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With his eyes closed, Harper could better feel the Eureka Maru’s engines pulse like a heart beating, as if he lived inside the body of a great beast, part of it. Part of Beka Valentine’s crew. After all the dreaming and struggling, he’d made it off Earth and into space. It hadn’t even taken much work, since Psycho Bobby had screwed himself and all Harper had had to do was bring it to Beka’s attention.
He was a kludge with prospects now.
Beka had mentioned having a Magog on her crew that he hadn’t met yet, but since it hadn’t eaten her yet maybe it was a different kind of Magog. The thought of a Magog anywhere near him made his stomach roil, but he could bear it. He could. Because he’d made it out.
By spacer standards, the Eureka Maru wasn’t much, Harper was sure. The Maru was a freighter, a salvage ship, obviously put together out of spare parts, but Harper admired it for that, for being scrappy. Given how he’d lived, all of his work had been made of spare parts. Beka obviously had an emotional attachment to this ship, and that made him like her and it even more.
She kept expecting the closed-in spaces and stale air to bother him, but he’d lived in tunnels since coming to Boston. Hell, the Maru’s air smelled fresher than those tunnels. She kept expecting him to need sky. He missed sky--what little sky he’d been able to see through the smog--but he had space now, endless and open. Free. Besides, she said that they went to planets for jobs sometimes, though she shuddered a little at the thought of being on a planet.
When Harper put his hands against the wall he could feel the thrum of the Maru working through his body, and it made him horny. It would be his job and joy to maintain this scrappy lady. He still salivated with lust at the thought of the port on Psycho Bobby’s neck. Something that would let him get inside machines was something he desperately wanted. Someday he’d have one. He swore it to himself. He wondered what it would feel like to have technology actually inside his body, a part of him, its power running through his nervous system and brain.
“You look orgasmic, you little freak,” Beka said.
Harper opened his eyes to see her standing there, framed by the interior of her ship. Their ship. “I take my jollies where I can get them, boss.” He was home.