Chapter 42 · Rinse and repeat

The Mynock had been in flight for six days, though the concept of “day” had already lost its meaning. Out here, the stars didn’t rise or fall—they just shimmered in and out of reach like fading memories.

The Way of Schesa was less a corridor and more a dare: a chain of short, unreliable jumps stitched together by stubbornness and half-forgotten coordinates. Each one had to be plotted manually, recalculated against gravitational drift, and cross-checked by hand because the ship’s computer didn’t trust its own data.

Eli was starting to understand why.

“Ready,” Stent said, leaning back in the pilot’s seat, his tone betraying neither hope nor fatigue.

Eli keyed in the next set of coordinates. “Vector aligned. If we’re lucky, we won’t jump inside a rock this time.”

“Luck again,” Stent murmured. “You’re obsessed.”

“I’m realistic,” Eli said, tightening his harness. “Only fools travel through the Schesa route without superstition.”

“Good thing I brought you, then.”

He gave Stent a thin smile. “Remind me of that when this ship’s atoms decide to be somewhere else.”

Stent’s reply was to nudge the throttle forward. The Mynock shuddered, the hull groaning as hyperspace swallowed them for the twelfth time that cycle.

The pattern had become ritual.

Calculate manually.
Jump.
Emerge.
Correct drift.
Find the next jump point.
Repeat.

There was no rhythm in it, only endurance. Each cycle drained a little more patience, a little more focus.

The cockpit grew quieter with every jump. Words became nods; nods became silence. Even the hum of the engines seemed to thin, as if the ship itself was tired of moving.

Eli’s eyes burned from the endless glow of the nav screen. The columns of data had started to blur together—numbers swimming into a single, endless equation that refused to end. He rubbed his temples and tried to remember how many jumps they’d done since the last recalibration. Eleven? Fourteen?

Stent stretched from the pilot’s seat, cracking his neck. “You’re drifting.”

Eli blinked. “So’s the nav system.”

“I meant you,” Stent said, eyes still on the console. “You haven’t blinked in ten minutes.”

“Mathematician’s blink rate slows in crisis,” Eli muttered. “It’s a scientific fact.”

Stent’s mouth twitched. “You should publish that.”

“Maybe when I get back to Csilla.”

“Your optimism’s getting worse.”

“Or my sarcasm’s improving.”

“Same thing,” Stent said.

Days stretched into a kind of timeless routine. They checked systems, rationed water, ate, slept. The galaxy outside remained abstract — coordinates and background radiation. Inside, every sound was catalogued: the scrape of metal against metal, the sigh of pressurized doors, the faint thump when Eli turned over in the bunk above.

Once, half-asleep, he heard Stent murmuring again — not Cheunh this time but something softer, words that carried rhythm without language. A lullaby, maybe, though the idea of Stent and lullabies seemed oxymoronic. Still, the sound was low and deliberate, almost mathematical. Eli drifted off to it without meaning to.

When he woke, Stent was already in the cockpit, silhouette framed by star-glow. The commander didn’t look back, but said, “Sleep improves your temperament.”

“Keep singing, then,” Eli muttered.

Stent didn’t ask what he meant.

By the tenth day, they had run out of conversation topics entirely. It wasn’t awkward — just the silence of two people who’d already catalogued each other’s limits.

The air had grown drier, recycled moisture becoming more theory than practice. Every drop of water was accounted for. They learned to measure by mouthfuls, to ration by instinct. Stent logged consumption on a datapad with military precision. Eli teased him about it once, until the commander handed him the pad without expression and said, “You may manage it if you find humor in the numbers.”

He didn’t tease him again.

That night, Eli climbed into his bunk and stared at the ceiling a long time before saying, “You always take the lower bunk?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Structural safety. If the hull ruptures, the lower bulkhead remains intact longer.”

Eli leaned over the edge, grinning down. “And if it ruptures from below?”

“Then we will be equal,” Stent said.

Eli laughed. “You know, you’re almost funny when you’re fatalistic.”

“I am rarely anything else,” Stent said, and turned out the light.

The cabin went dark except for the dim glow of status LEDs, soft blue halos pulsing in rhythm with the engines. Eli listened to the hum, to the steady presence below him, to the endless void outside that neither feared aloud.

For all its cramped misery, the Mynock had achieved something the Steadfast never had — honesty stripped of ceremony. Two officers, two species, one machine daring the universe to notice them.

Eli smiled into the dark. “Efficient,” he whispered.

Below, Stent replied without missing a beat, “Obviously.”

fragility, a minor technical scare, and a quiet shift in how Eli and Stent see each other.

By the second week, time had stopped pretending to move in days.

It flowed instead by maintenance cycles, meal packets, and the recurring hiss of the recycler. Eli’s circadian rhythm gave up somewhere around midweek; he lived by the engine’s pulse and by Stent’s unflinching schedule.

The Mynock behaved like a temperamental animal—mostly obedient, occasionally spiteful. On the twelfth day it decided to cough.

The sound began as a low rattle under the deck plating, then rose into a teeth-aching vibration that made both men look up. Stent was halfway to the access hatch before Eli could stand.

“Coolant feed line,” Stent said, already unsealing the panel.

Eli crouched beside him. “You sure? Could be the bearings.”

“Negative. Bearings fail gradually. This is percussive.”

“Percussive,” Eli muttered. “Nice euphemism for ‘we’re about to cook alive.’”

Steam hissed out as Stent twisted a valve. The compartment filled with the metallic tang of heat and coolant vapor. They worked in wordless coordination—Stent handling the precision tools, Eli bracing the line with gloved hands. Sweat prickled instantly despite the chill air.

When the valve finally seated and pressure normalized, the ship gave a small, grudging sigh.

Eli wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “We alive?”

“For the moment.”

“See? You can do optimism.”

“That was assessment,” Stent said, tightening the last bolt.

“Split hairs later. I’m calling that a win.”

He laughed—half relief, half exhaustion. Stent gave him a long look, something almost curious behind the crimson eyes. “You treat failure as entertainment.”

“Not failure,” Eli said. “Survival. The funny kind.”

They spent the next hour purging the air scrubbers and resetting the coolant system. The ship resumed its usual heartbeat, steady as ever, but the air tasted of metal and adrenaline.

Afterward, they both stood in the narrow galley, drinking tepid water like soldiers at truce.

Stent set his cup down with mathematical precision. “You responded adequately.”

Eli grinned. “That your version of a compliment?”

“It is an acknowledgment of competence.”

“I’ll take it. Thank the Imperial training.”

He leaned back against the counter, the recycled light turning everything the same soft gray. For the first time, Stent didn’t move to fill the silence. His posture was less guarded, shoulders lowered.

Eli said, “You ever get tired of doing everything right?”

Stent tilted his head slightly. “Explain the question.”

“You run on discipline like an engine. Doesn’t it get exhausting?”

“Exhaustion is irrelevant. Efficiency compensates.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only functional one.”

Eli smiled faintly. “Spoken like someone who’s never been on shore leave.”

Stent’s brow arched. “I have been on leave.”

“Let me guess. You reorganized the armory.”

“Twice,” Stent said without irony.

Eli laughed until Stent’s expression softened into what might have been amusement—or confusion at the concept.

The laugh turned to a cough. The air was still hot from the coolant. Eli reached for the water again. Stent, silently, passed him his own half-full cup.

“Hydration precedes humor,” Stent said.

Eli blinked. “Was that… a joke?”

Stent looked mildly offended. “A statement of biological fact.”

“Sure it was.”

They both drank. The Mynock hummed, smug in its equilibrium.

That evening, the stars rolled past like powdered glass. The viewport was small, a square of infinity, but it was enough. Eli stood there for a while, arms crossed, feeling the slow rotation of the ship.

“Do you ever miss planets?” he asked.

Stent didn’t look up from his datapad. “Planets complicate trajectories.”

“That’s not missing.”

“It is accurate.”

Eli smiled. “Figures.”

He pressed his forehead lightly against the viewport glass. Beyond it, the universe stretched endless and cold, yet strangely familiar. The Mynock felt, in that moment, almost like a shelter—a metallic cave carrying two stubborn minds through silence.

Stent finally spoke. “You would prefer planetary gravity.”

“I’d prefer a door that doesn’t hum in the middle of the night,” Eli said. “But real gravity’s nice, too.”

“Luxury,” Stent said, as if naming an extinct animal.

“Yeah,” Eli murmured. “Luxury.”

The next day passed in maintenance and routine recalculations.

By now the bucket-and-cloth routine had achieved the status of ritual. Eli had stopped complaining—mostly because Stent never reacted. Stent still emerged from the cubicle without a shred of modesty, skin glinting faintly in dull light, moving through the cabin like privacy was an outdated superstition. Eli had grown used to it in the way one grows used to turbulence—acceptance through repetition.

One morning, as Stent crossed from the wash-space to the galley, Eli looked up from the navigation console and said dryly, “You know, in some cultures that’s illegal.”

“In some cultures,” Stent replied, unbothered, “inefficiency is legal.”

Eli snorted. “Touché.”

“Touché,” Stent repeated, unfamiliar with the word but filing it away like data, while slipping his underwear on.

Later, while rechecking star maps, Eli caught himself humming—an old spacer tune his mother used to play during long runs through the Unknown Regions. He stopped halfway through, embarrassed, but Stent said from behind him, “Continue.”

“You like music now?”

“I am studying its function,” Stent said. “It appears to improve your concentration.”

Eli considered that. “Maybe it just makes the silence less loud.”

Stent didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

The next few days blurred. Sleep cycles shortened, water rations tightened, and yet something in the air felt easier—like both men had accepted the strangeness of coexistence. Eli learned to read Stent’s silences: the short ones meant focus, the long ones meant thought. Stent learned that when Eli started muttering to himself, it wasn’t complaint—it was calculation.

One evening, the commander set down his datapad and said simply, “You are less inefficient than expected.”

Eli looked up from the galley coil, brow raised. “Was that another compliment?”

“An observation.”

“Same difference.”

“Unlikely.”

But Stent’s tone was mild, and that, Eli decided, was progress.