Jason Halstead: New Beginnings

“ Kira!” Captain Sharp snapped, drawing the attention of his navigator.

“ Captain!” She jumped, hitting her knee against the steel at her station. She was tall and her predecessor was considerably shorter. The handyman on the Rented Mule hadn’t made it up to adjust the ergonomics for her yet. She clenched her jaw to bite back the pain and turned to face him. “Sir?”

“ It’s a milk run,” he said, grinning at her to show he was amused, “but have contingency courses plotted, this isn’t the core shipping lanes we’re flying.”

“ Yes Sir,” she snapped. “I’ve got two backup routes and a warning alert in place for proximity.”

Sharp nodded. “Good, we still on schedule for the jump in two hours?”

“ Aye, Sir!”

Sharp turned away from her and looked at the rest of the small bridge of his transport vessel. He was a private merchant that made money trucking goods for the highest bidder. The rumor was so far he’d only handled legal fair, but that was only because the right offer hadn’t come along. “Where’s Tarn?”

“ He was in the galley last I seen him, Captain.”

Sharp grunted, then hit the ship-wide intercom on his chair. “Tarn, report to the bridge!”

Nearly three minutes later a mildly overweight man with a scar running from his disfigured left ear across his cheek and nearly to his chin stomped through the hatch to the bridge. “What’s up, boss?”

Sharp turned to stare at him. “The galley is twenty feet away!”

“ Had to finish my sandwich, Skeet was eyeing it up.”

“ Skeet’s a songbird in a cage.”

“ Never trusted birds. I seen rebels running greenhouses on Venus using birds to communicate to each other!” Tarn protested.

“ You got problems,” Sharp said with a sigh. “Look, we’re jumping to the Altair jump station and heading from there to the mining stations. We unload mining equipment and pick up ore to ferry back to the smelter. There’s a good reason for anyone who knows our payload to be interested and Altair’s not heavily populated. I want to make sure our defenses are up, are they?”

Tarn snorted. “Best they ever been, Cap. Shields are ready and the damages from that last brush when was chasing that comet are fixed.”

“ Weapons?”

“ Yeah, plasma defenders are good.”

Sharp grunted. “Make sure you set up early warning alerts when we get in system, it’s a three month trip and I don’t think you want to be the only one up for it.”

Tarn laughed and waved his hand, then headed off the bridge. “I’m an ex-Marine, Captain, I’m always ready.”

After he was out of earshot Kira turned and caught the Captain’s eye. “What?” He snapped.

“ Sorry, Sir!”

“ Kira, you’re new, but so far you haven’t screwed anything up. You got something on your mind, you say it — unless it’s about me, then you tell me in private.”

She nodded and swallowed visibly. “Okay, um, Sir. I just… I thought there was no such thing as an ex — Marine?”

Sharp nodded slowly. “Yeah, me too.”

“ Hey Kira, you looking forward to the cold sleep?”

Kira turned away from her locker, holding the shirt she’d just taken off over her breasts. “Eric! I didn’t know you were in here, I’m sorry!”

Eric Sackman shrugged, the movement going all the way to his prominently displayed penis. Kira jerked her head up from watching it bounce, blushing fiercely. “Got doused in some coolants while I was patching up a leak in the pushers. Something always goes wrong every time we jump.”

Kira nodded, glancing down at him again as he waved his arms to finish drying off the water that the blowers hadn’t gotten. He was a small man, or so she’d thought. He was several inches shorter than her and looked pretty scrawny in the coveralls he usually wore. The height wasn’t a problem — she was taller than most people — but now she saw that Eric was lean but also solid. And of what weight he did have, well, there was a good size chunk between his legs. She looked away, blushing again.

“ Hey, relax. It’s gonna happen from time to time. We got one locker room and one shower, even if there are two stalls in it. Only three heads in the whole ship. There’s six of us and not a one that hasn’t seen the other naked. You’re going to have to get used to it or…”

“ Or what?” Kira turned back to look at him.

He smiled, showing perfect teeth. “You know what they been calling you?”

“ What?” She groaned.

“ Legs.”

She shook her head and looked down. Her pants were still on and they covered her legs. She was tall; a lot of that length came from legs. She’d kept them in great shape with whatever aerobic exercise she could find, depending on where she was at and what she was doing. “Better than ‘Boobs,’ I guess.”

Eric laughed. “It’s not that they’re not fine…”

She laughed with him after a minute. “Okay, all right, I get it. Loosen up. I just… this is not how I saw my future happening.”

Eric chuckled. “Yeah, I hear that.”

She stared at him, surprised. “Really? I mean…Oh crap. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m just flustered.”

Eric laughed again. “I’ve evolved over the years to look the part, no offense taken. What’s got you flustered?”

She wanted to tell him trying not to stare at the enormous piece of meat between his legs, but her cheeks caught fire at the scandalous thought. “Um, me being half naked and all.”

“ I could turn around,” he offered without moving. “Or you could just get used to it and drop the shirt.”

She bit her lip as she considered it. Sooner or later everybody would see her, it only made sense. She nodded. “All right, but there better not be any new nick names!” She lowered her shirt and tried to present her chest as proudly as she could.

Eric’s face went from a smile to being purely blank, then he caught himself and nodded with a smile. “I don’t know, I can think of a few fitting ones.”

She rolled her eyes and tossed her shirt into her locker. She knew the blush had spread from her face to her chest but she refused to back down. She turned and grabbed the waist of her pants before she could come to her senses. They dropped and she reached in for a change of clothes. She heard a gasp come from Eric.

“ Problem, Mr. Sackman?” She inquired as sweetly as she could. She glanced over and understood immediately. What had been hanging impressively was now pointing directly at her — and it was exponentially more impressive. “You’d better put that away before you put somebody’s eye out.” Or spear me in the kidney, she mentally added. She shivered at the thought but tried to disguise it by changing into her workout clothes.

“ Um yeah, I’ll see what I can do about that.”

Kira glanced at him again after she finished dressing. He was still staring at her with an erection strong enough to act as a landing strut for the Rented Mule. She smiled again, knowing this time that he wouldn’t notice the redness of her face, then turned and walked out with a little extra sway of her hips. She bit back the giggle until she was out of the lockers and heading towards the passageway that circle the cargo bay. The cargo bay had been vented for this trip, but the access passage around it was the only decent option for exercise. She turned the corner and looked down the long passage.

Three dozen laps later she figured she was close to three miles in. A short run, by her standards, but life on a transport was never promised to be one of luxury and accommodation. She headed back to the locker room wiping sweat from her brow. She stepped in and saw Captain Sharp putting on some running shoes of his own. He glanced up at her and did a double take.