Learning to Blush (2 page)

Thorton blanched. “I’m a commander—everyone else I don’t have any problems with. Ellie’s the only prima donna!”

“And you made her that way by not providing discipline. I won’t allow favoritism. It hurts morale. If you want me to write you a good report, you’ll lead a good command,” Graham informed. “Clear?”

“Yes,” Thorton grumbled.

“Good. Masterson out.” The image of Graham disappeared, leaving Thorton stewing. The full-blood humans on the ship weren’t even a fraction as much trouble. The couple was a pair of model citizens.

Thorton grumbled and turned his chair around to grab a sandwich from the small kitchenette area he had behind his desk. Finally—breakfast. It was already afternoon, of course, but that’s how things were since he took the engineering commander position—he had to grab food when he could, whenever he could, and as much as he could.

Ellie might not have been a very good officer, but she was a good engineer. She had gotten the ship out of a few tough binds that year, as Thorton had predicted. It seemed like nothing could stand in the way of that girl’s goals—not lack of materials and not lack of time. She always figured out how to make something work. If she had a submissive bone in her body, she would be a perfect worker. But as it was, she was unstructured and arrogant.

A red light was suddenly flashing above his head, followed ultimately by a ringing of an alarm. He looked over at his desk to see where the alarm was pulled. “For fuck’s sake!” Thorton growled angrily, stuffing the rest of his sandwich into his mouth before sprinting out the door towards the engine room.

“Goddamn it! I told her not to do it. I told her!” he growled to himself as he and the lower-level engineers rushed to the engine room to find that the system was overloading. A radiator had already busted a seam. Of course, Ellie was straddling a pipe above the engine and reaching down bravely to fix what she’d done. “What did I say?” Thorton shouted at her. Someone shut off the steam valve as he grabbed a steel sheet and, with the help of two others, repaired the ripped seam before turning the steam valve back on.

“Ellie, goddamn it! Get down here! The engine is unstable! I don’t want you in the area! We have to turn off the reactor first!” He knew Ellie knew all that—in the last year; hell, in the first three months, she learned the engineering core backwards. Still, she didn’t move from her position.

“I got it!” she called down to him. She was wearing protective goggles, which were fogging up in the room’s steam, and the fact that they covered half of her face made it nearly impossible to tell whether or not she was worried except that her lips were pursed with resolve.

He didn’t chance it. He began to climb the ladder up to where she was. He would drag her down if he had to. If the engine overloaded, parts could explode and spit at her like a projectile. The worst thing that could happen is the engine could rip open a seam big enough to cook her. “Eleanor! Get down from there!”

“I almost have it!” she argued, still trying to jerk her wrench over a socket.

Thorton ordered his men to shut down the reactor from the ladder, and kept on climbing until he was able to crawl out onto the piping that Ellie was sitting on. It was nowhere nearly as sturdy as he hoped it was up there, and the tubular piping rocked slightly under his weight. He took a deep breath to get his courage, and then continued to crawl towards Ellie, who was still trying to relieve pressure on the engine.

“I almost have it, I almost have it!” she told him, not even glancing up, although she could surely see him moving nervously in her direction from straight-ahead.

“Leave it! That’s an order, Kitten!” Thorton issued firmly. She didn’t even acknowledge him, just worked faster. “Did you hear m—?”

KAPLOW! Suddenly the engine hiccupped underneath them, and a nut flew between them. It was close enough to Ellie’s face that she swung away to somehow avoid it, and then lost balance on her pipe. Thorton reached out and grabbed her hand, which wind milled in his direction as she fell off.

He let out a surprised shout as he caught her entire bodyweight. The pipe under them creaked dangerously. He certainly noticed how her jaw dropped in horror and how firm her grip was on his.

“We’re okay,” Thorton promised. He looked at his position… It sucked, simply put. She was too far off the ground to toss safely away from the engine. He held onto the pipe under him with one arm and both legs and slowly scooted back towards the direction he had come, holding Ellie by her arm.

“Hurry,” she begged, looking down. They were both thinking the same thing—the engine could bust at any second. They could hear the metal creak. She grabbed his arm with her other hand. “Hurry!”

He clenched his teeth together and grunted as his chest got bruised by every damn groove of the pipe he dragged his body over until he got to the ladder. Finally, he was close. “Swing over,” he ordered, swinging his arm in the direction of the ladder.

She screamed from the motion. “No! I can’t!”

“Grab onto that goddamn ladder, Ellie!” Thorton barked.

With a whimper, she let go of his arm again and her body dropped an inch from his grasp. She gasped in both fear and pain. He swung her body over again, where she was able to hook the ladder with her leg and then grabbed hold of it with her arm. She pulled her body onto it as Thorton let go of her.

The engine creaked again. “Go! Go!” Thorton demanded, watching her climb down using only one arm. The arm he had grabbed onto during her fall she was clutching close to her body. He groaned and climbed down next to her and picked up her body with one of his arms, pressing her to his side, and then continued to climb down the ladder at a fair clip. The engine made a sickening crunching noise and then, GABANG! A seam opened up in the engine and a large chunk of the metal swung backwards, hitting against the ladder just over their heads. He dropped them to the floor and then shoved her to the ground and put his body over hers just before the ladder fell on top of them.

Finally, there was a loud roar and then a winding-down noise that whirred into silence. Ellie could hear Thorton breathing loudly into her ear, but didn’t move and didn’t say anything. With a relieved sigh, she pressed her face against the cold floor.

Thorton didn’t move until another couple of engineers came to help him pry the heavy ladder off his body. “Are you okay?” one of them asked, looking at the trashed room around them and the red marks across Thorton’s back.

Thorton rolled over to his side and one of the engineers picked Ellie up into standing. She winced at the pain getting to her feet panged in her body, and she rubbed tenderly at her shoulder before looking down at Thorton. “Are you okay?” she asked, echoing the other engineer, who knelt down next to Thorton.

Thorton looked void of all emotion for a moment. But in the next he climbed to his feet and quickly, hastily, began to take off his belt, looking menacingly at Ellie, who was already walking backwards away from him. “That’s it, you disobedient little…”

“Whoa, whoa! I’m injured!” she cried, running away from him towards the hallway.

“You
will
be injured! I’m gonna crack your ass the other way!” he said, running after her. “You nearly got us killed, you little shit!”

She had to run impressively fast to be able to outrun Thorton, who even sported a bit of a limp. She would have liked to be thankful for him saving her life. She even would have stood for groveling to him a little bit about how she was sorry her experiment didn’t go as well as she'd planned. She figured she’d bake him a cake or something later; just as long as she got away from him.

She certainly didn’t wait for the elevator—she vaulted up the stairs to the next level up, which was conveniently the medical level. Thorton was blind enough with rage not to notice that waiting for the elevator would get him there faster than the stairs. He was only a foot behind her the whole way, growling.

“Eeeek!” she hooted, running to the first friend she saw, who was luckily Fie, an eight foot tall giant of a man, even by Swarii standards. She was quick to use him as a barrier between her and Thorton, who kept on trying to reach out and grab her.

“Whoa! Whoa, Buddy!” Fie said, putting his hands on Thorton’s shoulders to hold him back, noticing that the man was bleeding from the lip and his nose, his chest and back covered with angry red welts and bruises, and that he looked extraordinarily pissed. “Whoa!”

“Get off of me!” he ordered. Fie continued to stand in his path, and so he looked around at Ellie, who pushed herself against a counter. “I should have you shot!” he spat, pointing at her with his folded belt. “This will be the last order YOU disobey!”

“Calm down, Commander. Let me take a look at you,” Fie offered, his voice as low and calming as it usually was.

Thorton’s face puckered angrily, looking up at Fie, then looking at Elle, who looked more ashamed than terrified with the way she hunched against the wall, still nursing her injured arm to her chest. “As soon as he clears you for work, little girl, your ass is mine.”

Ellie and Fie both watched as Thorton stomped angrily out of the room, after which Ellie looked up at Fie and requested flatly, “Do me a favor? Never clear me for work for the rest of my life?”

“What happened? I saw the alarm go off, but…” Fie asked, his brow worried. He walked up to her and carefully took her hand off of her injured arm.

“I was too clever by half,” she divulged as Fie carefully helped her shuck off her coat. She winced. “Thorton kept me from getting dropped on an engine that was blowing… Caught me mid-drop. It was impressive, but he nearly ripped my arm off. Think it’s dislocated?” she asked, with a shred of hope in her voice, as if she really wanted him to hell her that she had a slow-healing injury.

“Nope,” he replied simply, helping her pull off her shirt in order to look at her shoulder.

“You haven’t even looked at it yet!” she whined. “How do you know?”

“You have a low pain-tolerance, Ellie. You’d be screaming your head off if it was.” His words held a weight of certainty as he easily picked her up by her waist and settled her on the counter she had been leaning on, hoping the extra height would help his neck strain which he normally acquired from looking down at Ellie's short height. “A spanking would be the least of your concerns.”

“I think he was more interested in killing me than spanking me,” she grumbled, wincing uncomfortably as he worked with her arm by moving it ‘gently’ around.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

She looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “No, feels
fantastic.
Do it some more.”

“That’s
human
sarcasm, isn’t it?” Fie asked flatly. “You might not want to be sarcastic with a medical officer, Lieutenant. You’re a different enough species that I might not get it one of these days.” He looked down and saw that her entire wrist was bruised… a few of the darkening welts were in the shape of Thorton’s fingers.

“You’re a lucky little girl, Kitten,” Fie told her. “A lot of the engine blows end up with me sticking someone in a body bag and calling his wife with some bad news.” He shook his head. “All you have is a slightly torn muscle that will heal in no time and a few scrapes and bruises. It was just a regular day on the playground, as far as you’re concerned.” He walked across the room to grab a couple of supplies. When he came back, she was trying to rub some dirt off her nose with her even dirtier coat sleeve.

“Question?” she asked, watching him prepare a very, very scary-looking needle and trying to ignore him as he did it. “How many people actually get shot around here? For as much as I get threatened, you would think that it happens all the time.”

“On some ships it does happen all the time,” Fie replied. “I remember the first post I served on, about twenty men were shot for insubordination… Only one was actually killed, mind you, but a lot of shooting.”

“Nobody’s even insubordinate around here,” she chuckled nervously.

Fie raised a dubious eyebrow.

“Except me, I get it,” she replied flatly.

“That’s because Graham Masterson is one of those few men whose reputation precedes him. He’s talented—even if fate did put him together with one of the more silly girls in the universe. At least you’re just an engineer. It’s really uncommon for engineers to get disciplined on the whole. On any ship, anywhere, if you were to hold engineers up to the same standards and guidelines as everyone else, you wouldn’t have any engineers left— they wouldn’t make it past the first week. Why do you think the Admiral pressed Thorton into becoming an engineer? Because he didn’t want to see him dead. As you know quite well, Thorton wouldn’t have made it this far otherwise.” He looked up and added easily as he wielded the needle near, “This is gonna hurt.”

He wasn’t fooling. Nobody could make her scream like a two-year-old better than Fie. Not even Graham’s spankings ever produced the level of shrill pain that Fie could unleash within seconds. It was possible that he was very correct—she did have a low pain tolerance.

She left his ears ringing afterwards, and he let go of his steady hold on her in order to put his fingers over his ears and loosen his jaw as if to somehow repair the damage that way.

“It burns,” she whined afterwards, wincing even more.

“Let it burn. It’s healing the damaged tissue so I can get you cleared for work,” Fie told her.

Her eyes widened. “I don’t want to be cleared for work today! You saw Thorton, he’s crazy!”

“Yeah, well, from what you told me, it sounds like they need all the engineers on duty right now.” He didn’t sound very apologetic. He just picked up an electric tablet and started writing something into it. “Take a shower, take your afternoon nap,” he encouraged, “and report to duty in two hours. Your shoulder should be done healing by then.”

“Can’t you find something for me to fix up here?” she complained as he gently helped her put her shirt back on. “Any equipment that needs tinkering, perhaps?”

“Yeah, I could find you something… But I won’t.” He grinned teasingly and pulled her body off of the counter and set her feet back onto the ground. “I’m sure by the time you go down there, you’ll be full of spit and vinegar again, anyway. Your team needs you… Even if you’re the reason that they need you.”