Do Unto Others

[Rusty]

"Work on your tan?"

Like most spacers, the Captain ran on the pale side for her spectrum of pigmentation. It wasn't uncommon for Rusty to mimic falling victim to a flashbang grenade when too much flesh was exposed. It wasn't like there was much room for modesty on the cramped freighter, and since he had about as much interest in human sexuality as he did in Hutt husbandry, there wasn't much of a chance of him getting the wrong idea.

He had heard of Shards who fell for organics, and thought they were nuts. He loved the Captain in his own way, but there was nothing romantic about it in the slightest.

That didn't stop him from mocking her mercilessly, and she more than returned the favor when the mood struck.

"You're welcome to stay on Dressel. My shop is in a sort of rough part of town, but they threw in a pretty swanky apartment. There are always milk runs to pick up, as well.

 

[Malia Afredane]

"I'll figure something out. Now, go. I want a nap before we get there."

She was looking rather tired. She hadn't slept well the last night at her mom's and she just wanted her beat up bed and soft clanks and clicks of Gracie moving through hyperspace. She was quieter now in some places, but the main noises were still the same. She never would have forgiven Rusty if that changed.

She slept almost the whole rest of the way, but when she woke, she felt a little closer to herself. She came out, looking a little groggy and grabbed a water before she slid into the pilot seat and switched off the auto. It was time to set her down and find some trouble.

Passing through orbital control was easy enough with the new stuff and soon they were touched down in Breehara, ready to find a new adventure.

 

[Rusty]

The first stop was the apartment. Rusty didn't foresee spending a whole lot of time here, but it was in his name and if nothing else, he could turn it into a safe house.

The building was in downtown Breehara, one of the nicer districts. The doorman was a portly Sullustian in a uniform that, to the Shard's eye, looked completely ridiculous. All sorts of shiny bits and ribbons and stuff. The blaster at his side was completely serious. The fellow had a competent look to him, probably an old merc put out to pasture. The other residents seemed to find him comforting, especially as Rusty and the Captain walked in.

They weren't completely out of place. Spacer chic was the popular trend in Breehara, and the pair nailed that effortlessly. But unlike the other residents, their clothes were genuinely torn and tattered, their weapons worn down by wear and tear rather than the artfully scuffed pieces they preferred. They were the real deal in a crowd of posers.

Still, as they reached the apartment, the Shard had to admit that he liked the place. His appreciation deepened as he opened the door.

On Coruscant, you could expect an apartment of this price to be ostentatious, a visible display of wealth on a world where that could mean the difference between success in failure. This apartment was lavish in an understated sort of way. Lots of dark wood paneling, rich red walls, plush furniture that managed to look both stylish and comfortable, and a hundred other touches that screamed understated elegance.

"Holy crap," he said. "When they said an apartment, I was expecting something less, habitable."

 

[Malia Afredane]

She whistled when she saw the place, her duffle in her hand. This place reminded her of that Maker's suite on Zeltros but a little less sleaze to everything. She could definitely relax here a bit and with the added bonus that there was lots of beaches and resorts around. Dressel was known but it wasn't a huge tourist draw. The Dressellians weren't xenophobic but they kept to themselves and left others alone. Fine by her. Only downside was that they didn't really like to gamble. Bars had billiard tables, darts, and trivia games but nothing with cards.

No way for her to get in too much trouble. She'd be fine for about 3 days, then bored out of her mind.

She headed for what looked like a bedroom, only to find another small workshop, complete with a draft table and prototype parts to tinker with.

"Damn, is there any place they aren't expecting you to build something? Was your chassis an assembly droid in a past life or something?"

She chuckled with her joke. She knew his consciousness went back hundreds of years, and that he was not the looming body that towered above her and everyone else on the street. However, she still like to bust his chops about switching his body when he wanted a change up.

 

[Rusty]

"Actually, yes," he said in a faux Coruscanti accent.

Though he didn't have a face, he could imitate the haughty posture and body language of a nobleman.

"Lovely times, lovely times. My wife and I designed and built the finest toy spaceships the galaxy had ever seen. They flew like real ones, only smaller, and they didn't actually fly."

There weren't many types of droid Rusty hadn't inhabited over the years. Some Shards bonded with one droid, and that was it. Most of them, in fact. But there were a select few who preferred to keep their personalities intact, or liked to move around. They had figured out how to do it without binding to any one droid or altering their personalities. They weren't very well thought of by the more traditional Shards, who saw them as pikers.

Not that they'd ever say it to Rusty's face. There were plenty of Iron Knights that didn't want to tangle with him.

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Pffft, likely."

She ventured off and looked around a bit more and finally dropped down on the couch, her duffle on the floor.

"Apparently they don't want me hanging around too much. There's no bedroom in here with anything resembling a place for a squishy organic to sleep."

She pointed back over to the other obvious room that normally would have been a bedroom.

"That's a communications station that would give the new upgrades on Gracie a run for their money. So looks like I am taking my tired butt back to the ship. Right after a nap on this very plush couch."

She kicked off her boots, pulled an afghan off the back of the sofa and curled into it for a little shut eye, leaving him to go check in and do whatever he needed to do here.

 

[Rusty]

Rusty didn't have the heart to tell her the couch folded out into a proper bed, not since she was snoring the second her head hit the pillow.

The Captain had the uncanny ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere. He suspected it was a remnant of her time in the military.

If she stuck to her normal sleep cycle, the nap would take about three hours. That gave him plenty of time to make it to the shop, check it out, and head back

The ride out on the rented speeder bike was uneventful. True, the shop itself was in a rough part of town, but no one wanted to try to accost the big guy on the speeder bike travelling at speeds that would likely prove fatal to organics in the long run.

Once he got there, the Shard was surprised to find it bustling with delivery trucks. Apparently, his new investors had noticed when the Grace touched down, and figured he'd be getting ready to set up shop. They were half right, at any rate.

Fortunately for them, the stuff they were delivering, while not exactly suitable for mass production, was all top notch. Really, there wasn't much he couldn't make with the tools on hand, provided he could find the parts. There were even machines that would work exotic materials such as phrik or cortosis, assuming he could get his hands on some. Now that would be tricky.

Eventually, everything was in its place. There were plenty of crates left to be unpacked, but Rusty just didn't have the time. He wasn't even trying to set up until next month. The building, fortunately, locked up so tight it would take an angry Force powered Krayt Dragon to bust down the doors, so he had no problem leaving it there and heading back to the apartment.

Two hours and forty-five minutes had passed. Fifteen more until the Captain woke up. That was time to check the headlines, see what the local news looked like.

 

[Malia Afredane]

Mal was conked out for a little while but she woke up a bit early and pulled out her datapad to start watching her trashy soaps again. There was a really melodramatic one she loved coming out of Empress Teta. It was so thick with back stabbing, it was a wonder they didn't all wear layers of armor. When Rusty came in, she sat up and put her tablet away.

"Gotta line on a job. Picking up some cargo here, dropping it on Balmorra. Except it's contraband and the Sith customs aren't gonna take kindly to it. I have bribes for local officials provided that the Sith don't decide to look too close at Gracie. But Gracie is a known ship and I'm from Bal so it should just be a quick drop, say hey to mum and get off again. You don't have to go if you don't want."

She waited for him to tell her no. Skirting Sith customs was always riskier than Republic patrols.

 

[Rusty]

Rusty was sorely tempted to turn it down, but something stopped him. He wasn't overly fond of dodging Sith, since the merciless [bleep] would just as soon blow them out of the sky as order them to heave to, but at the same time, he felt he owed it to the Captain to show some trust. If she thought this was a good job, and she was trusting him not to get them in over their heads with this mess, the least he could do was return the favor.

"I'm game," he said after a moment. "It's not like I've got anything better to do, and until the shop starts turning out a profit, we can't afford to turn down the credits."

He waited for the Captain to get up, then hit a switch on the wall. The couch folded out to a bed that, while not excessively thick, looked incredibly comfortable. The Shard didn't say a word about that. Best not to needle the Captain too much before a job.

"Besides, I reckon the Wicked Grace could use a shakedown. I'm thinking it's better to put those fancy new gadgets to the test before we really have a chance to rely on them."

 

[Malia Afredane]

She stared at him for a minute, then looked at the bed, then back to him. Shaking her head, she grabbed the duffle.

"Whatever, let's go."

She accepted the job off the board on the trip back to Gracie and started to get her ready while the cargo was dropped off. Looked like a load of electrical components that were retrofit parts for something. The contraband bit was in the bottom of all the containers. She didn't want to know what it was. If the Sith outlawed it, then that was good enough for her. It could be a crate of fuzzy, stuffed bunnies and she'd still not want to know what it was.

The crates showed up a couple hours later and they were off the races and back to Balmorra. Hopefully it would be a quick trip.

 

[Rusty]

There weren't many interdiction points along the way, and the few known ones were carefully avoided by Rusty, with help from the new navicomp. A smuggler's navicomp was often a wealth of data on the best illicit routes, one of the reasons they were so prized by pirates and the first things destroyed by crews. This new one, however, was far and away better than anything that the Shard had ever worked with. Not only did it have the probably points for interdiction, but it even listed the ships, commanding officers, and crew readiness reports of the vessels the Sith were likely to have on station, along with handy little hints about who was likely to accept bribes and who wasn't.

This wasn't old data either. The time stamps were all less than a week old, and further investigation showed they'd be updating within the next twelve hours, now that the ship was on mission.

He suspected the data it held was worth far more than the cargo they carried.

Eventually, they reached Balmorra. Rusty programmed in a false IFF code into the transponder, one that wouldn't attract attention even on an old 3-Z, and they made their way to the surface.

 

[Malia Afredane]

The customs agent meeting them at the docking bay was one of Mal's old buddies from the Riveter. A couple jokes, a couple overly enthusiatic stories and the forms were signed and done without any inspections. The cargo was unloaded while Mal and the short little guy were heading off for a beer over at a bar near the spaceport. She would have to say hey to her mother eventually, but first she wanted to sit down at a place she didn't know everyone in the bar.

A couple hours later, Mal came back from the Riveter, drunk and singing something that was supposed to be a popular song on the charts, but it sounded like Mal was strangling cats. She bounded onboard, climbed to the cockpit and slid into her seat, wobbly on her legs. She leaned into the cushions of the seat and started talking like Rusty was sitting in the copilot's seat. Whether or not he was seemed to be another matter.

"Greg is never gonna lay off with the proposals. He asked again. Twice. I keep telling him that I don't want to settle down on Bal and he said it's a great place to settle down and I said that yes Sith regimes were great for kids. I don't know why, I don't want kids but the point is that he's so damn pushy and I don't know why he karking cares. I'm a crappy person and he doesn't even know what I do. Like none of it. I don't know what he thinks happens on ships."

She quieted down a second as something shiny caught her eye and she went off on another tangent.

"I think I have a hard time with relationships. I don't like people and people don't like me. Except Kairon. I liked him. He scrunches his face up when he broods and it's hot in this weird sort of way. I don't know. He seemed pretty preoccupied. With the job. Or something. Maybe it was the kitty person."

She sighed, her eyelids drooping a little.

"I wish you got this stuff. I suck at this humany thing and I need someone to explain it to me."

 

[Rusty]

Rusty snorted.

"Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure Kairon was batting for the other team, if you get my drift."

The Shard wasn't an expert in the delicate subject of human romance, but he could certainly tell when someone was less than interested in the Captain. From what he could gather, humanoid males found her charming at a certain level of intoxication. Anything past that point required herculean levels of tolerance or desperation, as she was about as subtle as a brick against the skull, and every bit as blunt.

"I suspect Greg sees you as a lost soul he can tame, but what the [bleep] do I know? The last time I got tried the whole romance thing, it was to get closer to a mark. You'll note I failed spectacularly."

It was a pretty safe bet the Captain wouldn't remember this conversation in the morning. She was on that fine line between ambulatory and ooze, something that always happened on Balmorra.

"Have you tried shooting him a little, just to see if he gets the picture?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

"You want me to shoot Kairon? I don't think that would work."

It took her a minute for her mind to accept that 1. Rusty thought Kairon was gay and 2. that he was referring to shooting Greg so he would stop asking her to marry him. She rubbed her eyes with the butts of her palms. Thinking was getting too hard right now.

"I think I should sleep it off."

She started for her rack, and whirled around in the corridor so quick, her knees buckled.

"I still don't know why I should shoot people. That is not going to get me laid."

She crawled the rest of the way to her bed, the door sliding closed to let her get some sleep. When she woke up, she hurt everywhere, especially in between her brain cells. Yes, you can hurt there. Hangovers were special. She got the heaves a couple times, but managed to keep herself together, and get some water in her. She slept the day away in port, solemnly resigned that she was not getting off the ship that night. She could barely make it to the cockpit. She kept to her room, watching sappy chick flicks and generally feeling sad for reasons she did not want to identify. She knew she was lonely, she just didn't want to actually think about it.

Around dinnertime, she came out to the galley to rummage for food. Rusty had been scarce all day. She called out just loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to rattle her head.

"How bad was I last night?"

 

[Rusty]

"You were pretty torn up, Captain," Rusty said cheerfully. And loudly. Very, very loudly. "It was a miracle you made it back to the ship."

The galley was awash with the smells of frying meat. Rusty had gone out during the day to purchase some local cuts, as well as fresh vegetables and eggs. There were fried eggs, stewed okras and tomatoes that had long ago congealed into the sort of soupy mess that the Captain liked, and a couple of large, bloody steaks. He was in the process of removing a pan of corn bread from the oven as she entered. He might give her hell for going out and getting hammered, but the Shard was always there to make sure she recovered as quickly as possible.

She didn't even notice when he inserted a saline lock into the veins of her left hand and started an IV drip of chilled saline and electrolytes, with a shot of glucose for good measure. He set a large plate loaded with her favorite recovery foods in front of her, as well as a bottle of painkillers and a glass of water.

"You want I should give you the highlights, or would you rather be surprised when I need to blackmail you in the future?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Surprise me," was about all she could mutter from under her glowering brow. He was having way too much fun with this. She must have been pretty bad the previous night. She dug into the okra and tomatoes first, the tangy taste helping to cure the feeling of fuzzy shag carpet on her tongue. The steak was perfectly cooked, and she polished off the glass of water with a couple pills. She held out her empty glass to Rusty as she was tethered to an IV hanging from the overhead light at the moment.

"The last thing I remember was Jorgen bringing me something called a red death. And maybe karaoke. The rest is a blur. I woke up here and alone so I guess it could be worse."

She chewed slowly, trying to remember but it hurt to think still, like her brain was clouded up with sludge. She stopped when she remembered something from earlier the previous evening.

"Mum wants me to take over the bar."

 

[Rusty]

"Of course she does," Rusty said, a hint of a smirk in his voice.

That was nothing new. The Captain's mother was always trying to get her to find a husband, settle down, and raise a passel of poop factories. He didn't know why the woman wanted grandkids so bad. From what he could gather, she decided to start a bar because it was one of the few places where children weren't allowed.

"It's more or less the same story every time. She wants you to take the bar, Greg wants you to marry him, and you still don't take my advice and shoot them both a little to get them to back off. Captain, my Captain, you are, in your own way, as predictable as the Balmorran tides."

He took the glass, filling it with sweet tea this time.

"So, talked to Kairon lately?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

She froze suddenly trying to remember if she drunk dialed him the previous evening then relaxed knowing that she never really did that sort of thing. However she tensed back up as the thought occured that if Rusty was bringing it up here, she probably brought it up last night. She had a piece of cornbread in her hand, mopping up the tomatoe juice on the plate, as she stared at him open mouthed.

"Uhhh, no?" She asked, hoping to something divine that the answer was actually no.

She swallowed hard, trying to play casual as she sipped the tea to rinse the fear out of her mouth. It wasn't working.

"Not since we finished that job on Shaddaa. Why?"

There was terror in her voice now, hoping that in her drunken state, she did not do something stupid.

 

[Rusty]

"Oh, no reason."

Even for a Shard in a droid body, it can be nearly impossible to suppress a laugh. Fortunately for Rusty, he didn't have his nervous system working against him. He kept his cool. Barely.

"I mean, it's not like you...oh, never mind. I'm sure it was nothing."

It was either go start cleaning off the stove or run out of the room to keep from cackling. Rusty went with the former, busying himself with cleaning up the residue of the meal. He was no means a 5 star chef, but he could pass for a pretty decent cook in a roadside diner.

"So, what's the next job?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

The color drained from her face. She gritted her jaw, shaking her head, despite how much it hurt.

"Alright, spill it. What did I do?"

She looked up at him, like he was bluffing on the other side of a sabacc table. The gambler in her had a pretty mean poker face but it might have had something to do with the scar running down her face. It seemed to intimidate some. But not Rusty. Still, she needed to know if she had royally screwed something up that needed to be fixed.