Starship pilot who lost track of where they end and the ship begins.
You didn't get shot. That made it a good day.
"Maybe you'll come aboard us for a meal next time," Shev said. He shook your bone hand, warm rough skin against your cool, thin paleness. "I hope there will be one. Sorry it had to be so tense."
You took your attention away from your cargo seal sensor and focused your organic eyes. You said, "But I am aboard you now."
The pirate - or rebel, to some, hero to others - raised his eyebrows. He said, "what? Oh... yes, one ship inside the other, I suppose..."
"Yes," you said. "My body is on your ship."
He trailed off into silence. After staring at your human face for several heartbeats - more of his than yours, his metabolism is elevated by the stress-adrenaline - he grunted.
"Right. Solo pilots," he said. "Well, we'll free you and see you clear of the mines now that delivery's done. You want to make it look like you were robbed?"
If he'd offered to break your arm you couldn't have felt more revulsion than this offer, to shoot you a little today after all. You emphatically say, "No. Thank you. I should go, sooner gone, better to avoid fedrats."
"Truth. Clear jumps, spacer." He said. He offered a clenched fist.
You bumped his knuckles with yours, then held your hand up in a fist, mirroring his. "Clear jumps and hails answered, spacer."
You laid your bones and meat in the acceleration cushion again. At the signal for clear and the feel of the big ship's rough grasping gantry arms letting go, you thrust away from Shev and his crew, and their clumsy, only half alive home. He might think your body strange, a traditionalist, unable to recognize anything but the meat and bone of the born person as "you," but you could still call each other "spacer" in solidarity. Ship pilots like you, pilots of sleeping ships, or sleeping pilots of sleeping ships, even crews and supercargo - everyone who treads the void is a spacer, and that commonality demands that spacers keep each other alive.
You hope you never get a fedrat distress call, because you know your heart - let alone your self-computers - would never let you break the ethic, even then.
You feel your antimass generator and the big sleepy ship's both spinning up, and feel out your course as a near reciprocal of theirs. The less often you're seen together with the rebels, the better. Your jump into warped spacetime begins as you reflect, "never" would be the actual best amount, too bad that ship of fancy took a sun-dive when the rats got Spencer. She was cunning, wily even, but as a stone-dead corpse her ship couldn't keep its logs away from the federation techs.
You made your course for someone who could help. You'd owe her for this, but that was nothing new.
