Gaze by Viola Grace Page B

enjoyed everything, but no one messed with the pilot of the Blue Fairy within her hull. The ship could, and would, use violent means to defend her, and the Fairy had an armament that would make a tank blush.
    She kept her sensors aimed at Naturan, but he did indeed lock himself in his room before he began using the com system, trying to get her punished for the rescue in the nick of time.
    Gwyn snickered, it seemed that he had forgotten all about his breaks and bruises.
    The coordinates that Nitza had given the ship were close. Apparently, dumping this pompous windbag was high on her dispatcher’s priorities as well.
    She watched the stars pass as the Blue Fairy accelerated through the dark sky. When the jump site was close, Gwyn opened her eyes wide and took the step from place to place.
    She loved watching the space between jumps. There was nothing like it.
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    The Blue Fairy was in an excellent mood. Gwyn was treated to the peculiar sensation of doing a spiral through space as her delighted ship corkscrewed through the shipping lane.
    “Baby, I know you are happy, but we are on a deadline. We have a new Guardian waiting for us. Can we please go in a straight line?” Gwyn flexed against the implants linking her to the ship.
    A glowing blue light formed in front of her and mimicked the corkscrew pattern.
    “Yes, honey bunny. I know that it is more fun to fly in spirals, but we are on the clock now. I don’t want to put the pressure on, but I will hold you to our deadline. You agreed to it after all.”
    The blue light darkened and dropped until it was inches from the floor.
    “Don’t pout, baby blue. We can go play when we get rid of this next Guardian. Shiver is our duty, and we both know we agreed to play out our duty.”
    The blue spot lightened and increased its elevation until it was even with Gwyn’s nose.
    Gwyn felt the warmth of the ship’s intensity in her mind. Blue was burning hot and bright today. She was excited about something. Perhaps it was the incoming arrival.
    A new Guardian was always exciting, but they were down a guest room courtesy of Naturan. They had to seal off his room and do a power scrub on it, but the bots weren’t done yet. Hopefully, they would finish with the room in a few days. It took time to repair the destruction that one man could do to the ceilings when he was weightless.
    The Blue Fairy took her to the jump site, and Gwyn looked through space before she triggered the engine that took the ship with them. She saw through space and smiled as her mind saw something that she had once only dreamed of.
    Seeing with the implants was different than regular vision, but she didn’t have a basis for comparison. This was the only sensory input that she had gotten that didn’t come through her skin, ears, or nose and mouth. Her hearing and touch had compensated for a lot, but nothing could have prepared her for the sights she was treated to when she opened her eyes that first time.
    It was only when her physicians noticed her squinting that she surrendered to the peculiarity of having to go back into their care and under the laser to fix her near-sighted vision. Before, she had been able to let people examine her eyes and not be nervous, but when she had to look into the red and yellow bursts of the laser, she had felt terror that her newly found vision was going to be stripped away.
    In less than two days, her vision had cleared, and she was able to begin using some of her new accessories. The mechanical and electronic hybrid system connected her optic nerve to her visual cortex in a way that Mother Nature had not bothered to do. Creating that one means of information input had changed her life just in time to turn her into the pilot of a ship with impulse-control issues.
    From the time that she arrived at the Transport Station, two years passed before she was capable with her new accessories and ready to meet the ship generated from her own cells.
    It seemed that