Blazing hot flames lapped at my fingers, as I cursed in pain, rescuing a wayward veg that had bounced out of my stir-fry. I adjusted the level of the plasma grill downwards and sucked my singed finger-tips, reminding myself to be more careful. I didn't want to catch on fire and go up in a whoosh of flames – at least, not today.
Flying aimlessly in the shuttle had nearly driven me bat-shit insane, as I struggled with the idiotic, pointless desire to live, shit, breath and fuck up, as opposed to the nice, quiet simplicity of death. After leaving the asteroid, I'd re-decided about – oh, I don't know – fifty or sixty times to end my miserable existence; but, every time, I reconsidered. Why? I'm still not sure I can tell you why exactly. Probably in large part because I was being a chicken shit. A smaller part of it was that I was stupid enough to think I could find some form of contentment, if not complete happiness and fulfillment. Best to start small, right?
Given my track-record, I didn't have the strongest claim on sound decision-making, so I had my hesitations when I ended up sending Vadah a message asking for my old job back. Would he still he remember me? Positively, that is (I was assuming I wasn't about to shake off the noodle incident any time soon)? Or, would he send a troop-transport to pick me up and torture me until I spilled the beans on everything I knew about the Rebellion?
Quite remarkably, within an hour, I got a message back from him, telling me he was happy to hear from me, that I could get my old job back, and he was sending a transport to meet me... Or was he? Could he be playing me? Could he be setting me to be executed and thrown into a pit of pain?
As it turned out, a transport did rendez-vous with me, though, instead of meeting a hovering multi-armed torture-droid, I met with a friendly lady from HR, who took down my information, debriefed me and ran me through the process of re-enlisting. As a matter of pro forma, I was asked to tell as much as I could about the Rebels, but the truth was that I so low on the food chain that I never really knew much that was useful or that they didn't know already.
While there was none of the violent tension that I had been expecting in the meeting, what did happen was some nice bonding with Jamie (the HR lady's name) over food and cooking, both of which she was very interested in as a hobby, and which I discovered I actually knew a lot about and – rather surprisingly to me – I found it was pleasurable to speak about it (if you must know, I did ask for her number, and we did go on a few dates, but we ultimately decided to stay friends – which I was surprisingly ok with).
I finished off the stir-fry with a few shakes of ground-pepper, and hauled the pot over to the serving area. I was back to being a line-cook, but, thankfully, my Head Chef was a living being made of flesh and with more than a set of rules and targets motivating her (yeah, I know, a female head chef; talk about progress!). Our head chef even made a point in getting us decent ingredients to cook with, like real bonafide vegetables, and encouraged us to cook food that we enjoyed eating – as opposed the never changing menus and crap-ass third-grade “fresh” processed shit Dee-Three-Pee-Oh used to have us reheat.
As part of the reforms that Vadah had begun implementing, the over-riveted droids were being phased out, along with their soul-crushing focus on efficiency at all costs that crushed the Empire from within – even while producing amazing graphs and figures at the end of the fiscal year. I had to admit that much had improved as a result, not the least of which was morale. These days, I even found myself looking forward to my cooking shifts and trying out new things. What was this galaxy coming to, huh?
Despite all the positives, I missed Mike immensely, and thought of him frequently when the pilots piled in for food. The crowd was still difficult during service, but having experienced being on the front and the stress of being shot at, I had somewhat more tolerance for them. In memory of Mike, during my time off, I'd made the effort to get to know some of the pilots and took playing cards with them, which significantly decreased their collective assholeness. In many ways though, tension was inevitable, as we were serving on the half-finished Deeeeath Star – the second iteration of it, that is – and there was a not so great precedent set with the last one having gone “kablooie.”
A rustle of movement and animated chatter started to get louder from down the hall, which I knew meant the messhall would soon be filled with hungry people. I might as well end the story here. I don't foresee anything terribly exciting will happen after this – besides a bunch of people asking for seconds and my vague concern that I may not have made enough for all the pilots.
Which reminds me: I need to catch up with some of the pilots who were heading down to the moon we were orbiting. Word was that there's some kind of local critter there, which I figured could be a good treat to have as fresh protein. Maybe someone could bag me a nice “eeewok” for dinner.
The End?
About the Author
Born in Montreal, Canada, Jack later moved to the West Coast (Vancouver) to do a doctoral degree that involved collecting many thousand ticks in the Okanagan Valley. He wasn't thrilled about the ticks either. Later, he dabbled in small-scale farming for a few year, during which he simultaneously developed an aversion to kale and fancy salad mixes. He now lives with his wife in Boulder, Colorado.
Jack is the author of An Okanagan Messiah Cometh the first book of the Gilded Butterfly series. The second book, Salt Spring Battle Royal, is due in spring of 2016.
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