It was actually a rather warm winter, but that didn’t stop the Norseman from complaining about the cold at every opportunity. The Norseman had a name, of course, but he didn’t use it much, and since the both of them lived out in the ass-end of nowhere nobody else needed to use it or even know what it was, so “Norseman” and “hey you” did all the dirty work. It made enough sense if you were just going to be called “Skraeling” (or “hey you,” but this time with a weird nasal accent). He’d actually made the effort to try and learn a proper language in addition to the noise the longship-riders used, which was nice, but he was so bad at it that he might as well have stuck with Norse. At least it was fun needling him about it.

The Norseman’d stopped fussing about how their food tasted once he’d finally gotten off his ass and started to help with the gathering; for various reasons he wasn’t allowed in the qajaq (he didn’t know how to paddle it right, it probably wouldn’t fit his too-long legs even if he did, and there was the whole “shipwrecked” thing that was just begging for more misfortune), but it was nice having a second pair of hands forage for berries and things, and so long as he was nowhere near the shore during high tide he could sometimes catch something when he went fishing. When the weather wasn’t good enough to be outside for long he carved trinkets out of leftover bone. “We can use them to trade with later,” he’d told the Skraeling when he’d made the first one, showing how the little animal he’d whittled had legs that went round and around themselves in knots. They looked nice and it kept him out of trouble, so what could it hurt?

It turned out they did hurt if you sat down on them unexpectedly.

Logan had been an enlisted man for a decade and a half, and fifteen years in the illustrious United Sectors Navy had taught him two things: one, that he was extremely satisfied spending most of his adult life working up to his armpits in moving parts, and two, that his patience with the average hotshot baby officer was maybe half as far as he could throw one. Working in the hangar meant that his life was an endlessly grimy affair, too, the kind where he brought his work home with him under his fingernails, so it was hard to escape the black streaks on his coveralls or the oily rags tucked in his belt whenever some cocky pilot sauntered by in a too-crisp, too-tailored dress uniform. It never helped when said uniform was filled out by an ass with the perfect ratio of curve to muscle.

One such ass belonged to Lieutenant Bajram Talay, fighter pilot and all-around thoroughly irritating human being, and a good deal of Logan’s deployment (the start of which had been when he first met the man, and therefore when things had officially started going downhill) had gone to alternating between refusing to have anything to do with Lieutenant Talay and furious masturbation at the thought of ruining that nice jacket of his. It made times like these especially nerve-wracking. Pilots could get very, very protective, especially during those long non-combat stretches of a deployment when they mooned about the ship with nothing to do but cause trouble for the rest of the crew. Matters were not helped by the fact that Logan’s assigned pilot had an amazing knack for making his aforementioned wracked nerves fray like cheap rope.

“So this is what you snipes do all day, huh?” asked Lieutenant Talay, peering at the exposed landing gear that Logan had been servicing. He was so close that Logan could smell his cologne. What kind of man wore cologne while deployed in the middle of nowhere? “They tell us how to make these things go and how to make ’em stop, but not what exactly other crew do with them. I thought it was mostly, like, refueling and detailing and maybe bolting on something that fell off.” He talked very quickly. Most pilots tended to, thanks to the implants.

Logan bit back what he wanted to say; minding his tongue was a skill he’d learned back when he was still a junior wrench-wrangler. He’d remained successfully enlisted this long for knowing when not to share what he thought of some snot-nosed toddler simplifying a complex, yet invaluable, position. “Sometimes it is, lieutenant,” he said, instead. He wiped his hands on a rag to try to burn off some of the sudden spike of nervous energy that had set his brain to humming. “We still dedicate most of our time to basic maintenance so we can trust everything to behave in the event of a scramble.”

Lieutenant Talay walked along the side of the fighter. His fingers trailed along the tidy insignia groupings painted just underneath the cockpit; he was one of those pilots that kept a tally of how many enemy units he’d shot down and wasn’t shy about showing it off. Logan found the practice barbaric. Logan would’ve found the thought of prints getting on his hard work to be unacceptable, too, but the lieutenant was wearing his white dress gloves at the time—because of course he was, he was a pilot—so Logan settled for being angry at generalized bravado. It would have to do.