The sharp beeping of my communicator heralded the start of my next shift, though I was already awake. As it turned out, my dreams could, in fact, be worse.

  With heavy eyes, I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed an unworn uniform, and stepped into it. I pulled my tail through the slit I’d torn in its rear, then zipped myself in. My fur still wasn’t completely dry, but that and its musty smell were low on my list of concerns.

  I glanced at Tau, still asleep in his bunk. That was odd. We usually ended up working together.

  I checked my comm for my daily work assignment, and was surprised to see that I was needed in the thruster room at the tail end of the ship. I hadn’t been allowed there yet, despite my pestering.

  I did my best not to wake my roommate on my way out, then began trudging towards the aft of the ship. Thanks to the navigation app on my comm, I made it without getting lost. I was doubly thankful that the halls were still deserted, given my disheveled appearance.

  I took the gravity shaft down to the first deck, then followed a central corridor until came to an end, at which point a reinforced door separated the thruster bay from the rest of the ship. I pushed the call button on the door’s console, and stood back.

  As the doors slid open, I noted that they were the thickest I’d seen aboard the Clover. I wondered why they would want thicker doors here than at the reactor core.

  “Rook? You good?”

  I snapped to attention, looking up to see Nova looking way too peppy for the amount she’d been drinking the previous night. “Yeah, I’m good,” I said, trying to believe it.

  She snorted. “You look like shit. Here, have one of these.” She produced a pill bottle from her pocket and shook it enticingly.

  I gasped, my chest swelling with joy. “Hangover Friends!” I exclaimed gleefully.

  Nova chuckled, and tossed them to me. “‘Sometimes, Friends are the only things that keep you going!’ Super, super bad for you, but hey, what isn’t?” She rolled her eyes, and continued under her breath. “Radiation shielding scarcity my left nut...”

  I debated whether to ask about the radiation issue, or whether she did, in fact, have a left nut, but figured that both questions could wait until the Friends kicked in. I washed down two of the pills with spit and passed the rest back.

  As I did, my tired eyes focused on the room for the first time. The rec room and mess hall were big. The bridge and reactor core were bigger. The thruster room was in a category of its own, taking up the entirety of the aft section of the ship, stretching to its outer walls.

  The floor, thanks to the ship’s strange gravity, wrapped around the ship’s outer perimeter. Far above me, at the opposite end of the room, I saw engineers working upside down from my perspective. A metre-wide path was clear, allowing one to walk to any of the six hulking machines that hugged the hexagon’s corners. The thrusters were oddly still and silent for the amount of force they must have been outputting.

  In the center of the hexagon, between myself and the engineers opposite me, was a pillar about two metres in diameter. Maybe it was to keep the extra large room from being crushed?

  “Pretty cool, right?” Nova asked with a giddy smile. “I bet you have as many questions as there are stars in the galaxy, but why don’t you let me explain some first?”

  I mimed zipping my lips. My tail would demonstrate my eagerness well enough without a verbal demonstration of my curiosity.

  Nova cleared her throat, and began. “Frontier Federation’s Explorer class ships were designed with six rear ion thrusters, designed for going in a relatively straight line for a very long time. You’re looking at the Clover’s main source of thrust in the two weeks we’ve been underway.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from pointing to the odd pillar, and asking “Is that seventh thing the fusion thruster?”

  She smirked. “No. That’s just the nozzle. Its main body is further back.”

  “Can you show me?” I bounced lightly with anticipation. “I am on the reactor crew, not the thruster crew.”

  “We do both,” Nova said flatly.

  “Budget cuts?” I supposed.

  “You’re learning,” she praised. “Come on, let’s get our hands dirty.” She pulled her wild crimson hair into a messy bun as she led me to one of the cylindrical machines. “Ears!” she yelled, before grabbing a set of noise cancelling earmuffs from a nearby toolbox and clapping them on over her terran ears. She handed me a second pair.

  I looked down at the accessory, then back at her curiously.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “For your ears!” she shouted.

  I put them on as instructed, the cups resting on my temples and the band flattening my pointed ears to my head. For what it was worth, sounds were muffled. Kind of.

  “Oh void I am so sorry!” Nova gasped, mortified by her mistake. “Hold on I have some ear plugs here somewhere...”

  Soon enough, we were both properly protected, her with heavy duty ear coverings, and I with squishy orange foam things. I helped her unbolt the side panel, freeing a hideous whine from the depths of the machine. I tried to endure it as she gestured to various components, mouthing words like ‘propellant compressor’, ‘plasma feed’, and ‘voltage transformer’. One final mouthed warning made it through as she excitedly indicated one final component, which glowed bright purple. “Do... not... touch!”

  I gave her a thumbs up, and noticed the fur on the back of my hand standing on end.

  I held the heavy metal panel in place while Nova bolted it back on. She grabbed a spray can from beside the thruster, shook it, then sprayed a heavy coating around the seam. Only then did she remove her hearing protection.

  My ears still rang from that horrible noise, but I tried to ignore it as Nova explained in detail how all the components we just saw accelerated inert helium to supersonic speed, then stripped it of its electrons and pushed it to near lightspeed before throwing it into space behind us, pushing us to our destination.

  “It’s extra efficient,” Nova explained, “because the Sues generate helium waste anyway. It’s what the corpo types like to call synergy.”

  “Cool, cool. So. Can I see the fusion thruster now?” I asked eagerly.

  Nova rolled her eyes. “Alright, mister one track mind. Just be careful not to disturb the engineers working on Cufuthu.”

  Evidently my clueless stare was enough to get her to elaborate. “Cuh for cute, foo for fusion, thoo for thruster. Cufuthu,” she explained.

  “That’s a stretch,” I mumbled.

  “Maybe one day, when you have a thousand responsibilities of your own, you can do the naming. For now, its name is Cufuthu, and it is a little demon child which is supposed to shave a revolution off our journey. Unfortunately, it was damaged in one of our gate hops. I told them the crack in the void shielding was going to be a liability, but apparently, even though it’s one of the most delicate pieces of machinery on the ship, it was deemed a ‘low priority repair’.”

  I gently patted Nova on the shoulder as I listened to her rant. “It’s a good name,” I acquiesced.

  “Thank you.” Her voice had a forceful edge to it.

  “So anyway, um... why are the doors so thick back here?” I asked. “I would have thought the core reactor would need more protection.”

  “If one of these guys explodes,” she began as we carefully stepped onto the next side of the hexagon. “Enough plating will protect the rest of the ship. If the core reactor melts down, everyone and everything in a hundred metre radius is getting erased. The best way to guard against that is to build it in the middle, where it’s safe from impacts.”

  “Is that why the controls are analog?” I asked. “In case of a cyber attack?”

  “Exactly.” She led me through a door onto the fifth deck, back into ‘normal’ gravity. I barely felt nauseous anymore as I stepped through, but part of that had to be from the Hangover Friends.

  I hesitated to ask the next question, but I needed an answer. “Why are we doing this without Tau?”

  Nova sighed, betraying the weariness beneath her peppy exterior. “I thought you could use a break from each other,” she admitted. As we stopped before the next doors, she looked at me seriously. “I realize that I may have pushed you together for the wrong reasons. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I replied awkwardly. “I’m sure you had a lot of reasons beyond the obvious one. Look, I appreciate that you’re not used to being around people like us. I’ll try not to take offense.”

  “Right,” she breathed. In another moment, her facade was back. “Okay. Let’s go!”

  The moment I stepped across the threshold, my feet lifted off the floor. Judging by the various components and tools suspended in the air, and the handles strategically placed about the walls, the room went without artificial gravity.

  The thruster itself was big enough for Tau to stand tall inside it, if it were hollow. As I drifted lazily upwards, I stared with wonder into the machine’s frame, its guts largely scattered around in disorganized clumps, cohabitating with gently spinning tools.

  Nova grabbed my ankle and yanked me back just in time to avoid a collision with another engineer, who herself was distracted by her communicator as she floated across the room.

  “Look alive people!” Nova barked. “Just because Cufuthu’s out of commission, doesn’t mean this is a safe place to slack off! Please, let’s get this place cleaned up. I want to see tethers on every free floating object, if you need more tell me and I’ll fight Harlyle over it.”

  The other engineer and I exchanged a sheepish look, and apologized to our superior before she began showing me around the room. I tried to imagine where each component fit within the half-disassembled body of the fusion thruster as we carefully maneuvered through the debris, looping around and around until I wasn’t sure which way was up. The inner workings of the thruster were more complicated than anything I’d seen before, and much of Nova’s explanation fell on dumb ears. Neither fact dulled my desire to understand everything about it.

  Nova wrapped up her explanation, coming to a stop in a disused corner. “Did you get all that?”

  I nodded, my mind swirling with new information. “Solid reactant pellets, lasers, explosions, velocity,” I recited.

  “Good enough! If you ever need a refresher, you can just read the manual,” she said helpfully.

  “There’s a manual?” I asked, snapping out of my information coma.

  “Yeah, there’s a manual for pretty much everything on this ship,” she explained. “You can request a copy of most of them from Artie.”

  I knew what I would be doing instead of sleeping for the foreseeable future. “Thank you,” I whispered, in awe of the marvel of engineering splayed out before me.

  “Tell you what,” she said thoughtfully. “Why don’t you work in here for a while? Get your hands dirty taking stuff apart, maybe find something the rest of us missed. We can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with this thing.”

  “Do you really mean it?” I asked incredulously.

  Nova shrugged. “Sure, why not? Just don’t break anything, and listen to the more experienced engineers. Try not to kill them with questions, either. Oh, and hit the gym, tiny. I don’t want you to waste away in zero-G.”

  I mouthed her words as she spoke them, nodding seriously. “I won’t let you down, Nova!”