The sound of clattering from outside the crew quarters slowly dragged Casey out of sleep. Blearily, she got out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants (which were under the arm she continued to ignore), and washed her face before going to investigate the noise.

As she approached, the smell of frying eggs and cured meats made her slow her pace. It was coming from an open door up ahead. That had to be the galley. Casey’s brain started a fight with itself over whether she should sneak away again or just accept her fate and go in, but before she could make a decision, Helga’s head popped out of the doorway.

“Good morning! Breakfast is nearly done, come on in. I saved–” Helga cut herself off, regretfully. “Never mind. Feel free to take a seat.”

“How did you know I was here?” Casey asked warily.

“You’re not wearing socks, Casey,” Helga said with an amused expression. “I could hear your feet tapping all the way down the corridor.”

Casey looked down, realizing her mistake. “Oh,” she said, then looked up again at Helga. “…Is there coffee?”

“Never leave home without it,” Helga said, and disappeared into the galley once again.

Casey entered and made her way to the table as Helga poured her a mug of coffee. “How do you take it?” she asked.

“Um. Cream, two sugars,” Casey said. Everything was too normal, it was setting her on edge. Then, nearly forgetting her manners in the face of this weirdness, she added, “Please.”

Helga nodded and calmly fixed Casey’s coffee, then set it down in front of her before returning to the stove. Casey stared at the mug as if it was poisoned. Eventually she took a cautious sip, and found that against all odds, it was coffee. Her stare then turned to Helga as she warmed her hands with the mug, taking a few more sips. Helga, for her part, seemed entirely unbothered, humming softly as she worked. Was this relaxed air intended to unbalance her? Maybe it was the calm before the storm.

As if reading her mind, Helga spoke up. “I’m not mad at you, by the way.”

Casey said nothing. It felt like a trap.

“I get it, you know?” Helga continued, almost speaking to herself. “I was like that when I was first let loose into the Frontier. Bitey. Thorny.”

She flipped a pair of eggs, and Casey watched them fly in a perfect arc to be caught by the pan again. “Let loose?”

“Mhmm,” Helga said, pushing around some cured meat on another pan with a pair of tongs. She transferred them to a drip tray, then slid the eggs onto a plate. Bread popped out of a toaster, right on cue. In a well practiced set of movements, she had two plates made up and on the table in less than a minute. “Eat up. I’ll tell you more once we’re done.”

Unfortunately, it looked delicious. The pair spent a few minutes in – to Casey’s mind – uneasy silence, the sound of cutlery on plastic plates being the only thing to break the quiet. Casey was having a hard time enjoying the food at first. Despite Helga’s earlier words, it still felt as though she had a sword hanging over her head. 

Stealing glances between bites, it slowly began to dawn on her that Helga’s calm air might not be an act. That, despite everything her brain was screaming at her, the large woman across the table just wanted to have a relaxed breakfast. She decided it was okay to let her guard down, just a little. Was there an imperceptible change in Helga’s expression as Casey’s shoulders relaxed? As always, she was impossible to read, but whatever her face had shown before, there was a hint of approval on it now. They continued eating, now in truce. 

Helga finished a few minutes later, and set her utensils down. She took another sip of her coffee, and sat back in her chair, satisfied after a good meal. For a moment, she seemed to consider her words, before saying aloud, “I used to be the son of a Duke.”

Casey nearly inhaled a piece of egg, but managed to cough it up in time. She coughed a few more times, and took a drink of her coffee before saying (between yet more coughs), “A Duke? As in ‘and Duchess’? As in knights and castles and swords?”

Helga tilted her head in curiosity. “How do you know about those? Ulthea doesn’t strike me as the place to learn history. Certainly not that long ago.”

“I’ve seen movies,” Casey said defensively.

Helga chuckled. “Right, of course. I guess that imagery does fit Ulthea well. Then yes, just like knights and castles. Your Intra Lingua might be doing its best to match our station in the hierarchy, but the terms are a bit different. My family was of the ancient lineage of Urthstripe, second to the throne of Salastrom. The King, my father’s uncle, had no heirs, and his health was failing. I was very nearly a prince.”

“Then why are you here?” Casey asked, with a sinking feeling in her gut. “Did Ulthea take your planet?”

Helga shook her head with a sad smile. “No, thank the Wanderer. Let me ask you this: how many Brocken have you seen out here, besides me?”

“None,” Casey said. “But I haven’t exactly been outside of Brock Station.”

“There’s a good reason for that,” Helga said, then corrected herself. “Well, not good. It happened about twenty years ago. I was training with the Ducal Sword Master in our yard. Our castle was part of a larger fortress that sat against a mountain, with a township spread around the foothills, and another outer wall outside of that. We were running through a few stances, he was correcting my footing. We started to hear screaming, alarm bells, and then these loud booms coming from down the hill, like thunder. We didn’t have gunpowder then. Explosions were something very specific mountains did, and everyone stayed well clear of those.

“We ran up to the wall to see what was going on, and it was a nightmare. Homes were on fire, there was smoke everywhere. Bright green and red lights were flashing in between houses, and the most frightening thing was this horrible angular… thing, just hovering in the sky above it all. Can you imagine what it’s like, for a civilization in its steel age to see a space ship for the first time?”

Casey shook her head, but stayed silent, wrapped up in the story. Space ships had been a part of her life as far back as she could remember.

“It feels like the gods themselves have come down from the heavens,” Helga continued. “My teacher told me to run for the castle and stay put somewhere safe while he ran to tell my father. Of course, me being a dumbass ten year old with a sword, I didn’t do any of that. My head was full of stories of heroes and knights rushing into danger to protect the unfortunate. I hadn’t been taught proper restraint yet.”

Helga took a deep breath, and let it out through her nose. “I snuck out. I thought I could be the big hero, protect the people in our duchy, maybe even have a story written for myself. As you could imagine, it didn’t go well. When I got down the hill and into town, I immediately got lost in the chaos. Smoke and fire everywhere, unfamiliar sounds of what I know now to be guns, and that… thing, up in the sky looming over all. I saw some unfamiliar people dragging an unconscious town guard, and leapt at them, sword raised…”

She trailed off. Casey realized she was leaning so far forward over the table that her loose sleeve had dipped onto her plate and picked up some food. Luckily for her, Helga was lost in thought, so she had a moment to brush it with a napkin. “What happened?” Casey asked.

With a small shake of her head as if to clear it, Helga said, “They trounced me immediately. These were pirates, so yes, they were uncivilized, but they had been doing this for a long time, and you don’t live long doing what they do if you aren’t prepared. My sword bounced right off of their personal shields, and their shock prods did the rest. Even in the battle-mist I was developing in my young age, which might have helped me shrug off a blaster shot or two, electricity was electricity. I was knocked out cold.

“I don’t know what became of the counterattack, but I know the pirates were able to take fifteen of us in total. About five they killed as examples to the rest of us. The rest were sold off and scattered across the galaxy. Wanderer knows where they ended up.” Helga was quiet for another moment before continuing. “Frances is the one who helped me escape, nine years later.”

Casey wanted to know what happened in those intervening years, but could tell how hard this had been for Helga already. Instead, she just began to feel guilty for what she said last night. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize.”

Over the course of the story, Helga’s posture had weakened, her shoulders had slumped, her voice lowered. Her eyes had been faded, looking somewhere into the past. When Casey apologized, a switch flipped, and she straightened up. The faint smile returned to her face. Even her eyes twinkled for a split second.

“How could you? It’s a ridiculous story. I’m practically a time traveller.” She took another sip of her coffee. “What I’m trying to get at here is that when I saw you for the first time, all alone, floating in the middle of the Benevolence’s cockpit, with a piece of shrapnel the length of my arm in your side, I knew you had just lost everything. That no one else was going to be there for you when you woke up in that clinic bed.”

“I’m not exactly the only one like that on Brock Station,” Casey said. “I thought that was the point.”

“You were a different case,” Helga said. “Besides a few skills that made you useful on a space station, this was an entirely new world for you. You know Listher and Vulka’s stories, sure, but they started in the Frontier. It’s the same for everyone else on Brock Station. And Vulka maybe had it coming.”

“Easy,” Casey warned.

“The point is,” Helga pressed on, “when I saw you there, I knew I had the chance to keep you from ending up like me.”

Casey was about to point out that Helga was actually very successful, and had a fair bit of power, but understood what she actually meant just in time. “Thank you,” she said instead. “It was nice to have a real home, for a while.”

“You still do,” Helga said. “Maybe you won’t be able to come back for a while, but when you do, Brock Station will be there.”

Casey had a thought that made her exhale sharply, in a sort of exhausted laugh. “You’ll save me a seat?”

A single bark of laughter escaped Helga’s chest. “Damn right! Okay, enough heart to heart, we gotta get jumping. Grab your arm on the way to the bridge, you’ll need it.”

“Need it for jumping?” Casey asked, skeptical.

Helga’s grin widened. “Nope. I’m gonna teach you how to fight.”