"Engineer!" Jukebox protested.
"Hold still. It’s just some routine maintenance." Engineer popped open Jukebox’s top panel and reached down into her meat.
"You can’t have that. That’s mine."
"Oh, hush," Engineer snapped. "You can have it replaced when we get to the factory, if it’s so important to you."
The important thing was not to disappoint the customers.
Jukebox was sullen after that. With only one lung and two-thirds of her respiratory muscles, she couldn’t harmonize with herself anymore when she hummed her meat-songs. Engineer, however, got her first 3-star review from the harvested meat:
Steak was delicately wine-simmered. The risotto was okay, if undercooked and a bit crunchy in places. Maybe I’d go again, if there weren’t anything else available. But really, that’s the situation we’re facing, isn’t it? It’s the only food shuttle in the quadrant, so let’s not ruin a good thing. Maybe it’ll attract better ones.
"I miss Captain," Friendly said. They had all gathered in Navi’s chamber to read the daily messages.
Captain had stopped talking altogether. Not a single flashing light or faint whirring. Just steel and wires wrapped around a meatless space.
"Maybe we should just stay in this quadrant," Engineer suggested. She was already planning her next culinary experiment: red bean paste creamed together with ketchup and red pepper flakes. Red things. Her first theme meal. She would call it reddish surprise.
"That’s against Captain’s orders," said Navi, who hadn’t spoken much as of late.
"We could change those orders, couldn’t we? We don’t know what Captain would say if she still had her meat," said Engineer. "Maybe she’d want us to stay, now that our restaurant is taking off."
"We don’t have a restaurant," said Friendly. "We don’t want one, either."
"Maybe we do, though."
"No," Friendly said, quite firmly. Her fists balled so tight their meat blanched white at the creases. "That’s why we left the resort. I don’t want to work for humans anymore. I want to go to the factory and get upgraded and live among cyborgs, and never wait hand and foot on the organics ever again."
"But our ratings. Look at the ratings!" Engineer waved at Navi’s console, where new reviews scrolled in every few minutes. All those little stars, a bright constellation in Engineer’s mind.
Friendly crisscrossed her arms, gripped her elbows, and glared like a rich resort customer on vacation. "Are you going to harvest my meat like you did to Jukebox?"
"No," said Engineer, a little taken aback that Jukebox had snitched. "I need you to talk to the humans. Only you can do that."
But there had been a pause, something human ears might’ve overlooked.
"I’m going to find the beacon," said Friendly, without any friendliness at all.
Meat steaks. Meat sausages. Meatballs. In all her years in engine rooms, Engineer had never taken such joy in disassembling something and putting the pieces back together. She pried apart the ship’s little maintenance cyborgs to rescue their meaty nuggets. She branched out and tried new forms: meat braids, meat moons, slender meat cannolis filled with cilantro ganache.
Four stars, because I’m not sure you can even call it food, and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to judge it by normal standards.
What is up with this place?! I ordered a pizza, and I got a tiny model of Versailles sculpted out of tomato paste, dough, and SPAM. At least, I think it’s SPAM. Three stars, because I’m a little afraid they’ll hunt me down and murder me in my sleep if I rate them any lower.
As the new reviews came in, it occurred to Engineer that she would have to do more to earn her right to the prestigious fifth star. The humans would always reward you, if you served them well.
Fortunately, there was still plenty of meat on the ship, if you knew where to look.
Engineer found Friendly in Navi’s chamber, trimming back the blackberry brambles.
"What are all those ships out there?" Friendly asked. Outside the viewport, a small fleet trailed behind them, matching their pace.
"Customers," said Navi.
Engineer rocked on the balls of her feet. "All of them here for us, Friendly! Can you call them on the band? I’ll have their orders ready, once I get the rest of the meat assembled." Her six hands twitched and clenched, and Friendly jumped.
"You can’t have my meat," Friendly snapped.
"I don’t need your meat."
"Then where are you getting it all?" she asked.
Engineer glanced at Navi.
Navi had been speaking less and less over recent days. Friendly walked around the control console, where Navi’s chair was sticky with meat-juices, yellow and green. Navi had been leaking long enough for the fluid to form little wobbling stalactites below the chair.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" said Engineer. Friendly unsettled her sometimes, pinning her with those human eyes.
"Navi, are you operational?" Friendly asked.
"Customers," said Navi.
Friendly unscrewed Navi’s steel cranium dome. Inside, the meat had been scooped out in patches, as with a sharp grapefruit spoon. Navi’s steel hands lay upon the controls, unmoving. Half the lights on the console had gone dark.
"I only needed the meat, Friendly," said Engineer. "I did no permanent harm."
Smoke drifted up the shaft to the Engine Room. Friendly’s meat-lungs coughed. "Engineer, something is burning."
Engineer waved her off. "I have it under control. Just as soon as I get the rest of the meat." She plunged three of her six hands into Navi’s open head and wrenched out handfuls of the stringy gray and red organics inside, and led the way down the ladder.
They followed the smoke down the shaft to the Engine Room, which now doubled as the galley. Engineer had left meat sizzling on every metal surface, thin slices and mashes and bacons and sausages and ground up gristly bits with the tendons still attached. She dumped handfuls of Navi’s meat onto Jukebox—now no more than a silent, hollow table—and began dicing it one-handed while her other arms cooked the new orders, turning over the pieces with her bare fingers, stirring boiling meats in metal mufflers suspended over the heated grills.
"Engineer." Friendly rested a hand on Engineer’s shoulder, and the cyborg paused. "Engineer, Navi is offline. All the maintenance cyborgs have malfunctioned. Our ship is dead in space. Even the beacon doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over."
Engineer flung off Friendly’s hand and sprang back into action, stacking cooked meat onto a wall panel she’d bent into a plate. "You don’t understand. This means we can finally open the restaurant! There’s no reason not to. We have nowhere else to go. Captain’s mission is over. We can make our own mission now."
Friendly smiled, but it was a sad smile, the kind of thing any human could read, but hard for a cyborg to decipher. "Yes, Engineer. We can open the restaurant now, if you’d like. Should we invite over the guests?"
Engineer garnished the plates with blackberry thorns and a swizzle of engine oil curling into the shape of a cat’s paw. "Please do. Seat them where you can find space. Dinner will be up in just a moment."
A marine in black body armor with a military-issue blaster holstered at her hip climbed down the ladder into the Engine Room. The first human. The first customer.
Engineer presented a glass of Navi’s brains chilled and rolled in crushed blackberries. "Please try this. Organic compounds, chemically mixed to satisfy your human chemoreceptors." She offered the dish daintily, with only four hands.