Chapter Text
Everybody knew the first rule of interstellar travel: "Space is big."
Aiglamene always said it in a way that implied big enough for you to die choking on vacuum a million miles from the closest living soul, you pathetic maggot. The old lizard had always had a really amazing economy with words. She spent them like she spent the vanishingly rare credits that came through the Berel IX mining outpost: with great reluctance, and always getting a lot more out of them than you'd think.
But Gideon had never needed Aiglamene to tell her that space was big. She knew space was big! That was the whole point! All she'd ever wanted was to get off the shitty asteroid mining colony she'd grown up on and see something else. Anything that wasn't gray rock or gray nutri-paste or the gray pebbled hides of the six-limbed Berellian miners. Aiglamene always said that Berellians couldn't see what Gideon called "color", but Gideon had always secretly suspected she was lying just to fuck with her. Not like it mattered. The only color there was to see on the outpost was in the patchy holo broadcast signals that sometimes broke through the storms in the ionosphere.
It was from the holos that Gideon learned how big space really was: big enough to be full of Klingons and Vulcans, Andorians and Betazoids, Borg and Romulans. And they all ate real food! And got to walk around on real planets, with actual trees and stuff! And they all had mating rituals that seemed pretty impractical but hey, who cared! There was a whole universe out there!
So when a down-at-the-lobes Ferengi "freighter" "captain" crashed on Berel IX and offered to sell his junked-out ship to whoever could spot him a fast ticket out of there, Gideon sold every mining credit she'd hoarded and bought him out. Sure, the Quick Buck was one busted rivet away from the scrap heap, but so was literally everything else on the outpost. Three whole rotations of loving work had the ship flightworthy. She renamed it the Darque Destroyer, took a subspace contract to bring the outpost's next ore shipment to a planetoid in the Vega system, and set off to see the universe.
And broke down after a week.
Space, it turned out, was big. Not in the fun way, like when you were living on a freezing cold dust mote and dreaming of all the adventures a galaxy could fit inside it. Space was big in the way Aiglamene had always meant: the "no one can hear you scream" kind of way.
She'd been adrift for three days with a busted impulse engine and a warp core that had been a burned-out husk longer than she'd been alive. Three whole days with emergency beacons blaring on all frequencies, and no one had wandered close enough to see what was up. Not even to try to eat her, like Aiglamene always said aliens loved to do to tasty, meaty humans.
After two days she gave up sleeping in the little crew berth under the starboard oxygen concentrator, and instead spent all her time doing sit-ups and clapping push-ups on the Bridge, where the comm panels were. She slept, when she could sleep, in a rat's nest of blankets on the hard plating. On the third day she managed to cut off environmental support to the rest of the ship, to conserve power. It wasn't really that different from apogee back home: cold, dark, boring. The only difference was that if she died out here it would be from suffocation and not a cave-in.
She was flat on her back on the fourth day, wondering if she could pad out her rations by cutting off one of her arms and eating it (and coming up with stories she could tell about her eventual robot arm that would make her seem dashing and attractive) when something on the comm panel bleeped.
Warning. Oxygen level depleted. Three hours' supply remaining.
"Yeah. No shit," Gideon told the comm panel. She'd ripped out half its wiring but she couldn't figure out how to turn the warning off. It was hardwired in, or something.
Just when she was starting to forget about it and really get back into the fantasy of her robot arm and the rad-as-hell Klingon flame decals she was going to put on it, the panel bleeped again.
Warning. Oxygen level depleted. Two hours and fifty minutes' supply remaining.
"You sound like Aiglamene," she told it. "The old beast always said I was a waste of oxygen. Affectionate, though."
Aiglamene had been fond of Gideon, her oddball foundling. She had given absolutely no hint through word or deed that this was the case, but Gideon knew it was true, the same way she knew that Berel IX was the armpit of the galaxy and that bloodwine and gagh were probably delicious. It was an article of faith. And after all, Aiglamene had been the one who'd made the decision not to eat the tiny infant human that had plummeted down the drill shaft in a busted-up envirosuit attachment eighteen years ago.
Instead of gobbling her up -- she'd been a perfect little shrink-wrapped meat snack for the crocodilian miners waiting in their hungry torpor through the long dark months of apogee -- Aiglamene had taken the trouble to raise her, sort of. She had taught Gideon to walk, scrounged food for her, even let her play with whatever she found in the trashed carcasses of crashed ships that littered the plain around the outpost for fifty kilometers.
Aiglamene and the other miners had eaten Gideon’s mother. But her mother had already been dead, so -- as Aiglamene always said -- no harm done.
And Gideon had always believed that, super deep down, Aiglamene knew Gideon could make something of herself, and wanted to see it. That the old lizard had been a little proud, even, when Gideon launched her spit-patched Ferengi shitship into the wide universe. That Aiglamene would give a sigh of resigned disappointment if she could see her adopted daughter now, three hours from death, having gotten nowhere and done nothing except some clapping push-ups and some masturbating to the same skin mags she'd been reading for years.
So Gideon would die as she'd lived: disappointing literally everyone. What else was new.
The console bleeped.
Warning. Proximity alert. Approaching vessel detected.
"Yeah, I know, it's -- wait, what?"
Gideon sat up so fast black spots swamped her vision. Disregarding the dizziness, she scrambled to the console and whacked buttons until the viewscreen fuzzed and showed her a ship.
It was a hell of a ship. Ten or twenty times the size of the Darque Destroyer, and way darquer, and probably capable of way more destruction. It was huge, and black as starless space, and decorated with fucking bones. Like actual bones! Some big ones looked bigger than Gideon's entire bunk back home, and then between those massive ones there were swirls of little ones -- teeth, maybe -- stippled in eye-bending patterns of white on black.
It even had a single, bulky, leaking warp nacelle, which was one more than the Darque Destroyer had. Gideon suffered a stab of engine envy that cut through the oxygen deprivation like a laser sword through plex.
She thumbed the comm button. "Hey! Unidentified kickass bone ship! Can ya girl get a ride?"
There was a crackle, then silence. Just enough silence for it to occur to Gideon that people who decorated the outside of their ship with bones might not be friendly, and might in fact want to decorate the outside of their ship with her bones.
But fuck that. She'd make a great space pirate. She'd read every comic book about space pirates she could get her hands on since the day she'd stolen the first one from a docked Bolian freighter. And Bolian space pirate stories were fucking wild. She pushed the button again. "I can help you! I can use a sword! I'm a great mechanic!" This last part was a lie -- or, as Gideon preferred to think of it, a spicy version of the truth. But it might get her on board, where her biceps could do their work.
The console bleeped. Warning. Oxygen depleted. Two hours supply remaining.
There was also that.
After a very long minute, the hiss of background static gave way to a high, cold voice. "Shut down your propulsion and weapons systems. Prepare to be beamed aboard."
The Darque Destroyer's propulsion systems were garbage and it didn't have any weapons. Gideon tried to prepare to be beamed aboard.
She was not prepared for it at all.