⚒️ Exit Criteria

by Joel Glover

The power was out. The whole ship was running on its emergency systems, lighting dimmed to the bare minimum, air filters humming like angry beetles.

“Can you fix it?”

He wanted to say yes. His nature was agreeable, detrimentally so at times, but this woman was so perfect; it was as if she stepped straight out of his wildest dreams and onto the bridge of the shuttle, pale and menacing. When she walked into the fabrication plant he thought he had fallen asleep at his tools.

“No.”

“Fuck.” She stretched the vowel sound out, rolling it around her mouth like fine whisky.

“The unit is burned out,” he told her, “there is some melting in there.”

“Fucking... fuck.” She seemed to enjoy this curse less. “That useless showy prick Gerald. Well, I hope he likes it here because if I have my way he’s never going to work as a pilot again.”

Amadou had not met Gerald yet, but he doubted the man would particularly like OBL Station. Royal Saudi Gusii had strict entry and exit visa criteria, an insistence on sharīʿah, and an objectionable tendency to pass inflationary cost pressure on to the indigent workforce. 

Most of the people onboard were desperate to leave and utterly unable to do so.

“What do you want to do?” He had to ask.

“What are my options?”

“You can have it stripped down here, we can do it in the plant if you want. Or you can get ported to a bigger dock.”

“Fucking Gerald.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “What will the price difference be?”

“Oh, it will work out about the same. The bigger dock will do it faster, with new machinery, so that'll cost less, but the tow will cost you. The problem is all the parts are Cavendish proprietary components, so their price is fixed.”

If she looked ready to spit before, now she looked ready to shit a goat, horns first. Her colour rose from pink to red under her seasoning of freckles before she took a long, calming breath.

“Might as well do it here then, hadn't I?”

Gerald, praise Allah for you, Amadou thought, considering for a moment a more fervent adoption of the faith of his grandparents if only this woman would grace him with her presence for... he realised he did not want to put a time limit on this prayer.

“We would be glad to have your custom.”

It was true. The price fixing on parts meant the only way to keep ahead rent on tools and workspace was to be constantly working. This job would keep Amadou—and at least two other mechanics—occupied for three solid weeks. Aftab, who ran the shop for RSG, would be looking for every opportunity to repair absolutely anything else that was wrong with the Babd, to stretch the profit above a subsistence level.

As it turned out Amadou had been wrong about the level of damage. He took meticulous records on his HUD, narrating his findings constantly. He did not want Captain Siobhan to think he was trying to exploit her.

“This char mark, here, Captain. That’s from improper sealing work done at a previous stop. This one is newer, and comes from overloading the gestalt circuits during high thrust.”

“In other words, pilot error,” she grumbled.

“Fucking Gerald,” he commiserated.

“Would this have been something he could feel?”

“A competent pilot would have felt a change in altitude adjustment after this, and it would have been flagged in the data lake as a deviation. Onboard djinn would typically alert you, but...”

“Don’t piss on my chips and tell me it’s raining, Amadou, but what?”

“But they were all disabled. Manually.”

She picked up a wrench and walked away from him.

The Babd’s onboard machine shop echoed with the sound of a stainless steel surface being percussively transformed into something altogether less smooth.

“This is going to cost more money, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps.”

Siobhan’s green eyes flashed at him from beneath short, amber lashes. 

“Perhaps?”

“There’s a boat in the junkyard. Caustic Seance. She hasn’t been gutted for spares yet. Nothing wrong with her engines; she had a radiation leak. If you were to buy the salvage rights, someone from your crew could see if the right pieces were available. Inshallah, I could fit them after hours and there would be no delay.”

“Nobody on my crew would know what they were looking for Amadou. Except Gerald, who I wouldn’t trust to piss in my mouth if my teeth were on fire.” She had a way with words. “Could I hire you to do it?”

“If it pleases you, yes, Captain.”

He had hoped she might ask.

The salvage operation took longer than Amadou expected. Someone in the Caustic Seance’s original crew suffered from an overabundance of caution and sealed every cable into place with polymer glue, then sealed the whole lot together with fire retardant monocouche. 

Of course, if the Babd’s crew exercised the same precautions he would have never had the pleasure of Captain Siobhan’s company. 

In the end, he settled for decoupling the entirety, casing and fire suppression intact, and bringing it onto the Captain’s black-winged ship. 

Along with a few other things he found along the way.

“Amadou, what’s this?”

His head was half in, half out of the ducting when he heard her return. He knew without looking what she found though.

Sitting on the bridge was the gift he brought her.

“What do you think it is?”

“It looks like a control panel for a weapons system I have never owned, Amadou.”

“I take it you haven’t been in the cargo hold yet, cap?”

“Amadou, what have you done?”

What he had done was find a completely off-book, unregistered, black-market, point-to-point, kinetic weapons system. It had been clinging to the hull of Caustic Seance, probably installed by the same paranoiac who fireproofed the internal wiring, huddling beneath thin plastic veneers designed to be punched through or burned off. Unbolting the components had taken less than an hour. 

He uploaded the printer guidance files to replace the veneers into the Babd’s shop when he came aboard.

The Captain cooed and purred as she examined his discovery, the chaff dispersal modules, the bundles of rifled barrels.

“How did you know?” 

“The clue’s in the name, Captain. I looked it up.”

He read everything he could about the ship. Its service logs, its crew biographies, its navigation history. Captain Siobhan’s name was almost certainly not Siobhan, though she was probably from Eire, her genetics being harder to fake than her accent. The history of the name added weight to this suspicion. 

“You’re a rare one, Amadou.” She patted the point defence cluster. “I have space on my crew for rarities like you.”

He watched her stalk away from him.

“But only if you’re interested,” she added.