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THE LAST MEETING THAT span was a sober affair; checking and rechecking that everyone had covered all the bases. Dasha’s plan for the explosive jailbreak seemed too crazy to be true, but the idea of checking who was inside first with a small force of armed folk, and then blowing away the outside walls of the jail seemed like it had too many useful side effects to not be carried out anyway. Dun sighed and concurred. The whole planning process had too much damn exploding in it for him to be entirely happy with it. After all, he’d spent a lot of time with Tali. Gods, what he wouldn’t give for her advice right now.
The boat part of the plan was a quite ramshackle affair, but Dun, having spent most of his youth in ramshackle aquatic craft, was quite at home with that. Having had a go of the raft in a test tank, a boat was too grand a term for it really. Still Dun was relatively happy with it. The team provided as muscle by Dasha seemed to have some kind of flair for raft assembly.
That left the crux of the operation: the explosives. Stef had done a fine job designing the mechanism by which an adapted spear at the front of the craft would trigger an explosion, only when a prior “arm” signal had been given to a small radio control strapped to the front of the raft. Again a demo of this in the test tank was given with a loud beep instead of the explosion. A large round of applause broke the nervous tension when the test worked perfectly. Stef had also rigged a number of packets of explosive to detonators and explosives with a short-timed trigger that had ten clicks worth of beeping then a sizable explosion. This provided the biggest round of applause of the demo, even though the test explosion was rigged using a weighted package right at the bottom of the tank. It satisfyingly “whoomphed” and lifted so much water that everyone in the demo party went back to the canteen wet.
The time for the raid was arranged: straight after sleep-cycle. They all retired to the canteen and some vine-fizz was broken out and everyone drank heartily. Dun’s head was starting to swim, not just with the effects of the fizz.
“Hey, good work in there today,” Stef said from his elbow.
“Same to you,” he said.
“Engineer,” she said, “it’s what we do.”
“Very clever though, and while supervising Dasha’s lot at the same time.”
“They didn’t turn out too bad once I’d shouted at them a few times to stop them fighting,” she said.
“Fighting seems to be what they do best,” Dun said.
“Ain’t that a good job?” Stef said.
“Suppose so,” Dun said.
The party was becoming rowdier. Dun worried about how much sleep everyone was going to get.
“Wanna go to bed?” Stef said.
“You still using that mind reading thing?” Dun said.
“No!” Stef said, mock offended. “Engineer’s honor. Come on.”
“But if we both go back at once, where will we sleep? There’s only one bunk.”
“For someone who might make a quite good leader, you can be awfully dim.” She laughed and grabbed his hand.
Dun was led through the back of the crowd who were building up for a rousing chorus of something extremely rude. They went back through the door to the barracks corridor and the couple of doors down to Stef’s room. She kicked the door open and, still holding Dun’s hand, swung him in, toed the door shut, and gently deposited him against the bed. She pushed. He fell.
“Hey, wait!” he said as she climbed onto the bed astride him.
“Wait, what?” she said dreamily.
“If we... What about... Aren’t you worried about pups?”
She laughed heartily. He liked her laugh, full-throated, sincere.
“Ain’t you old fashioned? We’ve got stuff to prevent that now.”
“But we hardly know each other...”
“You really do make me laugh, you know. We aren’t getting mated. Just, you know, doing it. If you want to.” She sounded unsure for the first time.
“No, I want to. I really want to, but it’s—you’re different.”
“And you’re sweet. Living here, it’s all a bit “anything goes”, especially the night before a raid.”
“Don’t people have mates then?” Dun said.
“Sure they do, sometimes. Bringing up pups, sometimes. Sometimes just because. But we don’t have to; pups are brought up by everyone anyway. We have to have lots of parents, y’know, in case.”
Dun scratched his knee, reaching between Stef’s legs.
“Gerrof! That tickles.”
And she fell on him, tickling him back, and then nuzzling him. The warmth of her body and her scent made Dun feel the happiest he had since he’d left the Bridge.
***
THEY WOKE CURLED AROUND each other and warm. Dun was scared to move, scared to break the moment. He felt warm breath against his neck, and her heart beating against his spine. Gods, she smelled good. Then there was the rough rasp of an alarm going off. Stef reached out an arm, batted whatever piece of tech had made the horrible noise and beat it into silence.
She turned over and kissed Dun briefly on the nose.
“You’re up, kid. Good luck,” she said.
“You too.”
“Go!” she said. “Get outta here. I’ll be there over breakfast and briefing.”
He left. He walked the corridors hearing the bustle that, this time, he had created. He found himself at the canteen, not entirely remembering the trip that got him there. He collected things to eat and something hot and bitter to drink. He was pretty sure they were the same things he had yesterday. He ate silently.
A bell clanged from the doorway and Tam’s voice followed it. “Briefing room in five hundred clicks for anyone who’s going on the sluice mission!”
Dun thought he’d better be in there first and made his way to the doorway. Stef squeezed past him and pinched his bum on the way past.
“Hey, you, sorry I’m late. Stuff to sort! I’ll grab a drink and be straight in.”
“I miss you.”
Excerpts from <Distress Beacon SN-1853001>. Found by E.S.V Vixen Terradate: 26102225
