Page 22 of Starfighter’s Salvation

I led my bonded mate toward the rescue bay, and every step of it, I was aware of her at my side like a second pulse.

Gina

* * *

Corvan's rescue ship didn’t have a name. Every other ship in the bay did. The Valor. The Lanix. The Wraith. Names painted under cockpits and beside loading ramps. Corvan’s ship was RV-217, and that was not a name. That was a manufacturing code. The rescue bay smelled of hydraulic fluid, cold metal, and the faint scorched trace left by ship hulls that had taken fire. Work lights gleamed along every scar in his ship's hull. She looked sturdy, like a flying tank. Safe. The kind of ship that could take a hit and keep on flying.

“What’s she called?” I asked.

Corvan looked up from a maintenance panel. “RV-217.”

“I can read. What’s her name?”

“That is her designation.”

“So, no name?”

“A name does not alter flight performance.”

“You say that now.”

He returned his attention to the panel, and I let myself look at him — really look — while his attention was somewhere else. The ship was built like Corvan. Big, scarred, more concerned with function than appearance. Heavy armor surrounded the medbay. The cargo rails could hold twelve stretchers or twenty-four seated casualties. Medical equipment lined both walls, and I wanted her immediately. My palm slid over a cargo rail polished smooth by years of stretchers, and I thought about the hands that had done the polishing. The ship felt solid under my touch. So did the man who flew her. Don’t, I told myself, but I kept looking at him anyway.

“She’s beautiful.”

His head came up at that. Surprise flickered across his face, there and gone, and I went warm and foolish at the sight of his smallest pleasure. I did that. I wanted to do it again. "Most pilots don't like these evac ships. Think they're too slow."

I walked through the med section, opening cabinets. Alien devices. Familiar shapes. Unfamiliar labels the cipher implant translated a second after I saw them.

“Hemostatic foam. Regeneration field. Portable scanner.” I opened another drawer. “What is this?” It was oddly shaped and not one I recognized from the game.

“Do not touch that.”

I froze. “Why?”

“It is a bone stabilizer. If activated without a target, it attaches to the nearest skeletal structure.”

I closed the drawer carefully. “Good to know.”

He opened a locked cabinet, and I may have made an inappropriate sound at the quantity and variety of medications and painkillers available. “This is better than Christmas.”

“I do not know what that means.”

“It means this cabinet is mine."

“Agreed.”

We spent two hours on equipment and another three in simulation. The first run tested basic loading. Easy. The second tested species differences and wasn’t easy. The first patient looked human until the scanner showed two hearts and blood chemistry that made half my Earth medications lethal.

“Alien medical education is terrible.” I selected the recommended drug equivalent and checked the dose three times. The next patient had a skeleton outside his body. The one after that considered the warming field a form of torture. I failed the run by overdosing a simulated Andromedan. Did those really exist? They could, especially since Corvan and his people existed. And Queen Raya and her people. This was just one star system in a very large universe.

“Well,” I said when the display marked the poor Andromedan dead, “that’s one way to learn.”

“Again,” Corvan ordered.

“I just killed someone.”

“A hologram. Better to learn now than when we're out on mission.”