The ship was up for sale, cheap. I went aboard and was rather shocked it had a gravy drive, though it looked old. I spoke to a close friend of mine who is Nae'hyn to help restore it. It actually had been given a voice! Sorta. Either way, it didn't take long before we became best friends. At least my travels won't be lonely anymore. -- The New Guy
This was a rare find in more ways than one. I know. The usual caution is caveat emptor when getting cheap deals in the Edge Territories. The only warning I got on the sale was, and I quote, "The previous owner said the ship hated him. It's haunted or something."
It was cheap and salvage is a lucrative business. Flipping ships can be a worthy pursuit when it's done right.
In this case... it was a rescue mission. I don't know what happened to its former family, but the Gravy Drive was alone and... howling. Poor thing.
People misunderstand Gravy Drives because they think they're cognscent. They're alive, they're sentient - and that's an important distinction. Rats are sentient. Worms are sentient. They're beings with senses. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're clever... or capable of communicating.
At least I understood why the sales rep thought the ship was haunted.
I had to disassemble bulkheads all around the Gravy Drive just to keep the poor thing company. Then, staying with it to at least try and soothe it, I reached out to my buddy Jax. She's Nae'hyn and would help a hell of a lot more than I could.
I sang it restful songs while I waited. All I got from Jax was a three-letter ping, omw and then she was incommunicado between then and when she barged through the airlock.
It's a hell of a thing to be chilling and crooning one second, and have the shit scared out of you by a buddy the next. I nearly soiled myself when she hollered, "Where's the baby?" at the top of her lungs.
My friend Jax can shout the paint off a wall when it suits her, and it suited her. She must have followed the sound of me having a near-death experience just to reach the drive.
My singing toned the howling down to whimpering. My buddy Jax got it to coo. Even if it sounded mournful during its vocalisations. Jax might not be a mechanic-priest, but she knew enough emergency care to get things stable in there.
Jax gave me a comms frequency to call and shooed me out while she got to work. It took me a while to get the shipboard comms to connect with the greater networks, but when I did.
Holy [EXCREMENT].
The Nae'hyn I contacted when absolutely frenetic. There was a three-way conversation between packing noises, an interrogation about the ship, and what things I could look at that Jax wouldn't chase me away from, and occasionally passing the comms to Jax, who could provide better information than my dumb [POSTERIOR ANATOMY].
There was a lot of shouting.
Apparently, there's a squadron of Nae'hyn investigators trying to find out what lead to the Drive getting abandoned in the first place. Meanwhile, I'm under threat of battle, war and sudden death if I dare think of mistreating the ship.
Why do they think I called Jax in the first place?
Over the next couple of weeks, there was a flood of Nae'hyn mechanic-priests. So many with no other target for their anger than myself. I remember hiding in an overhead storage locker until Jax found me to apologise.
"They're not mad at you," Jax insisted. "They're mad at the situation the Drive's in."
"Can they be mad in another direction?" I begged. "They're frightening."
"I know," said Jax. "I was looking for a place to hide, too."
[Photo by Hafidh Satyanto on Unsplash]
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