Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Yasha the Space Noble Read online

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  Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Yasha the Space Noble

  By J.S. Clark

  Copyright 2012 Jesse Clark

  Table of Contents

  The Story

  About J.S. Clark

  Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Yasha the Space Noble

  Just a little bit farther, Aiyela told herself though her arm was already trying to come out of its socket. The brown sleeve of her mechanics jumpsuit bunched bigger and bigger as her hand delved deeper into the underside of the Ealsurld M. 17 engine. She didn't know how they made it past the twelfth model. "No sense, gineers! Try turning a wrench with your hand instead of a keystroke when you build these things!" She shouted to her phantom who was, no doubt, living in a thirty-seven hundred floor space resort, retired on a pension for a lifetime's labor of never using a tool.

  The hole wouldn't have been so much a problem, her thin fourteen year old arms seemed made to contort around just about any obstruction. But it just so happened that she'd been woken up a little early by the proximity alarm indicating that if she didn't get the Ealsurld back up to full power in about twenty minutes, she would be banana paste on the wrong side of a black hole's event horizon. Bumbling out of her hammock and tripping on that open grate from a week ago, she was a little out of sorts.

  So when she should have shunted the engine's near-magic, H73-01 oil into the reserve cache, she instead ripped into its guts-the thought of going squish from infinite gravity, messes with the mind a bit. Plates and bolts were flying as she tried to get to the regulator, the setback was that now she was balanced at the top of a ladder-above the warning sticker-with one hand holding a valve shut. The stretch from there was the problem. Her elbow just couldn't reach to the bend.

  "Three minutes, thirty seconds until course becomes irrecoverable," informed the computer with its tinny antique vocalizer.

  "I know!" she screamed back. Suddenly she had an idea. With the ladder wobbling under her, she lifted her left foot and set the toes in place of her hand over the valve. She was about a parsec past precarious but she had the reach. Got it.

  "Full power restored, engaging course correction."

  "Yes!" The ship surged under Aiyela. "Whoa!" She rocked, the ladder tipped, and her foot came off the valve. Hot, dark oil shot out and sprayed her in the face. Completely off balance, she tumbled, banging everything on her way down.

  She wanted to cry as she sat up rubbing her sore head, but there was no time for that. Precious oil was splattering off the bulkhead and she had none to spare. Spitting oil and self-harpooning snipes, she scampered back up the ladder and slap, clank, crick-the geyser was finished.

  What next? She surveyed the damage. The Ealsurld's belly dripped into a puddle on the deck with a million-fingered smear on the bulkhead pointing to it. It was all over her face, in her hair, and down the front of her jumpsuit. She peeled herself out of the top, tying the jumpsuit's sleeves about her waist. It made her feel cleaner, even though after all these years her white tank top was shades of sweat closer to orange than white.

  She looked at the bay-some girls had closets that were bigger-past the engine's overhang to a triangle shaped shard of a mirror taped to the wall. Her brown hair was dark as dirt in the front, matching the color of her jumpsuit-one guess how it got that color. The H73-01 was already cooling, sticking to her olive skinned cheeks, brow, and fingers like greasy almond butter-oh almond butter! But some of it was still warm enough that it was pooling at the edge of her chin. Before she thought about it . . . drip. A stain like black mud appeared at the top of her shirt. Her last clean shirt.

  Tears followed, running hot and mixing with the mess that was her face. Always dirty. But there was no sense dwelling on it. She'd . . . survive. Brushing away the tears with the backs of her hands, she climbed down the ladder. A yellow control box hung from the top of the bay next to the engine. At the top was the arm of a mini-crane holding a bucket of water on an oxidized green pipe.

  She frowned again when she'd lowered the bucket. This was her only clean water-clean enough water, really-that was not for drinking. She stored it up there on the coolant return line to heat it rather than waste the power using the 'amenities'. There was enough to wash her face, or a shirt, but not both.

  If we're back on course, Verderoy is about twelve hours away. If I could get a job fixing a freighter or something, Aiyela counted her fingers. There could easily be enough to top off the tank, get another couple barrels of H73-01, refill the pantry and-maybe, just maybe-she could buy some new clothes.

  The idea had the glowy, fluffy feeling of a dream. The good kind where her ship was shiny, the stars were always streaking by, and her engine bay smelled like a fruit market. That probably meant it wasn't going to happen. Verderoy was a beautiful world, not the place where a no-name, raggedy wrench-turner was going to get a job. She was barely licensed at all, skills didn't matter, it was all presentation.

  Still, it was a glowy, fluffy dream, and she longed to see those stars streak by. The only other stops were Abrige and Bertelli, thinking about a stop there brought more lip curling 'ew' to her face than dreaminess. She could get plenty of work at either if the regulator didn't rattle to pieces first. But Verderoy would get her a lot closer, a lot sooner, to Cortess.

  Hmmm . . .

  How did I talk myself into this? Aiyela was glued with white knuckles to her ship's beaten-leather steering yoke. All about her, ships-all much larger and nicer than hers-were converging like a cloud into the orbit of a gleaming blue world, with a crescent of night on the left.

  Proximity alarms flashed from her smudge covered displays like northern lights, the audio alerts chirping like a flock of birds. Those nicer ships had high capacity auto-pilots that would keep their ships out of her way, but hulks like that couldn't stop on a dime so it was more a question of whether she could keep out of their way.

  She ignored about a million comcasts telling her to fire her pilot as she skirted under a white passenger liner and slipped into orbit. Aiyela was so close she could see passengers waving from the decks. Finally, she was into the calm of thick traffic, just waiting for her planetary approach vectors.

  It took about a half hour, but finally she was heading down to the planet. They had assigned her a dusty skid in Jernalis outside a podunk port south of Holumns. Holumns would have been a real point of interest, sending her to Jernalis was their way of saying "You're welcome," just not "you're welcome to stay."

  That was fine by her. She'd set up shop in the skilled labor district and after she got a few of their sagging berthas into the sky they'd pave her way right into the bigger cities.

  "Who needs you anyway! Your shop's only clean because there's nothing wrong with your customer's pristine engines to fix!" Aiyela shouted at the bay manager who'd turned down her application, shaking her fist as she walked backwards through the entrance. "Your trained monkeys here don't know the difference between a di-poxy quadthol deficiency and a kronex barrion shift!" She started to turn, "I hope your customers like dragging space dirt across the quadrant! That'll be cheap on their next fill-up!"

  Her foot caught on the seam of the outside pavement. Her other foot rushed around to catch her and her hands flailed out to the sides, but nothing stopped her from face planting into the man standing behind her. The last thing she saw was a clean linen shirt filling her view.

  Oh darn.

  The cloth was smooth on her face, a real fine weave. That meant it was expensive. She should have pulled back immediately, but that would mean facing the owner. The owners of expensive shirts rarely had good relations with clumsy, grease caked mech
anics. Time to face the magnetic field.

  Aiyela pulled back. There he stood, tall, with charcoal gray slacks and glossy leather boots. He also had that dazzling white, high collared shirt that now bore the haloed stamp of H73-01 from the ring around her face. She was turning red as she brushed back her matted strays, trying to make herself presentable when she realized she was only painting herself with fresh marks transferred from her overalls. That's when she turned closer to a shade of molten plum. She couldn't bear to look at his face.

  "You vector-daft little smear!" It was the bay manager. "I'm terribly sorry, milord," the barrel-chested man addressed the man with the ruined shirt. "She's not one of mine!"

  Aiyela kept her head down.

  "I