“Engineers are engineers, Captaine. It may be your ship, but it’s their engines.”

Weston laughed. “True enough, Milla. True enough.”

Their walk had brought them to one of the ship’s lifts, and the trio stepped into the small capsule.

“Hangar bay.”

The capsule whirred off while Milla looked around the small area.

“Here, put these on.”

The captain’s voice startled her for a moment before she took what he was offering her. “What are these?”

“Magnetic boots. The hangar bay is below decks, an area of the ship outside the rotating habitats.”

“Oh.”

Why is he showing me this? I’m not one of his people, Milla couldn’t help but wonder as the gravity in the lift lightened until she could feel her hair floating up away from her skull.

The lift arrived at the hangar bay and the door hissed open, revealing the cavernous expanse of the ship’s hangar. She felt almost lost as she looked up and around herself.

“Some of the shuttles are designed for trans-atmospheric flight and require more room for their controls,” Weston explained, noting her slightly overawed expression. “That and the fact that they are used to transport large items to and from the ship.”

The sharp clanking of their steps attracted the attention of several of the crew members in the hangar, but only one decided to approach them.

“Heya, Cap.” Stephanos’s cheerful face was sidetracked as he locked his attention onto Milla. “G’day there. Now, who’s this?” Stephanos hadn’t seen the pod’s survivor when they had offloaded her from the SAR shuttle; he had been too busy locking his own plane down at the time. But others had noticed while the E-med team had been hauling her to the med-lab, and with all the rumors that had begun to flood the Odyssey, he realized that this wasn’t a crew member.

“Is this the little lady we fished out of the drink a while back?” he asked, mostly just to hear himself talk.

Weston laughed again, leaving Milla wondering if the translation she received over her induction set was an error, since it sounded to her like this man was being rather flippant in front of the ship’s captain.

“Yes, this is Ithan Milla Chans,” Weston said, introducing the two. “And, Milla, this is Commander Stephen Michaels, but we call him Steph. Steph, Milla here was a duty officer assigned to one of the ships we found out there.”

Milla winced as the translation came through. Her eyes then widened in surprise as she noticed that the young man standing in front of them winced, too.

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am.” Stephanos’s joking face had dropped into a serious expression. The loss of shipmates wasn’t a joking matter to the young pilot, or to anyone who’d ever served.

Milla accepted his condolences without much reaction, concealing her feelings by looking around the massive chamber. A short distance away, she saw a shuttle that fit Captain Weston’s description of what he called a “trans-atmospheric” vehicle. At the other end of the bay, however, several sleeker shuttles sat in tight formation, with people scurrying around them with some urgency.