The captain’s intention was clear. Craig went with his escort Sol, the ex-Alliance soldier, to the engine room. He let the thumps of their boots walking through the hallways fill the silence between them; there was no need to jog Sol’s buried memory of him.   

The engine room was like any other heart of a ship: noisy, like static, with a constant whirr in the air - a surprise electricity jolt worsened the welcome. It was metal and grease everywhere. There was a kind of permanent dirtiness to mechanics - their oily black hands, smudges on their skins and a perpetually stained overall - that Craig had never been fond of. It reminded him too much of his birth world: both were besmirched. It had taken him a long time to be scrubbed clean of his past, more or less. He passed Higgin his dinner and shook his unclean hand. “Got one of my own,” he said, pointing a thumb at Sol standing guard nearby. “The last thing I need is for this ship to be stuck in this gorram system. The suits though, I don’t get a good feeling about them.” 

Craig picked up and fooled around with the device Higgin was fixing up with a nonchalance typical of non-mechanics. His eyes subtly scanned the room for any part worth selling. “I don’t like them suits,” he continued. “Not just them but any high-up-there ones. But money’s money, and they always got lots of them. What’s this anyway?” he asked about the device.