Rinn's Run: Chapter 15 - Education (Patreon)

Kalan spent the first few days in the wormhole getting Fresia acquainted with the ship. He was bemused by the way she found the ship and everything aboard endlessly fascinating. Most of the time, she simply listened as he explained how this thing worked or why that thing was there. Every once in a while, though, she asked some questions that Kalan had either never thought of or never bothered to ask when he first started working aboard ships. At the time, he had bigger things on his mind. By the time he might have asked, he took most oddities aboard ship for granted. A prime example was when he showed her around the galley. Em had called down for clarification about something during that tour. When Kalan had finished answering Em’s question, he turned around to find Fresia peering beneath the table.

“What are you doing?” He asked.

“Why is the table built into the floor?” Fresia asked in response.

It seemed so utterly intuitive to Kalan that he had to think it through for a second before he answered. “Almost nothing is left loose on the ship. While we have artificial gravity in place, what happens if it fails? We don’t want tables and chairs and, the gods forbid, knives and pots floating around. We particularly don’t want that if we’re under attack.”

Fresia looked pensive at that last, but only said, “That makes sense.”

“That reminds me,” continued Kalan. “Make sure you stow everything in your cabin before you leave it. Especially anything fragile or flammable. If there is an emergency or the gravity fails, the last thing you want is broken things. The last thing I want is a fire on the ship.”

Fresia did blink at that. “Don’t you have fire suppression? I mean, even my mom’s place on the station had fire suppression.”

“We do, but it’s the same thing as the gravity. While it probably won’t fail under normal conditions, there’s no benefit to taking unnecessary chances. If there’s an emergency, you won’t have time to run back there. Speaking of emergencies, follow me.”

Kalan led Fresia out of the galley and down the corridor to a cabinet painted an eye-wrenching shade of blue. He put his hand on a plate set into the bulkhead and pushed. A door popped open and he swung it open to reveal a space that was just about large enough for a person to step inside.

“Is this some kind of storage?” Fresia asked.

“No. If there’s an emergency and the hull is compromised, you run to one of these. There are a couple on each deck. You get inside and shut the door behind you. You’ll be wrapped in an EVA skin automatically. Do you see that button there?” He asked, pointing into the space.

Fresia poked her head into the space and nodded. “Yes.”

“If I give the order to abandon ship, you hit that button. Once the EVA skin is on, the ship will jettison you into space. The EVA skin will buy you about two days, maybe a little more if you can stay calm. There’s an emergency beacon built into the skin. If things go your way, someone will pick up the beacon and rescue you.”

“Okay,” said Fresia.

Kalan didn’t miss the decidedly uncertain tone in her voice. “Don’t worry. I’ve been riding in the empty for the better part of ten years and never had to abandon ship. Once we deliver the medicine, we’ll put these things on and take a little trip outside the ship.”

“Outside?”

“It’s something you should experience under controlled conditions, so you’ll know what to expect if the worst happens.”

Fresia gave the closet-sized shape a dubious look but nodded again. “Alright.”

Kalan felt that he’d instilled more than enough fear for one day, so he took her to the bridge. Em was there, as always, dutifully manning the navigation. It wasn’t necessary, as there was no navigation to speak of inside the wormhole, but the robot rarely left the station when the ship was in flight. Kalan parked Fresia in front of a display and pulled up something he wanted her to do.

“What’s this?” She asked, eyeing the projected display with interest.

“There’s a lot you need to know if you’re going to fly the ship. This is going to tell me what you already know and what you still need to learn.”

She gave him a put-upon look. “You’re giving me tests?”

“I suppose they’re tests, except you won’t see any grades at the end. You can’t fail these,” he offered, anticipating her concern.

Kalan didn’t know what kind of education the girl had gotten on the station, but he suspected it was slipshod at best. Worse still, he suspected she’d bowed out pretty early. He’d be shocked if there weren’t huge gaps in her math skills. He'd be even more shocked if she knew anything at all about practical physics. If they managed to fill in some of those gaps while she was aboard, there were worse results.

“Can I just not do these, and we’ll pretend I did?” She asked, giving him a hopeful smile.

He smiled back but shook his head. “Sorry. This is one of those things you just have to do.”

Fresia gave a disappointed little sigh, then turned her attention back to the display. “If I have to, then I have to.”

“Good. You work on this for the next hour or two. I’ll come back and see how you’re doing in a bit. If anything odd happens, listen to Em. He’s in charge when I’m not around.”

Fresia nodded absently, her attention almost entirely on the display. Kalan left the bridge and felt relief wash over him. It wasn’t the girl. With most of the threats in her life now dispensed with, she had opened up into a generally pleasant and curious-minded presence. Kalan simply wasn’t used to having that extra person on his ship. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent so much time talking. Before she came aboard, he’d often go days without passing more than a few sentences with Em or the engineer. He missed that silence. Still, she was occupied for now, which meant Kalan could retreat back into solitude.

He made his way down to the cargo bay and looked over the containers filled with medicine. He walked over to one and rested his fingertips on a rectangle of black with eight stars arranged in a circle at its center. Kalan didn’t find the state crest of Kesselian Alliance all that appealing, but he had to give them credit. They weren’t messing around with their response to the crisis on Ariadne base. The containers took up most of the available space in the bay. He had wondered at first why they’d sent it via private cargo carriers, but he suspected it was simply a matter of speed. Cargo ships like his were almost always faster than military vessels. It wasn’t that military ships traveled slower, but that they were generally deployed somewhere. Using one meant recalling it from wherever it was, then sending it on its way. Why do that when they could just hire someone like Artex, who already had a ship right there in port?

Despite the abundance of cargo containers, there was still enough open space for Kalan’s needs. He took off the captain’s coat and draped it over one of the containers, then stripped off his shirt and put it with the coat. He spent a good twenty minutes stretching. In theory, he was also finding his calm center, but that had taken mere seconds. He’d spent too many years training for it to be anything other than ingrained reflex. He walked over to a cabinet and withdrew one of the two practice swords that he’d had made to mimic his real sword, the only legacy he’d been allowed to take with him when he’d left his home. He worked his way through the forms he’d painstakingly committed to muscle memory through thousands of hours of relentless practice.

The familiarity of the forms took him beyond the surface calm he’d fallen into by habit. He slipped into a deeper, meditative state, the movements of his body something he was aware of only on the peripheral edges of his mind. He wasn’t Kalan Rinn, the fallen acolyte with all that entailed, nor the freighter captain with his many and mundane concerns. At his core, he was the cool emptiness of space and the unflinching flight of an arrow. Then, his sword came to a jarring halt as it struck the other practice sword. He snapped out of his almost hypnotic state and stumbled backward. In front of him stood a woman of middle years, with gray streaking her auburn hair, worry lines around her mouth, and the first signs of crow’s feet around her eyes. She held the sword in one hand with practiced ease. She gave him a faintly disapproving look.

“If this were a real battle, you would be dead,” she said.

“For the gods’ sake, Kala, you startled me.”

The ship’s AI didn’t bother replying, she simply started forward with a series of strikes that pushed the absolute upper limits of Kalan’s speed, strength, and skill. When he launched a series of counterstrikes, she parried and avoided them with the kind of mathematical precision only a machine could manage. He never once came close to actually landing a hit. This furious back and forth continued for the better of ten minutes. When it became obvious to him that he was slowing down, Kalan waved off the ship’s consciousness. She settled back into a calm stance and idly examined the practice sword in her hand.

“I fail to understand why you ask me to persist in this behavior,” she offered.

Kalan had invested in a system that used light and synthetic materials to allow the ship to manifest a kind of physical presence, at least in the cargo bay. He’d initially thought of it as a last line of defense for the cargo. It was only later that he’d seen the possibilities for training.

“I’ll never find another sparring partner who will challenge me at this level. I need it,” he explained, as he had explained numerous times before.

“You are a ship’s captain. Yet, you continue to train as though you were still,” she paused, “what you were. Why?”

“I’m not what I was, but it’s not something I can put down either. It’s a part of what makes me, me. I can’t think of a better way to explain it.”

The AI shrugged, a gesture he was sure she’d picked up from watching humans. “Very well. Why is the child here?”

The change in subject was so abrupt that it took Kalan a few moments to parse out her meaning. “Do you mean Fresia?”

“Is there a second new child on board?”

“Child? She’s not that much younger than I was when I first went out on ships.”

“Perhaps. Why is she here? What function will she serve?”

“She’s here because it’s necessary. I made a bargain to keep her safe, but she had to come with me to make it stick. Is she the reason why you haven’t been around the last few days?”

“She is. I haven’t decided yet whether I will reveal myself to her. She is bright, for a human, but someone did an exceptionally poor job of teaching her.”

Kalan blinked at that. “Did you peek at what she’s doing on the bridge?”

“It is my bridge,” said Kala, in a tone that struck Kalan as almost huffy. “If she is to be here, I have as much stake in her capacities as you do. Probably more.”

Kalan raised a placating hand. “That’s fair.”

“She’ll need substantial ongoing education if she’s to do more than simply subsist here, Captain,” said the ship.

“I thought that might be the case,” allowed Kalan. “Can you design some kind of education program that won’t feel like I’m punishing her?”

“I can,” said the ship.

“Then please do so.”

“I’ll see to it, captain.”

The projection set the practice sword on a container and vanished. It was, Kalan thought for the hundredth time, both unnerving and deeply interesting to watch a person’s body simply cease to be. Kalan rolled his shoulders and decided he still had a little left in him. He started the forms over from the beginning and soon found himself back in that state where his sense of self drained away. After he finished, he went to grab the other practice sword and saw Fresia in the hatchway, staring at him in open amazement. He started to say something but wasn’t sure what he would say. It wasn’t as though he’d locked the cargo bay or forbidden her from wandering the ship. She solved the problem by speaking first.

“That was amazing! Can you teach me to do that?”

“I can’t. It’s forb…” he trailed off.

If he was still a part of the Temple, it would be strictly forbidden to share what he knew. He wasn’t a part of the Temple anymore, though. He’d been stripped of all rights, responsibilities, and even citizenship. Didn’t that also free him from all obligations? It wasn’t as though they could cast him out again. The girl also needed some kind of training in self-defense. He’d seen that in her fruitless actions against the thug on the station. Still, learning to take care of herself was a long way off from the kind of brutal training entailed in the Temple’s style of personal combat. Kalan wavered in indecision as he tried to sort out the best thing to do.

“Captain?” Fresia asked, looking like she was afraid she’d made some awful blunder.

Kalan made a decision. “Alright. If you really want to learn it, I’ll train you.”