Chapter 1: Causality

Content Warning: Implied executions, use of a stun gun (non-lethal)

beep beep

June lay awake in the med bay of the ship, the constant low level humming, buzzing, and groans of the metal death trap around her. It was just a small cut and she was being careless so of course she hit her head, just a moment of… whatever it was but people had that all the time, why should people be worrying like that?

Starwoman somthing somthing June Glasgow, repair geek and last place contestant in the Planar Abyssalal’s weekly video game tournament for the… however long they’ve been fighting out here in the stars. Time was something that she didn’t really keep a grasp on very well. Of course she could roughly tell you how long it should feel to be in the ducting space for an hour… Didn’t matter anyways, wherever this ship went, and under whoever it was in the captain’s chair she would keep it running out of spite if she had to, that’s all she knew and all she needed to know, all she really did know.

That was a lie. She also knew that the ship were fighting some group, the Affinity? Something like that, names have never been easy, only after the fifteenth time really would they sink in, good thing her previous commanders never bothered to come down to her kingdom of pipework and cables often, some were real touchy on the crew knowing their names and one or two would puni…

June blinked as the beginning of a memory slipped from her comprehension, leaving her blinking and a few steps away from the bed. She let out a sigh and returned to the bed, everyone knows Doc ‘Morbid’ would have a hernia if his patients dared get up without his supervision. She lay back down in her bed, it itched and her wound was bound with bandages that were stained from previous patients, the doc trying to remove the old stains after his crude sterilization attempts. Surely they’d be pulling into a supply depot or something soon so they could restock, surely, others have to be out there.

That was the curse and the blessing of being one of the few people who knew how to repair the ship, she didn’t end up hearing much news, of course she knew about the rebellion against the Affinity and how the Planar Abyssal joined… that they were all some kind of monstrous xeno force. But that didn’t bother her much, as long as she had parts and duct tape to keep this rusty boat afloat it’ll all work out.

beep beep

Something didn’t feel right as her body relaxed and she seemed to shrink a bit into it, grasping the very tail of her train of thought, like she’d been plunged under the surface of a lake… The Affini, no they were monsters. She’d heard it in the galley, they were systematically hunting down the last of the few of the resistance ships. The fucking weeds were hunting them down for sport she heard. It shouldn’t have been surprising, the weeds seemed to treat the captives from their search-capture-and-fucking-brainwash missions. Always showing their victims off like they were some prime salmon to be displayed as they gasped for air, parading the poor fuckers out in their propaganda vids. Every time the captives looked like they were drugged out of their minds.

She looked around and felt an angry tension rise up in her as she pressed on the comms button next to her bed, it buzzed faintly as a light came to life for a moment. “Oi, doc i know you can hear me, I got a job to do and I don’t know why you’re keeping me you old fuck. Discharge me,” she casually said into the rusty microphone.

Static for a moment before the reply. “You know Juniper, I’ll never know what the fuck is wrong with you some times, and that’s not just you working yourself to death” Doc Coffin, previously Nurse Coffin before the old doc was captured, replied wearily as he audibly blew smoke from his mouth. Yeah real hygienic.

“I don’t know either, just let me get back to work so we can do our next job, ok?” she replied. A sigh followed through the speaker.

“Fine, but I’m going to have your hours shortened whenever possible, you avoided a concussion but it’s not good to push yourself after a bad head injury like that”

“Yeah and I want to be in bed with an Affini” she replied sarcastically as a green light sunk into a status board next to the medical bed burst into life.

“You’ll eventually get hit in the head hard enough that you won’t have a chance to get out early, I’ll make sure to bind you if necessary, don’t make me use the stun gun” Doc Coffin replied.

She grunted and shook her head. “One last thing Doc.” she said as she started putting on her overalls “How many times have I told you my name isn’t Juniper?”

“The same number of times you’ve mellowed out and insisted that it’s your name” Doc Coffin snapped back, great this bullshit again. She’d never ever remembered asking anyone to call her Juniper. Who the fuck names themselves after a plant in these times. Stretching her back she pulled her overalls over her and looked down at her sewn in name badge, Specialist 2nd rank Jewel Glasgow. Two years in the repair corps, three on smaller support vessels before she was assigned to this beautiful bucket of bolts and grease, all but one of those years though they’d been on the run from the xenos filth that had swarmed over Terra.

She guessed someone decided to pull a prank on her at some point and give her an intentionally wrong name tag… right?

The work Jewel had to do was hard but it was rewarding, even if she could never quite get a hang of how she could navigate the intricate web of ducts, access hatches, and crawlspaces. She didn’t need to know why, but that question nagged at her regardless. This was her ship, her bucket of damned bolts that she’d been nursing along ever since she downed bags in the rack room… years ago it must have been.

Since then through anti-piracy patrols and recon missions she’d served the ship with distinction. Best mechanic, and not long after Terra fell to the affini, the only real mechanic aboard. The ship had gone through hell, battered and bruised like a punching bag, she’d seen a good amount of it, and taken care of the consequences.

Reactor leak? Fixed while chewing iodine tablets and struggling with Jaxx to seal the compartment until the reactor could be scrammed and the backup brought up to power. Outer hull plate riddled like swiss cheese? She’d be out there with her… friend, welding it all up with fresh plates, these days scavenged more and more from barrack walls and floor plates on the nearly abandoned mid and lower decks, minus those necessary for maintenance work. The thought once horrified a part of her, health and safety and all that.

The Affini blitz into Terran space had changed that part of her that would always think safety and practicality a close second. This was war and she was throwing her whole body into the effort with every last bead of sweat, drop of blood, and push of her muscles she had in her. Of course the last couple years of dwindling nutrient paste and the rare canned foods from raided supply caches or dumps had left her frame a lot thinner than it used to be, everyone had lost weight, even the captain. But this was the long haul, the eternal war if these stars damned bushes decided to make it so. Jewel was a Free Terran until the day she died, and if necessary she’d go out tearing an Affini’s metaphorical jugular out with her teeth, that was a guarantee.

Crawling through the tight cableway near the reactor core was never a fun activity but it was necessary, both on account of the captain’s regular bug sweep orders, and because the cables were always playing up. Something deep down in the bowels of the ship was always short circuiting, today it was some data cable that fed reactor data to the command and control room.

“come on you little fucker, where are you” June muttered in the heavy dank air, grabbing for cables, grasping what felt like the right one. With a tug she pulled herself closer, pulling out her QR scanner and checking the designation of the cable.

beep

‘Reactor data cable 566-44B’ flashed across the screen, Jewel muttering it to herself as she reached into her tool bag and brought out a similar enough looking cable to the one she needed to replace. Clicking her communicator she rasped in the unbearable stench. “Bridge, this is Jewel. I’ve got the cable, disconnect the power on your end and I’ll get to work” there was a silence before the communicator clicked again.

"Bridge copy. Disengaging reactor data cable 566-44B. Make it quick, there's only one backup for data feed from the reactor and that's already twitchy," came from the speaker, tinny and distorted from interference as jewel started to cut the cable open. "And need I remind you that the last time you did this to another important data cable it fried only a couple days later, the Captain won't tolerate shoddy workmanship again, Juniper"

Jewel’s eye twitched just a bit at that as she flipped a switch on the communicator. “You know I don’t like you calling me that, don’t you remember?”

"What, you bouncing back to your other name again? Make up your fucking mind, woman." Jewel gritted her teeth.

“Fuck off” she replied, shutting the damn thing off. “The last thing you want is to piss off your only fucking mechanic who has an iota of how to repair the cabling and pipes in this rust bucket.” she growled, biting down on the insulating rubber of the cable to strip it back, exposing the foil wrapped strands of copper beneath. Pulling her scanner out again, Jewel pulled up a side by side view of the reactor cable and the target data cable she’d scrounged from around the place, double checking which cables needed to handle power and which needed to handle the data.

Naturally such an operation violated several dozen safety and technical specification guides, but fuck it, the ship was due for an overhaul when the Affini first arrived, so that went out the window, along with any final chance to do any of this sort of deep maintenance or supply restock when Terra officially surrendered. Deep down, Jewel knew this was a death trap, one clumsy crewmate away from falling apart, but until that day she would keep this damn boat together!

Pulling out a soldering iron and her last roll of electrical tape, Jewel got to splicing. Data to data, power to power, data to power and power to data. She didn’t quite know how she knew what strand needed to be connected where, just scratching it up to intuition. Soldering the newly spliced cable together she had to blow away the smoke while trying to keep hot drips of solder from falling to the rubber and burning it, an electrical fire was probably the worst way to go in here.

Finally though, the final bundle of twisted wired mated, followed by a judicious application of electrical tape as Jewel taped the atrocity of a jury rigged cable together again. With a sigh she turned her communicator back on “Jewel to bridge. I’ve patched the cable up, turn it on and see how it runs” she sighs, realizing that she’s been holding in her breath.

"copy" came the terse reply. A few anxious seconds passed. "cable functionality restored, no signs of faults, job done" the voice on the other end said before cutting comms again.

Another held breath suddenly left Jewel’s lungs as she slowly rolled over, the weak gravity of this part of the ship giving her movement a clumsy edge.

“That’s done” Jewel stared into the mess of cables, reinforcement beams, and pipes above the crawlspace, taking a few breaths. Stars, when did she last have a shower? When did she last sleep? Trying to think back it was just a blur, but that’s alright, that was her shift probably done by the time she got back to the workshop and put her tools away and then sweet swee-

FWOOOOM

A rumble of escaping hot steam rushed from the next bulkhead… In there was the boiler system, which heated the precious water for the showers.

"Steam pressure failure in the main steam heating circuit," erupted from Jewel’s communicator. "Jewel, Jaxx, you're the closest, stop whatever you're doing and go fix it"

“Fuuuuuuuuck”

Bed sweet bed. Of all places on the ship it was the one that Juniper enjoyed being in. The charms of being on a relatively new naval ship all those years back had quickly shriveled up. See one and you’ve seen them all was her view. Her rack? that was always a sight that could move her to tears, being both the sole source of comfort in this deathtrap and the only place she had any form of even semi-privacy. Sure her blanket was full of holes and the thin mattress wearing through, but it was the closest thing she had left to a home.

Juniper was thoroughly sick of being on this stupid ship, tired of the smell and the constant merry-go-round of technical faults and equipment failure. The food sucked, the work shifts were creeping to 16 hours a day to keep up with the dwindling crew size thanks in no small part to the captain’s regular purges of the crew as suspected ‘traitors’ and ‘spies’.

June was starsdamned sick of this death trap and she wasn’t going to let anything interrupt her few precious hours of rest curled up in her bed. At least in bed she didn’t have to work as her muscles cried from exhaustion, she wouldn’t need to deal with those idiots up on the bridge who thought they knew better than her, she wouldn’t have to contemplate the holes in her memory…

Sighing she thought back as far as she really could in the haze of exertion and likely contaminated recyc-ed air. There was the naval academy, flunked out of officer training so she got stuck with engineering, it seemed to fit her style more and it still paid for her hormones. First deployment mostly like a rolling internship, whatever warship passed by would pick her up for a couple months before handing her off on her next assignment.

She was due to have a nice six month period of shore leave and the chance to kiss the Planar Abyssalal’s ass goodbye, the Affini scuttled that plan. The following years felt like a blur as the ship engaged in fighting several times, escaping only due to it’s oversized engines and relative size, barely bigger than a corvette. Back in the day it was used to hunt down smaller ships and cripple them, being nearly 70 years old the thing was already in a dire state, now it was a flying safety hazard, more dangerous to it’s own crew than the Affini.

If the Affini had made first contact just a few days later Juniper could have just hid from the call to arms and waited for the Affini to come and take wherever she was, but no they just had to have the timing that’d keep her on the ship, only leaving a couple times and leaving her too afraid to desert. Somewhere in the blur of memory was the invasion of Terra and the surrender. While officially as a rebel there was no admiralty to court marshal her if she tried to escape and surrender, the now captain’s ever present threat of summary execution was enough of a deterrent. Of course the old man who commanded before them was much more reasonable and at first contemplated and consulted his officers on if the surrender order should be followed. The now captain led a mutiny in response, the old man was the first in the loyalist officer cadre to be vented, setting the now grim precedent.

All that though didn’t matter, in this moment Juniper had her bed time and she wasn’t going to let anyth-

***Attention all crew*** Came roaring from the ship intercom, ***All hands meeting on the bridge in 15 minutes. Repeat all hands meeting on the bridge in 15 minutes**. Juniper held back an angry scream as her arms weakly shook. I swear to all living fuck, the next time I get the chance, I’m running she thought to herself as she slowly threw her blanket off and made her way out the barracks to the bridge deck

- 

Reaching the bridge she’d realized since the last all hands meeting, more of the crew had disappeared. She knew about Doc Morbid, hard to miss the one qualified surgeon going AWOL during the last shore leave when she had a piece of pipe shrapnel lodged in her side a few… months back? Juniper decided on months, that made sense. More were missing too, though. Biggs in the kitchens, Alex the Armorer, Xavier and Frankie, Geta. A good third of the crew who were on the ship before the last shore leave or after it ended were gone, and the captain was probably responsible for half of those, the pig.

Juniper tried her best to suppress her anger, lest it explode, but the captain was the one person she had no problem comparing to a tyrant or a coward, for they were both in both spades, and they had all the power. With that power they had killed Jewel’s friends, killed colleagues and the remaining original maintenance crew, killed the old man, and fuck knows how many innocents.

The sight of most of the crew, like herself, in ragged stained and thoroughly unwashed clothes, malnourished and weak, was enough to piss Juniper off even more. What really took the cake, however, was when the pig walked in surrounded by their guards and closest officers, all of them looking a lot healthier in clean and untorn clothes. Juniper had to avoid tensing her fists, in the case the pig took that as a sign of treason of insubordination, as the pig started to speak.

The actual announcement was tense but, reliving by the end, friends of the Rebels had managed to pay off a dock master so the Planar Abyssalal could dock and get desperate supplies that it’d been short of for, by the counts of the others, nearly a year. Juniper however was more caught up in thought, finally a chance to act, she just needed to hear the words and it’d all fall into place.

“And as is customary, there’ll shore leave but given how good the Affini have got at whisking people away, you’ll be going in pairs, if you let your buddy out of your sight and they don’t come back, you’re being vented.”

The fucking pig. Bad enough to purge people who they suspected of trying to contact the Affini, now they were doing this? Are they mad?

“You hear that Jewel?” someone beside her said excitedly. Jewel blinked rapidly as she felt her head stop spinning, looking at the squat form of Jaxx, Jewel’s probably one actual friend here. “Shore leave. And I’m going to have to officially drag you everywhere while I grab as much junk food and non-bioreclaimed protein powder humanly possible” Jewel gave a snort in reply.

“Only if you stop me from trying to beat the snot out of any of the shrubs or plantfuckers we see” she replied, cracking her knuckles, but internally dreading the complications to her now forming plans that the captain’s last order required.

“Hell yeah”

The final hours until docking were rough on Juniper. She knew what she had to do, and she had to do it before anyone would notice. Having Jaxx with her complicated everything though. It would be easy enough to slink around but this buddy system? clearly the pig was learning that some people were obviously defecting. And as much as she found the short mechanic obnoxious, she couldn’t live with their death on her conscience.

Instead she decided she had to do something that Jaxx would never forgive her for and she hated herself even more to even contemplate.

Obviously a great big gash over one’s forehead will naturally rouse the suspicion of anyone so Juniper rushed to Doc Coffin’s office to get somthing to cover it that wasn’t some mangy bandage.

“You know, June, this stuff is expensive,” he said with a puff of the newspaper cigarette he eternally had in his mouth. “People have been trying to pick into the strongbox so sell stuff on shore leave, if they’re not just trying to shoot up in the underdecks.” he said as he turned around and got his keys out, quickly unlocking the padlock and pulling out the covering before locking it back up as quick as he could.

“You’re that paranoid?” Juniper replied, raising an eyebrow. “Or has it really got that bad for everyone?”

“A bit of column A, a bit of column B, and a healthy dose of lived experience in my old profession” he said with a mirthless grin as he started applying the product. It wouldn’t pass close scrutiny but that with a normal hat and nobody would notice.

“Fair enough. Though you know me, you don’t need to be so quick with your locking around me” she replied, stretching her arms out. Doc Coffin chuckled in response.

“No I suppose not, but I’m not going to let you flatter me into passing you anything, if that’s what this is leading to” he replied pushing his forehead against the lock box a few seconds before locking it up again.

“Don’t worry, doctor. I don’t plan on using or cheating you, unlike some people here” she grumbled, wanting to mention the Pig’s name, but knowing it’d get her vented.

“Well, you have fun out there” the Doc said turning around with a very slightly warm smile.

“I promise, I’ll party me and Jaxx’s socks off… and one last thing. My name is Juniper” she said, Doc Coffin facepalmed. “What?”

Jaxx couldn’t keep themselves still for a damn moment. Which Juniper guessed was in character enough for anyone who’s on shoreleave. What Juniper didn’t like is that it’d bring unnecessary attention as they kicked random cans against walls and trash can while stuffing themselves with candy and beef jerky.

“Quite a party animal, aren’t you Jaxx?” Juniper asked, guarded.

“Well of course, Jewel. You remember the shore party when we graduated. I’m never letting that one down” they replied with a grin. “Wait wait wait” they said stepping in front of Juniper, raising their hands. “Do you remember what happened during the old man’s birthday? You know when we were on the Silent Hauler?”

Juniper raised an eye. “What? I don’t… don’t remember” she replied, damnit why was acting this hard.

“You chugged like, half a keg! And you kept it all in for all of like ten minutes before you upchucked every last drop of it!” Jaxx said laughing Their ass off.

“Of course I did, it was half a keg!” Juniper snapped in response, a bit too harshly as Jaxx’s expression faded.

“Are you ok, Jewel? Are people calling you fucking June or Juniper again?” they asked as they took a step forward. Juniper looked into Jaxx’s eyes.

“I… I’ve been thinking a lot, about everything, about us, about if I can keep the ship going any more and… I…” and then she saw an Affini… small for one of their species but good enough. “Into that alley” she immediately whispered, pushing Jaxx against a wall and kissing them. Jaxx resisted for a second out of shock before leaning in as the Affini passed them by, giving them an odd look before continuing on. When Juniper broke the kiss Jaxx was red all over.

“I… I… thanks” Jaxx said as they looked from side to side “were you planning that?” they asked, silver eyes catching the light for a moment.

“yeah…” Juniper replied as she reached into her pocket. “I’m sorry for the next part of the plan” she said as she found what she was looking for.

“Sorry? Sorry for wha-” Jaxx let out as they saw the stun gun come out less than a second before it fried their nervous system, letting out a loud pained scream, muscles spasming and their consciousness slipping.

Juniper kept hold of Jaxx as they lost all motor function and slowly sat them down against the ground, the pounding footsteps of the Affini running towards the two of them, stopping a couple meters away. Too late to turn back now Juniper supposed as she spun on her feet, her heart pounding, breathing suddenly ragged.

“My name is Juniper Glasgow, I’m a rebel mechanic assigned to the disguised destroyer Planar Abyssal which is in dock twelve under the false name Lunar Tavern, the woman next to me is one of my fellow mechanics. I wish to formally surrender” she said, her eyes staring into the Affini’s so intensely it didn’t seem to process what she’d just said.

“HURRY” she yelled.