"So then I broke his jaw." Darla was quite proud of her story of how her last date had ended, Rolando considerably less so. They were seated at one of the few "finer" dining opportunities at the station. Fine dining in this case meaning food that wasn't just reheated paste, but instead was mostly reheated paste with some vegetables that had been freeze dried from some planet no one remembers.
"I think this was a mistake."
"What eating at this restaurant? Yeah the prices are kind of expensive." A waiter walking by gave Darla a nasty glare, but she shrugged it off.
"No I mean..." Before Rolando could finish the conversation there was a commotion from down the hallway. Boots running towards the docking area, Darla and Rolando put down their forks and made their way with the rest of the group of people. There were around twenty of them when they got to the docking area where a group of workers were frantically working to secure a dead ship so it didn't slam into the station.
"What's going on?" Rolando outranked everyone else in the area, but due to him being magical no one really paid his rank mind.
"Dead ship came out of a cut almost right on top of us, don't know if its electrical or not, but if we don't secure that bitch now she'll smash right into the station." The dock hand was chomping on a root while ordering the other people to try and fire lash's to secure the ship.
"Don't we have another ship on station we can use to lasso it or anything?"
"Nope, no one in port and our service ship just made a supply run." Rolando looked over at the workers trying in vain to hook the ship. Lash lines were entirely unreliable for hooking ships, and even if they did manage to snag it, there was no guarantee it would stop the thing from slamming into the station and gods know what kind of damage that would do.
"Can we hook into their bridge cam?"
"I don't see what that will do? Show us they aren't paying attention?"
"I need something to see to jump in there. Darla you're going to have to unhook me." Rolando held his arms out and Darla looked at him like she wasn't sure to do it, "Oh come on I'm not using this to skip out on dinner." She chuckled and then unhooked the shackles.
"Got you a look inside for whatever good it will do shifter." The term shifter was one Rolando had heard his whole life, most people said it in a derogatory way because of fear. He had gotten used to the suspicion, but was still mad despite his service record for all the derision. He could see the inside of the ship, looked empty and dark, he hoped for a brief moment it had oxygen, and then he was inside. That's how it was with shifting, he just saw something and then went there, there were of course space limitations, but he didn't exactly know how far those were the furthest he'd ever shifted was twenty miles and to the best of his knowledge that was one of the longest on record.
The inside of the ship did thankfully have oxygen, and it was as empty as it had appeared on the monitor. He didn't have a lot of time to look around, he had to make sure the ship didn't impact with the station. Rolando had in theory been trained on ship piloting years previous, but ships had changed from the last time he had any training and he wasn't the best person at all the technical stuff anyway.
"You're going to have to fire the reverse thrusters Lieutenant." Rolando wasn't that surprised they had gotten into the speaker system of the ship, I mean if they had cameras they could easily hook into the PA.
"Wouldn't happen to know what button that is dock officer?"
"It's to your right the big glowing button on the console."
"Oh right of course it would be." Rolando pressed the button and the ship fired its reverse thrusters. And stopped just shy of slamming into the station.
"Good job Lieutenant." Rolando breathed a sigh of relief, and sat down on the chair near the console, that's when he noticed the desiccated corpse underneath the station.
"Well that certainly didn't settle my stomach."
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