She had been his baby girl for fifteen, twenty years, and he loved her dearly, but he found himself unhappy with her.
Fraz wiggled their way into the aft hold and caused fluctuations throughout the ship. Using some little high-energy Eldan bauble to lure them outside to the small asteroid's surface only took the better part of a couple hours, and sealing the idle power conduit they breeched even less time than that.
Quiet without the soft static chirping and bubbling of the creatures, the cargo runner rest silent. Her commander walked through the aft hold one more time to make certain he had not missed even the tiniest frizlet that would nibble away at the power. All clear.
Jack Dynaer's boots carried him past cramped cryohold to hangar bay. He ran a gloved hand along the undercarriage of a sleek, small gunship made for acceleration and hard turns. This little lady still needed to be taken on a proper joyride with proper company, at some point...
He cocked his head back, a finger pushing the brim of his cap up. The other vehicles resting on their landings all waited in similarly silent anticipation. Perhaps their imagined impatience proved more real than his anthropomorphizing. The bay ships were, after all, subtly linked and arguably both self-aware and sentient.
Despite Peña's insistence over practicality, he previously declined the offer to give that AI the run of the entire Dawn. His baby girl always felt restless to him, and he would have hated to have that idea confirmed or disproven based on simple lines of code.
Jack turned back towards the hallways.
Three transmat station jumps and a couple short walks later, and he moved through another very different hallway. Low power cycle, everything was off save a handful of guide lights and markers that remained online so long as the generators ran. Thin red lines marked out the walls.
He briefly wondered if that had been built to his benefit more than the complex designer's, night blindness held in consideration. A selfish, needlessly hopeful thought, he banished it.
The codes for the doors still worked, though briefly he wondered what he even did trodding the halls of another's space, knowing they were just as quiet and empty as his ship. Another voice, two other voices echoing through the building, the low, distant rumble of some holo-screen being on, anything...
Luach's place had a good shower, and felt more like home than his ship did at the moment, and Jack's coffee pot, mug, and half of his things were here, and that chair in the bedroom still had both golden and glacial aurin's scents clinging to it, though human noses were supposedly insensitive to such things and he had not had chance to speak with either in some time.
Jack curled up in the bedroom's chair with coffee, clean out of the shower, and turned the holoscreen on, although his attention remained off the screen. Sound above the faint shift and creak of metal beneath sandstorm, the scents, and the warm spot indeed made the burrow feel like home.
