It had been an altogether better few days than Gareth had considered possible given the throat wound his friend had suffered and the unexplained rash on his own leg- for which Gareth refused to go to the doctor on account of Dave standing watch. Grant had told him to put some aloe on it, but since the aloe bottles on the Kroger had said they were for ‘after-sun care’, and since everyone who could read them lived in a big tube floating through space, there had been a general laugh among the crew about the ludicrous idea of wasting valuable carrying capacity taking the bottles and they’d been left behind. It was absurd he thought: they hadn’t left much, and what really irritated him was that they’d made sure to grab every condom- despite the lack of women on the ship and the over-availability of prophylactic options in every port they went to. It was almost like they were grabbed as a joke, which would have been fine if someone had thought to grab just one bottle of aloe as a joke as well. Of course no one had and he was reduced to rubbing yogurt on the inside of his thigh like some misguided teenage boy while hoping no one found out about it. That situation in particular had put a damper on his good spirit.

Then there was the captain. She’d been driving the men a little harder than usual (or a lot harder… how was he to know, really) since the botched plunder, but she’d been exceedingly- again, based on his limited experience- nice to him. Not once had she criticized his outfit or told him that the way he prepared his coffee ruined it in a manner she found morally reprehensible. He’d been enjoying the left-over hazelnut creamer that someone had put in the fridge two years ago but hadn’t spoiled and still tasted fine if you liked hazelnut in your coffee. Apparently lots of the men did, but any time they touched the bottle the captain came from nowhere to violently harangue them about how terrible their life decisions were. It hadn’t gone unnoticed onboard that she never said a word to him about it, and he found himself hoping she would at least once, just so Grant wouldn’t go through with the plans of ridicule he’d clearly been cultivating since the raid on the Kroger. They hadn’t come to fruition yet since, as Gareth believed, the level of work on the ship had gone up considerably and there wasn’t a lot of time for horseplay. Still, he knew something was coming. Choosing to ignore the impending ribbing, he focused on his work.

His task today was to clean the gunsights. Gareth was, unlike his crewmates, usually not averse to cleaning. He found it to be a methodic and soothing task. On this particular day, however, he was less than pleased at the assignment as it had clearly been some time since anyone had performed the task and it happened to require him walking in space.

The Ensler was not a young ship. It had previously been owned by a group of very circumspect gentlemen of generous height, who had a real preference for having everything custom-made along with a remarkable distaste for cleanliness. This meant that the only spacesuit on board when Jeliah had acquired the ship was roughly two feet too tall for her. It had remained too tall for any of the men aboard as she built her crew, but was now just right for Gareth. The spacesuit conundrum along with their proclivity for grime meant the gun sights were absolutely filthy. Gareth found himself wondering why she hadn’t purchased another one, as the residue on the main sight was becoming a major problem and the Ensler didn’t have very many guns to begin with- especially for a pirate ship- but when he’d politely asked her why she’d merely begun informing him, through a gigantic smile, of all the little costs that begin to mount with a small startup operation like hers and that if one didn’t manage it… . He was sure the rest of the story would have something to do with return on outlay or the need to reinvest in the human element and so he had nodded happily and pulled on the spacesuit. The truth was that as much as he enjoyed his work and his life he was terrified of space itself. So when he looked up, down, left, or right and became aware that what he was doing was looking into an infinite void in every direction from which it would be almost impossible to rescue him, he nearly froze. Then he realized they hadn’t attached the safety cord. At that point, he did freeze.