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I didn’t want to be called baby boy and spanked or anything, but it was kind of nice having someone bigger and stronger there, taking care of me. Worrying about me. It had been a long time since I’d been anything other than either alone, or the one playing caretaker in all of my relationships.
But this wasn’t failing to make my mortgage payment. This was us freezing to death unless he got things fixed.
So I made sure my clothes were all on and fastened, and I took the blanket that had been wrapped closest to my skin—and so was still warmest—and I went in search of Jax.
I found him working on a panel that, not gonna lie, shook my self-confidence a little. It was very much like anything you’d see in a science-fiction movie, all crystals and tiny words in a language I couldn’t read, and I had still kind of been expecting wires and circuit boards.
Wires and circuit boards, I knew.
Glowing purple crystals? Not so much.
I wanted to make a dilithium crystal joke, but I figured at best that would be confusing, since dilithium was an actual thing, and the interpreter implant had a tendency to be on the literal side of language. Doubtless Jax would end up telling me dilithium crystals weren’t a real thing, and my heart would be broken.
He was filing a crystal down when I got there, and as I walked up, he carefully slid it into place in a row with a dozen others. Nothing happened, and he scowled. After a second, he gave the panel a sharp rap. The crystal he’d been working on made a little clicking noise as it slid deeper into its slot, and the whole row of them flickered to life.
Jax’s grin could have lit the whole room. He waved at the panel, looking over at me. “We aren’t going to freeze to death.” Then he shot the thing another glance, suspicious, and added a muttered, “probably.”
“That’s great news!” I slid in beside him, looking down at the panel and leaning against his warm side. How was he shirtless and so warm? “So as long as this works, we have a heater?”
He nodded. “The system is fixed, and I have no doubt in that, but... the mechanism is made for space. Not for the ship being surrounded by solid ice on all sides. I do not know how that will change things. I know the ship and how to fix it, but I am a warrior, not a scientist.”
And I couldn’t blame him, since I didn’t have any idea about either. Something about the density of the ice surrounding us probably meant that it was more intense than the void of space, but... well, give me a break. I was a game designer, not a physicist.
But there was nothing either of us could do about it, so it was time to move on. “Okay, so what’s next? You have the biggest problem taken care of, as much as you can.” I gave a shiver, then glanced around. “Is it maybe going to warm up a little?”
“I hope for it,” he agreed. “But the system will not overtax itself. I set it to turn itself off if that becomes a danger.”
How was he so utterly sensible, this grinning warrior? I’d half expected him to be irreverent and careless, the only Thorzi I’d met who smiled all the time. But I supposed, a smile didn’t mean exactly the same thing to a human as it did to an alien.
I nodded, considering. “The, um, the distress beacon thingie next, right?”
He winced and glanced away from me, his cheeks going a little blue with what I was beginning to realize was embarrassment. “We do not have the parts required to fix it. Or complete the repairs on anything else, for that matter.”
He was ashamed that he wasn’t capable of doing impossible things. That was usually a problem with big guys who started thinking they were the baddest, most capable people around. Seemed like a lot of unnecessary stress to me.
“And it’s not like we’re going to find parts sitting around on the ice,” I mused, staring off into space. We were surrounded by ice, sure, but we had an enormous ship to work with. Hopefully it wasn’t too damaged in the battle and crash to be useful, but if we weren’t going to get certain parts running, we could work on the parts that could be fixed. Prioritize. “Could any of the ship’s other systems be cannibalized for parts to fix the distress beacon?”
His eyes went round, shocked, and he repeated, “cannibalized” in a questioning tone. Then he followed up with an earnest whisper of, “We have plenty of food, Wesley.”
I couldn’t hold back a laugh at that. “I’m not talking about eating anyone. I’m”—I had to stop for a moment, burying my face in my hands and just letting the laughter out before controlling it, and looking up at him again—“I mean—”
And this time, the shit-eating grin on his face was the most human expression I’d ever seen on him.
I gave his hard shoulder a shove that didn’t even budge his body an inch. “You’re messing with me. You jerk!”
He leaned forward and planted a kiss on the tip of my nose. “I presume you mean to take parts from one system, destroying it, and use them to fix another system?”
“Yes, that’s what cannibalized means in this context,” I muttered, leaning my whole body against him and scowling.
Okay, fine, pouting.
“Then as much as I would like to say something else, no. None of the systems would be fixed that way. The distress beacon and communication relay require the same part, there are only two on a ship, and both are broken, as well as the backup.” He glanced away, eyes scanning as though he was doing a mental catalogue before he sighed again. “I may have a way to get some of the parts we need, but for now, we should eat.”
“I can help,” I told him, and the look he gave me in answer was enough to tell me what he thought of that. I wanted to be angry with him. To rail about him thinking I was a child.
But if we were being honest, I truly was the next best thing to useless. I could do a lot of stuff. Hell, I thought I’d done a surprisingly good job steering and not running into anything. But fixing technology I didn’t understand? Not likely. Jax would have to put as much work into teaching me how to do it as he would into simply fixing the ship himself.
Still, next time he started working, I would stay with him, by his side. I would try to convince him to explain what he was doing, and how it worked. I could be useful. I would make myself useful, and my smiling alien warrior would stop thinking of me as a child he had to protect.
