The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part One: Meet the Crew

Orliss Strohmer, the squat parrot-headed captain of the mining ship Jealous Mistress, slouched moodily at the conn, empty darkness filling the viewscreen, hardly a sound disturbing what might soon become a fitful slumber for everyone on the bridge.

Several of his crew had taken up their positions on the bridge out of habit at this early hour of the day, but there was nothing to do—would be nothing to do for days, in fact—until the Mistress decelerated to a speed where visual wavelengths allowed them to at least assess their position relative to the distant star that was their destination.

Orliss watched them go about trivial duties with a mixture of respect and pity. Finally, he turned and let one of his eyes settle on his second-in-command, Valera Kossprey, and began ogling her legs. This was something that could potentially entertain him for hours, or until she got up and left. For a Zavinthian his size, those legs might as well be a mile long, and he had said as much to her more than once.

Valera shifted in her seat and threw him a warning glance. Orliss turned his attention back to his consoles for a moment, and when she was engaged in her work once more, he rolled his eye toward her again.

“Captain,” a voice at his shoulder intoned softly.

“Rrawwk!” Orliss squawked. He hated being caught by surprise, hated it even more when it caused him to make a sound reminiscent of a parrot—as he supposed it was fuel for species jokes among the crew—and hated it most of all when it interrupted a relaxing perusal of Miss Kossprey.

The voice was disembodied, or so it would have seemed to the untrained eye. There was a bare shimmer in the air and a distinct shadow on the floor. Psilos, the shade, expended a great deal of energy in this mode, and it only confirmed to Strohmer that he had been watching the captain watching Valera. Orliss shuddered, shaking the feathers of his head and shoulders back into place. One eye remained on Valera; the other turned slowly, deliberately to the heat-shimmer that was even now dissolving into the corporeal form of Psilos.

In his visible form, Psilos looked more like the classic xenophobic Earther's conception of an alien being: tall, slender, gray or green depending on the light, and large opaque eyes occupying most of a bulbous head. Orliss knew that Psilos allowed people to persist in the assumption that such a large cranium indicated a large brain and possibly advanced thought patterns. While the latter may have been true, Psilos' brain actually resided in his chest, close to where the human heart lay; as a result, Psilos had gotten up and walked away after several gunfights “ended” with an ignorant off-worlder trying to blow his brains out and then celebrating a little too soon.

Orliss clicked his beak—a sign of impatience—and Psilos stared back in fiegned ignorance until Orliss felt forced to ask, “Is there something you need?”

“I require a private sleeping accomodations and a recreational leave of absence,” Psilos hissed in a voice barely above a whisper. “These requests have gone unanswered for some time now.”

Orliss tried giving Psilos the full attention of his left eye, hoping to divide his attention between the whining of his head of security and the aforementioned legs, but Psilos repositioned himself strategicallly. Orliss clicked his beak again. “Your requests have not gone unanswered—they've simply been denied. There are no 'private sleeping accomodations' on this ship, and I do not grant anyone a 'recreational leave of absence' for any reason. See the doc about a dream vacation.”

The doctor in question was Moah, a cephalopod-like creature who—in everyone's opinion—was far too touchy-feely in his examinations. On their last trip through the Tier Siehni system, Moah had acquired a batch of dream vacations: pills that rendered the patient (or victim, really) unconscious for days on end while intense and vivid dream sequences played out. The batch had turned out to be somewhat ... sour. The result was that most of the dream vacations turned into haunting nightmares, usually derived from emotional images in the patient's past. Although the 'vacation' itself was a bust, it still had its intended effect: the patient returned to work with a vigor and a sense of relief.

Psilos did not feel the need to point any of this out to the captain, as it had clearly been an ironic suggestion, but the silence with which he replied was cold and dry.

“I do have another request, captain,” he said instead.

“Yes?”

“We are hauling this load to the Outer Rim, are we not?”

Orliss nodded, anticipating the conversation that followed.

“Let me scout the buyer for this load, captain.”

“We've been over this--” Orliss began.

“Yes, sir, but I can employ my skills to discover how much the other haulers are being paid.”

“Psilos, it's illegal.”

“Only if I'm caught.”

“Some haulers get paid more, and the quality of the ore is different from load to load.”

“They say it is different; I say ore is ore.”

“Psilos ... I already know what other haulers get paid.”

Psilos was incapable of showing emotion in his eyes or his face, but the surprise came across in the way he paused before plunging ahead again.

“Then we ought to demand a better price. We could refuse to sell.”

“And do what with the ore? We can't sell it ourselves, and if we did, we'd get an even worse price than the buyers will give us. We're not buyers, and we don't have an opening to sell to a plant. Those get bought out as soon as they become available. We'd have to knock somebody off to get an opening, and even if we did, there are always a hundred buyers right there, ready to outbid us.”

Psilos fell silent again, but this time under the onslaught of sentiments he'd already heard expressed a thousand times. Orliss poked absently at his shoulder with the tip of his beak, a nervous grooming habit from his youth. His mind was elsewhere, having had this same conversation with his former captain, the tables now turned.

“How do you know what the other haulers are paid?” Psilos asked finally.

Orliss stopped grooming and shifted in his seat. After a long pause he replied, “My mother's family were buyers. It's why they say she left my father: he was a long hauler, never got a good price for his loads, and she got tired of seeing him ripped off.”

In the corner of one eye, he could now see Valera listening. She had barely adjusted her posture, but her eyes were unfocused, her head turned just so, and her hands had stopped flitting over the controls at her station. For some reason, Orliss did not want her to hear about his father, did not want her to like him or dislike him for his family problems, and certainly did not want her pity.

“Captain,” Psilos began, “could we not take advantage of your family connections--”

“No!” Orliss held his voice down—no more squawking, he willed himself—and bit off the word sharply to keep the anger and humiliation out of his voice. “No, we're not going to do that.”

And that was the end of it, as far as Orliss was concerned.

Psilos excused himself, and Orliss managed to get some work done on the wave of anger that had surfaced over these painful memories. Eventually, he tried to go back to ogling Valera, but she was stretching her legs out just so, and something in the twisted mind of Orliss Strohmer suggested that she had heard it all, that she was putting herself out there for him because she felt bad for him. He clicked his beak and turned the conn over to his navigator, and a moment later he disappeared from the bridge.

...

The brief disturbance of the captain barging through the drop bay on his way aft did not throw Agram Vielt off his game—a game still called poker but so different after six thousand years that the name was little more than a symbolic nod to its predecessor. Agram held a stack of cards loosely in his left hand, which was still more or less the original appendage, although the skin had been grafted poorly. His right arm was robotic from the shoulder, and gleaming precision-tooled parts showed through the rubber flesh in places. The arm ended in what could be called a hand, though it was more like a conglomeration of tools that could be folded into something resembling a fist. Agram was accustomed to it by now, but fidgeted the thing constantly: folding it, unfolding it, switching tools, and so forth. All he really cared about was being able to handle his weapon and his mining equipment, but occasionally he would find an unexpected situation to use one of the other tools, and that really irked him.

Agram had lost his arm in a common mining accident: a cave-in. With no significant savings, no membership in the galactic guilds, and nothing paid toward medical emergencies, the doctors were supposed to simply seal the wound and make other repairs to the missing joint and nerve endings—Agram would have gone through life a one-armed methropod. Unfortunately for one of the other patients in the facility, a long-timer with a lot of paid-in medical and a current guild membership, he got put in the same pre-op ward with Agram. Agram sold several patients on the story that he was unlikely to survive the surgery, tempting them with the chance to win a little inheritance from a dying man.

Two days later, a whole lot richer—and a whole lot drunk—he sank his winnings into a gaudy replacement for his missing appendage. His twice-wounded roommates plotted their revenge.

Accustomed to thinking on his feet while drunk, Agram then skipped post-op recovery and bartered passage on a medical cargo looper before the anesthesia had even worn off completely. By the time anyone could catch up with him, Agram had already had plenty of time to practice drawing and reloading his sidearm with the mechanical limb.

Now Agram did his best to scan the faces of the other players without looking like he was scanning their faces. Agram didn't have a tell—that he knew of—but he frequently manufactured one for the other crew members when he thought they were looking.

Zuvie Matusek was looking.

Zuvie had come a long way to join the crew of the Jealous Mistress—not as far as Dr. Moah, but close. She was a Meratonan, childlike in appearance, at least until she got very upset or exerted herself physically, at which point she would undergo a disturbing physical transformation and more than quadruple in size. It's not really necessary to describe it at this point, since it does not usually take long for Agram to upset her.

Zuvie sat directly across from Agram, smiling contentedly—or at least, trying to appear contented. She had stopped looking at her cards, hoping to project an air of overconfidence, but Agram kept pace with her, raise for raise. She was desperately trying to keep a tic from appearing in her forehead.

Just as she looked back at Agram—trying not to look like she was looking, but failing—she saw the briefest line appear on his forehead: the faintest vertical crease of consternation, a sign she'd never seen from him before. Zuvie suppressed a smirk and decided that the time had come to call Agram's bluff.

When the cards hit the table, Zuvie's face went on a little journey, starting at smug celebration and then progressing through confusion, shock, self-disgust, and eventually misery. But it didn't move on to rage until Agram began laughing, and then Zuvie had to watch him scooping up his winnings—her winnings.

And then Agram winked at her.

One meaty hand slammed down on the table, and the two other crewmen bolted out of the drop bay as the transformation began to progress up Zuvie's arm, like a series of explosions in her muscles: one moment, Zuvie sat in the little chair, one arm impossibly huge and pressing on the table with its claw-like hands, and then less than a minute later, the snaggle-tooth grimace of Zuvie's alter-ego, Matusek, leered down at Agram with blood in his eye.

“I'll tear your arms off!” Matusek roared.

Agram stacked cards and credit vouchers lazily, keeping one eye on Matusek but not moving from his seat—deliberately so, in fact.

Matusek raked the table and two of the chairs out of the way—the table ricocheted off the ceiling and two instrument panels before clattering to the floor behind Matusek—and wrapped two crab-like hands around Agram, pinning him to his chair. “Did you hear me?!” the beast roared.

There was the faintest clack and hum then, and Matusek lowered its gaze to the Kreyk projectile weapon centered on its chest. Zuvie's voice came from somewhere inside Matusek: “Did you have that under your chair the whole time?”

Agram nodded.

Matusek's eyes squinted, and Zuvie's voice came out again: “Am I that bad?”

Agram looked down at the claws pinning him to his seat, the monstrous arms, the hackles standing up on Matusek's shoulders, the slavering jaws, and the remnants of the pink party dress impossibly still clinging to the creature in places.

Slowly, ever so carefully, Matusek—Zuvie, really, Agram considered—set the chair down and Agram with it. Zuvie's voice sounded one more time, as though she were deep down now inside Matusek, perhaps hiding and feeling humiliated: “I think I'd better go to my room.”

Agram kept his eye on the retreating beast, but he disarmed the Kreyk and holstered it. Eventually, he set about folding and stowing the table and chairs, and he was just starting to collect his winnings again when Strohmer reappeared from the hatch leading aft.

“Vielt!” the captain squawked. “Didn't I order you not to play poker with Matusek?!”

“I was not playing poker with Matusek,” Agram replied calmly, folding a stack of vouchers into his pocket. “Fralt, Gougham, and I started a game, and Zuvie joined us for a while. I have not seen Matusek for some time now.”

Strohmer clicked his beak impatiently. “You know what I mean, Vielt!”

Agram held up a hand placatingly. “Yes sir, I know what you mean, and I assure you that the moment Matusek showed up, the game ended by unanimous accord.”

Strohmer turned one eye on Agram Vielt, then the other, and finally made his way to the forward hatch, rawking to himself. “Ought to have Psilos sit in on these games,” he was saying as he disappeared through the hatch.

...

Fralt and Gougham didn't begrudge Vielt his winnings. When they had bolted from the game, Fralt had stuffed half her poker hand, two credit vouchers, a polarized mirror film disguised as a poker card, and a lucky charm—which was actually a small signal repeater—into her jacket before swinging through an upper hatch into the auxiliary cannon nest.

Gougham had stashed a similar grab-bag of items in his pants and launched himself through the first door he could find. In typical Gougham fashion, however, he'd managed to throw himself into a cargo hold, which he filled quite neatly, and which he only later realized he would be unable to open from the inside.

Gougham followed the ensuing 'conversation' between Vielt and Matusek—and jumped when a smashing sound caused the door to pucker inches from his face—and then waited at least ten minutes before tapping out a timid SOS.

Vielt was the first to hear it. He cracked open the cargo hold and shoved the Kreyk in—only to withdraw it and slam the hold shut again a moment later.

Eventually Fralt came looking for Gougham and managed to unfold him from the uncomfortable position he'd had to assume. She supported him carefully as they limped toward the crew quarters, but when Gougham suggested hopefully that he could use a massage, Fralt slipped out from under his arm and headed in the opposite direction.

...

Terza Fralt was no delicate flower, though she managed to pass for feminine when she wan't standing next to Valera Kossprey. The two despised each other for no other reason than that they were both women and they were both struggling for credibility in a crew full of chauvinists and womanizers. Any closeness between Fralt and Gougham was ammunition for Kossprey, and any perceived camaraderie between Strohmer and Kossprey was fodder for the entire crew. Typically, the two women avoided each other, and words between them were as icily civil as they could be made while still completely avoiding sounding polite.

Fralt was muscular, athletic, graceful when no one was looking—but she maintained a careful gorilla-like posture and demeanor whenever the crew found themselves planetside or on the outpost stations. Nothing made her more angry than to be mistaken for a sexual surrogate—or worse: for a crew mother.

Some ships had them: matronly women who shipped out with miner crews and served as nurse, psychiatrist, cook, maid, and—an unfortunate fact of deep space travel—eventually a kind of madame. Fralt found the entire concept disgusting, but she'd learned not to take up the topic—or have the conversation steered toward it—unless she wanted someone characterizing her as their crew mother. This sort of comment, in her opinion, had to be met with brutal violence, as in Vielt's case: she had casually tossed her drink on him.

Then she had set him on fire. They had been in deep space, and Moah had done his best to graft skin for his left arm, but the artificial skin cultures they had on hand were of the cheapest variety. Now Vielt's arm was like one of the many warning signs posted around the ship:

DANGER: AIR SEAL – IMPROPER USE WILL CAUSE BREACH
DANGER: ELECTRICAL SHOCK – WEAR INSULATOR GLOVES
DANGER: FEMINIST – SHE WILL SET YOU ON FIRE

Fralt had even assaulted Matusek once, but since Matusek deserved it—and since Fralt had bounced off like a rubber ball—that story is less interesting than Vielt's, so there you go.