Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who has a secret compartment
In the second hour of the ship inspection, Lieutenant Grewitt is beginning to look a little wild around the eyes. Keeping an inspection bay and a teardown team tied up this long has a price tag; holding up the other ships in the inspection line has a price tag; the accusations implicit in the unusual search order — that a squeaky-clean pilot was getting away with something, even if he couldn't substantiate what, and that furthermore that means Inspector Munford's work here for the past however many years has been missing these unspecified crimes for whatever reason — will come with their own price tags, if he doesn't come up with something that justifies them.
He'd been — finally, fervently — certain he would nail them both, whatever they're up to. And now the clock is ticking down to the statutory limit on his power to expensively hold up an entire queue of cargo craft without any concrete accusation, and he has nothing.
"Grewitt," the teardown foreman says eventually, tired and annoyed at the sheer amount of work his team have been put through for one man's spit-flecked, ranting, years-long red-string-wall determination to find a crime where there's no evidence of one committed, "unless you want us to dismantle life support, there's nowhere left to look," and Grewitt hesitates, because he wants, he wants so badly, to find something.
Cap'n Bobbs raps on the polychrome plate under her crew jacket, where ribs should be. "I crewed on a boat where the air failed, once," she says, patient and laconic. "That's when I needed to swap out my lungs. Aside from your paranoid smuggling phantoms, what kind of fucking fool are you accusing me of being? Dicking about with life support?"
"We could hook up the ship to shore support and strip down her bio functions, sir," Inspector Munford adds from the other side of the bridge, frosty. "Call that another hour, then another two-plus to jumpstart and recertify her air circ."
"And legal liability for biosupport viability problems in the following year," the foreman says.
Under their combined, withering stares, Grewitt sweats. In his uniform pockets, only the painful clench of his hands keeps them from a tremor.
"Close her up," he says abruptly. "Inspector, write her papers. She's clean."
"Thank you kindly," Bobbs says, with sarcastic courtesy, to his hurriedly exiting back.
"Hello, stranger," Bobbs drawls, in a docking ring bar a few weeks later. "What's a nice girl like you doing on shore leave in a dive like this?"
"You're right," Munford says lightly, sliding onto the stool next to her. "I should dump whatever cheap asshole dragged me here and split."
"Oh yeah?" The Cap'n grins and knocks back her drink. "Well, if it didn't learn you anything about cheap assholes, I've got a real shitty hotel room—"
"God, shut up," Munford tells her, rolling her eyes, but she's the one who tugs Bobbs from her barstool by the wrist and drags her right out of the bar, eyes dark and lips wetted.
"Stop squirming."
"I'm not squirming," Bobbs says peaceably, naked on her back on a shitty hotel bed. "You ain't left me the energy to squirm. My god, woman."
Munford, straddling her hips, carefully hooks the lugs of a maintenance tool into the indents in Bobbs' chest plate, and levers down. Bobbs huffs at the pressure; Munford, maintaining the leverage that retracts internal seals, wrangles one-handed with a precision bolt driver, undoing the captive fasteners that hold Bobbs' machinery closed.
"I do like a woman inside me," Bobbs jokes lazily, as Munford opens her up.
"Shut up, Theoretta," Munford says, with the contempt of deep and long-lasting affection.
The artificial gas-exchange cans, either side of Bobbs' chest cavity, have been replaced with aftermarket ones two-thirds the size; compact high-performance free diving kit. In the freed-up space, taped in place within her chest, is a radiopaque protective pouch; dimly visible inside, a stack of high-density data wafers.
"Paydirt, you magnificent bastard," Munford says, tossing the pouch onto the pillow. She reaches for the cleaning alcohol and wipes, swipes away any spots of finger grease and contrabrand residue, carefully closes the Cap'n back up.
"Yeah," Bobbs says, and smiles up at her, tugging on her thighs. "Now scoot up here and lemme show you what else the expensive lungs are for."