Local Star, Aimee Ogden [ebook reader that looks like a book txt] 📗

him look up and push his goggles to his forehead. “Good, you’re here. Losing the morning’s got us behind schedule, and the bursar will want a discount for every day, every minute we delay in getting these things back to them.”

Triz walked to the wallmount, picked up a wrench, and turned it back and forth in her hand. She was tempted to take the wrench to the discarded piece of plastiglass, but of course, the whole point of plastiglass was that it wouldn’t break except under a level of stress much greater than an angry mechanic could produce. “Is that what you’re worried about?” she asked. “Having to offer the Fleet a discount?”

Quelian set the sealant hose aside and leaned on the nose of the Skimmer with both hands. His face showed no emotion, but a telltale flush of his forehead betrayed him. “What should I be doing? Tearing my clothes, screaming and wailing? Should I smear my face with mourning paint and say my prayers over the recycler hatch?”

“She’s not dead.” Triz replaced the wrench and chose a bolt extractor instead, which she carried over to Kalo’s fighter. She remembered the conversation with Nan and the thought of Kalo calling her like he was practically a part of their family still burned her. The cold core at the heart of that fire whispered: Maybe they’d rather have him in their gon than me. No—she shrugged off that selfish thought. At least someone had remembered Nan.

But she’d rather get Kalo’s Skimmer back in fighting trim and have him out of her hair sooner than later, especially if the alternative was him haunting her for the next week. The respiration cells on the shitting thing weren’t letting air flow through; Triz hated greenwork but even starfighter pilots needed to breathe. She climbed atop the Swarmer, just behind the cockpit, and began to work the paneling above the cells loose. “She’s in Justice. Stop acting like they’re the same.”

“I’d ask you to stop acting like you can see stars between the two.” Quelian pounded on the Skimmer’s wing. The impact sent the sealant hose skittering away; it crashed to the ground beneath the fighter and he barked a curse. He dropped down heavily beside the fallen hose. “I know how you feel about each other.” The absence of the word love there sent supernova sparks up behind Triz’s eyes. “But she’s not the same woman who left Vivik, and that’s something we all have to come to terms with.”

Triz wrenched the paneling free, and a barked laugh came along with it. Now here was something she could do for Casne: throw herself on the grenade of Quelian’s anger. “That’s what this is all still about? She was never going to take over the wrenchworks. She never had the sense for a busted ship, let alone the ins and outs of every make and model that comes through here.” It felt good to say the things to Quelian that she’d balanced on the tip of her tongue for years. Maybe a little too good. Was her anger for Casne’s benefit or her own? She frowned and started working the algae cells free from their frame. “Isn’t that why you keep me around? Because you needed a spare?”

“Don’t turn this around on me.” Quelian threw the hose back up over the top of the fighter but didn’t follow it up. “My daughter made her decisions. You not liking how they came out doesn’t erase them.”

Triz’s tongue worked its way out between her teeth as she ripped off panels; now she bit it hard. “And you not liking them doesn’t make a war crime out of a rough goodbye!” Each algae cell she pulled free was brown, and their gelatinous enclosures were hardened from their usually soft state. Too dry? She flipped the frame over to check the intake and found it crusted over reddish-brown. Flakes fell away when her fingertips brushed against the ragged coating; she let the cell frame fall back against the Skimmer as she crawled forward and into the open cockpit.

Her work gloves dropped into her lap as her bare fingers searched the smooth, cold interior of the plastiglass cockpit shell. Ah: there it was. Someone untrained in the arts of the wrenchworks might not have been able to find it, but yes, a small, irregular dimple marked the place where the plastiglass had slowly closed back around a puncture. Some piece of microdebris or shrapnel had penetrated the cockpit. She turned to kneel against the pilot’s seat; someone had scrubbed this side of the air return intake clean, but she could see more ragged crust peeking through from the other side. Her heart hammered in her ears. The knot of frustration tying up her guts over the past months unraveled: not in relief, but in a wild expansion that balled up in her fists and closed off her throat.

The algae cells had died because the air intake was blocked by dried blood.

“Triz!” The banging of her heart echoed back from the wrenchworks. She blinked. Quelian was pounding the hose nozzle against the Skimmer’s fuselage. He stopped only when she fixed him with a hollow stare. “Have you heard a single word I’ve said?”

“I’ve heard plenty.” She unwound herself from the cockpit and slid over the side of the fighter to the floor. She didn’t land as neatly as Quelian, catching herself with one hand on the fuselage before she could fall. “I’m sorry I’m not her. If that’s what you’re wishing. If I were the one locked up in a Justice cell, she’d be doing everything she could to get me out. She wouldn’t hole up here in the works wishing things were different. So I guess I’m going to do what she would.” Turning her back on Kalo’s Skimmer and on Quelian too, she let herself stride back toward the lift.

“Don’t you walk away from this wrenchworks!” Quelian shouted. “Veling is a recycling engineer, not the shitting owner of