheads in spacedock could talk about Curve field theory, and cutting edge physics all they wanted, but the chief engineer in the field just had to get the thing working, and kept it working when some idiot from the home office wanted to measure their dick by claiming they had the fastest ship in the fleet.

  But as her dad always used to say, “dick size doesn’t matter in the vast coldness of space. Nuts all freeze the same.”

  After she got the entire second shift making sure the damned thing didn’t fall apart, she was ready to make her report about the incident, but she wasn’t going to accept a middle man. As much as she thought Stryker was a solid dude, the captain needed to hear it when he was being a jackass, and she had no problem telling off her superiors. Part of the reason she was on this heap of crap.

  “Computer, locate Captain Peecurd,” Talleriah said.

  “Peecurd is in Eleven Backward.”

  She turned to tech Manson and said. “Don’t let the ship fall apart while I’m away.”

  “But what if–”

  “You better hope those atmo units have enough air to wait for rescue.”

  The tech’s belt contraption was rated for vacuum and even could keep the person inside with air for about three hours or so. It wasn’t as good as a vac suit that had mag boots, air for days, and even some chemical propellant for getting back to the ship, but considering if the ship went up, they’d be lucky to teleport in time to avoid the explosion.

  She stormed off toward the lift.

  ***

  Elven Backward was like Moulin Rouge if Moulin Rouge was directed by the guy who made Roadhouse and starred the cast of the 1980s street gang classic the Warriors. One group of techs who should have been in engineering were all wearing white face paint, no clothes, and taking turns punching each other in the gut while laughing. Another two were making out in the corner with such passion it could be classified as erotica. A third was weeping in the corner.

  Captain Peecurd was leading other members of the crew in sea shanties and clanking tankards together as they drank their way into oblivion. Stryker couldn’t believe what he was seeing. One of the techs sniffed another in the crotch and began to lick the wall while reciting Shakespeare.

  Talleriah arrived a moment or two after Stryker.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “What the shit?” She said.

  “I know. The captain doesn’t usually start singing sea shanties until he’s at least had three,” Stryker said.

  “No the explosion was just in engineering but ensign Rob and Marth are from astrometrics…” She nodded to two men who could only be described as two mimes performing Cirque du Soleil.

  Stryker began to feel a wave of dizziness come over him. He turned to Talleriah and saw that her wavy blonde hair was rippling, and she had a stack of eyes.

  “Put on your hazard suit,” she said and her words came out with sheet music and fluttering birds. She activated an atmo unit on her belt that melted when she touched it. She handed him a glowing shimmering orb.

  He reached out with fascination with the device. He knew somehow that it was connected to god. He didn’t even believe in god, but this thing was somehow godlike and transformative. The entire human race would just be lightwaves drifting through the universe.

  He pressed the button and a black hole encased his body. It covered every inch of him and attempted to pull him apart atom by atom. He attempted to scream, but he was trapped in a void, but somehow, on the other side of a vast chasm was Talleriah with her wavy hair fluttering and rainbow sheet music erupting from her lips. Her extra eyes drifted away in a cool breeze.

  He could feel his legs moving as he followed the musical notes and occasionally, from the corner of his eye, he’d see a lizard scurry by when but when he turned to take a look at it, he felt hands directing him back on the path the golden musical road that burst tiny musical notes every time he stepped.

  Occasionally a two-head ogre or dragon would saunter by and he one time thought that he saw an apple tree with all the knowledge if he could just take a bite, but this mystical elf creature with silver hair kept directing him through tunnels with gemstones encrusted into the walls.

  He was about to grab a gem when the elf turned into a demon and shoved him into a pit where he fell for what felt like his entire life, birth, death, everything in between flashed through his mind until he landed at the bottom of a well where the elf cackled with glee.

  A wolf was in the well with him. It had black mangy first and smelled like death. He remembered the pungent smell of burning flesh when he was at Tupac V. The burning bodies… the smell of their crumpling hair in the flame, it was something he’d never forget. Something the captain drank to forget.

  He could see the wolf was coming for him. It was time to pay the price for surviving. The wolf would have his due. The creature bit into his shoulder. Not a ferocious tearing of being mauled by an animal, but a slow deliberate malevolent force that sank into his flesh.

  He screamed as the wolf fed on his soul and realized he was in sick bay. The ever logical Dr. CrushIt, named after the famed self help guru CrushIt, held a eNeedle that was embedded into his arm. Talleriah sat on one of the empty beds, grinning at Stryker.

  “Mind telling me what I’m doing here?” Stryker said while Dr. CrushIt removed the eNeedle from his shoulder right where he could have sworn a wolf was snacking not moments before. Dr. CrushIt was half Ares, not the sign, the race of aliens, who were nothing like the astrological notion that the planets gave a crap about human personality.

  Ares were a race of extremely logical aliens whose one defining physical characteristic was a point in their ears, the bottom of their ears. Despite being named after his human mom’s favorite personality, who’s the author of Crushing It: Smash work, love, life, CrushIt Finance: Obliterate Debt, CrushIt Tuesdays: Destroy your work week, and CrushIt After Hours, Annihilate your bed for all night pleasure, Dr. CrushIt was logical to a fault which meant he didn’t have the best bedside manner.

  “You’re here to get a shot of hyrdothorobetramatadatazine which would have caused your heart to explode if your body hadn’t been pumped full of Blaze to counteract the effects.” Dr. CrushIt said with his matter of fact tone.

  “Blaze?” Stryker said, puzzling it out and putting together the scene he witnessed in Elven Backward before his… experience.

  “The previous owner’s of the ship left a little surprise stashed in the panel of the ship, and it happened to be near the air intake vent.” Talleriah said.

  “Why weren’t you affected?” Stryker asked.

  “We put on our hazard suits. At least I did and second shift. First shift is all high as a kite in Eleven Backward. I sent them all to sleep it off but it wasn’t till I had had my atmo unit off for a bit that I started to feel the effects coming on when I realized that it wasn’t just engineering that was affected.”

  “Why didn’t the air recyclers scrub it out?”

  “Shit, you got me. The ship’s a piece of crap being held together by toothpicks and duct tape. Maybe the unit is on the fritz or the compound is one of those fancy custom molecules made by pushers for high-end clients. This was the fucking super yacht of drug dealers I wouldn’t be surprised by anything.”

  “We’ll have to get that looked at.”

  “With all due respect, sir. I have to keep this goddamn thing from going supernova first. The captain is running this ship too hot.”

  “I don’t think the captain is in his right mind.” Stryker voiced his concerns.

  “The drug is altering his perception of reality.” Dr, CrushIt said.

  “No,” Stryker said and told them about the energy surge from the Captain's ready room, how the computer sometimes fails to find him onboard, and the strange behavior. “Now, I know the captain likes to pound a few back now and again, but have you ever been with him when he’s drunk?”

  “I can’t say that I have,” Talleriah said.

  “He’s not so great to be around.”

  For the most part, it was true. The captain drank alone in his quarters. When he was younger, the man would be leading the off duty IF soldiers in sea shanties. However, ever since Tupac V, he drank alone, and while Stryker couldn’t verify it, he did know a hangover when he saw one and the captain had a lot of them lately. He didn’t want pull the mentally fit card because the man always performed his duties, but now he seemed to just be ignoring them altogether.

  “How much do you have left of the drug you just gave me?” He asked the doctor.

  “Enough for us, important members of the crew, but once we leave the hermetically sealed sick bay…”

  “We’ll have to take our chances.”

  “I set a medical alert so there should be some crew who got their hazard suits in time.”

  There was a chirp and Stryker called it through.

  “Sir,” a crew member said. “The VIP. He’s, well, you gotta see this.”

  Stryker face palmed. If there was one thing worse than a rich asshole that thought he knew better than him about how to fly the ship, it was high rich asshole who thought he knew how to fly the ship.

  Outside the sick bay, Stryker saw Ensign George stop in view of the window with a rapier and no shirt. The man made a swashbuckling pose and ran down the hallway.