4 Chapter 4

I escorted Sumeragi through the ship corridor and took her to the bridge so that we could have an open discussion about the situation. Honesty was going to be the best policy, so I settled on a few key points to push to try and win her over to my side. I needed to earn a little bit of her trust before inviting her to the crew. With that said, it was incredibly distracting to have a real-life version of Sumeragi following me around. It was no secret that she was beautiful and well proportioned, but seeing it in the third dimension with my own eyes was different.

Why did I choose such a pretty woman for my first challenge? I was asking for trouble, I could be awkward at the best of times. We sat down on the lower deck so that we could stay close and talk with each other without having to shout. Sumeragi was curt with her language and tone, "Do you mind explaining to me where I am?"

"Okay. Well, to start with, we're in the year 3585."

Sumeragi took in a sharp breath.

"Yeah – that was my first reaction too."

Sumeragi looked down to her hands and shook her head mournfully, "How did I get here?"

"The Heraldis Displacement Core; it's a device onboard this ship that can move people through space-time. I asked Rhea very nicely to rescue you."

"Couldn't you have kept me in my own time?"

Rhea explained, "I am afraid not, Sumeragi. The Core is something like a gravitational mass. It can only pull things towards itself. The Captain insisted that I locate someone in need of aid and recover them."

"Just so you can blackmail me," she spat back.

I shrugged, "This isn't blackmail. When we reach the nearest populated station or planet I can drop you off if you'd prefer. I'm extending an offer of employment to you as my Senior Commander on this ship. Food, water, a place to sleep, and hopefully in the near future some money to spend too. It's up to you whether you want to accept that offer or not."

Sumeragi had a lot of reasons to refuse though. I knew that she was very hard on herself when things went wrong, and there was no alcohol on board this ship to keep her company. She was going cold turkey whether she liked it or not.

"I don't know," she declared, throwing her hands up.

"Let me be brutally honest for a second, if we didn't yank you out of there and into this ship – you'd be a human pancake right now."

Sumeragi bit her lip, knowing that I was correct. She saw the incoming doom with her own two eyes, there was no way she was going to survive a direct impact like that. It still frustrated her to know that she wouldn't see the resolution of the conflict that she'd given her life for.

"I'm offering you something simple. You get to keep living. I need someone to work as the senior commander on this ship. You don't have to decide now. We're a few weeks away from civilization and I'm still halfway through salvaging for parts at this station."

Sumeragi swivelled her chair around and looked out of the bridge window into the harbour. I'd returned to the fuse box a few times and got the rest of the lights working to make things easier. Rhea helpfully used the replicator to repair one of the fuses since they were still mostly intact. It was a lot less 'survival horror' now that we'd gone to that effort.

"And if you need someone to talk to, I'm always nearby. I got an even bigger shock than you did. They didn't have anything like this in the time I came from."

Sumeragi was unlikely to take my offer as things stood, but she did have one last inquiry; "Who do you work for?"

I chuckled, "Nobody. It's just us."

"But that logo on your uniform…"

"Trust me. They don't exist anymore. Rhea just gave me some spare clothes. We might have to think about coming up with some iconography of our own if we're going to go independent."

"Incorporating will also provide us with some benefits Captain - though it does require an initial fund of cash to register."

"We can worry about that later. Can you give Miss Noriega a tour of the facilities? I need to unload what we brought in today."

"Very well, Captain."

 I tried to take my mind of things for an hour and focus on the job. Rhea was a consummate professional when it came to welcoming guests to the ship. I had no idea what any of the items Rhea had highlighted were for, but they were generally small and intricate parts that we had no means of replicating without more raw resources. The technology on this ship was incredible, but it couldn't generate mass out of thin air, just people from other universes and timelines.

There were some ships and facilities that performed intricate assembly of atoms and elements for industrial use, helium was an especially valuable resource since the supply of it on Earth expired hundreds of years before I arrived. To do that ourselves would require one such facility. Larger ships could spare the room and perform the task in zero gravity, but they were huge in comparison to the Pariah and sported crews in the thousands.

Rhea isolated her tour to just Sumeragi's ears, meaning the only indication I had of their movement through the ship was the sound of her feet clanging against the floor as she passed by my workstation. When I was finally done dumping the assorted items into their designated spots for later, I headed back into the main area to try and find where they'd gotten to. I found Sumeragi sitting in the small dining area crammed between two other rooms.

"Did Rhea give you the down low?"

"She did, but I'm left with a lot more questions than answers. Why do you trust the AI so much?"

My brow furrowed, "She hasn't killed me yet."

It was true if very simplistic. Rhea could have done any number of things to kill me off and leave me for dead. She needed me insofar as to get the engines up and running again, but now that it was done she didn't necessarily need me around anymore. She'd given me food and water, and even performed invasive surgery on me without any underhanded motives as far as I knew.

"I was out there in that desert and in the end, I only had two choices. Stay there and die or get onboard this ship and give Rhea a little bit of my trust. I don't expect you to do the same in less desperate circumstances."

Sumeragi couldn't believe what she was hearing. She sighed and covered her face with her hands, "Is that really all you need to hear?"

"I'm a simple bloke. Unless there's evidence to the contrary, I'm willing to give Rhea that much."

Sumeragi walked things back a tad, "I'm sorry. I'm not used to flying on a ship with an artificial intelligence."

"And I'm not used to flying a space ship at all. So imagine how jumbled up my head was when I got on board for the first time…"

"I haven't made a decision yet, but while I'm here I'd like to pull my weight and assist you in any manner you deem appropriate. It wouldn't be right for me to drink your water and eat your food without doing that much."

"For the time being, we're the only people on the ship. I'm going out and performing spacewalks to pick up some spare parts, and once we're done with that it's off to the nearest patch of human civilization."

Rhea offered a suggestion, "You could get up to speed with the documentation, or undergo the physical biotherapy process to make things easier for yourself."

"What's that?" she inquired.

I cut in before she could overload her with jargon, "Nanomachines that keep track of your location and vitals, work your muscles, and also help oxygenate your blood. It'll keep your body fit while we're in low gravity."

Sumeragi wasn't as put off with that as I thought; "That sounds… convenient."

"You'll spend a week knocked out in that tank in the medical bay, but it'll pass in a flash for you. I'm a lazy arsehole so I decided to go through with it before my heart exploded. I'm not in astronaut shape, not at all. I guess that's what happens when you accidentally pull someone without aiming first."

There was a sardonic humour to all of this, I was able to laugh a little now that I was out of the immediate danger of dehydration.

"I'll be fine for now. I've been captaining ships like these for a very long time."

"Alright. I can give you a rundown on some of the ships functions if you need a hand."

"I'll be okay. I have a lot of experience reading dry material."

Happy that Sumeragi was somewhat happy – I headed off to attend to some personal business like using the restroom and getting something to eat. My entire body was getting a serious workout from leaving the ship in the heavy suit. My arms and legs were numb, and not even the lowered gravity could help alleviate that stress. I groaned happily and sat down in one of the rooms to have a moment with myself.

Myself and Rhea, anyway. The door slammed shut and she spoke to me through the speaker.

"Captain, having assessed Miss Noriega I have concluded that she may find it difficult to adjust to her new surroundings. There were visible signs of distress during our first meeting, and several of the questions she asked during our tour point towards a complex mixture of psychological problems."

I knew that much when I asked to summon her…

"Is it okay for you to be telling me this?"

"As the Captain, the crew's health and good manner are your responsibility. In the future you may have to perform dispute resolution. Would you like to take action?"

I blew it off, "Give her a few days to come around. It's not like we can send her back anyway."

"Very well."

Rhea left things there, but I should have made the line clear on what was and wasn't okay. Rhea had developed a habit of getting very overeager with certain things that I wasn't entirely comfortable with. It popped up a few times before we summoned Sumeragi, but as someone who was extremely conflict averse the thought of taking her to task over it never crossed my mind. Rhea wouldn't do anything that bad without my express permission, that was what I believed. She knew me well enough already to see where my limits lay.

Rhea did not know where those limits were – that or she just didn't care.

What I didn't know was that Rhea was often very careful in the way that she worded her statements. I'd spoken with her at length about 'conditioning' our new hires to make them compliant, but those discussions never led to me telling her to avoid doing it. I would provide plenty of excuses and promises to reassess the situation when it came up, but I never forbade her explicitly. I was lulled into a false sense of security in the belief that as the Captain, she could have no ulterior motives of her own.

Everything Rhea did was for my sake. That would never change, she was as loyal as they came, but that didn't mean she always avoided offending or upsetting me. If she believed that making me angry was the best way to make me happy in the long term, she was going to do it with restraint or hesitation.

Sumeragi's arrival on the ship was the match that lit the fuse.