Sci-fi. A navigator on a starship is interrupted by the captain’s dog.
1k, rated T.
Tara grunted in surprise at the blunt nudge against her thigh, and she looked down into Katinka’s big brown eyes.
She was a lovely dog, dark brown with thick shaggy curls, her bearded muzzle and tufted ears a lighter colour than the rest of her coat, and she had a long tail that was usually wagging, but wasn’t at the moment. Tara had never worked on a starship that had a free-roaming dog before now, but Katinka was the captain’s dog, and she was allowed free range.
Except when the captain first came on deck in the mornings and at mealtimes, Tara didn’t actually see her much – Captain Levente said back on Earth they’d go on miles-long hikes together, and Biggs, one of the storage engineers, said that she spent most of the day walking around the ship’s corridors or lying down on the observation deck and watching over the cargo bays.
The captain’s dog was looking up at Tara with a serious look on her face, standing up on all four paws, and as Tara met her gaze she looked demonstratively toward the shuttle lift before locking eyes with her again.
“Hi, Katie-girl. You okay?” Tara asked, reaching down and knuckling over the top of her head, but Katinka didn’t close her eyes and wiggle her butt as she pushed up for more pets like she usually did: she gently shrugged Tara’s hand off, took two steps back, and once more took a sidelong look toward the shuttle lift doors.
Leaning back in her seat at the nav comm, where she’d been sorting through the logs that had to be dispatched to the next beacon on the route to Arctus III as they passed it by.
“Uh, Lieutenant?” Tara asked. “When’s Captain Levente back on deck?”
Lieutenant Garcia looked up from where she was obviously flirting with Lieutenant Hosk.
“Not for another three hours, crewman. What’s the dog want?”
Katinka grunted, nudging Tara in the thigh with her nose again before taking two steps back again. Two more looks back toward the shuttle lift, and then an impatient whine.
“I don’t know,” Tara said. “Should I follow her?”
Garcia shrugged, turning back to Hosk, and Tara glanced at the timecode in the corner of her monitor before she pulled herself up and followed Katinka to the lift and stepped inside. After a few seconds of Tara not giving a verbal command, the shuttle lift moved based on the nudge of Katinka’s nose against the western wall.
Tara wondered faintly how long it had taken her to understand how the lifts worked, how well she navigated them – she was five years old and had apparently been on starships on and off since she was a pup, but she was bred to herd sheep and drive livestock, running around fields and mountain grazing grounds, not cargo trawlers. The shuttle lifts, the cargo bay doors, the auto ladders, were they really as intuitive to her as grasslands and dirt and streams?
Katinka pulled up her nose and after a second, the shuttle lift came to a stop, the doors opening. She didn’t wait for Tara, just trotted confidently down the corridor so that Tara would follow her. They were on the second habitat deck, but they were only carrying a handful of passengers, so most of the units were currently being used for additional storage, and a lot of the corridors were dark until Tara and Katie set off their sensors and the overhead lighting switched on panel by panel.
A two-minute walk and Katinka came to a stop, wagging her tail and giving a sharp bark, but until Tara stepped forward and the next panel of corridor lighting flicked on overhead, she couldn’t see what the dog was pointing her towards.
The bot whirred helplessly in place, stuck partway into the access vent the cleaning bots used to travel between decks – a ripped sock was caught on the vent’s hatch, stopping it from receding fully into its slot, and the bot couldn’t quite fit through its usual gap.
“Oh,” Tara said. “The scutter’s stuck, huh?”
Rushing forward with quick little tip-taps of her paws on the carpeted corridor, Katinka barked and shoved at the bot from one side and then the other, nipping at it the way Tara guessed she would nip at a sheep’s front legs to try to get it to go backwards and get itself loose from a trap or a tangle. She knew Katinka would herd some of the bots around, especially the delivery units that were a bit bigger than the cleaning scutters, Tara had seen cute videos of her nipping at their wheel arches or shoving them from the sides or the backs with her nose to get them to move out of the way of crew.
“I got it, I got it,” Tara said, crouching down and pushing a stylus from her pocket underneath the frayed sock edge and using the leverage to tear the stubborn fabric free. The hatch slotted out of sight, and the bot’s whirring changed in pitch as it actually crossed the threshold and into the vent before the hatch dropped again, its edges seamlessly disappearing into the corridor wall.
Tara picked up the sock and looked to Katinka, who barked and hopped up on her back feet for a second, her tufted ears twitching, her tail wagging.
“Yeah, good job,” Tara said, laughing. “One of your sheep was stuck in the fence, and I got it free. Same as back on the farm, huh?”
Katinka scampered away, and rubbing the back of her neck, Tara made her way back to the bridge.
She had a new entry to make in her personal log.
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