“If you get space-dust in the manifold, I will shoot you out the airlock!” Andra bellowed from her place under the belly of the badly-crushed mining ship. Wires sparked all around her, kept at a safe distance with the barest thought while she tried repair the damage to the engines. “Get me the damn cross-crank!”

Telling silence answered her yell, and she drove the last screw in with rather more force than was strictly necessary before she began extricating herself .

“I trust you aren’t talking to me,” Cygnus said mildly. He leaned casually against her tool chest and watched as she dragged herself the rest of the way out from under her ship and got to her feet. “But I assure you, if there is dust in the manifold, it was not my doing. Unfortunately I do not know what a cross-crankis.”

“There is dust in the manifold, and no, you probably didn’t do it,” she admitted, and wiped her greasy hands on a rag. It didn’t help much. “Pyx did, and he probably snuck out to flirt with that cute pilot that came with your lot.”

“Indus Crux,” Cygnus supplied after a moment of thought, amused and annoyed in one. Andra was genuinely surprised he knew the pilot’s name. “He flirts with just about anything that has a pulse.”

“I’ll warn Pyx if it gets serious,” Andra muttered. She eyed the telepath curiously and dug for the tool she needed. When she found it, she waved it at Cygnus. “This is a cross-crank. It turns things that are supposed to turn and don’t.”

“Noted,” he said, and took a seat on her abandoned stool as she jammed herself back under the ship. “Dust?”

“Dust,” she grumbled, and got back to work cleaning out the multichambered manifold. “Aren’t you supposed to be guarding the senator?”

She wasn’t being particularly reverent, or particularly polite, but he didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it was a refreshing change. It had to be exhausting to have people afraid of him all the time.

“It is,” he commented out loud, and laughed when she loudly thought profanity at him. Telepathy wasn’t one of her talents, and was his strongest, but they both knew it was rude to eavesdrop on someones’ thoughts without permission. “And to be fair, it’s difficult not to hear you. You have a loud ‘voice’.

“I barely have any telepathy,” Andra pointed out as she struggled with the crank, cursed some more, and set it aside. Pinpoint focus, and a precise telekinetic twist, got the difficult panel open. “Telekinesis, yes, but not much of that either.”

“Interesting,” Cygnus murmured. Now that she knew he was there, Andra could feel him in her mind, just quietly watching her work, and her thoughts on the matter. Currently her thoughts were unflattering to pretty much everyone, and twisted sideways with annoyance even as she attempted to wipe the grit out of her eyes. “You’ve been tested?”

“Yup. During flight training,” Andra confirmed, and scooted back out to wipe her face off properly. “Two second precog that’s usually ‘feelings’ and enough telekinesis to make sure I never drop a bolt where I can’t get it.”

“We are interestingly compatible,” Cygnus commented as she got most of the oil off her face and promised herself a thorough shower later to get the rest out of her hair. She turned to get a clean rag and discovered him already offering one. “Your mind is… easy.”

“I don’t know if I should be okay with that,” Andra replied, and wiped her hands. It wasn’t that uncommon to find compatible minds among psionics, although usually they had paired abilities. “Easy?”

“I hear every mind within a planet of me if I don’t shield them out, and connect with almost none of them” he pointed out, and moved when she nudged him out of her way. “We connected so well you got pulled in when my vision hit.”

The vision. Andra still wasn’t sure what to think about out, and was, in fact, trying very hard not to think about it. She was a pilot and a mechanic, and not important enough to give an opinion on pretty much anything.

Hopefully no one besides Cygnus himself knew that they were linked at the time. She didn’t want that kind of attention, thank you very much.

“Why not?” he was still following her thoughts, and Andra decided she didn’t really mind. He seemed like he probably needed a friend, and she was probably one of the only ones who wasn’t afraid of him. “Ah, I was also wondering about that. Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Either you’re gonna pop my brain or you’re not, and there’s nothing I can do if you’re gonna” she told him, and considered for a minute. “Loose the fancy cloak and roll up your sleeves. I need another pair of hands if Pyx is gonna go chase tail instead of help fix things.”

“I know nothing about ship engines,” he said, clearly taken completely by surprise, although he did take off his cloak, and rolled up his sleeves out of the way. “How dirty am I likely to get?”

“Very,” she told him, and made him laugh as she slid back under the nose of her ship. “If you want to change, there are some coveralls in the chest.”

“I don’t think anything of yours will fit me.”

“They aren’t mine and they’re sized for someone freakishly tall.”

“I am not freakishly tall.”

“Uh huh. Freakishly tall. If you’re gonna stay, you’re gonna help. Get me the number-five socket wrench and the socket that goes with it.”