by F P Adriani
My mouth twisted a little now. “It seems you and I have a history of winding up with people we’re not suited to. How do we know we wouldn’t be next on the list?”
His brown eyebrows rose, but he took a step closer to me. “You really think that? Because I don’t.”
“I don’t know what to think, to be honest. I think that, deep-down, I’ve always felt something here.” I jerked a finger in the space between us. “But by the time I started realizing what I was feeling, you were part of my crew, and I’ve always had a rule about not getting involved with my crew.”
“Well, you’ve gotten involved with Babs—and I know not sexually. But people can’t help their emotions.”
I felt the pressure of tears behind my eyes now, because…he was right. That Babs was leaving was hurting me a lot more than it should have been for “just an employee.”
I lifted my sad eyes right to Gary’s eyes now. “Why didn’t you say how you felt sooner—like years sooner!”
“Because of what you just said: you weren’t interested. I could tell that. I think everyone could.”
“Who’s everyone—you mean people know?!?” My face felt like it was totally red now, and I wasn’t sure which embarrassed me more: my red face in front of Gary, or the idea that my crew knew how Gary felt about me while I did not know.
Now Gary said, “I’m sure some know—no, I know some do. Babs, for one.” He rolled his eyes, and they finally fell right on my face. “Even though we debated sometimes, I felt like she was an ally on this, and now she’ll be gone.”
I couldn’t help frowning. “I hope we’ll be gone from here soon already, and everything goes all right afterward.”
Quite quickly now and in one motion, Gary’s whole body turned away from me. “I’ll get on the installation prep right away to make sure everything goes perfectly. Especially if I’m going to be up here….” There was a question in his statement—and, more importantly, in the soft brown eyes he turned on me.
It took me a moment to build up the nerve, but I finally moved closer to him and laid a hand on one of his bare forearms, which hand then slipped into his hand, into his warm hand. “Gary, this feels strange…but, I think I’ll get used to it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it before.”
His eyebrows were up again, and there was a delicious smile around his wide mouth and heavy mustache. “Really?” he said. “I’d like to hear what you thought then, and what you’re thinking now….”
“Oh my—” I laughed lightly “—not sure I should go into that on the bridge!”
“Then I really want to hear it,” he said.
We were both laughing now, and then a moment later we were both finally closing the gap between us, till we kissed for the second time ever—and I soon realized how much better this kiss was than the first one, and then I was soon closing the bridge doors, and locking them.
*
In order to get the Pelchrist installation done as efficiently as possible, Cambridge imported some engineers and other workers from Blue Station; then they, a few of Cambridge’s own people and Gary and my other engineering crew made the installation. It took them days to finish that and all of the post-installation testing involved, and to weld up the hull too.
Ten days after the Demeter first landed on Genteran, my crew and I said a happy goodbye to Genteran and a tearful (on my end) goodbye to Babs, and then the rest of us were finally on our way to Sereska Station—and then I began developing panic-attack feelings.
Gary was now at his new—and hopefully permanent—perch on my bridge, but no matter his repeated assurances to me about the core installation and the hull repair, I was having a hard time believing that the hull would survive the first space-flume trip to The Sereska Layer.
This would be the hull’s first real test; lifting off through an atmosphere was one thing, and the hull had resisted the immense forces of that just fine when we left Genteran.
However, a planet was generally spherical, so in many cases a planet could effectively be treated as a point mass with predictable uniform forces around it, which was almost never the case for space flumes: they were an entirely different thing to physically navigate. Though the flumes did most of the work, the extreme forces inside them were often unpredictable in direction because the space flume shapes were fluidly unpredictable.
As we approached the Sereska flume now, Gary was behind me at his new station on my right, and Chen was in front of me at his usual station on my left; the three of us were coordinating with Steve down in engineering, who had been sending commands over his computer to the new reactor.
“This feels weird,” he said suddenly over the intercom.
My heart began galloping a bit wildly. “What feels weird, Steve?” I asked fast.
“Gary up there, me down here,” Steve said. “How many times have we navigated flumes while working together?”
“We’re still working together,” Gary said. “We’re just displaced in space with respect to the ship. Speaking of displacement, I’m getting too much variance in the primary heat coil beside the beam engine.”
“I see it,” Steve said, but he said it in a way that was a bit too tart.
Gary let out a low laugh. “Getting territorial already?”
Steve’s louder laugh came over the intercom line. And then Chen and I joined the laughter.
I was smiling now as I worked my captain’s panel, checking various areas around the ship, including the cargo bay; May had just sent me back an everything’s-in-place-for-Sereska text-message.
Now I just hoped everything was in place for my whole damn ship….
We finally entered the flume to Sereska, and I could feel sweat dripping down the sides of my face as Gary and Steve got into a companionable duel over how best to navigate the flume, which actually wound up saving me from having a heart attack.
I never thought that they would be so funny while working at “opposite” ends like this, and their humorous banter took away some of the sting that a missing Babs had caused me. The camaraderie of the two men also took away the stress of their and Chen’s maneuvers inside the superfast moving space flume. I didn’t pay as much attention to the technical aspects of the trip through, and, when the shearing forces almost approached the tolerance-level rating on the hull, I just went with the flow of Gary’s and Steve’s banter through the danger—and then the next thing I knew, the Demeter was shooting out of the flume and all of the hull sensors were reading fine on my panel, and on the engineering and science panels, too.
“You can stop holding your breath now, Lydia,” Gary said on one of his trademark low laughs.
I glanced over my right shoulder at him and gave him a quick, slightly shaky smile. He seemed to know me very well now, but then that wasn’t surprising: for days we had been spending quite a bit of delicious time in his cabin whenever we could find the time….
I turned back to the front of the bridge; I stared at the wide viewscreen there, at the mostly black space outside the Demeter, at the pinpoints of bright stars and planets.
I always marveled at how vast everything was. Though humans had reached many very far places, the Universe still seemed never-ending, unknowable. My crew and I had encountered strange things on Genteran, and the people there would now be living with that strangeness more intimately. However, there were probably even more strange things in the rest of the Universe. There might even be more dangerous things, too.
For sure, there were pluses and minuses out here. But who knew what excitement might come up next? That navigating the unknown—that was really what always kept me coming out into space.
My eyes still on the vastness beyond my ship, I smiled widely now, both at myself and at everything my ship was, because no matter what might happen during any future experiences with the unknown, after everything that my crew and I had been through together, I was pretty sure that we would be ready for those new experiences.
Firestone
My crew a
nd I were on our way to one of the largest space stations in the galaxy when Chen told me he and May wanted to get married at the station.
I was in my black captain’s chair on my bridge; my boyfriend Gary was behind me and on my right at his science station. And now he and I both said to Chen at the exact same time, “Congratulations!”
I grinned at Chen. “Will you want a bigger room? There’s the junk room on the first maintenance deck—it’s been needing a cleaning for, well, years now. It’s quite big, so we could refit it as an apartment. Would you be interested in it?”
“Yes!” Chen said, nodding rapidly, his shiny dark hair shimmering beneath the bridge’s bright overhead lights. He was sitting on my left in his red pilot’s chair, and he swiveled it toward me now. “I’ll have to discuss it with May of course. But we’ve been bouncing back-and-forth between each other’s cabins—” Chen cleared his throat, through a rapidly reddening face.
He and May had first gotten involved months ago, but I hadn’t noticed their relationship for most of those months, which I considered both a testament to my being somewhat out of touch with the social life of my crew, and a testament to how professional my crew were: they were able to keep their private lives separate from their work lives, even when they lived where they worked for most of the year.
“Well then,” I said now, getting up from my chair, “there’s no time like the present.” I looked at Gary. “Can you handle things here by yourself for a little while?”
“No problem,” Gary said, smiling at me, his heavy brown mustache curving with his mouth in a very pleasing-for-me way.
For a long moment, I couldn’t take my eyes from him; I was feeling something I didn’t want to feel at the moment, that I didn’t want to think about at the moment.
Quickly now, I turned back to Chen and said, “Let’s go take a look at the junk room.”
*
As Chen and I moved toward the Demeter’s upper decks, I thought of The M-Word. Both Gary and I had taken the plunge with other people years ago, which plunges wound up being mistakes. But, I had finally hooked up with Gary a few months ago, and since then, The M-Word had occasionally popped into my mind—and then popped right out, probably because I made it pop right out, especially before it could pop out of my mouth.
Still, marriage was something that even couples in today’s modern, zipping-across-the-galaxy times usually considered at some point. It seemed the human heart hadn’t evolved as fast as our technology had….
I wondered if the dynamic on my ship would soon change yet again; I’d recently lost Babs, my science expert. I hoped I wouldn’t now be losing both my pilot and the director of my cargo bay.
Chen and May were still fairly young. Chen didn’t have any family on Earth; I wondered if he was planning on creating a family, but I didn’t want to pry by asking him about that.
Also, because of some crazy recent events, my crew and I had been forced to stay at Sereska Station longer than I’d planned. We had to do more maintenance on the Demeter’s engines and other parts there, which meant I’d never gotten to take a break on Pink; nor had my crew gotten to take one on Aper Minor. We were even more overworked—and overstressed—than normal, so I’d scheduled us to go back to Earth soon for an extended break. But now I worried that an extended break there might lead to a permanent stay for Chen and May….
When I finally stepped onto the Demeter’s first maintenance deck, I reached for my new belt. I normally wore a leggings-and-shirt type of “uniform,” as I was wearing now. But I’d recently changed my usual belt to a captain’s tool belt. It was soft yet kind of cage-like; the flexible red fabric fitted above my hips and slightly onto my hips, and it contained several nice-sized pockets and built-in devices.
My fingers now slid along the stretchy fabric, in search of my built-in communicator. “May,” I said, glancing down at my belt, “Chen told me your news—congratulations! We’re taking a look at one of the junk rooms upstairs. I’m offering it to the two of you, once we clean it up. You want to check it out now?”
“Oh, Lydia, that sounds great!” May said over my communicator. “But, since we left with the cargo from Vitalia, somehow I misplaced one of the containers of columite we picked up from Sereska. I’ve had to move a bunch of containers to look for it. I’m sorry, Lydia….”
“Don’t worry about it—you’ll find it. Where the hell could it have gone anyway—into a black hole?” I laughed softly at my own words.
“It’s just so frustrating,” May said, in a voice vibrating with said-frustration. “I’m so careful about staying organized.”
“I know. That’s why you’re on my ship and why I want to keep you here!” I blurted out. My face felt a bit red as I turned to Chen beside me. I did not want to pressure either of them, but I was afraid that I had indeed just pressured both of them. I said fast now, “Come up if you can when you’re done, May, all right?”
“Yes!” she said, and I saw Chen smile. His cheeks were a little red, and really, I’d never seen him looking happier.
I clicked off my communicator, and Chen and I reached the junk room. I opened the black control-panel beside the metal door so I could unlock the room. I usually kept most of the rooms on my ship locked; I trusted my crew, but, occasionally, I had paying passengers on here; or cargo-loading workers and other staff as new, temporary crewmembers, as I had right now. So I generally followed a lock-the-rooms policy as much as possible, especially in certain parts of space, and where we were now was one of those certain parts.
I punched my captain’s code into the junk-room’s electronic panel; then I turned on the heat inside the room and unlocked the door. It slid open—but only a little of the way.
“Yikes,” I said. “Could the workings in the wall be rusted?”
“Yeah,” Chen replied. He was beside me now, pressing his palms to the door, right near where I had just pressed mine.
My face reddened as we tried to slide open the door more, but my reddening state wasn’t only because I was physically straining myself; I was embarrassed that I’d offered this room to Chen when I couldn’t even get the fucking door open.
Chen hit some buttons on the control-panel and we worked together for another moment, applying pressure to the door again, till there was a loud sucking sound and the door finally opened all the way.
Other than a shaft of light sliding in from the hallway, the room was quite dark inside. But the lights on the ceiling should have come on automatically. When I tried to flick them on now using the interior switch right inside the doorway, the lights wouldn’t work.
“Oh christ,” I said, glancing at Chen’s profile. He was standing in the doorway, and I could have sworn I saw a laugh bubbling behind his face. “Not much of an offer, huh?” I said to him now, my mouth curling into a wavy line.
His laugh finally came out. “It’s no secret that this ship is getting up there in years.”
“I know,” I said on a frown. “It’s due for a major remodeling. Might as well start here!” I pressed my belt communicator for my lead engineer. “Steve, I can’t get the lights to come on in the junk room on Maintenance One. Are the bulbs out or is it the switches and panels? Can you get me some light in here—”
“Hang on, Captain,” Steve said. A pause. Then: “The sensors are showing the panels are fine. But I’m getting some bulb problems, yeah. When was the last time you updated the workings in the bulb-canopy?”
“Um…I have no idea. But it’s clearly too long a time, probably from before you started working here…. Never mind, Steve. We’ll get flashlights from the closet down the hall. But, add the canopy-repair to your list of side-tasks.”
“Will do,” Steve said.
Chen and I now went to the hall maintenance closet and removed two flashlights (which were both working—hooray!); then we went back to the junk room.
I walked in first, sliding the beam of my flashlight over the room’s contents, then sliding a few of those contents out of my way
. “I probably should have organized this space better,” I mumbled, not expecting a response from Chen, and I didn’t get one. “Let’s clear a path to the other end—so you can get a better idea of the room’s size and shape.”
“Thanks, Lydia—it looks like it’ll be great.”
“I hope so,” I said, feeling a little breeze of warmish air touch my face as the room’s heating system started up for the first time in a long time.
Chen and I attached our flashlights to our clothes now—my light to my captain’s belt, his light to the belt of his black pants—and the two beams fell on an old panel-table. Years ago, I’d had someone move it from a closet in the cargo bay to up here. The table must have been part of the bridge from before I’d bought the Demeter: the tabletop’s rim was a metallic brown, which some of the fittings and decorations on the bridge still were. But, someone had changed much of the bridge to a newer, brighter, redder style—probably so the ship would look nicer and entice a buyer, who wound up being me….
Now I said to Chen, “I think we should start by moving some stuff to the emptier closets in the hall—should have probably sold some of this shit to a scrap hauler years ago! I just hate to get rid of things.”
The panel-table had roller balls on the bottom, but they were old and stiff, so when Chen and I tried to use them now, the table would only move an inch or two at a time.
“We’ll be here all day like this,” I said on a groan. “Let’s lift it—it doesn’t feel too heavy.” Both of my hands were beneath the table’s top, at the corners where two of the legs were. But Chen was stronger than I, so when he lifted his end, it wound up higher than my end. I instinctively pushed forward toward the table—and hit the frame beneath the table’s top, knocking a part of the frame open; it was actually a small drawer, which hadn’t been visible before it fell open.
