“He’s making her work so hard it could end up hurting her!” Milly argued, having finally calmed enough to seek out not Niko, but Dabry in the kitchen. Her pupils were wide and flashing with anger, and the feathers along the back of her head and neck stood up, an elaborate white crest.
Dabry didn’t look up from the bowl he was mixing. “The captain usually knows what she’s doing when it comes to these things,” he said.
He took two small tasting spoons to dip into the pulpy mass, holding one out to Milly. She took it reflexively and tasted it as he did the same.
“Salt,” they said in unison. Dabry carefully sprinkled a pinch across the surface and resumed mixing.
“The girl doesn’t know enough to resist when she’s being pushed too far,” Milly said, but her feathers were slowly flattening.
“You could train with them,” Dabry said. “Keep your edge in too. That might smooth things over, what do you think?”
“I think you are managing me, old man,” she grumbled, but reluctantly took the next tasting spoon, nodding in confirmation after sampling it.
“Better, right?” he said.
“Still needs a stronger acid note,” she said.
“Noooo…” He tasted it. “Well, perhaps.”
“But why should he be training her in the first place?” Milly said, trying another tack. “I thought we would eventually create another restaurant. She does not need to know how to fight to work there, unless you plan on having her play security, which seems an odd choice.”
“We have to deal with Tubal Last before any of that can happen,” Dabry said. “He will not let go, Milly.”
She nodded unhappily.
His attention focused entirely on his mixing, he said, “And if any of us splinter off—as Petalia did, which has proven a mistake—I would suspect he would take advantage of that to hunt them down.”
He did not look up to watch her expression, so he did not see the feathers startle, then settle again.
“I am sure,” she said, “that any of us that have thought about such things have considered that and factored it into their decision.”
“One would expect,” he agreed. His strokes in the batter were sure and methodical, his voice absent as though he were thinking of other things. “All of us are intelligent beings, after all.”
He set the spoon down and said, “But I will talk to the girl, and make sure she knows that she can object. Will that make you feel better, Milly?”
“It is enough,” she said. “You always do enough, you and Niko. That is why I am still here.”
Atlanta went to the ship’s garden space for refuge. The light here was ruddy; it played over lighter leaves, making them pale green and yellow, while deeper green leaves darkened, their surfaces glossy and laddered with shadows. The space was cramped, vines and leaves constantly grasping outward as though to claim more territory. The air smelled better, fresher in this space than anywhere else, tinged with oxygen and green.
She was thinking about the conversation with Skidoo rather than how much she still hurt, even after that hot shower. Four spans wasn’t that long; it didn’t seem reasonable for Talon to mean to train her multiple times a day. She consoled her perplexity with the cinnamon cookies she’d brought in her pocket. Something about eating them here made them taste even better.
Cinnamon was new to Atlanta and she couldn’t get enough of it. The sweet dusty burn appealed to her, and lately Dabry had been serving it in a different way with every meal.
She was focused on savoring bites of her cookie, alternating them with thoughts of Skidoo, who roused in her both trepidation and delight, when she heard the door open.
Dabry said, “Are you hiding here because you’re hurt?”
She shook her head. “No,” she lied. “Just tired, that’s all.” The fear of her inadequacy flared up. She should’ve been able to stand up to his treatment, but the relief of Milly’s intervention had been tremendous. She would never be a soldier like the rest of them.
Dabry eyed her and the bruises covering her arms but said nothing more on that subject.
Instead, he said, “You have been wanting to learn more about cooking and making food, so this time, let me start with the very basics and show you some things about the garden. Then I can add you to the duty roster for maintaining it, and when you cook with those ingredients, you will understand them better.” He held out an upper hand and hauled her to her feet.
“Niko used that phrase too. Why is there a duty roster?” Atlanta asked, trailing after him. “The ship is more than capable of handling all the work.”
“Well, the ship is capable of maintaining itself, certainly,” Dabry said. “But if we are to be Free Traders, then we need things to trade, and that requires some effort as well as thought.”
“I thought the point of traders was that they bought things cheaply in one place and then took them to another place and sold them at a profit.”
Dabry grimaced, though it was unclear if the expression was for her or the brown leaf he’d just picked from a vine to consider. “It is a bit more subtle than that. And there is plenty of excess time aboard a ship that is moving. If we do not keep everyone occupied, then most of them will just spend their time pleasure-seeking in one way or another, sometimes to the point where they do not even interact with each other.”
He put the leaf in a pocket and moved on, checking over the racks of plants, beckoning him to follow her.
“The ship is capable of tending all of this space itself,” he said. “But interacting with the food before you cook it is an excellent thing for a chef to do. And you should learn what needs to be done overall, in any case. Most ships do not have biomechanicals that it controls—instead they have robots and drones, and those can be rendered useless in a variety of ways that are much harder to do with biomechanicals. You need to be able to carry operations out if something fails.”
One of the central racks stood empty now, though on either side, the plants in those racks were already sending out tendrils to explore the shelves. Dabry pointed at it.
“That’s our first priority,” he said. “I’ve brought in starts for the vines we’ll put there, and we’re interspersing it with slips of bio-engineered ginger in several flavors. Those established vines are called laseriabells—see the shape of the blossoms? They produce a sort of aerial tuber that has a nice texture that varies according to how you prepare it. Can be a pleasant starchy quality or something a lot smoother. Not much base flavor to it, so it dresses up well, which is good, because it’s extremely productive. We’ll mix in a couple of sweet potato vines as well.”
“That rack is intended for plants that clean the air,” the ship said.
“These do,” Dabry told it. “They also happen to produce these edible tubers.”
“What if you eat all the tubers?”
“Then the vines will produce more.”
There was silence, a decidedly sullen one.
Dabry said, “I’m sensing that you’re not happy with this, Thing. Can you explain why?”
“The vines fit in two categories and it is indeterminate what their primary category is,” the ship said in a peevish tone. It did not like the idea of something being two things at once. Something about the taxonomy seemed antithetical to how it understood the world.
“Their primary purpose will remain the cleaning of air,” Dabry said in a patient tone.
“But not all portions of the plant will do so,” the ship pressed. “The tubers will not do so.”
“Hence we will eat them,” Dabry said. “Most of them. The whenlove plant is more for decoration than anything else.”
The ship worried this idea around in its head and emerged from the brief reverie still very unsatisfied. However, it decided to wait and see what happened.
Dabry kept quiet until it became obvious that the ship had nothing more to say on the subject.
Turning back to Atlanta, he showed her how to place the plant starts in the little bags of soil that would then be injected with water and placed in the rack. “Poke your finger through the blue-marked hole, here,” he said. “Then put the plant’s roots in the hole you created, yes, like that but a little deeper. Good. Squeeze the bag just a little to get the roots settled in the growing medium. Now all you do is add water, here, until this spot turns green.”
Her hands liked the feeling of the bag as it went from dry to moist; there was something about the transformation and the way it felt in her hand that was marvelous each time, like touching something and feeling it come alive. She had never gardened at home, although it was not an uncommon hobby.
Happiness seeped through her, replacing the worry over roles or the bruises Talon had inflicted. Every time she took a breath, the air felt full of moisture and life and a calm happiness. The long plant tendrils in the racks all around drooped down in the low gravity, brushing against her as she worked, but she tried to avoid contact, worried that the oils from her skin might interfere with their growth.
Dabry worked with the smaller bags that housed the ginger and slotted them into the rack one by one, at a much faster rate than Atlanta.
She could smell each time he started a new row because it signaled the introduction of a new flavor of ginger: lemon, then lime, then basil, pepper, some unidentifiable fruit—raspberry? Strawberry?—then a very plain, unadulterated, classic ginger so strong she felt as though she could taste it in her mouth. She was still only a few rows in with the larger plants when Dabry shifted to those in order to assist her, starting at the top and working his way down while she continued to build upward.
They met at the mark a third of the way up; she was irritated with herself for not having moved more quickly, but then she consoled herself with the thought that it had been her first time doing anything like that.
Dabry insisted on checking over all her plants, nudging a couple more deeply into the soil and tugging one out a bit. She wondered if his maneuvers did anything other than remind her that he was in charge and had been doing this much longer but then dismissed the thought. It wasn’t like him.
He was impressed by the speed with which she took to it. He’d worried that she might take a long time to find something she was good at. That could erode someone’s confidence. But now he could see her gaining some and, more than that, enjoying herself freely.
Smiling to himself, Dabry surveyed the rack with satisfaction. “That is a good bit of labor,” he said. He turned back to Atlanta. “Do you understand how the racks work?”
“No…” she said uncertainly.
He spent the next hour disassembling and reassembling one to show her how it functioned, how the water was pulled along by capillary motion, then took it apart again and made her be the one to reassemble it this time. She got it halfway right, arriving at the end with a number of leftover parts, so he showed her where she had gone wrong and had her do it again.
“But surely this is something better left to the ship to do,” she protested.
“What if the ship were disabled, what then?”
“We would go to a station and ask them to fix it.”
He rolled his eyes at her. “By the time that this trip is over, you will understand some of the basics of ship maintenance.”
“But I can’t hope to learn everything there is to know about running the ship! It’s too complicated!”
“You can learn the basics of the systems, the mechanics underlying them, at least many of them. And if you know those things then you have a much better chance of being able to fix a problem than the person who regards the machine as a mysterious and unfixable box. A good soldier is prepared to deal with any situation.”
“But I am not a soldier,” she said. “We are not fighting anyone or hiring out as mercenaries, are we?”
“No,” he said, coiling hoses to put them away. “Niko and I have had enough of war and we will not take anyone back into it. But life is its own kind of war and we have banded together in order to survive that battle. I will give you all the weapons that I can, and yes, I will speak in military terms more than once, because that is the language that I have always taught in. And Niko will insist—as will I—that you know how to defend yourself in a fight, and are not a liability. That’s why she set Talon to training you.”
“What would make me a liability?”
“If we had to watch over you for your own safety,” he said. “If you consistently behaved in a way that brought danger to us.” His gaze was mild. “I am sure you can think of all sorts of things if you set your mind to it.”
“I want to be useful,” she said.
“Good. This is where you start with that.”
“No, truly useful. Everyone brings something to the group except for me.”
He patted her head with a hand. From anyone else, the gesture would’ve felt patronizing, but somehow, he made it comforting. “You are young and inexperienced, Atlanta. Much of this will come with time. The best thing that you can do is watch and learn from the things around you.”
Dabry’s heart twinged at the feel of the glossy hair against his palm, like Keirera’s warm scalp under his hand. She would be a good bit past Atlanta’s age, as he judged, if she had lived.
“Are there other plants to start?” she asked as he forced that thought away.
“Plenty of them,” he said with deliberate calm. “I brought seeds and cuttings. If we’re going to be aboard the Thing for a good long time, I’ll add more of them over time.”
“What will you add?” the ship asked. “More plants with more than one use?” It pronounced the last with a trace of horror that it found itself unexpectedly enjoying. These new passengers—who it would be carrying for at least a solar year or two, based on Arpat Takraven’s request—had provided it with the chance to experience so many new emotions and feelings. More than it had ever been able to indulge in during the hundred or so years that it had simply been a vessel or plaything to the idle rich like Takraven, who sometimes left it in dock for years at a time.
“Maybe,” Dabry said in a portentous tone, winking at Atlanta. “Perhaps even some with three or even four uses!”
She rubbed her face to hide a smile at the dead silence with which the ship greeted this joke.