with my other side, but it’s so puny.” Her nose wrinkled.
She probably didn’t mean for it to be cute, but it was, and he laughed.
“That’s how it is for us mere unmodified mortals. We’re all puny.”
“Maybe you can get some nice enhancements after we finish our mission,” Jess said. “With bigger arm muscles, you could lift large unconscious mercenaries without the assistance of tools.”
“I don’t mind tools. Tool use was how we developed large brains and separated ourselves from the apes. I’d rather see you get an upgrade to your spine. That would be far more useful than me getting cybernetic biceps so I could win arm-wrestling contests against mercenaries.”
“I’m a little scared of having more surgeries,” Jess admitted. “The last one was major and left me alive but messed up. And spines are somewhat important.”
“Somewhat. You could always retire from this job and do office work. It’s hard to fracture your vertebrae while sitting in a chair and composing messages on your chip.”
She grimaced. “Unless you’re so bored you fall out of the chair and break your back.”
An alert blared over the speakers, and First Officer Mendoza on the bridge called key personnel to battle stations. Yas didn’t see anything threatening outside the porthole, but he trusted the slydar detector had picked up a ship. Dubashi? The astroshamans?
“Guess I was wise to just get a sandwich.” Jess started to back away but paused, looking at Yas again.
He had been enjoying their banter and wished the night had gone on being quiet and uneventful.
“Thanks again for helping. For caring.” She stuffed her half-eaten sandwich into her coveralls pocket.
Yas was on the verge of pointing out that the robotic mess-hall attendant wouldn’t punish her for taking a plate to engineering, but she stepped in close, and he forgot to speak. She lifted her hands to the sides of his face. He froze, forgetting to breathe as he wondered if—
Jess leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t the kiss of a friend or a colleague, but a mouth-open, tongue-teasing actual kiss that prompted thoughts of bedroom activities to stampede into his mind.
The deck shifted, gravity fluctuating as the Fedallah switched direction too quickly for the spin gravity to compensate. Yas might have gripped Jess harder—at some point, his arms had wrapped around her waist—and ignored it all, but she smiled against his mouth and stepped out of his embrace.
“They usually notice if I’m not at my duty station in a battle,” she said.
“Uh, yeah. Me too. I think.”
“They usually notice if you’re not at your station after a battle.” She squeezed his hand as she stepped away. “Coffee later?”
“Oh yes.”
Yas gathered his scattered thoughts, realizing he needed to get to sickbay and into a pod if he didn’t want to be thrown all over the place, but glanced at the porthole before leaving. A ship had come into view, a sleek, dark blue cylinder with what looked like circuitry all over the hull. An astroshaman ship?
The Fedallah was right behind it, so close that whatever camouflage the foreign craft had was no longer effective. The warship opened fire at its back end.
Aiming to destroy it? Without warning? The other ship wasn’t even trying to maneuver yet. The crew must not have guessed the Fedallah had obtained a slydar detector.
The astroshaman ship was tiny compared to Rache’s big warship. How could the captain not feel like a bully for picking on it? The other ship had shielding, and the attack didn’t blow it away, but it was hard to imagine them winning in a battle.
When Rache had spoken of convincing Moonrazor to repair the gate, Yas had assumed he meant to negotiate. Maybe blackmail or bribe but not blatantly attack.
With Yas’s thoughts of romance shattering into a thousand pieces, he rushed to sickbay. Before he reached it, the other ship fired back.
A surprising jolt flung Yas against a bulkhead. Whatever weapon that was, it had sliced right through the Fedallah’s shields. Gravity disappeared briefly, his feet flying free of the deck, and he caught himself before his head crashed against the ceiling. He lacked armor and magnetic boots, but he put up the helmet of his galaxy suit for some protection.
As he passed the last porthole before turning toward sickbay and the protected interior of the Fedallah, he saw the enemy ship firing back, strange pulsing blue bolts that widened and wrapped around the warship’s hull. Maybe Yas had made the wrong assumption about who would win the battle.
Alarms went off, and a