Reformation: Chapter Thirty-Four

Notes: Back at last! Sorry for the delay, and the fact that it's not terribly long, but hey--it's here. And Cody and Ten! Yay!

Also, again--sorry for the delay, but winners of the audiobooks for Where There's Fire will be announced tomorrow! The conference was fun, the networking was great, but omg--I'm so tired now.

Title: Reformation: Chapter Thirty-Four

***

Chapter Thirty-Four

It felt different than ze had expected, approaching the planet like this. Ten had done the same exposure and zero-g training that every cadet at the Academy did, and while careening through a planet’s atmosphere in an attempt to safely land a modified hoverbike on its surface was decidedly not one of the training scenarios, it shouldn’t have made any difference. Ze’d been exposed to crashes, explosions, breakaways—every nasty thing the programmers could think of. Hell, Ten had been in actual shuttle crashes, so this really shouldn’t have fazed hir at all.

Which was why ze couldn’t understand why hir heartrate was spiking so abnormally, or why it felt like their oxygen supply had already run out even though ze knew, logically, that that was impossible.

“Everything looks good,” Cody said from in front of hir, his eyes glued to the instrument panel. Never mind that the bike was projecting data that could be read directly through their implants—Cody had never quite attached himself to doing things the easy way, like cadets who’d grown up with the technology. “We should start falling through the top layer of atmosphere in forty-five seconds.” Ten could hear the excitement in his voice. “Time to see how good our heat shielding really is!”

“It’s—the best,” Ten replied, and why was ze stumbling over hir words? “Nat-naturally. I-I-I’m the one who…the one who des-designed it.”

“Ten?” Cody turned his head around to look at hir. “What’s wrong?”

Ten shook hir head. “Noth-nothing.”

“This doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“It’s nothing!” Ten snapped, pleased at how anger kept hir words together better. “I’m perfectly fi-fi-fine!”

“Ten…”

“I don’t know!” ze burst at him. “I don’t know what’s wro-wrong with m-m-me! I feel like I’m having a hear-heart-heart attack! I don’t even know wha-what that feels like, but it must be a lo-lo-lot like this!” Stars that had no place in the sky were swimming in front of hir eyes now, and Ten blinked rapidly trying to clear them. Hallucinations? Ze couldn’t be having hallucinations, there was no reason for it!

“Ten.”

Hir eyelids were fluttering fast enough that they blurred the back of Cody’s head. The stars were getting thicker.

“Ten! Listen to me!”

“I-I am!”

“You need to take some deep breaths before you pass out!”

“My brea-bre-buh—” Ze stopped talking to save hirself the embarrassment. Obviously if ze couldn’t even get a word out, hir breathing wasn’t fine.

“Here.” Cody moved one of hir hands from around his waist up to his chest. His suit was too thick to feel anything through, but a moment later a reassuring thud pulsed through their combined grip. “You feel that? Breathe when you feel the beat.”

Ten would have argued, but ze didn’t have the air to spare for it. Ze pushed hir pride aside and tried to breathe along with the next slow thud. It was…harder than ze’d anticipated.

“Good,” Cody said encouragingly, and it shouldn’t have mattered because being good at breathing was a stupid thing to try and excel at, but the strange, crackling tension in Ten’s chest eased slightly. “Keep it up. Keep breathing with the beat.” The planet grew larger and larger, filling all of Ten’s view, looming immense and inescapable as the light surrounding their shields began to glow with heat. “Breathe with the beat, Ten.” Cody squeezed hir hand. “You don’t have to watch,” he said gently, his voice as sweet as any touch he’d ever shared with hir. “Just close your eyes and feel. Feel the beat. Feel me. I’m here with you. We’re together.”

And it might have been cowardly, and any other day Ten might have scoffed and rolled hir eyes at what seemed like such condescending gentility, but not now. Now ze pressed hir head tight to Cody’s back, closed hir eyes against the brilliant fire surrounding them, and focused on the beat.

Ze didn’t need to look death in the eye when life was holding hir hand.

***

Miles swayed back and forth like he was lying in a wave pool, like the kind he and Claudia had taken the girls to a while back. It had been nicer than he cared to admit out loud, the warm air contrasting perfectly with the cool water. He’d closed his eyes and floated for over an hour, until his kids had pulled him into a water fight. It was like being back there, except…he was cold. And dry. And—fuck.

He forced his eyes open and looked around the darkened interior of the pod. The emergency lights were on, and the locator beacon was beeping soundlessly—the speaker must have broken in the fall. His cadets were still, unmoving on the floor, and Miles reached out to them, ignoring the sudden stabbing pain in his leg. He touched Grennson’s neck—there was a pulse, a strong one, but he had a bleeding head wound. And Darrell’s own heartbeat was thready, and from the odd way his tunic sat against his chest, Miles could guess why. Shattered ribs, in all likelihood. More than the simple Regen kit in the pod could handle, but he pulled it free and gave them each a shot anyway. Grennson’s wound stopped bleeding, and Darrell’s breathing eased some, so it clearly hadn’t hurt.

Cadets stabilized, now he needed to stabilize their craft. Miles tapped into the computer with his implant. Current status?

Pod is 88.5% inoperable. Hull is cracked. The rate of leakage into the space between the outer and inner hull will force complete submersion in approximately five minutes.

Submersion… Outside environment?

H20, Cl-, Na+, Mg2+, Ca+—

Seawater. They’d hit the ocean. Any air?

The top 23% of the craft is yet uncovered.

Then they still had time to get out. The parachute that had deployed to keep them from dying when they hit the surface doubled as a life raft, if he could get it to inflate. Miles crawled to the hatch at the top of the pod and checked for it. Still there, still attached. Good. Activate raft inflation.

Affirmative. The raft puffed into life in front of him, and Miles breathed a little easier.

Location of detachable emergency beacon? It glowed into existence in his mind, much subdued compared to the motion of the other one. He grabbed it and tucked it away in a pocket. “Emergency kit? He took it and stowed it away, then gingerly slid the boys into inflatable vests, careful not to move them too much.

Speed of saturation is increasing. This pod will face complete submersion in thirty-four seconds.

“Shit.” Miles wrenched the hatch open, shivered for a moment at the chill air and the splash of icy water that entered through the hole, then lifted Grennson up. It wasn’t easy, but he got the cadet onto the raft and secured with just enough time to get an arm around Darrell before the pod was completely submerged, and water filled the rest of the interior. Miles held his breath and reminded himself not to panic. He could do this. He’d been in worse situations, and at least the chill of the water was numbing the pain in his leg.

Darrell’s best inflated automatically, buoyant enough to lift the cadet but slim enough that Miles could still get him through the darkened porthole. He followed and pulled the lever detaching the raft from the pod before it dragged the whole thing down, then got onto the raft himself before gently lifting Darrell up after him. He secured the cadet’s vest to the raft, pulled a thin survival blanket out of the emergency gear and nestled in between the kids, then covered all of them with it. They were both still breathing, and the beacon was going. If anybody was looking for them, they’d be found.

Before the next storm, he hoped. 

Reformation: Chapter Thirty-One

Notes: Time for Cody and Ten to make questionable decisions together! Oh, young love...

Title: Reformation: Chapter Thirty-One

***

Chapter Thirty-One

Two hundred and eighteen little leaks amounted to a hell of a lot more confusion and discord than Ten had expected. Yes, of course there was going to be a certain amount of pandemonium, that was the point. Almost as soon as they got to Pandora, Corva had thought better of it. In her defense, Ten hadn’t expected them to come in quite so close to the actual battle, and what a battle it was. The Box was the only city on Pandora, the place that all trade went through, and the warring fleets had massed above it and were going after each other with all the fire and fury they had. Bits and pieces of detritus struck the Drifter ship, a few of them causing minor hull breaches, and that was when Corva pulled the plug.

Unfortunately, her plug triggered the waste system’s meltdown, and that triggered everyone else’s meltdown. It was—okay, it was messy, pretty gross really, and Ten maybe hadn’t anticipated all the nooks and crevices that connected the waste system to other parts of the ship, because shit was getting everywhere. On the other hand, the ship itself was going nowhere, so…Ten was calling this a win.

“Time to go,” ze announced to Cody as ze joined him in the hold of Jack’s ship, where he was inspecting the new shield that they’d installed. It was meant to be a joint sophomore year project, the sort of thing that they’d have months to work on and perfect before installing for a very careful—but not too careful, this was them, after all—test fall through Olympus’ fairly forgiving atmosphere. Instead, they were going to try it over Pandora, which had one of the most tempestuous climates among the Fringe planets. They had to plot a path through the storms, through the debris, down to the ground and then hope—very strongly hope—that the parachute deployed the way it was supposed to and their thrusters didn’t overheat or freeze and that they landed close enough to the city that they could walk inside of the shield, but also far enough away that they didn’t bounce off the surface of it on their way down. All of which also assumed that their oxygen held out, their restraints held on, and their nerve held, period.

It would be interesting, for sure. Ten wished ze had time to document all the variables more fully, because it was hard to get a perfect statistic for their probably survival. Ze would tell Cody seventy percent, if he asked. That was the kind thing to do.

“Are you really sure about this guidance system?” Cody asked, seating the module a little deeper into the front console of the bike.

“As really sure as I can be given the tests I’ve been able to do. It’ll scan constantly until we enter the atmosphere, and as soon as we break out below the storms it’ll pick up again. We’re in luck there, actually, there’s a big clear path over the Box right now.”

“Okay.”

Ten rolled hir eyes. “Okay? This is our lives you’re talking about, this is our very existence being called into question.”

“I know.” Cody’s smile was wide, his eyes a little too bright when he looked up at hir. “It’s gonna be fun.”

“That’s not your usual reaction to my experiments.”

“We’re doing something. Even if it ends with both of us smeared across the upper atmosphere, at least we’ll have tried.”

Well, that sounded…reckless. Not that Ten cared, really—ze’d be with Cody, and that was assurance enough for hir—but Cody actually had a support system that would miss him if he died. One he’s already spurned, Ten reminded hirself. Cody knew what he was doing. And so did ze. “Let’s suit up.”

The suits were more than your usual atmospheric pressure units—they were designed for deep-space miners, people who might vacillate between the hottest and lowest survivable temperatures within the same shift. They bulked them up with all sorts of additional venting and coolant and pockets in case of emergencies, and each one was equipped with a personal parachute. They carried enough oxygen to last for two hours, which was double what Ten expected they’d need. “After all, we’re not the first people to do something like this,” Ten had expounded when they first started the project. “It’s been done successfully at least ten times before on different planets.”

“And how many times has it failed?” Cody had asked as they laid out the framework for the shield.

“Those failures are irrelevant to our success.” Which was a total lie, and Cody had made hir lay out all the ways something could break, lose power or otherwise end their lives. They’d handled those design flaws, though. This was going to work. It totally was. Ten wasn’t going to have it any other way.

“Let’s get to the airlock,” ze said once ze got hir helmet in place. The air it circulated was cold, a side-effect of all the coolant, but it tasted fresher than the atmosphere inside the ship, particularly now.

The bike, massively redesigned though it was, still moved easily on its anti-grav tracks. They carefully propelled it out of Jack’s ship and toward the internal airlock on the other side of their landing pad. “It would almost make more sense to steal his ship,” Ten lamented—just a little. “He’s not going to need it for anything.”

“We’d need clearance from central to open the airlock that much, which means Corva would see it,” Cody said. “And if we compromised the bay, it could lead to a massive depressurization. We’re not here to get people killed.”

“Just maybe ourselves.”

“Exactly.”

They stopped in front of the airlock. Ze input the code to open it—of course ze had them, ze hadn’t been idle even while ze was confined to working on the goddamn sewage system. The Drifter ship dumped more waste into space than it really should, and that meant that Ten got access to the basic codes. The light flashed amber, once, then turned green. Ten frowned. “Strange.”

“What?”

“Prooobably nothing.” The lock opened and they wheeled the bike inside. Ten turned back and shut it, then to be careful, input the naughty code he’d learned from Livia that would jam the door hard for five minutes no matter what. It was used to torment people on the engineering teams, but Ten wasn’t going to take any chances. “Okay. The outer door should open in two minutes. Let’s get rigged.”

A hoverbike was not a spaceship. It wouldn’t protect them from the intense heat of deceleration or the brutal vacuum of space. Or at least, it wouldn’t if they hadn’t installed a nano-diamond shield that spread out from a heat cone on the nose. Cody took the front seat, Ten took the back, and once they were in position, Cody activated the system.

Smart harnesses melted out of the body of the bike and closed around their limbs and helmets, holding them firmly in place. The nav system uploaded and immediately began scanning potential routes down onto the planet, their modified thruster fired up to give them the push they needed to fall toward the Box, and the shield itself unfolded like a translucent shroud around them. The heat displacement coils followed, and a final check of parachutes and safety redundancies followed. All green.

“Looks good,” Ten said.

“Excellent. One more minute to open.”

“Cody, what the hell are you doing?” That came in over the loudspeaker, noisy enough that they could hear it through their helmets and the shield. They didn’t have a lot of mobility left, but still managed to turn their heads back and look at Jack. He was punching furiously at the keypad.

“Huh. I guess it was an alarm,” Ten mused.

“Cody! This isn’t funny, deactivate your stall code and get back inside the ship!”

“He won’t be able to hear me if I speak,” Cody said.

“Nope.”

“Good. ‘Cause I don’t have any words for him anyway.” He turned his face resolutely forward.

“I will come after you! I’m not letting you do this, do you understand me?”

“Why does he even want you?” Ten asked. “He hasn’t spent more than ten minutes in your company since we got on board.”

“Games. Just games.” Cody shook his head a little. “Ten seconds, you ready?”

“As ready as I can be going into a largely untested experimental flight with no fallbacks.”

“I knew you were having fun.”

“Cody! Cody!”

Five…four…three…two…one…

The airlock opened, their thruster fired, and the hoverbike tumbled into space.

Reformation: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Notes: I now it isn't long, but it's some of your favorite people! Jonah! Cody! Ten! Not all together quite yet, but still, we're getting there. Enjoy ;)

Title: Reformation: Chapter Twenty-Seven

***

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jonah knew it was dangerous, but he had to get out of the bunker. He couldn’t stay and listen to one more rasping breath from Lacey, couldn’t listen to the Regen unit fight her body’s failure for another second. She’d been unconscious ever since the crash—two weeks, God, had it really been two weeks? It was incredible that she was still alive, but that wasn’t going to last much longer. Her organs were starting to shut down, and no amount of Regen was going to start them up again. She needed direct intervention, maybe even organ replacements, but until they got back to the Box…if they ever got back to the box…

Two weeks of failure. Two weeks of careful, delicate forays out from the bunker, so cautious after almost getting found. They weren’t far from the city, Jonah knew they weren’t, but the few miles might have been a mountain range for all his likelihood of making it through, while towing Lacey, and not getting shot down on the trip. The bombardment of Pandora City seemed to have diminished, at least, but there were still ships patrolling all around it, searching for breaks in the shield, for suspicious heat signatures, for new ways in.

There were no ships out tonight, though. Jonah lay on his back and looked up at the sky, beautifully clear after the last storm had blown over yesterday. The stars were sparse out here on the Fringe, none of the glittery nights he remembered from his brief stay on Olympus, but he could name every one of them. It had been a thing for Cody for a while when he was a child, learning all of the star names and then promptly making up his own, along with brand new constellations. Jonah raised a hand and traced a line between two faint white stars, looping it down to a third, reddish one near the horizon. The Fishhook, Cody had dubbed it. “But not a real one, Daddy, because it’s not nice to the fish,” he’d added seriously after telling Jonah its name.

“Good call,” Jonah had said. “I’m sure the fish will appreciate that.”

God, he missed his kid. He missed him like he missed home, but he was so grateful that Cody wasn’t here. Jonah was already failing one child. If he’d failed his own as well, he didn’t think he’d be able to live with himself. Garrett would probably have some strong words for him about that…but then, Garrett probably would have found a way out of this situation a week ago. It was only thanks to Garrett thinking ahead and stocking these damn bunkers that Jonah and Lacey were still going. Everything in there was a little reminder of his husband, and the only comfort that Jonah was likely to get at this point.

He wasn’t going to run out of food any time soon. He had the generator, he had shelter, he even had Regen for himself if he got injured again. None of that would be any good to him if Lacey didn’t make it, though, and at this point…well. He wasn’t sure what the odds were, but he’d be surprised if she lasted through the night. He should be in there, comforting her. Staying beside her, even though she couldn’t feel him, even though she’d never feel anything again.

Jonah’s breath caught in his throat, and he blinked hard to clear the tears from his eyes. Damn things, making the sky blurry, making it seem like the stars were…moving… Only, no. Those weren’t stars. And they weren’t satellites. Those were ships, the brightness of them visible to the eye for the first time, and they were—firing on each other?

Jonah scrambled to his feet and squinted up at the battle. What the hell? When had this started, when had things changed? Who was fighting who? A scope, there had to be some kind of scope in the bunker…

He wouldn’t be able to see much, but he was going to catch every detail he could.

***

If there was one thing Ten didn’t like, it was being told what to do.

Well, in perfect honesty, there would never just be one thing Ten didn’t like. The universe was full of things that were stupid, inefficient, incomprehensible, and just plain dumb. It would be impossible to list every single one of the things Ten didn’t like, because it was a list with no end. Every time one thing came off it, two more were added. But right at the top of the list was a dislike for being told what to do, because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Ten had a better handle on whatever was going on than the supercilious person informing him of what had to happen next.

Quickly climbing that list, though? A thorough and virulent dislike of people trying to tell Cody what to do. Yeah, sure, Ten did it hirself every now and then because Cody wasn’t as alert as he should be and it was worrying, what if the man piloted himself into a black hole someday because he let himself get distracted by, whatever, fluffy catterpets needing adoption? It was the sort of thing Cody might do, was what Ten was getting at here. Ze couldn’t put anything by Cody when it came to being a self-sacrificing moron, which was why ze started putting in place precautionary measures as soon as Cody told hir the deal he struck with his heinous, hidebound, vacuum-sucking bitch of a grandmother.

“I’m mostly concerned she’ll turn tail as soon as we get to Pandora if things aren’t calm,” Cody had confessed earlier in the week, his hands stroking a nervous pattern across Ten’s back as they huddled together on their cot. Jack hadn’t been back to his ship ever since they first boarded. Apparently the matriarch of the clan was keeping him close. Ten snorted to hirself. Like ze’d ever rely on someone so fundamentally useless to assist with something as important as keeping Cody safe. “Bypass it and head straight on to Pollux.”

“It would be a waste of resources. Food, fuel, money—a total waste.”

“Yeah, one that she’d love to take out of my hide.”

“You’re not letting her, though.” Ten lifted hir head and looked at Cody bluntly. “You’re not letting her wear you down. She doesn’t have the right to touch you, much less punish you.”

“Of course not!”

“Good.” Ten had snuggled back in contentedly. “Then there’s not going to be an issue. Trust me.”

“But…no one’s being put in danger, right?”

“I’m a genius, not an evil genius, of course no one’s in danger.” Not mortal danger, anyway.

“What did you do?”

“What makes you think I—”

“Ten.” That was Cody’s “I’m not kidding around” voice, and Ten responded to it even though ze didn’t like to. “Really. What did you do?”

“I…might…have reprogrammed a section of their hygiene protocols to force a massive overflow into the central tank as soon as our speed is cut enough to establish orbit.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that as soon as we stop to take a look at Pandora, the shit tank is going to overflow. Like, massively. There are spilloff pipes, but half of those have been very slightly compromised, just enough to spring a leak or two or, perhaps, two-hundred and eighteen. It will force an emergency shutdown of the engines due to environmental hazards, and take at least a week to repair. And by that time, if we’re close enough?” Ze glanced over at Cody’s shrouded bike. “Well, I guess we’ll be hoping the modifications to that hold up, won’t we?”

Cody hesitated for a moment before a huge smile split his face, and Ten sighed with relief. Internally, of course, it didn’t do to share that ze had been nervous. “You think of everything, don’t you?”

“I try.” Ten shut hir eyes and pressed a kiss to Cody’s shoulder. “I really try.”

Reformation: Chapter Twenty-Two

Notes: More Reformation, this time with Cody and Ten and a little family time...which goes terribly, as family time occasionally does.

Title: Reformation: Chapter Twenty-Two

***

Chapter Twenty-Two

“This is ridiculous.” Ten stared at the three-dimensional model of the ship that Cody had helpfully projected in their quarters and shook hir head. “Completely ridiculous. I can’t believe that while I’ve spent the last week being dragged through fifteen levels of sanitation—fifteen levels! Like they can’t settle on a central location and route everything to be processed there, because nooo, that would be too easy—you’ve managed to just…just spy your way across a third of the ship with no one fucking wiser!” Ze turned to glare at Cody. “Since when did you get good at being covert?”

“I’m not being covert,” he said. “I’m walking around in an engineering uniform and fixing things. People are happy to see me. It’s amazing what you can get done with a molecular bonding wand and a little conversation.”

“You should bring me with you next time.” Ten reached out and flipped the hologram around, peering into its corners. “You’re missing a few deep pockets here and here, we should go back and fill those in. And two of us would be a lot faster at mapping out the rest of this thing. You’ve got the ports and engineering and a lot of the housing section, but there’s a plethora of secondary and tertiary piping that it would be good to get a handle on, especially if we want to be able to estimate how things will react with each other in unpleasant circumstances.”

Cody didn’t bother trying to correct Ten about any future unpleasantness. Ze was probably right, after all. Still… “I’m not the one who’s been whisking you off on projects every day without giving me a second glance. Livia, right? Chief sanitation engineer?”

“Chief pain in my ass,” Ten muttered. “She looks over everything I do. Everything! Like I need supervision or something! Like I’m not the best welder on this whole stupid ship, because it’s a skillset any infant could pick up. Like I don’t know how to connect pipes carrying disparate acidities and have no idea how to manage basic chemical interactions, my god. It’s like being with Symone again. I’m so sick of it.”

“Not sick enough of it to tell her no.”

“We’re supposed to be making ourselves useful, right?” Ten shrugged. “I recall that being shoved in our faces by the bitch that runs the place. I’m trying not to give her an excuse to make a nuisance of herself. But if you asked for me to go with you instead, I bet Livia would say yes.”

“Maybe.” Cody leaned back against the wall behind their cot. “And then maybe she’d bring it to Grandma’s attention and instead of me being able to slip away unnoticed because no one wants to work with me, we’d be watched and followed and everything would be reported back to her.”

“Everything is probably reported back to her anyway.”

“Yeah, probably. But she hasn’t—” The com unit on Jack’s ship sounded, and a second later they heard his voice.

“Corva wants to talk with you, Cody.” He didn’t sound happy about that fact. “There’ll be someone to escort you to her audience room waiting outside the shuttle. Don’t…don’t stall, okay?”

Ten arched an eyebrow and looked at Cody. “She hasn’t what? Kicked us off the ship yet? Clapped us in irons? Summoned us to her fucking audience chamber, who the hell does she think she is, queen of the universe?”

“I guess I spoke too soon.” Cody hesitated, then reached out and took Ten’s hand. “You don’t have to come. You could stay here and—”

“Yeah, no, crazy, you’ve got to be ill to suggest such a thing, are you ill?” Ten pressed the back of hir free hand to Cody’s forehead. “Don’t be stupid.” Ze leaned in and kissed Cody, then toppled forward onto his lap as Cody tugged at hir hand. “Mmmno, we—”

“Have to go, I know.” Cody knew he should feel nervous about it, but the truth was he was having a hard time feeling much of anything lately. It had been a week—a little more than that, actually—since he’d found out about the attack on Pandora. He’d spent the first part of that time feeling so much, worried and afraid and angry, so, so angry at everyone even obliquely involved. Angry at his dad for being there, angry at Garrett for not stopping this from happening, angry at Darrel and Grennson and even Ten for not being as affected as he was. It was stupid, and exhausting, and he’d felt guilty over it even as he’d indulged himself.

Walking around the way he had, just him and his mapmaking and his small efforts at fixing small things, had been kind of meditative for him. It had helped him tamp down on the storm inside of him, enough that he could at least make a good effort at being okay with the world. That kind of repression wouldn’t fly with Ten for long—ze noticed everything eventually, it was part of what made hir such a good scientist—but as long as he maintained his equanimity around hir, he could probably manage for a while longer. Of course, going to see his grandmother would probably test him, but he wouldn’t know until he tried.

“Okay.” He kissed Ten one more time, desperate to pull hir back down onto the cot so they could just be together for a while, doing anything other than talking, but now wasn’t the time. “Let’s go.”

The person waiting for them was Livia, a familiar face at least, but as usual she made no eye contact with Cody. “Let’s go, kiddos,” she said impatiently as they stepped down the shuttle’s ramp. “It’s not good to keep Corva waiting.”

“Ask me how much I care,” Ten replied.

“Ask me how many more kilometers of pipeline there are to be fixed up over the next week.” She turned and led them out of the bay, and Cody silently activated his map. If they were going somewhere new, he wanted to document it.

“Not fair, not fair at all, I’ve been doing more work than all the rest of your minions combined for the past week and you know it. You should let me do something interesting, I’m curious about the state of your oxygenators—are you using algae in conjunction with the sanitation system to emit more for the environmental system, or are you just cruising through space hoping you don’t run out of the stuff and that your scrubbers keep working and that there’s no localized explosion that opens a gap and vents all your precious resources into space before you can refill at whatever planet will have you?”

“You never shut up, do you?”

“You already knew that.” Ten kept up a steady flow of questions as they walked…and walked…and walked. It took almost half an hour of winding walkways and some very improbably stairs to finally make it to Corva’s location. Cody was sure they hadn’t gone the easy way. If she was trying to make it hard for them to find their way back, well…he smirked quietly as he registered the route and watched the changes integrate into his map.

The audience chamber wasn’t all that large, but it was definitely the most technologically advanced room that Cody had seen so far. Screens and holograms projected flight data, ship specs and a series of more personal notes that vanished the moment Cody and Ten walked into the room. In the center of it all was Corva, sitting in a chair that had an old-school direct connection to her ancient implant. She lifted her head off of the metal prong that slotted into the back of her head, and turned to look at them. She might have frowned, although it was hard to say—her expression barely changed. She reached for the mug sitting on the armrest of her chair and sipped at the dark, oily liquid within.

“Finally.” She glanced at Livia. “Leave. Take the other one with you.”

“Ten stays.”

“You’re in no position to make demands of me, child. Livia.”

Ten was making that face ze made when ze was about to do something spectacularly destructive, and so Cody squeezed hir hand. “It’s okay. I’ll be back with you in just a few minutes.”

“Is that true?” Ten demanded of Corva.

“Get out and find out.”

“Really.” Cody smiled for Ten, grateful that he was still so empty it felt natural. “I’ll be fine.” We won’t be disconnected, he added via the implant, and Ten nodded reluctantly. Livia pulled hir away, and as soon as the door closed, Cody turned back to his grandmother.

She didn’t waste any time. “There are no communications going in or out of Pandora. None. The planet is either dead or under siege, and this ship has no business putting itself in harm’s way. Not for the likes of you.”

“You were heading there anyway,” Cody reminded her. “Your business there came before me.”

“We can sell our goods elsewhere.”

“Not for as much.”

“Better that we still have someone to sell them to than risk annihilation at the hands of whoever is attacking that colony. I don’t want to go to Pandora.” She cocked her head. “But I also don’t want you on this ship.” Her voice turned harsh. “You’re a canker, a blemish. You’re a scut child who should never have been made, much less born. I told your father to get rid of you once he realized there were going to be problems, but he wouldn’t. I raised him too softly.”

“I’m sure you don’t make that mistake anymore.” Cody was amazed he sounded so calm.

“You’ve got them all fooled, don’t you? Fooled into thinking you’re a real person, when you’re just as fake as the womb you were incubated in. You’re a medical mistake, and it doesn’t do to let people start thinking of things like you as real. I won’t kill you,” which answered a question he hadn’t let himself wonder yet, “but I won’t be responsible for keeping you alive here. We’re turning toward Pollux. You’ll be on your own there.”

“No.” It was a gut instinct to argue, and Cody knew he had to follow it up with facts, fast. Corva clearly hated him—he had to make it worth her while to stay on course. “You should keep going to Pandora. Not because of the trade for your goods you’ll get there, but because of the trade you’ll get for me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“The Federation has deployed a fleet to the colony. They’ll be there soon. They’ll take care of the pirates, and they’ll pay for my return.”

“The Federation doesn’t pay for hostages.”

“Then they can be used to relay a message about me to my stepfather, who will pay for me. He’ll pay anything you ask.” Cody knew that much was true. He hadn’t left things very good with Garrett, but Garrett would never turn away from him.

“That’s a lot of trouble to go to for an uncertain future.”

“Everything about your entire life is uncertain,” Cody said, letting a little of his disdain show. “Your ship is falling apart. Your people live huge parts of their lives in the dark, reduced to their work and nothing else. You have cargo that you can’t easily offload, but you have an expensive hostage to help offset your costs if you play your game right. Wait and see what the fleet can do. Bargain for me. You’ll be surprised at what you get.”

“Perhaps.” Her lips pursed like she was about to spit. “You know, I’m inclined to keep your little friend. Livia says he’s useful.”

“It’s ‘ze,’” Cody corrected. “And trust me when I say that you can’t handle the hurricane Ten would drop on your ship if you tried to separate us.”

“Fine. Then you’ll be offered as a package deal, but if I don’t get enough for you? I might rethink my stance on keeping you alive.”

“Understood.”

Well. At least it was all out in the open now.

Reformation: Chapter Seventeen

Notes: A little Cody perspective this time, because it turns out he can take care of himself, darn it. 

Title: Reformation: Chapter Seventeen

***

Chapter Seventeen

It didn’t take Cody long to realize that no one was going to work with him. Honestly, he shouldn’t have assumed otherwise. His grandma had made it clear that he was nothing to her, or worse than nothing—an interference she didn’t want to have to deal with. None of the mechanics even spoke to him, although he got plenty of sometimes-curious, sometimes-baleful glances.

Well, then. If he wasn’t going to be making any friends today, then he could work to accomplish his secondary objective. Multi-layered plans were a tactician’s greatest friend, and as much as Cody was learning at the Academy, he’d already sat at the hand of the master when it came to having a backup.

He grabbed one of the welding helmets from the wall, ignoring everyone like he knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. He didn’t bother with the tool kit—Cody had a molecular repair wand in his own tool bag, which worked a hell of a lot better than the ones like this that burned—he sniffed—fossil fuels? Really? Wow. It was a wonder everyone on this ship didn’t have cancer.

Cody tucked the helmet over his head, covering up most of his hair—he’d thought about cutting it down to bristle-length a dozen times, but Ten liked it like this—and all of his face. He knew he was still being watched but he ignored it, grabbing an apron to go with the helmet and putting it on before accessing his implant. His head ached a little, but the mapping function came up easily enough.

Location 1—name.

“Main hall for engineering,” he murmured. The designation appeared in his mind, a glowing blue dot right beneath his feet. “From main door, leftmost hall.” He started walking toward it, a thin line appearing in his mind, the first strand of his rudimentary map.

“Hey!” someone called out. “Your girlfriend went the other way, Bound Boy!” Nice, Cody hadn’t heard that one before. He ignored the directions and the taunt, and continued until he hit the hall and started down it.

Location 1-a: leftmost hall.

“Good enough for now.” He walked on, slowly, taking note of interesting features and doors into other compartments. The farther he went, the fewer people noticed him, until after half an hour he was still walking and nobody he passed—and there weren’t many of them in this part of the ship—bothered him at all.

This corridor seemed to be fairly close to the hull, if the temperature readings Cody was getting were correct. He’d left the original ship behind a thousand steps ago, but whoever had grafted these two together, they’d done a good job. It helped that the ships were the same model—Parvathan Stars, his memory supplied, probably about three hundred years old—but there were some noticeable differences. He stopped occasionally to zip a few sections together that looked on the verge of falling apart, either due to poor maintenance, poor welding compound or just…rust.

Holy shit. Who knew that anything was made with metal that rusted in the space-traveling era? The big advantage of meta materials was that you didn’t have to worry about them breaking down like origin materials would, because they took care of each other’s weaknesses and enhanced each other’s strengths. So strange.

Eventually he took a ladder up the side of the ship and to the hall just above it. This one was tighter than the first, more like a walkway, with a grate floor and a much closer ceiling. There was pink foam under the grate, and foam on the external-facing side of the hall as well. A quick probe informed him the foam was actually spray-on insulation. Spray. On. Insulation. Fire-retardant but not fireproof, and not the sort of thing you’d worry about in a part of the ship that wasn’t close to where people lived.

Location 2—name?

“Firetrap,” Cody muttered, then winced as the program wrote that onto the map. “Delete. Rename dwelling-adjacent walkway, once elevated from 1-a.” It did so, and Cody squared his shoulders and started walking again, careful not to touch the insulation any more than he had to. Toxic, so toxic. No wonder his dad had taken him and run out of here as soon as he could. Cody was surprised he’d survived to the age of five in this ship.

He managed two more levels before he sat down to have lunch, a protein bar that he’d brought along with him. The area he was in was criss-crossed with pipes that carried water through the ship, if the occasional drips that hit the floor were anything to go by. Cody wanted to imagine it was clean water, but he kind of doubted that the environmental scrubbers on this thing were anything to shout about. The best he could probably hope for was non-poisonous.

Drip. Drip. Drip. The noise was a little obnoxious. Cody looked around for the nearest drip and spied it a little under a meter away. He pulled out his repair wand, stretched over and touched it to the pipe. One quick zip later and the leak was sealed. He sat back to finish the rest of his lunch, and—

“No!” A kid—a tiny kid, he couldn’t be more than three or four—scuttled out from under a bent piece of siding that must have led through to one of the living areas. He had skin so black it looked almost blue, and wore a jumper than had probably once been yellow but was now settled firmly into beige. “Turn it on again!” He looked with distress down into the grating below the drip, then turned and firmly smacked Cody on the helmet. Ow. He pulled the visor up.

“Take it easy!”

“She needs the water! Turn it on!”

“Who needs the water?”

“Missy!”

Cody was still mystified. “Who is Missy?” The kid grabbed his arm and tugged until he bent over to look into the grate. At first all he could see was pink foam, but beyond that there was a sliver of the metal beneath it, and caught inside a crack—or was it a deliberate fault? It was hard to tell from here—was a yellow blossom nestled in a bed of green leaves. It was a—no. Really?

“A dandelion?” Cody murmured. “Seriously?” He knew they had a reputation for being able to grow anywhere, but on a Drifter ship caught between toxic insulation and rusty metal? The water must be carrying more nutrients than he thought. Which also meant it was probably dirty as hell, even if all he could smell right now was the underlying chemical funk of the foam.

“Missy,” the kid repeated. “She needs to drink.”

“How long has she been there?” Cody asked.

“Since last time.”

He nodded encouragingly. “Last time what?”

“Last dirt time.”

“You grabbed a few seeds the last time you went planetside?”

The kid shuffled his feet. “They grabbed me. And then fell off. And I found one and put it here.”

“Huh.” Of all the places to grow a garden. Cody nodded. “I get it. Okay.” He reached out with the wand and reopened the tiny gash in the pipe. “There. Water for Missy.”

“Good.” The kid looked satisfied. “I’m Zan, I’m five. My mama is kitchen folk.”

Well, that was a matter-of-fact introduction. “I’m Cody. I’m nineteen. My daddy is a pilot.”

Zan frowned. “But you look engines.”

“I’m engines, but my daddy isn’t.”

Zan made a face. “Weird.”

“I guess so. You hungry?” Cody shared the rest of his protein bar and a one-sided conversation with Zan, who was more than happy to talk up a storm now that his pet flower had been tended to. By the time Cody left, he and the kid were fast friends, and he promised to come and visit Missy again.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of interaction Cody had been expecting when he got out of bed that morning, but it was way better than nothing. He smiled through the next hour of mapmaking, walking over four miles’ worth of halls and traversing at least seven originally-separate ships before he got a message from Ten: Finally done. Heading back to our place. Meet me there? He sent back the equivalent of a nod, and had his implant plot the fastest route there given the information it had. Fifteen minutes, three ladders, and two stairwells later, and Cody was back in their dock, where Ten was waiting impatiently for him.

“The way this thing leaks I’m amazed it doesn’t just all decompress and kill everyone,” ze said as soon as ze saw Cody. “You think what I do is dangerous? I have nothing on these people, nothing, it’s astonishing they aren’t all dead of some ridiculous mold-borne illness because they don’t have the facilities to give people more than one shot of Regen a year unless they’re on the verge of death, which you would be all the fucking time here. Oh my god, you were on the verge of death all the fucking time! Why did Jonah wait until you were five? Why do I have to do this again tomorrow? Do I have to do this again tomorrow?”

“You do,” Cody said, setting the helmet and apron aside. “I’m sorry.”

“Hmph. On the plus side—and there was only one, and this is it—Livia is competent and not a complete idiot. So.” Ten flopped back on their cot. “What did you do today?”

Cody grinned and accessed his new map. “I’ll show you all about it.”

Reformation: Chapter Fifteen

Notes: Back to Cody and Ten! More specifically, back to Ten, who is paranoid. Whatever, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

Title: Reformation: Chapter Fifteen

***

Chapter Fifteen

Not mine, not mine, not mine: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/334251603576650025/

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Ten was a genius. It might be an exaggeration to say that all of hir ideas were good, but when it came to problem solving in a pinch, Ten was second to almost none. Ze would have been a brilliant tactician, hir instructors at the Academy had lamented, if ze was better at taking into account the human cost of things. Ship in a bind? Surrounded on all sides by the enemy, no way out? Ten would blow up the ship. Not only would ze blow it up, but ze’d do it in the biggest and most spectacular way possible, to maximize destruction. Yes, it meant ze died, along with all of hir crew, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Win at any cost? Needless to say, it was an attitude that had permanently sidelined hir from any chance at a command track in the Academy, which was exactly what ze’d meant to happen.

Ten was actually very cognizant of life, when it suited hir to be. Hir life, of course, was paramount when it came to preservation, because otherwise ze couldn’t do a damn thing to look after anyone else, but the lives of hir loved ones came in a close second. In Cody’s case, that second was so close a space as to be practically nonexistent. And here they were, on a Drifter ship that was verging on derelict, puttering through space with a bunch of people who either disliked them because they were outsiders, disliked them because they didn’t fit the mold, or were curious about them but not willing to do anything to help them. Ten didn’t trust Jack as far as ze could throw him, but at least ze knew he’d look after Cody. Jack wasn’t a mechanic, though, and it was inevitable that Ten and Cody would eventually be separated during their work. So, a few safeguards were in order.

Cody’s eyebrows went up the “morning” of their second day on board the ship, when Jack was called to pilot and they were going to get a handle on everything that needed repairs or upgrades. “Are you serious?”

“What?” Ten asked, still holding out hir “keep Cody alive” emergency kit. “It’s not like any of this stuff is super obvious. No one will know that we think they’d a pile of advantage-seeking , scum-sucking—”

“That’s not fair to say, we don’t even know them yet.”

“We don’t need to. We can infer everything we need to know about them.”

“And your inferences have led you to decide they’re…scum-sucking?”

“More like they think we’re scum-sucking lowlifes taking advantage of Jack’s stupid hospitality, but that’s six in one, half a dozen in the other. The point is, a lot of these people aren’t going to like us, and there are a lot of ways that things can go wrong on a ship, especially a ship carrying five hundred people that looks like a floating tumor.” Ze pressed the kit at Cody again. “Take it. Come on.” Cody still looked doubtful. Time to break out the big guns. Ten took two steps forward, plopped down in Cody’s lap and leaned into him, wrapping hir arms around his neck. “For me,” ze whispered, and kissed him.

Bad idea. Oh no. It had been so long since they’d had sex, days, and they hadn’t had a quiet moment together in almost as long as Ten was a lot of things but an exhibitionist wasn’t one of them, especially not with Cody’s creepy dad not two rooms away, and damn it, damn it, ze could grind down on his lap right here and get hirself off in two minutes, ze was sure of it.

They were supposed to be in the engineering section of the ship in ten, and it would be a fast walk as things stood.

“Oh my god, really?” Cody demanded as soon as Ten pulled back. “Now?” He’d sprung up almost instantly, and his expression was pained as he pressed a palm against his groin. “We don’t have time.”

“I know.”

“I hate this.”

“Me too! If you’d just taken my present in the first place, you wouldn’t have had to be reminded about how much you’re missing all of this right now.” Ze indicated hirself with a wave of hir hand as ze stood.

“I don’t need a reminder,” Cody groaned. “I think about you all the time anyway. Shit.” He shut his eyes for a second, then held out a hand. “Give it to me.”

Success! Ten handed the kit over and watched as Cody deftly took the pieces apart, slotting them into place on his body and clothing. Perfect, perfect, perfect. As soon as the booster went over his implant, Ten reached out. Can you hear me now?

“Loud and clear.”

Use your implant.

Yes. Cody winced. “Ugh, I don’t like that.”

“It’s harder without Hermes to help,” Ten agreed. “We should use it in case of emergencies only, but at least it’s a way for us to communicate if they stick us on opposite ends of this crate.”

“It’s not a crate.”

“It’s a flying basket case. It’s the space equivalent of a ship’s graveyard come back to life—it’s a zombie ship. Have you ever heard of zombies before? Because this thing is one of them.”

“Ten—”

“They have an average of three leaks a day on this ship. Three! A day! We’re talking hull breaches here, and I don’t care if it’s a little one, when the part of your ship that keeps you from decompressing and freezing in space is malfunctioning, you need to dedicate some time to it, not just keep slapping patches on and calling it good.”

“I know, I—”

“That’s why the kit is important, okay?” Ten stopped pacing and looked at Cody. “I know you think I’m overreacting and that this stuff isn’t necessary, but it is, and not just because someone might do something stupid and malicious. It’s an anti-accident kit too. It could keep you alive, and I’d give you one even if you weren’t a natural. I don’t care about that, you know I don’t.”

“I know.” Cody got up and straightened his clothes. “And I know you’re wearing one too, so it makes me feel a little better. Same gear?”

“Mostly.”

“Ten…”

“I know you don’t like the shocker but that thing has saved my ass several times, and I’m smaller than you. People are going to try to take advantage of that.” They stepped off Jacks’ ship and headed toward the hall that led to engineering.

“It might not be as bad as you think.”

Ten snorted. “You’re the most annoyingly optimistic person I’ve ever met, and keep in mind, I know Grennson. You leave him in the ether, though.”

Cody shrugged. “Why borrow trouble when we’re not going to have any shortage of it ourselves?”

“Hence the need for the kits.”

They made it to engineering with a minute to spare, not that it seemed to matter. The compartment was immense, like an ancient depiction of a hive of bees, full of ladders and corridors and people, each one moving with purpose, some of them accompanied by sparks.

“Fun,” Cody said, looking around.

“Tragic,” Ten corrected. “Fucking tragic, a first year Academy student could organize a workplace better than this.”

“I guess we need to find ourselves something to do.”

Ten’s idleness, at least, was put to an end the second a small, slender woman with dark skin and neon bright hair saw hir standing in the doorway. “Hey, you!” Ten glanced hir way. “Yeah, you! Whatshirname, Tiennan.”

“Ten.”

“Right. You know how to weld?”

“Does a baby know how to drink milk and shit?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Answer the question, smartass.”

“Yes,” Ten said, enunciating clearly. “I can weld. Any idiot can weld.”

“But I need an idiot who can do it in tight quarters, and Corva said we’re to keep you kids working, so!” She clapped Ten on the shoulder, knocking hir forward a step. “My name’s Livia, and you’re coming with me to sanitation. We’ve got a containment issue.”

“Joy,” Ten said sourly. “And Cody?”

“Eh, the little prince will find work for himself soon enough, right?” She glanced disinterestedly at Cody, who just shrugged and smiled at Ten.

“I’ll be fine. You go have fun in sanitation.”

“I hate you.”

It was unfair how Cody’s grin made Ten’s heartrate pick up so reliably. “I know.”

“Enough sweet talking, kid.” The woman pushed an old-fashioned portable arc welder into Ten’s hand, along with an apron and a pair of goggles that had clearly seen better days. “You ready to get down and dirty?”

“I suppose I have to be.”

Ten looked back once as ze followed Livia down the hall. People moved around Cody like they didn’t even see him. He didn’t seem bothered, though.

Good luck.

Cody sent back the mental equivalent of a wink. It would have to be enough.

Reformation: Chapter Twelve

Notes: This is for my poor sick darlin', who needs something happy in her life. Have some Cody and Ten!

Title: Reformation: Chapter Twelve

***

Chapter Twelve

Not my ship, not my ship, not my ship...

Sometimes, in dreams, Cody thought he relived his early childhood on a Drifter ship. He would walk down endless, twisting corridors made from mottled patches of metal, rusty scraps scraped just clean enough to catch a bond with newer polymers. Sometimes he was running toward his father, sometimes he was running away from other people, but Cody was never still when he dreamt of Drifting. He and his dad had left the clan when he was only five, but occasionally he would catch a whiff of burning solvent or thick, ancient oil and stop in his tracks, his head turning to track the smell despite himself.

Cody knew that leaving had been better. He’d been a liability on a Drifter ship; his dad had never said it, but Jack had uncomfortably intimated as much more than once. Kids who couldn’t heal fast were burdens, and nobody had time to take care of a burden when you were expected to start working as soon as you could walk. Instead, Cody and Jonah had made a new family with Garrett, and Cody wouldn’t trade it for the world. Still, there were times when he felt like a bird trapped not in a cage, but underwater, in a place it shouldn’t be able to survive. He couldn’t be a Drifter because he was a natural, but he would never really fit in with the glitz and glamour that came with Garrett’s lifestyle either, for the same reason.

Ten, on the other hand, would thrive anywhere. It was evident from the moment they caught sight of the enormous Drifter ship, well beyond the orbit of Olympus, where it would have had to pay docking fees. Jack eased them in toward what sort of, kind of looked like a port that would work for a little skip ship like his, and Ten actually twisted hir head to follow the motion. “How will we—oh, of course, at an angle. So you can cluster ships around a central intake. Clever. Very ungainly, but clever.”

“Don’t matter how elegant you look when all you’ve gotta worry about’s livin’ in space,” Jack muttered as he delicately guided his craft into the cradle. “No gravity to break you down. Now look, this skipper’s mine, but that don’t mean other people ain’t gonna come in here. You got a way of locking that bike?”

“Why don’t we just stay in here?” Cody said. He already felt like his skin was crawling at the thought of going onto the enormous ship. So many people who he didn’t know, who hadn’t wanted him…

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, we can make our quarters here, can’t we? So we’re out of the way?”

“Can’t contribute as easy when you’re out of the way,” Jack said. “’Sides, everyone’s gonna want to see you. I’ve been talkin’ you up for a while now.”

“Even to Grandma?”

Jack clapped Cody on the shoulder. “Let me worry about your Grandma.” The little ship docked with a faint clunk. “She shouldn’t kick up too much of a fuss. Like I said, we’re headed there anyway. Just makes sense to take you with us.”

Ten was frowning. Cody cut in before ze could say anything to Jack. “Thanks.”

“I’m going to lock the bike,” Ten announced. “Cody, come with me so I can show you the code.”

Cody frowned, but followed Ten back to the storage bay of the ship. “There is no code,” he pointed out once they were alone. “It’s DNA-keyed, I remember because you pricked my finger for hours before you got it to work right.”

“You’re not going to freak out on me, are you?”

Cody blinked. “What?”

“You aren’t going to suddenly decide that you wish you had been a Drifter all along and dive into assimilating their culture and forgiving them for all the awful things they did to you just because you’re lonely and looking for a connection?”

Cody parsed Ten’s breathless question out bit by bit. “Okay, first off, I’m not lonely. I’ve got you.”

Ten rolled hir eyes. “What about when I’m not enough for you?”

Cody actually laughed. “When have you ever been not enough? Do you even remember our time on Perelan? Who was the one who took time out of hir busy schedule to come back inside and do martial arts that I know you hated with me?”

“I don’t hate them, I just find them inefficient,” Ten defended hirself. “There are so many more practical ways to prevent someone from messing with you. Poison comes to mind. A mild poison,” ze amended when Cody raised his eyebrows. “Just enough to make them fall down and not be able to get up and exact vengeance, which would give you time to really make them regret it.”

Well, that sounded disturbing. “Do you actually have something like that?”

“We’re getting way off subject here.”

“Right.” Cody took a breath. “I don’t wish I was still a Drifter. I might sort of wish I’d been able to find a place here when I was a kid, but I didn’t. They didn’t want me, and they didn’t give my dad much of a choice, and we left and it was the best thing for both of us. I wouldn’t have met Garrett otherwise, which means I wouldn’t have met you, and I can’t imagine my life without either of you.”

Ten looked a bit shocked. “That’s…good.”

“And I do want to assimilate as well as I can while I’m here, but I don’t really give a fuck whether they like me or not as long as they get us where we need to go. My dad is what matters now, not me having a bunch of friends. I don’t need to make friends anyway, I brought my own.”

“Ha,” Ten muttered. “You mean I brought myself, that’s what you really mean. And it’s a good thing I did, because—”

“I know,” Cody said. “I already know. I always know exactly how lucky I am whenever I’m with you. That’s how I feel, okay? We’re here and I’m going to be polite, but the only person whose approval I need is yours. Got it?”

Ten’s mouth silently opened and closed a few times, the way it often did when ze was trying to think of a way to be verbally affectionate that didn’t make hir also feel over-exposed. Cody took pity on hir.

“Let’s say it’s done and get back out there, okay? We’ve got some meeting and greeting to do, I bet.”

“Right. Yes.” Ten’s hands twitched, but ze kept them at hir side. “You’re still in uniform. We both are. Should we change?”

“Why bother? If they can’t handle us like this, they probably aren’t going to be any better if we’re in civvies.”

“Who would ever have thought that of the two of us, you’d be the one to screw convention?”

Cody took Ten’s hand and smiled. “Can’t have you getting bored. Come on.”

It turned out, the term committee was a drastic understatement. There had to be fifty people waiting for them in the little docking bay once they were out of the ship. Jack swore quietly. “Let me do the talkin’, okay?” he murmured to Cody before stepping forward to face a woman with short, storm-gray hair and a face like an angry walnut.

“Corva, I can explain.”

“Explain a pair of strangers on board my ship?” Her voice was as dry as dust. “I’d hope so.

“Cody’s no stranger.”

“Cody’s been a stranger since before he was born.” Cody was really glad he was holding Ten’s hand, because it was oddly comforting to feel Ten’s nails dig into the back of his palm with barely-restrained emotion. It was nice that he wasn’t the only one.

“He’s got news about Pandora. He needed a lift there. Ain’t like we don’t have the space.”

“And what makes you so sure we’re still headed that way, eh?” she taunted him. “Why not find an easier drop for our goods?”

“Because the price on Pandora’s the best for five systems and you know it,” Jack replied. “You ain’t gonna give up that kind of profit without a fight.”

“Don’t mean we need useless people on board, taking our resources without giving anything back.”

“They’re mechanics. Engineers. They can work on the ship, get some of the dark parts lit up again.” Jack was incredibly persuasive when he wanted to be, Cody had to admit. “And they’ve got credits to pay their way.”

“Credits only spend on Central planets, and we don’t deal in places like this for long.” She glared over Jack’s shoulder at the two of them. “Or with people like them.”

“Corva. I gave ‘em my word.”

She glared at Jack. “Keep this up and your word won’t be worth the price of space junk.” She turned to shout at the watching crowd. “Get back to your stations! I want the stench of Olympus out of my nose before another hour passes! Get us up to speed toward Pandora.” She turned back to Jack. “As for them? They’re your problem. Put them to work. Feed them from your share. I don’t want to see them. I don’t want anything to do with them.” She turned and stalked off down the hall.

“Bye, Grandma,” Cody muttered.

Yep, this was going to be fun.

Reformation: Chapter Nine

Notes: Ten's perspective this time--I got it done, yay! 

Title: Reformation: Chapter Nine

***

Chapter Nine

Tiennan St. Clair had never been much of a “people” person. It was a stupid phrase, in hir opinion. Everybody had to deal with other people, it didn’t matter whether you liked to or not. People were always around, you were a person yourself—the whole thing was redundant.

When ze was young, being a “scientific” person had held far more allure. Who cared if anyone liked the fact that you could blow the room off a greenhouse without damaging a single plant? The point was, the experiment was a success! Scientific progress could be measured and accounted for, added and calculated and, yes, while there were messy parts of it (Cody would say it was all messy, but Cody didn’t have the same kind of vision Ten did) overall, it’s adherence to logic and process was incredibly gratifying. People didn’t have the same sorts of processes. Talk about messy.

Being one of those chatty social butterflies did have it’s perks, though. People listened to you better if they liked you, even if what you had to say was complete shit. Morons were more inclined to give you grants and lab space if they thought you weren’t “disruptive.” Symone, Ten’s legal guardian, had talked to hir over and over again about the necessity of finding a way to get along with people, at least while ze was still at the Academy.

“Their rules might not make sense, but you have to follow them if you want to get far enough ahead to where it won’t matter.”

“But I’m never going to join the military,” Ten had insisted. “The Academy just has the best program for undergraduate sciences! Why should I go along with their stupid—”

“Because I said so.” That was how a lot of conversations with Symone ended. It was way too easy to exasperate her.

Ten hadn’t found anyone ze’d really bothered listening to on the subject of obedience until it came to Garrett. Ze had instantly been drawn to Cody, and his father Jonah was still the source of a slightly-ridiculous crush, but Garret…Ten felt like ze could really talk to Garrett. Not because they were both scientists, although Garrett was a pretty good one, but because Garrett had taken an early disinclination toward humanity—which Ten could totally understand, all things considered—and turned it into an ability to manipulate people at the highest levels of government. He’d explained it like a science, and Ten had found that fascinating.

“You have to be able to provide something other people want,” Garrett had said one night when they were all together, even Grennson and Darrel, having dinner in some posh restaurant downtown. Jonah had distracted everyone else with something, so it had just been Ten and Garrett at the table. “Whether it’s a product or a perspective. People are mostly selfish creatures, and they’re always on the lookout for self-improvement. If you can offer them something that appeals to them, they’ll work to accommodate you. Of course, they might also try to steal from you or murder you, but,” he’d shrugged his elegant shoulders, “that’s pretty much par for the course. Utility is the key to others keeping you around. And eventually, you get to the point where you don’t need their approval anymore, because your position is too strong to oppose.”

“That makes so much sense,” Ten had marveled.

Garrett had laughed. “Jonah doesn’t like it when I put things in such ‘mercenary’ terms, but that’s because he’s a nice person.”

“Just like Cody.”

“Yes. Like Cody.” Garrett had looked out at his family, his eyes glittering, mouth twisted in a little half smile. “I’m not. And it’s better that way. Nice people need support from those of us who are willing to be hardasses to get what we want.” He’d smiled at Ten. “I’m glad Cody has you.”

“Me too.”

And now more than ever, Ten was glad ze’d taken precautions to ensure that Cody couldn’t do anything dumb, like run off without hir. Cody might have Jack on his side, for whatever that was worth, but Ten knew how to keep people from taking advantage of him.

And that was going to start right now.

“The bike has to come,” Ten said briskly, interrupting Jack’s refusal as they stood outside his beat-up shuttle. Jack had been glad to see Cody—ecstatic, even. Ten didn’t know the whole story, but from what he’d been able to piece together, Jack had given up all his rights to his natural son, only to decide he wanted to have a place in his life later on. Cody, being the sweet-natured person he was, was all for that. Jonah was less enthusiastic, and Garrett would probably happily have Jack murdered on the sly if he thought he could get away with it. Ten had decided to go with Garrett’s viewpoint: reluctant engagement, but absolutely no trust.

Jack didn’t trust hir either, so it all worked out.

“There ain’t room for it.”

“In what, the shuttle or your ship?”

“Either. There’s barely room for you, so if you wanna come along, I suggest you—”

“We’re not stupid, you know.”

Jack blinked. “What?”

“We’re not stupid. You’re trying to manipulate Cody into doing things your way because you feel like you’re doing us a favor, but we’re not idiots. This model of shuttle can lift off with up to ten-point-two tons of cargo, and from the looks of your suspension you’re carrying no more than five. The bike weighs less than one eighth of one ton, and all three of us put together aren’t going to change things much. It’s also carrying all of our supplies, which you’re going to be partaking in, so file it under necessary baggage and let’s go already.”

Jack looked at Cody, open-mouthed. Cody shrugged. “Ten’s right. We’re not trying to inconvenience you, but we need it. Unless you want the Lady to kick us off as soon as you bring us up.”

“The Lady” was Cody’s grandmother, the matriarch of the Helms clan. Cody couldn’t remember much about her, but seeing as she hadn’t tried to contact her son or grandson since they’d left the clan, obviously there was no love lost there.

Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “Cody, she ain’t gonna be happy no matter what you bring up. The more you’ve got, the harder it’s gonna be to justify finding room for you.”

“Your ship is bigger than most space stations,” Ten said. “I daresay you’ve got room for two not-so-large people and one bike.” Honestly, was the logic of it so hard to follow?

“Jack.” Cody reached out and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’re not going to make trouble for you, we just want to get to Pandora.”

“Right.” Jack looked at Cody like a person might look at his last meal before an execution—wanting him, but knowing that trouble was going to follow after. It was…kind of disturbing, in Ten’s opinion. Ze slid a little closer, close enough to touch if ze needed to. “All right, then. We have to get outta here before they shut down the ports.” He waved both of them toward the shuttle. “I’ll get her prepped, load your bike into the back.”

“Got it.” They separated, and as soon as Jack was inside the shuttle, Ten sighed.

“How disturbing do you find him? Because you must find him disturbing.”

“He just doesn’t quite know how to deal with me,” Cody said as he rolled the bike around to the open hatch.

“That much is clear. Just…stay close to me up there, okay?”

Cody grinned, but it looked a little forced. “You think I want to be alone with anyone else up there? None of them have any reason to like me, I know that.”

“And hitching a ride with these people is really the best thing you can do right now? I’m not judging,” Ten added as Cody turned a glare on him. “I just want to know.”

“It’s better than I could do in some safe house on the edge of the universe,” Cody said flatly. “Garrett wants me out of the way, and I wouldn’t be useful to anyone like that.”

Except Garrett, Ten thought, but ze didn’t voice it. “You ready to shut down your implant?” Ten asked. It wasn’t like they’d be able to use them on a Drifter ship, without the embedded capabilities of most of modern society.

“Yeah. My messages are kind of piling up.”

Probably. Ten already had several each from Grennson and Darrel. Cody had to have more. Ze pulled hir one of hir latest inventions, a tiny remote that could selectively disable nonessential parts of implants. “Come here.” Ze stroked the curly hair at the back of Cody’s hair up out of the way—not essential, but ze took ay chance ze had to run hir hands through Cody’s hair—and turned ninety-nine percent of it off.

Except for the part that would let them communicate at a distance. It wasn’t easy to do, but Ten was pretty sure ze was going to want the option of using it, just in case.