Chapter 5: Shore Leave

“Why must we go on shore leave?” Zhari asked, trailing behind McGregor as he walked down the Pinwheel’s rotating torus. The massive lamps that were embedded in the station’s painted ceiling shone brightly, their warmth and golden light approximating that of Earth’s sun. There was a gentle curve to the floor, sloping up and out of view in both directions, planters filled with trees and flowers breaking up the monotony of the white metal. The buildings to either side of them were made to resemble those that one might find on a city street, going some way towards making the inhabitants feel like they were on a terrestrial planet, rather than a giant military installation that was floating through open space. Beyond the scant few meters of metal and armor that made up the station’s hull was vacuum, but one could almost forget that fact if they suspended their disbelief and let the Pinwheel’s quaint decorations fool them.

McGregor found himself unable to indulge in such fantasies, as he was a pilot by profession, more accustomed to seeing the station from the exterior than the interior.

The torus was always crowded. Throngs of humans and aliens rubbed shoulders, going about their business, military personnel and tourists alike. You got used to seeing the different species with time, but walking around the station was never boring. Giant Krell lumbered about, eight or nine feet tall despite their hunched posture, the smaller races clearing the way lest they be crushed underfoot by the reptiles. There were also Borealans like Zhari, towering felines that usually roamed about in tight knit packs of five or six.

Zhari was different however, her pack only consisted of two people.

“We’re going on shore leave because I’m not a workaholic like you are, hairball,” he replied. “I need some damned vacation time or I’ll go stir crazy.”

“You’re a pilot, your job consists of sitting in a cramped cockpit for hours on end. Surely the Pinwheel is reprieve enough?”

“Listen, I get a few weeks of vacation time a year, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss out on some downtime because you can’t pull yourself away from your job for five minutes.”

“I am a-”

“Yeah, yeah,” he scoffed as he cut her off with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You’re a proud Borealan warrior and you have duties and honors and other such things that make sense to you but which inconvenience me massively.”

Despite towering over McGregor at eight feet and weighing half a ton, it was immediately obvious to anyone who saw them interact that the smaller human was the one in charge. Talking to a Borealan in the way that McGregor did would usually see the offense answered with a swift claw swipe, if not an outright dismemberment. The aliens were hardwired to live in a strictly hierarchical society where even something as minor as a lingering glance could be considered a challenge to an individual’s status, a challenge that must be answered with violence.

They had to undergo strict integration training once they arrived on the Pinwheel, which they must complete before being released into the general population, and before being allowed to serve in mixed species units. Many were sent back to their homeworld, unable to adapt to human social conventions, and even those that passed with flying colors sometimes encountered problems here and there. When an equilibrium was found between a human and a Borealan, it was usually tentative and precarious. But that was not the case with Zhari and McGregor.

Some months ago they had been stranded on an uncharted planet, she had been a commando, and he had been her shuttle pilot. As the only survivors of the crash, they had been forced to survive together in the depths of the planet’s primordial jungles, their bickering eventually reaching a head that saw the pair battle for dominance. It was a battle of will as much as it was a battle of physical strength, and it was one that McGregor had won.

Overcoming her made him Zhari’s ‘Alpha’ according to the customs of her people, the leader of a pack whose word was law. While Borealans usually clawed each other into hamburger meat in an attempt to seize or maintain that position, McGregor had won it through more ... cerebral means.

“Aren’t you supposed to do everything that your Alpha says?” McGregor chided, and Zhari bowed her head in deference.

It was ... interesting to the say the least, having a giant alien who would obey his every whim. She was a monster of a woman, built like a damned tank, the high gravity of her home planet giving all of her people the bodies of Olympic athletes by virtue of simply existing. She was strong enough to flip a car, and yet she was sworn to him, servile and submissive.

The Navy life was a busy one, and the two companions served in different branches, which meant that getting some alone time was difficult. Fortunately they both served on the same jump carrier, the UNN Shiroyama, which meant that their shore leave coincided. The old girl was currently undergoing a refit in the Pinwheel’s dry dock, and so the crew had a couple of weeks of downtime.

To Zhari and her ilk, duty was everything. They loved to fight, and to Zhari especially there was no such thing as leisure. When they weren’t deployed they were training on the range, sparring, or doing rigorous exercise to keep their bone and muscle density healthy in the Earth-standard gravity.

She was his subordinate however, and she would obey any command that he gave. They hadn’t had more than a day alone together since they had been rescued from the surface of EE-4, and McGregor was planning to make up for lost time.

They followed the painted arrows on the curved floor of the station, heading towards the residential quarter. There was permanent and semi-permanent housing for personnel and civilians who were stationed on the Pinwheel, separate from the barracks where the majority of the troops lived. Some were spartan and consisted only of what the occupant needed to perform their duties, and others were as large and as lavishly furnished as an apartment that might be found on any one of the more developed colony worlds.

McGregor had saved up enough credits to rent one of the nicer apartments for a week, suitably sized and furnished for a Borealan, with a raised ceiling and reinforced furniture that could handle their weight. He had been planning this for a while, but he had only just let Zhari know about it. He had wanted it to be a surprise.

“But what will we do for a whole week?” Zhari asked, incredulous.

“Don’t you have hobbies?” McGregor replied, dodging through a group of Marines who were headed in the direction of the military quarter. “Is there nothing you like to do besides fighting and training?”

“I am a soldier, fighting is my purpose.”

“Yes, but outside of fighting. You don’t watch movies? You don’t like music? You don’t ... knit?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he shrugged.

“Well you can’t have been a soldier all your life. What did you do before you joined the military, back on Borealis?”

“As a kitten I played with my siblings, as all kittens do. When I came of age, I joined the military. After I had proven myself worthy, I was sent here, and I underwent integration training in order to serve the UNN on behalf of my Patriarch.”

“Hang on, how old are you exactly?”

“Nineteen.”

McGregor was surprised. He had never asked a Borealan their age before, but he had expected her to be older than that. She was so ... developed. Perhaps it was just her stature that made her appear older than she really was from his perspective. The lifespans of different species seemed to vary dramatically, with the Krell being the outliers. The reptiles would keep living and growing until something killed them, potentially living for hundreds of years.

“Wait,” he said, scratching his chin as he did the math in his head. “That’s in Borealan years, and they’re like ... four hundred days. Nineteen times four hundred, minus nineteen times about forty, divide that by about three hundred and sixty five...”

Zhari waited patiently, curious as to what he was trying to calculate.

“Yeah, I figure you’re about twenty, going on twenty one in Earth years. I’m four or five years your senior.”

“Is that important?” She asked, stepping around a startled technician whose eyes had been glued to a tablet computer. He hadn’t seen her coming, and he looked up at the towering feline with wide eyes, skirting out of her way as she strode by on her long legs.

“It wouldn’t be, but you talk and act like you’re forty five. I think you need this shore leave more than I do.”

They walked in silence for a little while longer, until the residential quarter came into view, mock houses sculpted into the walls of the station lining either side of the promenade. They extended further into the hull of the station, with only their facades visible from the street, made up to look like town houses and apartment blocks. Many of them had planters by the doors and other such decorations, all the better to sell the illusion and to remind the occupants of home.

As well as being a major military base and a dry dock for the UNN’s largest classes of ship, the station had been built with extended deployments in mind. When the journey to the nearest habitable planet might take two months, shore leave became a major problem. People would get cabin fever if they spent too long in the confines of a spaceship, which were laid out more like submarines than the way most civilians imagined them. They needed to stretch their legs, both for their physical and mental well-being. With that goal in mind, the space station had been constructed to provide an environment that approximated the feeling on walking around in a city.

If people were going to be stationed here for extended periods of time, might as well kill two birds with one stone. There were bars, stores and restaurants, gyms and recreational facilities. There was even an Olympic sized swimming pool that McGregor was sure must be heavy enough to throw off the station’s rotation.

They made their way along the rows of mock buildings, until McGregor spotted the one that he had rented.

“This is us, number two seventy five,” he announced as he walked up to the door. He fumbled in the pocket of his Navy blue uniform for a moment, searching for his ID card, then pressed it against a scanner that was embedded in the door frame. Despite being made up to look like they were built from brick and mortar, the apartments were as much an integral part of the station as any of the other facilities, hardwired into the station’s central computer system.

There was an affirmative beep, and then the door slid open, granting them access. Zhari didn’t have to duck under the door frame, as the apartment was built for her kind, and she followed behind him as he stepped inside.

It was remarkably spacious, considering that they were on a Navy space station, with a high ceiling and expansive rooms. It was open plan, the living room and the kitchen sharing one large space, with the bedroom and bathroom sectioned off behind their own sliding doors for privacy. Besides the lack of windows, it could have been mistaken for an upscale apartment on Earth or Franklin.

The human apartments had to be booked months in advance, despite being far more numerous, but the ones designed for Borealans and Krell were often empty. Very few of the Borealan personnel who were stationed on the Pinwheel were civilians, with the majority being Equatorial troops from Elysia who were housed in the barracks. Accommodations had been made for the Krell, but the UNN had soon learned that the species did not produce any ambassadors. The aliens were far more content to lounge in any large body of water that was available.

He looked up at Zhari, and she seemed to be impressed. McGregor wasn’t sure what the living arrangements were like on Borealis, but the apartment was a damn sight better than the barracks, or the cramped crew quarters on a carrier.

As well as renting the apartment, McGregor had arranged to have some things delivered in advance, mostly food and other amenities. The boxes of goods were waiting for them on the kitchen table, which was about a foot higher than was convenient for a human. All of the furniture was the same, massive and reinforced in order to handle the exaggerated weight of a Borealan. There were no mixed race apartments, the options were either to have a ceiling that was too low for Zhari and chairs that would snap like twigs under her bulk, or for McGregor to live like he was in a forced perspective movie for a week. He had chosen the latter, if only to ease the suffering of his wallet.

He was majorly out of pocket on this one, but it wasn’t like the money was doing anything besides fermenting in his bank account. For all he knew his next mission would be his last, and you couldn’t take it with you.

He had no idea what Zhari and the other Borealans spent their paychecks on, probably dumbbells and bullets, those were the only subjects that seemed to be of any interest to them.

His towering companion walked about the living room, examining it as McGregor looked on.

“So, what do you think?”

“Why is it so large?” She asked.

“What kind of a question is that? It’s large so that you have more space, it’s better.”

“Why is more space better? It’s unnecessary, they could have fit two apartments into the same amount of space if they had designed them to be more functional.”

“That’s not the point,” McGregor sighed, fearing that his investment was being wasted on the alien. “It’s supposed to be luxurious, relaxing.”

“I do not feel relaxed.”

He rolled his eyes and walked over to her, taking her by the wrist and maneuvering her onto the couch, which was about twice the size of the human variant. She sank into the soft cushions, the frame creaking under her weight.

“Sit down, relax. That’s an order from your Alpha.”