(Note #1: All comments and constructive criticisms are welcome and appreciated.

Note #2: The first piece of artwork in this chapter was created by the Pretty Perchance AI Art Generator. The second and fourth were created by Steve Rayner and the third one by Faith Desky.

Note #3: And finally, thanks to volunteer Literotica editor TheNyxianLily for her help with editing.)

Calley was under the hot water of the shower spray as Alezanna shampooed her shipmate’s hair. They were speeding away from Palcon but the Hi-Vel engines had yet to be activated. Or perhaps the captain had already fired them up. Calley wasn’t really noticing things in that moment.

She’d yet to say a word since returning to the ship. Upon getting aboard, Captain Sal had headed off to the cockpit while Alezanna had taken charge of Calley. The clothes they’d been wearing had been thrown into the garment washer, though the Bellixan had expressed doubts they’d ever feel clean again. Then the two had gone into the showers. Calley had stood motionless under the water spray while Alezanna had cleaned herself up. The young spacer had looked down as the water falling off her body had slowly become less dirty. But she’d made no move to clean herself. She’d used no soap or shampoo. She was too numb to do anything but think about the man she’d killed.

She had hoped to banish the thoughts of Peetyr from her mind once they were off Palcon, but found she couldn’t. Though she had been distracted by worries of imprisonment or execution before, now that her concerns had vanished, the terrible events of the day consumed her thoughts again. So much so that when Alezanna had begun applying shampoo to Calley’s hair, the Gynapsi hadn’t moved and let her do it. Although she was used to sharing living space with women, Calley hadn’t been touched by one since leaving her family, cycles ago. And even though she’d become quite comfortable around her older shipmate, she probably would have flinched at her touch under any other circumstances. But at that instant, she’d been too drained to bother.

“You’ve got mud in your hair,” Alezanna informed her as she lathered up Calley’s copper-coloured follicles. “Let me wash that out for you.”

“Blood too,” Calley said in a monotone. “I’ve got blood in my hair too.”

“Blood washes off, Calley. It’s just another liquid. Like wine or juice. The right cleaner and the right amount of water, and it’s gone.”

“I know,” Calley said, this time with something approaching her normal tone. “I’ve had to clean myself up after fixing up injured crew. I’ve had blood on me before. But never before because I… Because it was me who…”

“Because of what you did. But you’ve hunted so you could eat before. Which means you had to strip and cut up what you killed. That’s blood too.”

“Not people blood,” the young spacer pointed out. “I’ve never eaten a person.”

“Neither have I, and I hope it stays that way.” Alezanna finished cleaning Calley’s hair. She began rubbing Calley’s back with a soapy washcloth. “But I understand. You’ve never had to kill someone before. I can see that. I understand how you’re feeling. Right now you’re with me, but your mind is back on that street, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Calley admitted.

“And no matter what the law said, about how you had the right to shoot him, about how it was self-defence, all that doesn’t make it any easier to accept, does it?”

“No. On some level I know it’s true but I still… I can’t…”

Alezanna, having washed Calley’s backside and her arms, now crouched down and began on her legs. “I know, Calley, I know. You’re a better person than I am. The first time I killed someone, I didn’t feel a blessed thing about it.”

“What did they do to you?” Calley asked her.

“Nothing at all,” the beautiful mechtech explained. “She was a daughter of a rival family on Bellixa. It was some matter of family honour or something. All I know is I was attending a gala and she walked right up to me and challenged me to a duel.”

“Like in the holo-vids,” Calley realized. “With swords and those little wrist shields. I never knew if that was made up or not.”

“It’s quite real,” Alezanna explained. “But I didn’t use the shield. Not everyone does. Some duel with a sword and a dagger in their other hand. Some just use the sword and nothing else. I even saw one man with two shields once. He’d sharpened their edges. Pretty unconventional. Me, I’d trained with the two daggers. Turned out to be the right choice. She was using a rapier and it was too heavy for her. She came at me a few times and I deflected her sword pretty easily. Then I realized she was off-balance each time she attacked. So I let her charge one last time, spun out of the way and she stumbled past me. As she did, I put my left-hand dagger through the back of her neck. That was it. I don’t think the whole thing lasted two minutes. Turn around so I can wash your front.”

“How old were you?” Calley asked Alezanna as she turned around as requested.

“Fifteen cycles old.” she answered. “Barely a meter tall. But old enough to defend the family name when I had to. And the strange thing is, as much as I already hated Bellixan society by then, it never occurred to me to turn down that girl’s challenge. I didn’t enjoy fighting her, but I didn’t hate it either. And after that night, my parents never said a word about my daggers again. Before that, they’d disapproved of my choice of weapons, but after, they never mentioned it.”

“Did you ever fight any other duels?” her companion asked. The talk was keeping her from thinking about her own troubles for the moment, so Calley was eager for it to continue.

“About a dozen or so, I think,” Alezanna admitted. “I never really kept track. Had I been more involved in the family’s politics, I might have fought more. Whenever two or more families are in the same place, a few duels usually occur. But I kept myself on the outskirts. I think I was challenged more because I made no secret of my distaste for highborn society. Some people didn’t like that.”

“Seems like a strange thing to die for.”

“You’re not Bellixan,” the tall woman stated as she got up and began washing Calley’s chest. Again, it was the sort of familiarity the Gynapsi wasn’t used to, but she accepted it anyway. Alezanna, meanwhile, continued her explanation. “And to be clear, not all duels are to the death. Sometimes it’s explicitly called for, yes, but other times a fighter can yield. A few times, I fought to first blood. Got a slight cut on my shoulder one time. Barely a trickle of blood but it was enough for me to be declared the loser. Not everyone wants to die over a matter of honour. Sometimes the duel is called when a fighter can’t get up anymore, regardless of how they feel about it. But a lot of times, someone dies. It’s accepted. Fighting with sharp weapons is dangerous. Even when all you want to do is scratch someone, accidents happen.”

“Did that ever happen to you?” her companion asked. “Kill someone you didn’t want to?”

By this time Alezanna was washing Calley’s shoulders and moving up to the young woman’s neck. Before she did so, Calley caught a troubled look cross her friend’s face. “No, Calley, not in a duel. Well, not in my duel anyway. And I didn’t kill him. There are worse things you can do than kill someone. If I had killed him, he’d have been better off. But that’s not a story I want to tell today. I’ll just say that I did a terrible thing and I got away with it. No one blamed me, but I was horrified by what I’d done. So like I said, I know what you’re going through right now. You’re sleepwalking, moving from place to place without really being there. I was in the same state. Numb. And then, well, I got very upset, a little crazy even. But the captain was there to help me through it. And then it passed and I realized that the universe wasn’t going to stop existing just because of what I’d done. I woke up the next day and had to keep living my life.”

Calley wasn’t sure how she could get past the day’s events like Alezanna was advising her to. She tried again to push the thoughts of Peetyr down, to think about something else. But her duties aboard the ship seemed so trivial. She couldn’t wrap her mind around them. She couldn’t even concentrate on how it felt to have her shipmate wash her face.

Alezanna finished scrubbing the young spacer’s face and gently turned her towards the shower spray to rinse off. When she finished, Calley shut off the water and turned back to her friend. “I don’t know how to stop thinking about it,” the medtech admitted. “I wanna think about something else. Anything else. But I can’t.”

The taller woman pulled Calley into a tight embrace. She only said one word into the Gynapsi’s ear.

“Cry.”

At first, Calley didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure what the beautiful Bellixan wanted her to do. She opened her mouth to ask her what she meant. But before she could say a word, her chest tightened up. No sound escaped her throat and it was all she could do to take in a lungful of air. That done, she surprised herself with the wail that she let out. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move but cry, yes, she realized she could certainly do that. Her thoughts returned to Peetyr’s shooting, but also the events before that. How the men had confronted and attacked the two spacers. Calley was sad about what she’d done, but realized her sadness had been directed to the dead and injured men. She asked herself why she was crying for them when she was the one who’d been forced to do what she did. Everything was their fault. All she and Alezanna had wanted to do was get back to the Ravenfang.

Her crying became equal parts sadness and outrage. She gripped her companion tighter as she gave in to her rage. In that instant, she hated the five roustabouts. The two dead ones deserved to die. The two wounded ones had gotten off easy. She wished they were dead too. And even the little one, Brion. She regretted her decision not to press charges against him. Let him rot in some correctional facility. Hadn’t he grabbed at her? Let his ass be violated by some older convict. See how he likes it.

As angry and vindictive as her thoughts were, she also hated herself for thinking them. At her core, she knew that as bad as things had gotten on Palcon, it didn’t justify how hateful she was being. This fueled her crying further. She was fearful at becoming this bad, this angry a person. Unbidden, memories of other indignities she’d suffered came back to her. Crewmates trying to feel her up, racist comments, employers short-changing her for the terrible jobs she had to do. It went back to before she’d struck out on her own. Even when she was with her family, she’d been treated poorly by so many people. It was an easy thing to say the universe is unfair. But at that moment, Calley had had enough of seeing it firsthand. She knew it was impossible, but she wanted to go back into her mother’s arms and be told everything would be all right, even if it wasn’t true.

But she knew she couldn’t do that. All she could do was cry into Alezanna’s bosom. So she did that. She cried her pain, her anger, her fear and her sadness. She had a whole reservoir of bad experiences she’d put away in the recesses of her memory. Now they were all coming back to be screamed at and cried over in equal measure. She was beyond words, beyond talking about the bad things that had happened to her. All she could do is wail and cry. She thought she was done a few times, but every time, the emotions would take hold of her and she’d start up again. And through it all, Alezanna held her close as Calley cried and shook.

Calley wasn’t sure how long the two stayed there. All she knew is that after some time, she couldn’t cry any more. Her throat was raw and she was exhausted. She looked around and saw that the two women had slid down to the floor and were now in a sitting position. She disengaged herself from her companion and took a deep breath.

“Are you sure you’re finished?” Alezanna asked her.

Calley nodded her head as she wiped her face. Her friend got to her feet and offered her a hand getting up. The young woman unsteadily got up, grateful for the help. She needed to put her hands on the wall to support herself as the Bellixan grabbed a towel and dried her off. She then quickly dried herself off and held Calley by the shoulders as she led her out of the room. The two made their way to Calley’s stateroom where the older woman directed her shipmate to the bed. Calley laid herself out under the sheets and covers as Alezanna tucked her in. She was asleep before her friend had even finished.

The next thing she knew, she was awake and she felt an unfamiliar weight at her side. She saw that the captain was sitting in the chair at the side of her bed with his feet up on the mattress. Her stirring got his attention.

“Finally up?” he asked her.

“Awake, I guess,” she said as she started to sit up. She remembered that she’d gone to bed in the nude and caught her blanket before she could expose herself. “How long was I out?” she asked her shipmate.

“The better part of a day,” he answered. “Alez and I have been taking turns keeping watch on you. We wanted to make sure someone was there when you woke up. How’re you feeling?”

“Okay, I think,” she said as she thought back to all that happened before she passed out. She realized the events on Palcon were finally in their proper place in her mind as memories. “I think I’m ready to move on, face a new day.”

“Good to hear. I’ll leave you to get dressed. Meet me in the galley. I’ll cook you something to eat. You gotta be starving.”

He left her room, allowing her to throw off the bed covers she’d been using to preserve her modesty. As she got up, she noticed her clothes from the previous day were neatly folded on her desk. She remembered Alezanna’s words about them not feeling clean after what had happened. She picked up the blouse and saw the dirt and blood was gone. She hung it up in her storage unit. It was just a garment and held no bad memories for her. She’d have put it on were it not for the fact that she’d worn it yesterday. She put the rest of her cleaned clothes away and dressed in one of her old jumpsuits. She didn’t feel the need to make herself look more presentable if she was just going to work on the ship until they got to wherever they were going.

She joined the captain in the galley where he was pouring batter into a pan. A plate of scrambled eggs and sausages along with a glass of vitamilk were on the table in front of her. She sat down and dug into the food. Between bites, she asked, “Where are we heading?”

“Shellaba,” he answered. “Good place to find a deal. Lotsa trading there. And I thought a more civilized planet might be a nice change of pace.”

“We’ve got no cargo though,” Calley pointed out. “You’re losing starcred on this trip because of me.”

“Yeah, we left quickly, but don’t feel too bad,” the captain reassured her. “For one thing, don’t forget that Alezanna was there with you. If only one of you had run into trouble, we wouldda hauled ass just as fast. And sure, there’s profit to be made in hauling synthfruit, but not that much. It spoils too quick and stinks up the hold.”

Calley wasn’t sure if he was downplaying the wasted opportunity in order to spare her the guilt. She had seen him negotiate enough times to know that when starcred was involved, Sal’s relationship with the truth could get a little fluid.

“They had perdium mines there,” she said. “We could have moved some of that somewhere.”

“This sector’s lousy with perdium. No demand for it anywhere nearby. Those mines sell to long-haul ships, bulk convoys. We’d have to go so far to sell it that, once you factor in fuel costs, permits, food and all that, we’d be lucky to make a few microcreds.”

He turned and slid a pancake onto her plate. She was surprised at how hungry she was. She took a nearby bottle of leaf extract and poured some on the food.

“You don’t need to pretend like losing starcred is no big deal,” she said before she drank some vitamilk.

“Well thank you very much for your permission,” he replied sarcastically. “But it happens sometimes. We had a good run of luck since you came aboard. Good profits on most trips. But believe me, this isn’t the first time the ship’s taken off empty. Gods, it’s a wonder I’ve gotten this far considering how badly I started off. Those first couple of cycles, I had no idea what anything was worth.”

Calley was genuinely surprised at the captain’s revelation. “You? I got the impression you were born a trader,” she admitted.

“Not at all,” he told her as he washed the pans he’d used to cook her food. “I grew up crunching numbers. I come from a family of accountants. Mom and Dad both worked for some big companies. But they were too nice to ask for a salary that was worth the work they were doing. When I started helping them out in my teens, I saw how much the companies had and how little of it they were willing to share.”

“And that’s when you decided to become a freighter captain?” she asked.

“Oh Hells no!” he said with a chuckle. “I decided to be rich. Started angling to marry a rich girl. Did whatever I could to impress the gentry. Whatever it took, I did. When I have a goal in mind, I’m not afraid of doing some hard work. Eventually, I was able to find some willing ladies.”

“Ladies?” she repeated. “You married more than one?”

“Well, not at the same time, of course,” he reassured her. “I can be pretty charming when I wanna be, but not enough to get a harem. And there’s no polygamy on my planet anyway. No, when I was old enough, I enlisted in the local militia. My mathematics expertise got me assigned to a cruiser as a navigator. From there, it wasn’t too hard to get some piloting experience. And I looked good in my uniform. That was the endgame. Impressing the ladies. I got myself invited to the right parties, mingled with the right families. Eventually, I was able to romance a nice, rich officer’s daughter.”

“I hope starcred wasn’t all she had to offer.”

“Oh no, she was a beauty as well,” he said with a smile. “And it wasn’t like I didn’t love her. Just that, well, I had a list of things I was looking for in a wife and starcred was part of it. But I wasn’t a complete mercenary. There’s no point in being with someone if you don’t enjoy their company. And if I thought a woman would make a bad mother, for example, I wouldn’t have been interested.”

“Wow, so you were thinking of starting a family. What happened?”

“Whirlwind romance, quick marriage, she lost interest in me, divorce less than two cycles later. Got a bit of starcred in the settlement, but I won’t lie, it hurt to lose her. So I went back to my military career. Didn’t have access to the same social circles after my divorce, but that was all right. I realized the rich weren’t any better than I was. So I dropped my requirement that my next girlfriend be rich. I thought I could do better looking in the ranks of those I worked with. Figured It was more important to have a lot in common with a woman than anything else.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Calley agreed as she finished eating her pancake.

“So I met my second wife. She was a quartermaster in the main shipyard. Not a flight officer like me, but in the ranks. When I complained about the upper brass, she understood. If I gripped about the rich, she gripped right back. Seemed like a match made in the heavens. So once again, quick courtship, quick marriage.”

“And did the same thing happen?” Calley asked before putting another mouthful of eggs in her mouth.

“Actually, it was the opposite of my first marriage. My first wife stopped loving me, and this time I loved my second wife too much. Started to resent our time spent apart. So since I had started off as a bookkeeper, I resigned my flight commission and got myself transferred to her unit so we could spend more time together.”

“And that soured things, right?” Calley ventured.

“Nope,” Sal replied as he put away the cleaned cookware. “Things got better. We worked well together, kept things running smooth and since we were often in the office alone together, we sometimes engaged in some… shall we say, adult situations. And before you judge me, it was the militia’s fault. The female officers were all in tight skirts that hugged their asses. And I like me a nice ass. What was a healthy young man supposed to do?”

“Not get caught, hopefully.” Calley said as she handed him her empty plate.

“We never did,” he said as his voice took a slightly sad tone. “But that was part of her problem. She liked to take risks. Now a little danger can be a fun kink so at first I was okay with it. But as time went on, I started noticing some irregularities in the books. Some equipment going missing here and there. She told me not to worry about it, mistakes happen all the time, bureaucratic errors, stuff like that. But I dug a little deeper and realized there was a pattern to what was happening. And it led back to her. She was selling weapons and tech to the black market. I confronted her and she didn’t even try to deny it. Told me she’d split the starcred with me. Awfully decent of her to bring her husband in on the scam, don’t’cha think?”

Calley didn’t answer the question, asking one of her own instead. “What did you do?”

“Well, I couldn’t turn her in. They don’t send you to the stockade for what she did. Well, maybe if it was meds or some tech components it would have ended with a court-martial. But weapons, no, that gets you put in front of a firing squad. I loved her too much to get her killed. But I couldn’t take her offer. I might like starcred more than somebody should, but I’m an honest man at heart. I’ll take advantage of a bad negotiator, sure, but stealing, that’s a line I don’t cross. So I told her that. I warned her that if I figured out what she was up to, others could too. But she wasn’t interested in listening. She got angry, and then she got desperate when it was obvious I wasn’t gonna go along with her. She offered me a payout to keep me quiet. At first I was gonna turn her down, but I changed my mind, I’m ashamed to say.”

“It’s not the same as stealing,” Calley pointed out.

“No, but it’s not like I didn’t know how she’d gotten that starcred. The simple truth was, I was hurt that she thought I could be bought. Add to that one failed marriage and now another about to go into the crapper. I couldn’t imagine staying in the service with her in it. I knew, when she’d eventually get caught, there was no way she wouldn’t try to throw me under the trans-grav. The only way I’d be safe was to get as far from her as possible. Taking the payout made me complicit enough to keep her from turning on me, and it bought me enough time to muster out of the militia, head to the Spacers’ guild house and sign on to the first ship I could find that was leaving the system. I needed to lick my wounds and having that starcred, even if I didn’t spend it, it helped. It made me feel, as wrong as this might seem, like the time with my wives wasn’t a total waste. Anyway,  I bounced around from one job to the next, you know what that’s like, and then a couple of cycles later I came across this beat-up ship.”

He knocked on a wall panel to emphasize which beat-up ship he was referring to and continued. “Suddenly I had a use for my savings. I bought her with the starcred I got from my two failed marriages. Almost renamed her “The Heartbreak” before I came to my senses. I didn’t need the reminder of what had gotten me the ship. So I threw myself into my new business, learned as I went along and discovered it suited me fine after a while. I figured I was done with women aside from the odd trip to a brothel. And then after a while, this tall Bellixan knockout showed up and put a knife to my throat. But I’m told you already know that part of the story.”

“Yeah,” Calley agreed. “But she only told me how she ended up on the ship, not how you two fell in love. But yesterday, she told me you helped her through a tough time. Was that when it happened?”

The captain looked away uncomfortably. “That’s… not really my story to tell. Alez might tell you about it someday. Or she might not. If she tells anybody, it’ll be you, but it’s not an easy thing for her to talk about. Just don’t ask her about it. What you went through yesterday, well, she went through something like that too. And on that note…”

He moved to her and sat down at the table opposite her. He put his hands on the table and she put her smaller ones in his. “I told you one of my sad stories,” he said. “And I know one of yours. One of your worst, I’d imagine. You had to kill a man yesterday, and unless I miss my guess, that was your first, wasn’t it?”

Calley nodded and he continued. “My first wasn’t so hard on me. When you’re behind a ship’s guns blowing up an enemy fighter, you don’t see the face of who you just killed. I did it a bunch of times. Then, cycles later, after I bought the Ravenfang, I had to shoot someone face-to-face because a deal went sideways. And even with all those ship kills in my past, it still messed me up a little. Now what I’m about to tell you is a terrible thing to say, but it’s the truth: It gets easier. In this life we lead, there are dangers. It’s never a good thing to kill, but sometimes it’s necessary. If someone wants to hurt you or yours, you gotta stop ‘em before they can. I try to steer us away from dangerous cargo. No weapons, no chems. But you never know what’s gonna happen. That deal where I had to shoot my contact? Verosian linens, if you can believe it. We’d negotiated a fair price, I thought. But when I showed up with the merchandise, he went for his gun. I went for mine, I was faster, end of story.”

“Did you keep the starcred?” she asked.

“You’re Godsdamn right I did!” he confirmed. “I’d say I earned it, almost being murdered. Now, I didn’t like killing that man, but it was him or me. It bothered me, sure, but I had to deal with it. And the next time it happened, it still bothered me, but I dealt with it again. Like I said, it gets easier. I’ve never killed anybody without good cause. I’m no psychopath. When I meet the Gods in the Hall of Judgement, I’ll know I won’t be damned for what I had to do. It’s the same for you. You know you had to do what you did yesterday, right?

Calley nodded again. “Yeah. I can see it now.”

“Good. I wish I could promise you that’ll be the last time you have to kill someone, but the Gods laugh at our plans. Yesterday you acted on instinct and your instincts were good. You’re still here, Alez too, the law says you’re in the clear. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing else to say about it. Unless you feel different. Is there anything you need from me or Alez?”

Calley thought about his question for a few seconds. She finally answered, “No, I don’t think so. I think I just wanna get back to work. If we’re going to Shellaba, I should look up if we need to inoculate against anything going around there. And then there’s always something on this ship that needs adjusting.”

The captain nodded. “Alezanna said something about the lights in the main hold flickering. See what you can do about it. But after you make your call.”

Calley hadn’t thought about how much of the events on Palcon she intended to tell her mother about. “I think that’ll be a long conversation that’s gonna upset my Mom,” she told her friend.

Sal stood up to leave, but not before telling her, “If she’s a spacer, she’ll understand. I’ll go relieve Alezanna. Don’t worry about her interrupting your call. She’s been up for a while so I’m ordering her to bed.”

With that, he headed to the cockpit. Calley moved over to the common area’s communications panel. She took a deep breath and started recording a message to her mother. She hoped it would be the last time she had to go over the events on Palcon.

NEXT CHAPTER: Pirates and presents.