Tiny Dots On An Endless Timeline

Jax

Jax was sitting at a table in the mess hall with a cup of some kind of Halli tea in his hands. Cookie was a couple of seats down from him, his cup full of the same spice tea, eyes turned down to his cup. Oppenheimer, always the rebel, was seated across from him on the table with her back to her father, her legs draped over Nimoy's shoulders, her elbows on her knees, chin resting on her loosely curled fists. Nimoy for his part had reclined back against the table, assuming a demeanor as though nothing in the universe had ever mattered. Asimov and Mumru did not sit at the table but instead stood off to the side. Mumru in his transport, their body a neutral translucent nothing color, and Asimov, his stillness immediately giving him away as artificial.

They had left the spaceport yesterday, but no one had seen Skip since they had boarded and logged their purchases, both personal and professional, in the ship's central computer. They had all spent a little time in the decontamination room and been flashed for harmful bacteria. Jax never liked the sensation of the med-flash, it reminded him of the time his UV shielding had failed and he had gotten a full dose from Alpha Centauri A. Sunburn doesn't begin to cover it, even with the full host of med bots working on him it had taken him a week to recover fully, and the skin on his left side was still more sensitive to heat and light than the right. Getting med-flashed felt like all of that, but compressed into three seconds.

Jax knew that they had picked up a new crew member, but he didn't know if anyone else knew. So, instead, he sipped the flavorful Halli tea and let the deep tones of spices and herbs wash through him. Jax had been strictly anti-tea when he had first signed on to the ADA, thinking it the stuff that weaker people drank instead of coffee. After nine years around tea drinkers, he had come to love it. When he retired he was going to make sure he had a steady supplier for some of his favorite blends. Not that he was apt to retire anytime soon if he didn't get a hold of his credit spending. He looked around at his fellow crew members again, contemplating what the last 20 years had been like. Almost all of them had been together that long, except for Asimov, of course, he had been made in the last five years or so and, while Jax didn't dislike the android, he had never really warmed to him either.

While Jax knew that Nimoy had made an effort to make Asimov appear human, he felt that some of the features, like the exaggerated facial expressions and the pallid off-white clearly synthetic attempt at skin, were borderline offensive. He couldn't blame Asimov for that, but it still made getting close to the android in any meaningful way difficult. Oppenheimer had no such qualms and had taken to chumming around with Asimov as often as she did with Nimoy, and since the two of them were essentially attached at the hip, that was saying something. Himey always said it was because he was dead useful in the mech lab, and Jax begrudgingly admitted that he was not too shabby a roughneck either. Even if it was disconcerting that he exited the ship with only a tether, not a suit to run the drills and gas excavators. No, Jax liked everyone just fine, he maybe wasn't the best at showing it, but he had been a wayward kid with no direction and a mean streak, and Skip had taken him in, just like everyone else here.

No matter how much Jax complained, he couldn't imagine working for anyone else, living anywhere else, or doing any other job. He knew that most of the stories of the crew were similar to his. Cookie had been on a prison colony on Kepler, when he got out, he had met Himey's mom and gotten married, settled down, started some kind of soup house on Mars, and then whomever Cookie had been working for that had landed him on the prison colony, to begin with, had caught wind of where he was and tried to rope him back in. Cookie had refused and they had murdered his wife. She had hidden Himey away in a trunk and the girl had almost died of oxygen deprivation before Cookie in his grief had heard her wails and found her. Skip had taken in Cookie and Himey both, even though Himey was just an infant, and had made sure that she had access to education, and she had turned into a damn fine mech-head. Even if Cookie was still not a great cook.

And Nimoy, christ Nimoy. Talk about a sob story. Skip had found him at the same spaceport he had found Cookie and Himey. An Agean child wrapped in a blanket and tossed in a dumpster before his implants had been done, his stinger wasn't even wrapped in its carapace yet. The child was probably only hours old and already choking on air that wasn't meant for him. Jax shuddered to think about it. Mumru had a story, though Jax didn't know what it was, he had never asked the Coruso, and probably never would. The species were weird about their trauma, as it was shared in their collective, and so some of it didn't strictly belong to them. But Jax was certain that Mu was just as broken as the rest of them.

Jax knew that whatever reason Skip had for bringing on another crewmate was probably a good one, but he was still apprehensive. While all of them here now had worked out, there had been some that hadn't. The Halli beggar who had turned out to be a grifter. The Setskahn who had turned out to be one of those homeworld weirdos who believes everyone not like them is a subclass of lifeform, who had tried to poison the whole ship. Skip's heart was always in the right place but it sometimes got in the way of his higher brain functions and judgment. Jax could only hope that whatever new excuse for life that he had dragged out of the gutter this time would be like them and not like the others. Nothing could have prepared him for what walked in the door with Skip, however. Not in a million years, Earth or GSA, would he have guessed this. He felt rage bubble through his brain even as his heart dropped into his stomach.

As Skip walked into the mess hall with the Vidhvan in tow, no one said a word for a solid minute. The Vidhvan shrunk behind Skip at the scrutiny, their cheeks shimmering in a self-conscious blush. Jax was the first to speak, and when he did it came out in a harsh croak, his throat throttled in fear and revulsion. "What the fuck, Skipper..." was all he managed.