[snip]

Mark stepped in. “You’re back earl…” He stopped and blinked, his eyes flicking nervously around and about the quarters and Rick’s ‘new’ stuff. He hadn’t noticed Nessa yet. “Um, what is this stuff? Where is that goi..” he cut out as he suddenly noticed Nessa and started, backing into the corner. “What have you got? Did you smuggle that onboard? You can’t hide a dog?! And .. here?” It looked like he was almost on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Easy. This is Nessa. She got .. mislabeled and loaded here instead. I’m .. ” he took a breath and said, “I’m looking after her.”

“Here?”

“Why not?”

“There’s all this stuff? And look at the size of that … bed?” Rick sighed as he looked at it too.

“You never had a pet?”

“No. On a boomer ship we didn’t have them.” Mark crawled around, picking his way through the stuff and climbed up to his bunk. “Just glad you know about pets.” Rick didn’t meet Mark’s eyes in that statement and turned away his tablet that he had open to ‘basics of dog ownership’. Slowly Rick moved about, finding places to stow Nessa’s things in his locker, stuffing Nessa’s bed as best he could between the corner where Mark had hidden and the door. Her food and water he put in the opposite corner not far off of their corridor to the facilities. Being the ‘engineer’ he a affixed a small night light over it so that they wouldn’t trip over it in the dark. He found the food dispenser fascinating as an engineer and poked and played with it to figure how it worked. “You’re going to break it,” Mark said, watching him from above.

“I’m not going to break it. I’m an engineer. We don’t break things.” Under his breath he muttered. “Yeah, Rick, don’t break it.”

“You said her name is Nessa?”

“Yeah, she’s a MACO dog. Has the rank of Sergeant. So she kinda outranks us.”

“MACO? You mean she might bite me?” Still nervous.

Rick glanced up. “No. She’s not like that. More a sniffer dog and support dog.” Okay, he lied. She could bite and sounded like she’d take them all out back in the cargo bay. Nessa had Sasha terrified. “I’ll take her along on shift, um, I hope. I’ll talk to the chief about that. She’s bright. I’m thinking she can be helpful.”

“You’re good with dogs?” Mark asked.

“Yeah, great. Barb’s family has them. Real used to them.” Well, okay, another lie.

“What about when she has to, you know, does she use the facilities? I’ve heard some cats can do that.”

“We walk in the arboretum,” Rick said, pushing out more confidence than he had on that. It was smaller than he had hoped but it did the trick.

So this went on with Rick getting rather more flustered but eventually opted to just go to sleep, figuring that Nessa would wake him if she had to hit that arboretum again. But he lay awake worrying on whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. But something in him had to take care of this dog. He’d wake early and study.

With things setup by Rick once she saw her bed had been setup and no orders to do so came she defaulted it seemed to deciding to go lay down herself. After a bit of shuffling on the plush bed for comfort the dog was soon out like a light.

Of course eventually the night did pass and morning came. Almost to the second Nessa awoke at 0500 in the morning. Without skipping a beat the dog moved over to its water and food feeder and by pressing a paw on each in turn was able to get its morning meal and a healthy drink. If neither of the two occupants of the room were yet awake Nessa then finished with her morning meal went back to her bed where she laid back down but this time stayed awake as if on alert looking towards the door to the quarters and the two sleeping occupants in it.

GM CockRoach