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Norman Takamori isn’t stupid.
It’s just… he’s been so tired lately. There’s a pulsing pressure behind his eye that just won’t quit. It’s been there for malton units, just building. Everything’s too loud or too bright or otherwise too intense; last unit, one of Margaret Encino’s matchas nearly brought him to his knees.
It’s the Aguatunisian. That’s it. Norman’s not used to having a psychic rooting around in his brain, is all.
“Sorry!” Riva floats serenely in their orb and looks anything but.
Scowling, Norman forces them out of his mind. He needs to focus. Sure, the situation isn’t ideal. His ship has been blasted half to hell, but there has to be something he can do so he can walk away with something.
“How’re we feeling, Takamori?”
Norman looks at Jan De La Vega’s smug face on the holoscreen. The image blurs. Norman shakes his head. He needs to focus.
The android’s voice comes over the gunner channel—and why are they all on the gunner channel, that’s not what it’s for —laced with artificial cheer. “I can make a hologram—”
The bridge around Norman lurches as The Lady Pike’s tractor beam finds purchase. Sundry Sydney’s smooth voice is too loud in his ear and Riva’s pressing into his mind again and the Red Hot’s rivets are screaming where an Armstrong Roid Remover is clamped down and tearing in and there’s blood everywhere, hot and thick and metallic, clogging Norman’s nose and drying on his face and he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
Norman slams a button and jettisons the crates.
The gunner channel crackles with protests. It’s too late. Fifteen crates of borinyum krystals hang in the vacuum of space, rotating gently from the force of their expulsion.
The Lady Pike releases her grip on the Red Hot. Norman watches her scoop up all fifteen of the crates, one at a time.
Fifteen’s a good number. It’s the magic number of a three-by-three square. Put the number five in the middle, the even numbers in the corners, and the remaining odd numbers in the remaining spaces, then each row, column and diagonal add up to fifteen. Adding the middle number three times also makes fifteen. Every digit has a place, and every digit is in its place.
Christ, but Norman misses the Brigade. He misses it with a fierceness that feels awfully close to needing: like the undeniable desperation of an addict. He misses the uniform lines of red, green and blue, the security of clearly defined ranks and rigorously protected uniformity. All Norman has to do is hold the line.
Jan De La Vega grins as shark-toothed as her ship. “Well, Takamori, pleasure doing business with you. Rough stars out there. Sorry for you luckless, abandoned, and forsaked.”
Norman’s holoscreen goes dark. The Red Hot jolts underneath him as Gunnie kicks them into faster-than-light.
It’s quiet over the comms. For a long, blessed moment, it’s quiet.
“Well, that could have gone worse,” Riva says, shoving their way into Norman’s head like they do a thousand times every day. It’s like flares going off directly in his face: colours and light and sound and smoke.
Gunnie chimes in over the comms. “I honestly thought we had 'em,” he says, forcing fake levity into his voice because he’s a gambler and an idiot.
“I did too. I think it was cowardly to give up all those crates.” Norman can’t see Sundry Sidney, but he imagines she’s punctuating her point with her gun arm. “I know that I'm not supposed to speak up against people, but there's other people right now. So I'm trying to please them. And I could’ve made a hologram so we could’ve kept one of the crates.”
Norman drops the controls. He presses his forehead into his now-dark holoscreen and relishes in the darkness.
He must’ve bit his lip. That’s where the blood came from.
“Um,” and fuck, if that isn’t fucking JibJob’s own Raymond Zam poking his head onto the bridge and his nose into none of his own fucking business, “we're supposed to get an alert whenever the bay doors open 'cause we were in the middle of a quarterly graphics meeting. You know, we only have them once every three nargons. And basically, you know, we had an emergency airlock and just was like a loud noise in the middle of a presentation.”
Blood and light thunder in Norman’s head, but sure, the bay doors made a loud noise.
"Just a heads up in the future,” Raymond says, putting the passive in passive-aggressive.
“Great.” Norman lifts his head up and finally looks at Raymond. "We'll figure it out or whatever.”
Raymond looks at Norman for a ribec too long. He shifts his weight from foot to foot like he wants to say something. He’s already pushing his luck. JibJobbers shouldn’t be on the bridge, that’s not what it’s for.
Maybe Raymond sees something in Norman’s eyes because he turns and heads back to his fucking quarterly graphics meeting.
"Can I say something real fast?" It’s not a question. Norman sandwiches his head in his hands and presses, trying to alleviate the pressure. "This is the most worthless crew I have ever had in my entire life. Not one of you knows how to do your job right. And that makes my job impossible."
Again, Norman thinks of the magic number fifteen. Every row adds up to fifteen. Every column adds up to fifteen. Every diagonal adds up to fifteen. Even the centre adds up to fifteen.
Riva’s crying. Their tears join the water in their bubble, refracting light. Good. Riva’s voice is softer when they’re sad, more muted than their typical excitement, and they tend to leave him the fuck alone when they’re focused on licking their own wounds.
“Yeah, cry.” Norman doesn’t feel cool saying it, but the other option is to tell them to nut up and he doesn’t want to hear another lecture on Aguatunisian biology. It doesn’t have the same effect as it did in the brigade, but then again, that’s true of this entire fucking circumstance, isn’t it?
“Gunnie? You're a coward.”
Norman lets the silence over the comms wash over him.
Eventually, Gunnie says, “I'd cry if it wasn't expensive.”
“I don't know what's going on over here—” and now it actually makes sense that Norman’s talking on the gunner channel because he’s addressing Sundry Sidney and Big Barry Syx, which is what the gunner channel is fucking for “—but we’ve got to hit our shots.”
“I did actually hit one shot really well,” Sundry Sidney shoots back, evidently still upset about the hologram, which admittedly would have been a good idea if only Norman could fucking focus on anything beyond the seasickness welling up inside him as she talks and talks and talks, each inane comment brighter than the last. Syx starts talking, too, and his brassy voice is too much.
“Hey, you're a clone. I don't listen to you.”
That shuts Syx down quick.
“Whenever we get back to where we need to go to fix this ship, I'm cleaning house,” Norman promises. God, it’ll be incredible. He’ll have an ordered, quiet ship. At long last.
Wait. Norman takes another look at the comms. Margaret Encino’s on the line. “You're fine,” he tells her, in case it wasn’t absolutely obvious. She’s the only person on this fucking ship who knows how to pull her weight and she’s not even a crew member. “Thank you for, you know.”
Suddenly, Margaret’s right in front of Norman. She gives him a big handshake.
Norman smells matcha and blood.
Margaret looks at him strangely. “Are you okay, Captain?” she asks, gesturing to his face. “You’re bleeding.”
Norman reaches up—to do what, knock Margaret away? Stupid —and sees his hands for the first time since he hit the eject button.
They’re covered in blood.
Margaret’s covered in blood, too, from where he’d shook her hand. There’s blood everywhere: his hands, his face, the pilot’s station. The blood is sticky and tacky and beginning to dry into thin, brown flakes, and it’s everywhere and someone’s screaming and he can’t breathe.
Norman stumbles backward. The pain in his mind is white-hot now; it’s like something important in his brain is on fire.
Margaret says something, but there’s too much blood and sound for Norman to understand her words. It’s like the time he’d been hit by a stun grenade as a cadet, except this time he can’t compartmentalize it because the pain’s not localized to any one part of his body; the burning originates in his head, but it’s working its way outwards faster than he can overcome it.
There’s the familiar, awful feeling of something forcing itself into Norman’s mind and he falls to the ground, all sense of decorum lost.
“Captain? The Skipper?” Riva’s voice echoes through Norman’s head, so loud and strong that his eardrums rupture. Blood pours out of his nose and ears. Norman blinks and finds that he can’t see because there’s blood coming out of his eyes, too.
“Oh, gross.” Margaret steps away from the growing puddle of blood, high heels clicking. At least, Norman thinks that’s what happens. It’s hard to be sure. She fiddles with comms until she’s hacked into the fucking gunner channel. “Hi, it’s Margaret. I’m here with the captain on the bridge. Would it be at all possible to get a medpack?”
Norman must black out because when he opens his eyes again, he’s in his quarters and Sundry Sidney’s standing over him with a used medpack in her non-gun hand and murder in her cybernetic eye. The rest of the crew surrounds his bed in a vaguely threatening semi-circle. Norman’s surprised to see Margaret here, too.
Unconvicingly, Sundry Sydney says, “No one tried to pickpocket you while you were unconscious. Even though your quarters are way nicer than ours.”
“Yeah, Skipper. And there wasn’t a mutiny. Light or otherwise,” Syx lies, just as obvious.
“Appreciate it,” Norman rasps. He’s unsure whether or not he means it. From the looks the crew and Margaret are giving him, they’re not sure, either.
Gunnie is standing the furthest away. The face he makes implies he’d rather keep his distance for fear of somehow raising his impossible monthly payments, but curiosity wins out and he leans in to get a better look at Norman. “Skipper, what happened?”
Norman drags himself into a seated position. “I don’t know how The Lady Pike knew about the krystals. We’ll head to Madrugada Station for repairs.”
It’s a good thing they’re fifteen malton units away from the Red Hot’s next upkeep. Fifteen’s a good number. It’s a magic number. In every dimension of a three-by-three square, the digits will add up to fifteen. That means Norman has time to come up with enough money to cover the crew’s paycheques for the next nargon, and eventually, the Red Hot’s registration.
God, he’s so behind on bills.
“That’s not what we mean,” Syx says, looking unnerved. “You were bleeding from your eyes, dude.”
Norman tears the vitals monitor off his chest and searches for his clothes. Sundry Sidney throws a freshly-cleaned shirt at him with more force than is warranted, since she’s standing two feet away from him.
Gunnie clears his throat pointedly, crossing his arms as he does it. “So?”
Norman pulls the shirt on and dodges the question like a fucking professional. “Are we en route to Madrugada station?”
It’s so satisfying to watch Gunnie deflate. “Sure,” he says, throwing his hands half-heartedly in the air. “I’ll get right on that.”
Norman’s halfway through standing up—and it doesn’t hurt because he’s not injured, he’s just tired, and he’s perfectly steady on his feet, actually, because he’s not dizzy or nauseous at all—when Riva decides to throw their metaphorical hat into the metaphorical ring and press their consciousness into Norman’s.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” they ask, frowning in that way of theirs that looks more like a wink. “Because I’m getting a lot of emotions from you and it doesn’t seem like you’re alright.”
A bolt of pain shoots through Norman’s brain. His nose starts bleeding. In a spandec, his shirt is drenched, and he doesn’t know whether it’s the blood loss or the way the bloody fabric sticks to his skin that knocks him to the floor.
“Stay the fuck out of my head!” Norman shouts, and then he’s retching and the room is spinning and then he’s unconscious.