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The Aurora was a large ship. She prided herself on this, and providing room to live for all of her inhabitants. Some of these places were more sought after than others; especially the ones close to her engines, warmed against the cold of space by the Aurora’s whirring heart.
At the moment, one of these very places was being fought over by the usual suspects.
~~~
Another sharp gunshot, the following ting! of an empty round on metal floors silenced by ringing ears. It joined a small pile of its fellows, its fallen compatriots in no way a mirror of the targets.
Jonny wore a cross expression, ears pinned back as he bared his teeth at the writhing mass of octokittens, tips of sharp canines glinting in the gunfire. His eyes were a mess of old eyeliner and the unaddressed crust of good sleep. It felt like every damn day he had to fight the octokittens for his good napping spots back. He held a bundle of his nesting material under his other arm, scraps of blankets and old clothes, as well as whatever of his crew’s hair he could snatch from the Toy Soldier’s unnervingly growing collection. He growled as he saw the tentacles of the creatures left trails of slime and fur in the pile of what he couldn’t grab, and fired a few more rounds. If he killed any he couldn’t tell, the writhing mass concealing any carnage and generally ruining any of the fun he could’ve been having. And Marius certainly wasn’t helping on that front.
“Jonny!” he snapped in the moments when his voice could carry. “There are other places on board to sleep! Like your own bedroom! Bloody hell!” The latter was as a bullet ricocheted and caught the floor far too close to him. “If you keep killing them, they’re just going to swarm in. We only stood a fair chance the last time because they ate some stowaways before getting to us!”
“My bloody ship. My bloody stuff,” the first mate grumbled in response. His gun clicked dry, and he fumbled to reload around the bundle in his arms. If he dropped it the octokittens would get to it, too.
“Calm down, if you need to take a nap that badly just ask Ashes, they’re always eager to set a fire if you need to be warm.”
Jonny finished loading his pistol, and fired a shot into one of Marius’s knees.
“Fuck!”
~~~
The sound of gunshots varied slightly between the models each member of the crew preferred to use. Living long enough, a member of the crew could tell, from the sound echoing through the ship’s metal halls and the frequency, who was shooting. It was like learning to recognize a person's footsteps. Ivy was the first to pick up on this.
She looked up, cocking her head to angle an ear towards the noise. Raph tried to protect her nails from any damage the sudden move might cause.
“Jonny,” she said, and one could almost hear the gears in her mechanical brain whirring like a Rolodex.
Raph tutted and began fussing over cleaning the blood-red polish off Ivy’s cuticles. “I wonder what he’s up to.”
Ivy’s head remained to the side, listening intently. “I’d say a 95% chance something to do with the octokittens. The longer I go without seeing Marius, the more it ticks up to some of the shots being aimed at him.”
“And the other five percent?” Ashes asked. They sighed irritably and took a draw from their cigarette, tossing aside another bottle of polish that peeled right off Brian’s metal fingers.
“Same it always is,” Ivy said, looking at them.
Ashes selected another polish from the pile, this a deep purple. “Weird sex thing with Tim?”
Brian nodded solemnly as Ashes opened the bottle and tried once more. “Weird sex thing,” he said. He focused on the polish. A thinner formula, it didn’t even spread, just pooled on his smooth metal. Ashes hissed in frustration, and closed the bottle. They went to toss it as well, then regarded the bottle.
“It’s a nice color,” they mused. “I’ve been meaning to hold Jonny down and paint his claws to match mine.” They opened the bottle, and painted their own nails. They looked up at Brian. “I think we’re out of luck in this batch.”
Brian rubbed the polish off his finger, the substance beginning to dry and become tacky. He stood up.
“I’m going to go grab one of the Toy Soldier’s rasps. It didn’t like when I dulled one last, but I’ll be sneaky.” The metal man, was not, in fact, sneaky. Especially not on EJM.
“Check on Marius if you see him,” Raph said as he left the room. “Those 95% odds are pretty good that I’ll be able to have some fun extracting bullets.” She hummed contentedly, beginning to paint an intricate pattern in black with a thin brush.
~~~
One of the warm spaces not being fought over by Jonny and the octokittens was the Toy Soldier’s wood shop. It knew that the crew members with flesh enjoyed this, and had set up a pile of blankets in the warmest corner. Currently bundled in them was Nastya, in the cozy space between sleep and alertness. She enjoyed listening as the Toy Soldier hummed and sang softly to itself. It often did this with lullabies if someone was sitting with them.
A “wood shop” is not the single most accurate description of the space. There were pieces of wood, tools, and small piles of sawdust Tim and Ashes regularly carted out as tinder. But this is ignoring the fact the Toy Soldier is made of wood. Much of the supply used to be its body, and many projects included reshaping itself or trying to recreate how it functioned on a smaller scale. It was as much a laboratory as anything Raph or Marius used.
Much of the Toy Soldier’s work focused on what made its automaton body work the way it did. It had no apparent power source, nothing to explain how its limbs moved, nothing to explain why its voice didn’t rot in its wooden throat. It has mirrors set up to examine the gears of its interior, what little there was. Similar gears were stored in the drawers of the workbench, each made from melting down broken pieces of the Aurora, hoping they contained some trace of her consciousness. Brains from the Acheron floated inside the darkness of opaque jars, the only proof of the contents in the small light display attached to them, showing the wavering lines of brain activity. The Toy Soldier had managed to create some small wind up birds that chittered metallically and hopped about, but nothing like itself. There were also personal effects of no importance to its work. Among these were the locks of the crew’s hair that Jonny was always nicking, as well as various other tissues, sliced thin in between glass plates, or suspended in preservative chemicals. And then there was the teeth bowl, but that’s neither here nor there.
It looked up, pausing its absent humming as Brian appeared in the doorway.
“Heyyyyy Toy,” he began, and the Toy Soldier immediately regarded him with suspicion, setting down the half-finished carving it was working on. He began to reach towards the short row of rasps of different sizes hanging on the wall in front of the Toy Soldier. “Can I borrow—?”
“Like Hell You Can!” It launched the carving knife it had been using at him, and he jumped back as it pinged off his metal frame. “Last Time You Dulled It To Hell And Back! It Took A Proper Century To Get Another! Not To Mention The Metal Shavings!” It scowled at him.
Brian held up his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright! I didn’t need it that badly anyway!” Seems like the carving knife had hit the switch back to MJE.
The commotion masked the sound of others approaching, and Brian and the Toy Soldier only looked towards them once they were already there.
“Hi Brian, hi Toy.” Tim hauled Marius by his armpits another few backwards steps, and peered into the workshop. “Hi Nast.”
Nastya glared at him with bleary eyes, awoken but unmoving in her cocoon of blankets.
“What’s All This Then?” It and Brian looked down the hall at the trail of blood from Marius’s saturated pant leg.
“I heard Jonny shooting and tracked him down to see what the situation was,” Tim explained. “Walked in on him losing a battle to the octokittens and Marius in a pool of his own blood with a shattered kneecap.” He indicated the man by bouncing him slightly, causing him to wince. “So I’m hauling him off to Raph.”
“At this rate I’ll probably be healed before we get there,” Marius commented.
Jonny joined in from where he’d been trailing behind the two, still holding his bundle. “I’d give Raph some more entertainment, but that damned octokitten hoard took two reloads and still forced us out of the room.”
“Two reloads minus a few,” Marius corrected.
“You sided with the enemy!” Jonny retorted, pointing his empty gun at him.
“You just have to—!” He cut himself off. “Fuck it. No talking since into the gremlin. Haul me away Tim!”
“Gremlin?!”
Brian moved out of their way as Tim hauled Marius past him. Jonny rolled his eyes and didn’t follow, instead heading into the workshop. As he passed Brian, he noticed the switch, and nudged it back into EJM. As Jonny entered the small room, Brian took his chance, snatching a rasp while Jonny was behind the Toy Soldier’s chair, blocking it in.
“Hey!” it snapped as he darted off, leaving a diverging track of Marius’s blood on his feet. The Toy Soldier turned back to their work, grumbling expletives.
While it stood to retrieve its knife, Jonny settled into the pile of blankets next to Nastya, burrowing himself into them and arranging his own bundle. Nastya lifted an arm, allowing her brother to snuggle under it and deeper into the pile. The Toy Soldier continued its carving and resumed humming its lullaby. Jonny soon fell asleep in the Aurora’s and his sister’s warmth. Nastya began to doze off as well, but not before a panel popped open from the wall, revealing a single blinking light. She smiled, translating the familiar rapid binary. She raised the arm not around her brother’s shoulders and gently rapped her knuckle against the wall behind her in quiet Morse code. I love you too, Rora. Keep an eye on those hooligans for me.
You know I will.
I know you will. You’re a great ship. And a damn fine woman.
~~~
And so the starship Aurora continues to fly through space, content.