Aiyela the Space Gypsy Meets Yasha the Space Noble Read online

can see that," said the man called a lord. "And so you should take care, because she is someone's, and you never know what kind of person that person is."

  What'd he say?

  "Everyone is someone's." She dared look at the man now. His hair was brown, slightly curly and light, coiling upward off his neck. The springiness seemed to go with the rest of him. His skin was like slightly-used oil, general-purpose, featuring his face with shadow, yet he seemed light. The lines of his face were drawn with a somber peace, but the deepest were laugh lines.

  Aiyela hadn't thought about laugh lines since her mom had pointed them out on her grandma's face. That was long before Aiyela had accidentally taken to system hopping on her own in her mom's old Ealsurld powered '72 Mi-Kalat.

  "My name is Yasha." The man bowed slightly.

  Aiyela wasn't quite sure what to make of this. Neither could the bay manager apparently, who slinked quietly away. There had to be some joke being played at her expense, no doubt revenge for that beautiful shirt. Quietly, she gave up her name. "I am Aiyela."

  "You are a mechanic?"

  Great. How long had he been listening? If he had only heard her complaint about the monkeys, her career in Jernalis was probably over. Then again, even if he'd caught the tail end of her in-depth comparison of Hechtron and Droner spatial shifters, a layman like him wouldn't understand the nuances of the discussion. "Oh, not too much. I dabble here and there, more of a hobby really." Her best bet now was to fade away and hope she did not get a reputation from the encounter.

  "That's not what I heard."

  That long huh? "Well, I uh . . . that is . . . me and the uh distinguished proprietor of this establishment were uh having a uh academic discussion." Everyone knew when talking to nobility you had to use all the words in your education, preferably those learned last and that took the longest to say. "No doubt, I was uh . . ." Aiyela coughed then bit her tongue. "No doubt, I was mistaken in my comprehension." She would rather have been siphoning raw fuel by mouth. "And I hope to graciously uh amalgamate the bay manager's tutorial into my concordance."

  "Concordance?"

  Oops. Aiyela paused. "Right, uh lexicon." She started to back away, beaming a tomato faced smile as she tried to excuse herself from the situation.

  "Thing is, I was looking for a mechanic."

  Aiyela glanced at the bay, amply supplied with every imaginable tool-and a few unimaginable ones-with just about an employee for each. "Well you're in the right place to find a . . . " she coughed again, "mechanic."

  "A fine girl, she has an eye for an orbit, milord." The bay manager conveniently re-injected himself into the conversation. "We do have a full complement of technicians, credentialed from the finest schools on Verderoy."

  "No, I really think you're the one for the job. That is, if I can afford you."

  Aiyela tried to recall how hard she had fallen on her head when she came down the ladder. "Afford me?"

  "Yes. You do take royal crown?"

  Royal crown? As in currency? She shook her head hoping to tighten closed her slacked jaw. Come on girl, act like you've been paid with cash sometime in your life! "Yeah, of course. Everyone does."

  "I'm told some prefer to barter to avoid bank hassles."

  She forced a laugh, "Ha!" It may have been too loud. "What rubes."

  "Well, if it's all the same to you. We can discuss the price after you see the job. My vessel is not airworthy so you'll have to meet us in low to mid-orbit."

  "Orbit, right." Here goes the job. "Thing is, I'm a little low on fuel and my Osmund regulator is uh, in need of replacement."

  "You're a hard bargainer. I'll give you an advance, say twenty thousand crowns as a diagnostic fee. Will that be sufficient?"

  Twenty thousand crowns! Shiny, ship sundries flashed through her mind like a catalogue of the unaffordable. She coughed, "We can start on that."

  Aiyela still couldn't believe what was happening to her. If there wasn't a gleaming Osmund regulator in the Ealsurd, a topped off tank that could shave off a month of space travel, and a small box full of thirteen thousand spare crown, she might have thought she was still dreaming.

  She was still tempted to when she saw lord Yasha's ship. A brass trimmed leviathan was coming alongside. It had to be a couple thousand feet long, sharp like an arrow but beveled and wavy like freeze-dried bean pods. Beside its glittering trim, panels marked its hull like ceramic tapestries in blues, turquoise, purple and white, shimmering like a peacock's feathers.

  It made her blush as she thought of the pitted, rusty, boxy-blunt hull of her tiny Mi-Kalat coming alongside headed for the cargo bay. I suppose if they turn me away now, at least I got paid for showing up. The idea of getting paid without doing the work didn't really appeal to her, but if she showed up it wasn't her fault that they sent her away.

  To her surprise, no one said a thing about her ship. The deck crew didn't even lay out a fluid tarp to catch her ship's piddlings. Hers of course would not be doing any piddling. She couldn't afford the waste, but if it was someone else's and it looked like hers, she would have put out a tarp.

  The deck crew chief was courteous-or she imagined it was courteous since it never happened to her before-and lead her down beautiful halls that looked as though they were made of glowing eggshell and adorned with raised metal moldings making scenes at various intersections.

  Finally, they arrived in the engine room, if room was the right word. She could have parked the Mi-Kalat in this one. It was enormous. And clean. It wasn't fancy, like the rest of the ship. It wasn't fit for a Sabbath social or a lord's birthday party, but to a mechanic it was just as beautiful. Grated catwalks that were not corroded. Safety yellow paint that was still bright enough to catch your eye before you collected another scar. Floating computer remotes to show you what you couldn't see instead of having to find every problem by the heat of a covering or the rattling vibration of a buffer plate. A rotund robotic trunk was anchored to the wall, ready to supply a spaceman's horde of tools to the technically skilled repairwoman.

  "Hello there, Aiyela!" A voice came from above. Floating downward-upside down, his hair falling like springs 'upward'-was a familiar bearded face behind a pair of reflective goggles.

  It took her a moment to recognize him. "Y-yasha? Lord Yasha?" His clean-well, originally clean-shirt and pants were gone, replaced by a stained but serviceable navy blue jumpsuit. It was better than hers, but far from noble attire.

  "Some call me lord, yes." He smiled.

  "Uh . . ." She tried to think of the respectful way to ask, why are you here, wearing that? "Where are your engine workers?"

  "Oh, I gave them the day off. The new guy just got married, and they were making rather merry. The mead supply is much depleted if you know what I mean." He kept grinning. Aiyela noted that he had the slightest red to him as well, though perhaps that was from being upside-down. "Anyway, I thought this might be above their pay grade."

  "Above?" She tried not to be snippy, but this was getting to be a little too much. Money or not, she had to be the rear end of his joke. And why not? "What do you need fixed?" She crossed her arms and settled over one hip.

  His demeanor changed a little. He must have picked up that she had picked up on his joke and she wasn't having it, and now he wasn't having her not having it. But she didn't care, she might be a greasy space gypsy, but she had to be worth more than that shirt and it was no cause for him to treat her like this.

  Still, Yasha went on to explain his problem. His ship operated a trio of interlocking Droner spatial shifters. To run at speed greater than light a ship had to create a field that mimicked the properties of a tachyon. Most ships could generate different configurations of their fields and achieve different relative speeds within each configuration. Kind of like how a bicycle could go different speeds in different gears. Most ships though, had to drop back to regular space before reconfiguring their field. Yasha's system could create a transitional field while another field was present, and then another
fixed configuration so it never had to drop back to regular space. His had a habit of breaking loose in its modulation-the current age equivalent of a runaway accelerator. No one was going to give him a ticket, but you could waste a lot of fuel when you overshot your destination by a star system or two.

  He might actually have understood what I was saying about Hechtrons and Droners, she thought back. Interlocking spatial shifters were notoriously complex, not just any mechanic could work on them. Those guys back on Jernalis would have had him gutting his own ship, leaving its innards floating across light-years and possibly two or three dimensions. It was just possible that she was the right mechanic for the job, and more amazingly, Yasha might have known it.

  Turned out, Yasha was something of a mechanic himself. He floated beside her wherever she was-these gravity nullifier harnesses were a real treat-handing her tools, which he in turn got from the big box droid.

  Work was going along fine, mostly anyway. She tried to wash up at the hazmat station, but she wasn't going to ask for a bath-heck, it had been a month since she settled for a shower-or to do her laundry first. She was left to grimace every time her greasy elbows or knees scudded a clean surface. She started to peel down her top half to eliminate half of the offenders, but she thought of her shirt.

  Why had she been in so much of a hurry that she couldn't have dropped a few