Why Don't You Like My Cooking?
Kim worked late with me on this one and it was a fun ride--and wonderfully insightful on her part. Thanks, Kim!--Maer
Saturday, 17 Jan 2522
Durance class Equinox
En route to Osiris
1550hrs, ship’s time
I’d done my midday check of the engine systems aft and had devoted a little more time to my current project in my quarters when I sipped my coffee and found it had gone cold. Grimacing at the taste, I went to the galley to find better. Crossing the lounge I reflected on Nika’s dressing me down and realized that I had the propensity to obsess a bit hard on things others cared little for or about. Obsessing isolated me from the rest of my crew—my family—and as a result, I had little idea what they did when not engaged in their job. For instance, Kiera had done a marvelous job keeping the coffee going 24/7 and keeping it fresh, but assuming she wasn’t tending to a passenger, what was she doing right now? I pondered it as I poured myself a cup and took it with me to the lounge to sit and think.
I knew that Joshua favored hydroponics, Nika preferred the bridge and the view of the Black it gave her, and that Arden could usually be found surfing the Cortex or indulging in reading his medical journals. However, that wasn’t quite the same as having the sort of in-depth knowledge that shipping out with them for years would normally grant me.
You could sit here and marinate or you could get off your ass and do something about it.
I rose and hit the stairs down to the passenger deck. With luck I might find Kiera there or barring that, she might be in the for’ard smuggling compartment (as I’d taken to thinking of it) and I could at least help her root through the things in there.
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Her boots were hard on the deck and she knew the sounds were probably louder than they ought to be as she stalked away from Botany Bay to the waiting laundry. Grumbling to herself, she abruptly realized that the eternal coffee pot had probably gone bad in her absence and spun to go to the kitchen. The laundry would wait for the coffee and she'd take her irritation on the poor linen in a bit once the coffee was refreshed.
Joshua's pity party, well deserved or not, had made her as irritable as a wet cat. Sorry don't do no good one of her playmates had said when she was a kid and broke his toy and those words came to her in Joshua's voice in her head. She paused and kicked the wall in frustration before regretting it immediately. “Sorry baby,” she murmured, sliding her hand down the wall soothingly and then started back to the kitchen. Hold on, Eternal Coffee. I come, she mouthed and smiled at herself.
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I heard her before I saw her. Going back up the stairs, I reentered the lounge to see her cross the threshold into it.
“Hey,” I said. “Got a minute?”
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Her fingers trailed across the doorframe as Kiera's face lit up with a smile. “You're alive!” she chirped and then, “Sure! Just let me get the coffee going.' She went to the pot and smelled it before putting her hand to it and wrinkling her nose. “Dead,' she declared and dumped it to clean the pot to ready it for a new batch. New filter, grounds and water set and pot back into place, she hit the button and settled on the table bench. “Whatcha need, Rina?”
She was secretly glad to run into the little engineer. Joshua had filled her head full and some of it bore repeating to his ladylove.
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“Yes, I'm alive. Any reports of my demise are completely spurious, I assure you.” I grinned and followed her into the galley. Seeing there was fresher joe in the offing, I dumped my mug's contents in the sink. I rinsed it and racked it and fetched a clean mug from the cabinet. “As for what I need?” I stood cradling the mug in my hands like a beggar or a penitent. “I need a clue. About you, the crew, everyone.”
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“Don't know if I'm any help, but ask,” Kiera answered. She jumped up abruptly and pulled out some flour, sugar, vanilla, and butter along with a bit of processed bean protein. Glancing back at Rina, she smiled. “Don't look at the box of protein goo. I use it to stretch the recipe. But I'm in the mood for shortbread cookies. I just didn't want to use a lot of butter and flour because they cost a lot.” She turned back to her project and set the oven to preheat. “And you're making a face, but you didn't notice it before in the other cookies.” She began to grease the pan that she had pulled out.
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“I'm not,” I said, stung. Then: “Was I?”
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Kiera laughed. “Don't even have to look, Rina. I saw your face when I made that spicy vegetable tofu with Joshua that night for dinner. The two small pieces of tofu that you managed to swallow with your tea were compliment enough. Just pretend you don't know what I'm doing. Think 20 minutes to yummy warm cookies.” Retrieving a bowl, Kiera began to mix the ingredients.
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“All right, all right,” I said without heat. “Everybody knows I hate bean curd tofu. Blegh. But you’re right I didn’t notice it in the other cookies.” I leaned against the prep counter and watched her sift the dry ingredients together and cream the butter and sugar. Hell, the fact I even recognized what she was doing was a testament to Joshua’s patience in our cooking lessons. Maybe I’m not as clueless as I thought. Even so …
“So, you know something about me and I really don't know all that much about you. Come April, you'll have flown with us for a year, Kiera, and all I can come up with is a) you're a kick-ass surgeon, b) you're a sharp dealer, and c) you’re even sharper as a shooter. Oh, and d) you like dolphins enough to paint them on your cabin wall. But that's pretty inadequate considering I've had practically a year to learn more about you. And the fact that I haven't just points up the fact that I'm pretty sucktastic at social interaction.” I sighed and said to the ceiling. So, here I am. Getting ready to ask you a bunch of nosy questions. Sorry.
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The ingredients went together into the bowl and then were rolled out to be cut into cookies. Kiera forsook the cookie cutter, choosing instead a glass that had the size mouth that she preferred. "Ask away. I'm not too shy."
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The coffee machine made the death rattle that announced the end of the cycle and I filled my mug and set it where Kiera could reach it. I poured another mug for myself and sipped it as I considered what to ask. Might as well go for broke.
“What do you want out of life, Kiera?”
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"Oooh, thanks," Kiera noted, taking the mug. She put some valuable milk into it and then sipped it happily. She put the cookies in to bake and began to clean up her mess. "Money and peace of mind," she answered, smiling as she settled across from Rina. "Maybe love. Don't know about that though. Hadn't done so well so far, so money and peace of mind."
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"Is that all there is?" I flicked a glance at her and then away. "I don't know. I've seen you patting EQ here and there. Maybe you've already found your love and don't know it. But getting back to the first two, would having buckets of money give you peace of mind? It would make me a nervous wreck, always worrying about stock market downturns, depreciation of assets, having my bank robbed. That sort of thing."
I had an idea forming at the back of my head, but the front of my head was too noisy to let me hear it. So, I'd take this conversation where it would and hope that idea would make itself heard.
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Her cheeks flushed lightly. "I do love this ship. She has a wonderful history of bravery until Potemkin got her." Kiera made a quick face. "Well, at least part of her history is brave; I don't know it all. But I guess I think that the both of us are having a second chance at the same time. The Equinox is quirky and stubborn, but strong and sleek. Like my old horse I had as a kid. I feel a kindred to her." She took another sip of coffee. "But I'd call it affection, not love. Relationship is too new." She grinned. "We've only been on a few dates you see." Watching Rina's face, she grew more serious. "Money makes being unhappy much more bearable, Rina. It's not as stressful having it as not having it. If you have enough, then it's spread out over planets and banks. One mishap doesn't affect the other pots of money. And there is a peace of mind not wondering if you can afford new shoes or underwear."
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"I don't doubt it," I agreed, thinking of the many times I'd had to go without cash and necessities. "But it's no substitute for human contact." I breathed a laugh and shook my head. "Like I would know, right? My first love was rather like you and EQ. I don't think I really ever told anyone but my first intense relationship as an adult was with my ship."
It was a bald admission I hadn't made to Joshua, or even to Mike, and I considered them the closest human contacts I'd ever made. Still, Kiera felt for our ship as a living thing, something I felt keenly, and so I shared a secret I felt she could understand, and understanding, keep.
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"There is a heartbeat to the things," Kiera admitted. "And they seem to breathe with a life of their own. And I know that it is our fevered imaginations, but somehow I've always thought that things miss you when you've formed a bond with them and let them go. I can see that a ship would be your first love. You seem to intuit them and they respond. Humans don't do that well at all. No matter what you think you know or how they think they know you, eventually it all comes up wrong." She looked down into her cup. "Well, that was a sad observation, wasn't it?"
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"It can be," I said. "But you'd have plenty of company." I drained my cup and set it aside, and got comfortable against the counter. "I like to think that the things we love love us back, like people. I'm sure there's a lot Freud could make of that statement, or of me. The hell with it. I can't live my life scared of what others might think. You'd be a hostage to public whim til the day you died and that's no way to live. But as much as I loved my ships, in the end they weren't enough. I'm still human and I need others of my kind to keep me sane. And I couldn't put my life on hold waiting for the few occasions when the one man I trusted crossed my path to let my guard down. So ...," I shrugged. "I let go. Opened up. Found a whole new landscape. Confusing as hell though."
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"How so?" Kiera prompted. "You and Joshua seem to be in lockstep."
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“Highgate. Back in June. The trial. Remember it?” As much as I loved Joshua and Mike, it wasn’t something I could just flat out explain. I had to approach it sideways.
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"Sure. I'm with you … continue."
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“Well, I’ve already told you that my first real love was my ship, right?” God, I was jumping all over the map, but like I said, I had to approach it sideways. “I wish you could have seen her, Kiera. Fast. Sleek. Packed a punch. Sweetest engine package ever, nimbler than a cat. But then, the Alliance always knew what it was doing when it came to her ships.” I flicked a glance at her then, wondering if she could see where I was going.
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Kiera kept her eyes steady, nodding. "And?" she prompted.
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"She died. Highgate wasn't what you'd call the Alliance's best day ever, not then. We were ambushed, plain and simple. I felt the shot that killed her, Kiera. I was trapped in engineering with everything coming down around us, with our Captain screaming for power to shave our vee, and there wasn't a thing I could do to save her. We came down hard, ended up in three pieces. I was pinned in the wreckage and her ordnance was about to blow. I was this close," I paused and held up two fingers pinching a cat's whisker of air between them."This close to going with her. I changed my mind. I don't know why. Maybe it was hate for the bastards that shot her down. Or maybe for the bastard I swore I'd outlast for revenge. Whatever. I got my ship off me and pulled clear before she blew."
I shook my head.
"As break-ups go, you could say it was spectacular. Gave a whole new meaning to 'crash and burn'."
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"Your lover protected you," Kiera observed after popping up to check the now wonderfully smelling cookies. "Not long now," she observed, settling back down. "I'd say that she died protecting you if you made it down. You owed it to her to go kill the bastards who brought her down. They killed her and a lot of her crew. I understand. I'd have gone bug nuts if someone had hurt my horse. I'd be a bit annoyed if someone hurt the Equinox. She's my girl."
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"That's what I felt when Mike's squad found me." I had to smile. "That's not exactly what happened, though. I thought the Universe had finished monkey wrenching my life to hell. I was wrong. She wasn't quite done with me yet."
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"Mike, the guy in the prison, Mike?" Kiera clarified.
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"The same." I said nothing more, letting the information sink in, let her make her own connections.
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"So how’d the Universe monkey wrench you concerning this Mike? I take it that he was in combat too, considering that you mentioned his squad found you. What happened next?"
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"How many people do you know start off as enemies in war and end up lovers for a decade, Kiera? I wasn't his girlfriend, I was his prisoner. At least, in the beginning. By the end of it, not only had I defected, I'd fallen in love with a man I'd once swore I'd kill before I'd let him touch me. How's that for a monkey wrench?"
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An eyebrow raised. "How'd he keep you, Rina? Was he cruel?"
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"No." I shook my head. "He was too smart for that. Didn't lay a finger on me that the job didn't require. And the job was to get me to defect. I had skills as an engineer that they needed, so ...." I shrugged. "I was pretty banged up. You can't have a ship fall on you and come away without a scratch. You've seen my scars. Some of them come from that and some of them are inside, where they don't show. Mike sussed that." I could feel myself getting drawn off on a tangent, knew that rabbit hole intimately and dragged myself from falling in. "Fast forward a bit. He had an emotionally scarred young woman on his hands with valuable skills locked away in her traumatized head. She was someone who'd already shown enough strength of will to resist the enemy with two busted legs and broken ribs and whatever her own side could throw at her. The only way he could get her to flip was not to play to her expectations but show her the facts and let her make up her mind. That he did. Brilliantly. To be fair, I don't think he intended to fall for me, and it took me weeks to realize that he had. At the time, I was too preoccupied with escaping to notice."
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"So he loved you. Did he use it to his advantage?" She allowed the other question to ask itself. The way that the little woman was speaking about Mike, he hadn't.
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"No. Actually, I think he might have let me walk away without telling me anything. It wasn't his style to force himself on anyone, not like that. Especially not since it was what I expected him to do. But you can already see he didn't walk away at the end. And I'm sure you'll understand why, since you've been on the receiving end of it yourself: I hammered at him until he told me what the hell he wanted from me, why he insisted on being so damned nice." I crossed my arms and looked at her. "That's when he had me, if he'd been of a mind to see it that way. The second I gave a damn about what he wanted or what he thought, I was his. Not that I realized it at the time, either. Took me another week to figure that one out."
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Kiera nodded and jumped up to pull the cookies from the oven. Nabbing a spatula, she set them on the table and pried on up for her and one for Rina. "I say we eat what we want and not tell the boys that they're here. Leave some for Nika, tho'." She smiled and blew on the cookie before taking a little bite. "He was a better man that I. I wasn't ready to be hammered." Her so recent conversation with Joshua twinged through her mind. "I needed it, but I didn't react as nicely as your Mike. So how'd you end up here with Joshua rather than with Mike? He sounds very kind and seemed very strong and assured from what I saw. That would be a hard combination to leave, yes?" Waiting a beat, she added, "Not that Joshua isn't a great man."
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"It was. He is. Even after all this time, even with Joshua here with me, he's like my first ship, Kiera. He got under my skin, got past all my defenses, and he'll always be part of me. Like surviving a natural disaster, he changed me and made me what I am. And for ten years, it was enough."
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"So what changed?" Kiera bit fully into her cooled cookie. Needed chocolate, dark and sweet. But no luck. That had liquidated in her container. All for good reason, she reflected, thinking of Nika's eyes and the medical bills of the crew that had eaten up the money. Her turned her mind back to the man called Mike and his relationship to Rina. No matter what you think you know or how they think they know you, eventually it all comes up wrong, she repeated to herself. Now I find out what went wrong.
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"Well, I started the war on one side and flipped to the other--there were other compelling reasons for it that I won't go into here--and I did a long-term job for the Independents that saw me cut loose at the end of the conflict with nowhere to go or anyone waiting for me. It was three years before I saw him again. By then, I'd hired on as engineer on a freighter, the first ship I'd flown as crew for nearly five years, and by then there was no turning back. He never asked and I never offered, but no matter how much I loved him, I couldn't leave my ship for him. And I never asked him to choose me over what he did. So, a long distance relationship was what we ended up with. It suited us well enough but I think it isolated us. Our jobs consumed us and spat out what was left. And in my case, what was left was ... broken. It took a chance comment by a woman I barely knew, but someone Nika trusted, to get me to see that. Once I did ... well, you know how I am about fixing things. I became my own special project. I asked for help and I got it. I moved on and when I caught up with Mike on Highgate, he ...," I faltered, not sure how to articulate it. "He asked me to do something that I thought he'd never ask me to do, something he fought hard to keep me from doing in the beginning, though had he asked me at the time, I might have."
I picked up a cookie and bit into it. It had just the right amount of crispness to it and it resisted my teeth with a satisfying little snick before giving way. I swallowed and gathered my thoughts and said, "He asked me to kill Joshua. Play along, lull him into a false sense of security, and flat out kill him. Just like the war. But the war's over, Kiera. Bit by bit, I'd left it, pulled myself out of it. And when Mike gave me that order, I finally saw what I wasn't able to all those years: for Mike, the war would never be over. He was in it, all the way in. It gave him a purpose that being with me could never replace and it was something I couldn't compete with and win. He did what he did to carve out a place in the Verse where we could be together but it was from the position of someone fighting an enemy that didn't quite exist anymore. I'm not saying that the Feds are all sunshine and rainbows and goodwill, but—." I sighed and had to give up. "I'm not saying this well, but basically, I think the game had changed and he wasn't able to change with it. Or maybe he had access to intel I didn't and he was still three moves ahead of me on the board. All I knew at that moment was I wasn't seeing the man I thought I knew and trusted, and given that, I couldn't do as he'd asked. And later, he admitted he knew I wouldn't have gone through with it. Which made me all sorts of mad."
I put the cookie aside, no longer interested in it.
"He chose exile over the firing squad, had them stick some damned bomb up his neck to keep him grounded on Miranda. And he's there waiting for me. I'd come to him in the end, he said. I didn't make him any promises but helped him load up and watched him leave. He took off for Miranda and he took ten-plus years of my life with him. You know the rest."
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Kiera studied her over the cookie and felt a deep sadness. He would get her in the end, this Mike. She had no question, nothing but a deep certainty that the man she had seen in a cage was right. There were so many things that she had caught snippets of when she was a child and then a teenager, so much that had she had the mind, she might have realized how important those snippets of adult conversation were. Her world had shifted from one reality to another when she had seen her own face laughing at her beside her father, realized then that there were things that money could do, things that power could do. The War had not happened in the Core. It had been an annoyance to the rich and idle, something to profit from and write off losses from, something to mess with the Cortex feeds of other, more important things than a bunch of Rim worlds with delusions of grandeur.
She couldn't, wouldn't tell Rina that she agreed with Mike, agreed that he probably was right. It told her volumes that Mike had asked her to kill Joshua, that he had known she wouldn't. Rina wasn't a natural born killer. Not that personal, not that cold. Oh, she had killed, but in defense. Not killed out of betrayal or the rush of the moment. Kiera's mind cast to the man who brains she had spread over the wall of the elevator and the horror on the rest of the crew's face and then to Allan. She assigned no emotion to either of them; Allan's ghost had been laid to rest and the other poor soul had never been given one. Too many people had died as she frantically tried to save them in her residency and then later on in the streets, her hands in their chest as the light went out of their terrified eyes. If Mike knew that already about Rina, then he knew more than Joshua would ever accept, knew her in a way that would draw Rina to him once she was ready. Mike had saved and remade Rina and then given her to the Universe to let her fly.
And she had just left Joshua, bitter with rejection, trying to put his mind around why everything he touched had not turned to gold. Kiera took another cookie and ate it slowly in silence. What did Mike know about Joshua? Did it matter? The poor man had been a test to assure Mike that Rina was still his, was still who he had let free to find her wings. Joshua would be appalled to find out that he was only a caretaker for another man's loving creation. She wouldn't let him know. She wouldn't let Rina know. Finishing her cookie, she said, "And then Joshua came and made your world right." She felt ashes in her mouth as she said it.
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I watched Kiera's eyes glittering, saw her thoughts flickering behind them, and wondered what the redhead knew.
"The easy answer to that one would be 'yes'. But I'm not known for taking the easy way over the hard." I paused, considering the consequences. Then: "I haven't forgotten what Mike said before he left. And as much as I love Joshua, I can't completely discount it. I'm not unaware that I'm the first woman Joshua's ever slept with. The survival odds of a relationship built on that foundation aren't promising. I feel like a traitor saying it, but I can't deny the numbers. So if you want to assert that Joshua made my world right, I can only say I hope so, and I can only try to make it as right as possible for him." I held up a hand. "And before you start thinking it's just one long never-ending mercy-fuck, it’s not. So not."
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That finally broke Kiera's dour mood and she slumped to the table with laughter. "Well, that was too much information," she said through helpless giggles. She sighed at length, wiping her eyes. "Oh, damn. I needed that, Rina." Shifting to relieve the pressure on her rump, she shook her head. "I'm not counting Joshua out yet, my dear. I'll be honest with you. I don't know if Joshua is who he will be, or if one day, he'll trap me in my room and demand that I change his face back to what it was and declare that his own true personality is in effect and that all of this is crap to him. But I do know that if Joshua grows into the man that he can be, he'll be a force to be reckoned with. Mike will have a fight on his hands. And they will be fighting over a wonderful woman." She looked pointedly at the rejected cookie. "Who has again nibbled at my offerings and turned them down. I'm giving your share to Nika." She rose to her feet and took the pan to move the cookies into a container. "You need to go see the aforementioned Joshua tho'."
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I snatched up the cookie and ate it like child guilt-tripped into eating her veggies at dinner. It really was a delicious cookie, but I knew the time for telling Kiera that had already passed. I swallowed it down and said as she bustled with the pan, "I hope not. It's hell to lose your first love. It's worse to lose your second. To have the second and the third fight it out, maybe die doing it? Who in their right minds would want that? I don't doubt that when Joshua comes into his own, he'd be damned formidable but why does that have to equal a showdown with Mike? That's insane. It's stupid. Besides, I'm not some ... some carnival prize to be fought over, dammit. I know it might sound odd coming from me but this is not a fight I want to happen. Ever. Although I appreciate the compliment you tried to give me ... I think," I added. "Just another one of those interpersonal things I suck at."
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"Yes, you do." Kiera realized that she too, sucked at the interpersonal thing, but was tired of trying to be diplomatic. Snapping the lid shut as she put the pan in the sink to clean it later, she handed the container to Rina. "Take these to your damn obsessed, sulking boy man and see if you can make him feel less rejected by life. He's in the middle of trying to figure out that ledger, which is probably important because I don't think it is, and sulking that I rejected his tender attempts to help me about Allan. Which, of course, started a cascade of rejection, horror, and unhappiness that he is refusing to lump completely at my door because Joshua is basically a nice, but sometimes stupid as hell man. Unfortunately, I believe your Mike is too, so one day they'll just have to face off and back up ten paces and defer ownership of you to the other one until you decide to run away with Joshua's robot." She turned to favor Rina with a bright smile "Or you can just run away with me. I'll be bitter and alone, but hopefully wealthy and have lots of peace of mind."
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I couldn't help it. I busted out laughing. It took me a minute to get a grip but I got it.
"Kiera," I said then, wiping tears. “If I ever get the urge to give up on men completely, you'd be the first woman I'd run to." I caught my breath and tucked the container under my arm. "God knows, men have given me sufficient cause, but I hate leaving a fight unfinished. If there's anything left of me at the end of it, I will look you up and tell you all about it."
I gathered to go, knowing that the conversation hadn't actually gone in the direction I'd planned or even wanted for it, but nevertheless felt I'd somehow gotten some of the answers I'd come for. Probably more answers than I thought. But I knew it was the way of such things that they would come to me in their own time. So little in the Universe came easily or for free. After all, I'd told Kiera more about my past than I'd expected but I decided it was fair repayment for what she gave in return.
"You don't suppose we've stocked a nice wine to go with these, do you?"
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"Plebian," Kiera snorted. "Milk or chocolate, not wine." Her lips pursed and then she added, "Liebfraumilch maybe. It's sweet enough." She reached out quicker than thought and caught the little engineer in a fond hug and let her go. "I'm gonna go abuse laundry into nice, sharp packages and then get ready to take the watch. You get bored of trying to make your man happy, come and bug me. I don't know if you're done talking; I know I'm hustling you off, but I'm behind schedule now and I've got to add a moment in sometime to make fresh cookies for Nika and Beggar." Her mouth twisted wryly. "Oh and Arden, too. I guess he can get some. He's been a regular love puppy mothering Nika. Now get! I've got things to do and you've got a man to do." She swatted Rina on the butt and gently pushed her out of the kitchen.
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I almost protested that doing Joshua might not be in the cards—our current watch schedule combined with our current side projects had precluded the possibility—but shut my mouth on it. We might get lucky. Why jinx it? So instead I hugged Kiera back and whispered into her hair, "Spasiba, Kierusha. Thank you." I let her go and got out of there before sentiment claimed any more of me.
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Go to Kiera's Crew Page or Rina's Crew Page
Go to Timeline, Season Five, Jan 2522 to Aug 2522
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