Furnace Read Free

the light and scope my accommodations. I was barely aware of my surroundings, in fact, which isn’t like me at all. I like to think of myself as a fairly easygoing individual (at least, as easygoing as a navigator can be; our kind tends to freak out when life doesn’t go exactly as we plan), but failing to unpack my belongings in favor of immediate debauchery was a little much even for me. I was about to sleep for a month, though. I didn’t plan on spending much time in my quarters. And as long as I didn’t get so bent out of shape in forty-eight hours that I couldn’t program a course for Marvek (the human colony where we were scheduled to pick up an ambassador so he wouldn’t fall victim to disgruntled colonists and then purchase some rare mineral from a shady Fronov dealer), I figured I would be all right.
    Before I reached Europa Center and The Captain’s Quarters though, one of my crewmates intercepted me. The pilot, I quickly realized. Tymoteusz Wolski. We called him Teemo.
    “Chalmers,” he grinned, making his tight, brown stubble stretch across his narrow cheeks. He slapped me on the back and turned me in the opposite direction.
    “Teemo,” I answered.
    I did my best to sound carefree and happy to see him, but thinking back, I probably did a shit job of it. As much as I wanted to get to know the man better, especially given that pilots and navigators are supposed to be like the rhythm section of a spaceship, I was in a hurry. It had been a long, long time since I’d held a woman, and the fleet wasn’t exactly the best place to strike up meaningful relationships. In time, I knew I might get friendly with some of my shipmates. Myself included, there were seventy-four souls on the RSA Rockne Hummel , and thirty-three of those seventy-four were female. I hadn’t gotten to know any of them well enough to calculate whether or not there was intimacy potential beyond a work relationship, but I was hopeful. It was going to be a relatively long mission for a mid-sized vessel, after all, and we would be working in tight quarters during our duty shifts outside of hyper-sleep.
    The woman waiting for me in The Captain’s Quarters, however, was familiar territory. I didn’t want to blow it.
    “Where you headed?” Teemo asked.
    I knew him well enough to see there was mischief in his eyes, but not well enough to realize I should have run screaming the moment the smirk rose to his lips. Luckily, I didn’t learn my lesson from him that night. Or maybe un luckily, I guess. Maybe if he’d dragged me off somewhere to get shitfaced and I hadn’t met up with my old flame at all, we never would have wound up on Furnace. Or maybe fate would have brought us there anyway.
    “The Captain’s Quarters.”
    He scoffed. “The CQ? That place is shit!” He waved both hands and shook his head emphatically to be sure his point was well-received. One thing I learned quickly about Teemo was that he was a consummate showman. Nothing was ever simple or boring for him, if only because he was determined to act as though it wasn’t. “No,” he continued, giving my shoulder a sharp tug. “You’re coming with me.”
    I forced a grin and tried to slip his grip. “Is that so?”
    He nodded. “It must be.”
    That was the other thing about Teemo. No one expected him to speak English (the lingua franca has been Galactic Standard since First Contact) and he wasn’t great at it, but he tried anyway whenever he was off-duty around Americans like myself. I can’t say why. I certainly never learned Polish.
    Planting my feet, I finally wiggled free and started off in the opposite direction. “I’d love to, Teems, but I’ve got plans.”
    “Plans?” he frowned. “What kind of plans? Am I invited?”
    I laughed, and this time the good humor was genuine. I could feel that I was in the clear, and memories of the girl waiting for me—the one I’d been daydreaming about ever since learning our mission included a stop at Europa—were