Page 20 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Jasmin

That three-month journey to Strewn meant we had to ration our food a little, difficult with a growing teenager aboard the ship.

At first, we’d struggled with communication because it seemed he had no translator and didn’t speak the traders’ common spoken here in the Zeta Quadrant.

It wasn’t until he overheard me cursing at one of Bev’s panels that liked to jam that we had a breakthrough on that front.

My UAR dialect had piqued his interest; he’d dropped what he’d been doing with the bits of metal he’d found and rushed to my side.

Eyes wide, he’d stared at me until I’d repeated my swearing with heated cheeks.

Then he’d made a hand gesture—indicating ‘more’—and I’d started talking in my native tongue and in as many of the UAR languages as I could remember (as a pilot, I’d learned about a handful—just enough to get around).

“You’re from the Alpha Quadrant like me, aren’t you?

” I said. He started nodding furiously, and I made a note of the fact that the traders’ dialect most used in the outer reaches, at the border to lawless space, seemed to work for him.

I didn’t know his species; there weren’t any that had that rather rough, metal texture to their hair or the metallic sheen that now covered all of his skin, it made him glitter copper and silver.

“Can you speak at all?” I asked, and he shook his head, touching his throat.

Ah, so it wasn’t silence from the trauma at least, he was mute.

I saw that Yashan was watching us from a seat at the small galley, a glint in his silver eyes that told me he was happy.

Relieved. “Outer reaches? Lawless space?” I asked, and the kid nodded again.

“Can you write in this language?” Another nod, so I got up and hurried to grab one of my datapads, switching it to the dialect he seemed to know and handing it to him.

Soon, Yashan and I learned his name, Eoin, and that he was of a race called Terafin.

I knew this race, and when I looked at him more closely, I could see the similarities: the bright azure eyes, the delicately pointed ears…

but that metallic sheen and bristly hair were unique to him.

He said he was a metallurgist and could absorb all kinds of metals and minerals through his palms. It was how he’d disabled our pain collars.

That was certainly one question solved, though it was hard to tell the kid that we had no way of returning him home, to the Alpha Quadrant.

Bev would be shot on sight if I ever flew her back into UAR space.

He shrugged calmly, however, and wrote down that he had nowhere to return anyway.

When I leaned over and pulled him into a hug, he accepted it, returning the gesture.

Heart full, I looked over at Yashan and noted the yellow and blue mixture that made up his facial dots. Happy and sad both, yeah, me too.

We settled into a rhythm after that. Eoin took to life aboard Bev like a duck to water.

He was indeed extremely gifted when it came to metal and soon had all of Bev’s warped and dented panels smoothed out and functioning optimally.

I’d set him up with a language learning program so that he could learn to understand Zeta Quadrant’s Traders' Common and be able to speak with Yashan.

Yashan and I made love at night and sometimes in the morning.

He had taken over the rationing and the galley, experimenting with ways to make our ration bars and small amount of supplemental food stretch as long as possible—and taste better.

Sometimes the results were fantastic; sometimes not so much.

Eoin and I always made sure to show appreciation anyway, it was good to see Yashan develop a new skill.

By the time we were limping into Strewn Shipyard, three months after our escape, we felt like a family—the one I’d never had growing up in an Earth orphanage. Drifting through space, I’d been without my tether; now, my tether was this ship. My tether was Yashan.

“Now what, my love?” he asked, coming up behind me on the bridge and wrapping his two lower arms around me.

He had to bend down to rest his chin on my shoulder, his black hair tickling my face now that it had started to grow longer.

“Now we pick up a load of goods to sell and a new navigator. And then we’ll see about rescuing some more of your brothers. ”

His silver eyes gleamed in the reflection of the viewscreen. “That sounds perfect.”