Bhayrip wasn't the worst unit leader Taz ever had, but he was a close second. One unfinished year at a CPS Minder Academy in his youth seventy years ago had apparently made him an expert on everything related to minders and talents. His idea of management was jumping in with gravity boots, causing chaos, then blaming everyone else when it blew up in his face. He couldn’t be bothered to pay attention past the first thirty words of anything. Unfortunately for disaster victims everywhere, he was determined to stay on active duty until the mandatory retirement age of one hundred thirty.
Shen barked at her and nipped at the leg pocket of her loose uniform pants.
Taz laughed. “You’re quite right, Shen. I’m supposed to be working, not star-gathering. You’re a good dog to remind me.” Unlike the other teams’ dogs, Shen didn’t appear to have a functioning controller in her head, so Taz had to speak to her in human language. Even if the dog had a controller, Rylando probably wouldn’t let Taz use it, any more than he let the other team members do so.
Keeping an eye out for wandering weasels and shepherding dogs, she quickly cleared the rest of the large items that didn’t belong to Silver Team and added them to the outside stack.
The rest of the storeroom mess wouldn’t need the assist frame, so she marched it to the corner, disconnected, and stepped down to the floor.
Out of habit, she used the manual controls to power it down instead of her implanted headjack and controller. It was a legacy of her military days, but very few CPS minders had them. Having a military-grade controller that could wirelessly interact with chatty AIs was just as handy as her teke talent in rescues. She’d styled her dark hair to cover the jack and avoided mentioning it, in case having one broke some obscure CPS regulation. Rylando knew, but no one else in the unit seemed to have noticed.
Both cats now sat on the skimmer’s canopy, as if surveying their empire and finding it wanting. Mariposa was excavating the jumble in the corner, intent on eating every insect she uncovered. When Lerox lumbered over to nose through the pile, she screeched and flew up to the top of the cabinet. Lerox’s pawing made a bigger mess but did cause more insects to move, making them easy prey for Mariposa to swoop in for the catch.
Taz couldn’t tell if Lerox’s actions were intentional or simply opportune. She’d have to ask Rylando. She’d often seen him encourage them to use their skills and superior senses to uncover hidden contamination and damage, so maybe that explained it.
Thankfully, he didn't ever seem to use his minder talent to march them around like brain-wiped automatons, like she'd seen one previous team member do several years ago. Most animal-affinity minders were better with animals than people, but that previous rescuer had hated both the job and anything living. Rylando was the exact opposite.
And once again, her thoughts wandered without her permission to her teammate. Apparently, her stupid heart learned nothing from her epic record of failed relationships. Especially the last disaster that had caused her to request an immediate transfer, even though it meant agreeing to an extra year of CPS service. Her lover from regular military Space Division had turned out to be a cheating thief, and she hadn’t seen it coming.
With this new assignment, she'd vowed to be professionally friendly with everyone but wear extra flexin armor around her heart. Easy enough with the rest of the unit and space-station personnel, but she hadn’t counted on Rylando being so sexy, funny, and clever. Or how much she enjoyed being around his animals.
She picked up the chair Lerox had been trying to eat and carried it to the wall where it belonged.
Null chance of anything happening between her and Rylando. Even if he hinted that he returned her interest—which he hadn’t—they’d have to go stealth mode with their relationship. She wasn’t doing that ever again. Besides, it was unofficial but well-known GSAR policy to break up any such unions—even cohab agreements and marriages—by transferring the parties as far apart as possible. With her rotten luck, they’d assign her to her dysfunctional family’s home planet, or even worse, back to the duty station she’d just escaped from.
Blowing out a noisy sigh, she got back to work. Keeping busy was the best thing to keep her from the same spiral of thoughts she’d been fighting for the last hundred days. She cleared a path to the dented skimmer and made two piles, one for undamaged goods and one for repairable items. Units never threw anything away if they could help it. Lately, new supplies from GSAR came just about as often as someone winning the Nine-Planets Lottery.
Shen sat and looked up expectantly, as if waiting for something to do. Taz tried one of the few commands she knew. “Shen, find the exit.”
The moment Taz raised her hand, palm forward, Shen took off like a rocket around the bulk of the skimmer to the far-right end of the storeroom. Stymied by the jumble of bins blocking the door, she nosed and squeezed her way through them. Once she touched her nose to the door, she backed up, sat and barked twice, paused, then barked twice again.
The two cats watched Shen’s actions like they were spectators at a grav-ball match, making Taz laugh.
“Good job, Shen!” Taz showed the dog her flat hand, then lowered it to her thigh. Shen trotted back to Taz’s side and sat, looking up.
She crouched and stroked just under Shen’s ear, praising her cleverness. Recently, when Rylando had been away for a day with Moyo and left Shen behind, Taz had awakened to discover the dog sleeping at the foot of her bed. Probably missing Rylando and wanting some company. Taz pretended to herself that she hadn’t been feeling the same thing.
Shen licked Taz’s chin, then stood, tail wagging.
Though it was probably silly, Taz made a point of talking out loud to the animals. “We need to move more of this so the cleaning bots can do their job.” Taz turned a mock glare and a wagging finger toward the two cats. “And leave them alone, you two miscreants.”
Lerox, apparently bored with the pile of debris, jumped up on one of the few undamaged crates and started grooming his belly, leg in the air.
“Come on, Shen, let’s clear more paths while we don’t have a weasel underfoot.” She snapped open a few crates for collecting the smaller items. Handing some of the items to Shen to carry was fun, and the smart dog quickly figured out which crate Taz pointed to. The sooner they made a dent in the cleanup, the sooner Taz could sneak off for a nap before taking the comms shift.
Not that anyone would thank her or Rylando for taking care of the mess. As near as she could tell, Unit 1051 had become the short-term parking lot for screw-ups and the permanent punishment post for assholes. If only she’d known that when she’d looked for the unit with the most vacancies, presuming they’d take her immediately—which they did. She should have asked around for recommendations, but she hadn’t wanted to wait. All she could think of was getting away.
Her best guess as to why clever and highly competent Rylando stayed in the unit was his unusual team. He knew the regs backward and forward, and easily stymied Bhayrip’s petty machinations. A more effective commander might maneuver Rylando into giving up his animals.
At least she’d had the good instinct to let Bhayrip and the others think she was on punishment detail for a previous colossal catastrophe she'd been ordered not to reveal. Much safer to be dismissed as just another fly-by fool than resented for being Ensign Excellent.