Long Haul Ch. 01

//Author's Note: Huge thanks to my good friends KatieTay and SkullTitti for their help in translations and tone! This story could not have been possible without their patience and assistance!//

Wren sat back in her chair, with her bowl of cereal resting on the top center of her chest, and put her feet up on the console. "So," she said, in between bites. The man on the other end of the call drummed his fingers impatiently, seeming to grow more frustrated every time she chewed. She furrowed her brow and stared out through the front viewport. And then took another bite.

"Come on, Wren."

Wren held up her right index finger, spoon tucked against her palm while she chewed, but that just seemed to irritate him even further.

"It's a good offer."

Wren scrunched her face while she chewed, and leaned her head from side to side.

"We're already way over market value here."

"The-uh ish no mawket foh thish," Wren said, fixing him with a disapproving stare. She swallowed and ran the tip of her tongue through her molars. "It's one of a kind. Look, I can sell the ore to someone else if you don't want what I come back with."

"Of course we want it," the man said irritably. "But that's not the only thing we want. Let us take the whole unit off your hands."

Wren scooped another bite of cereal, and gave him a flat stare as she chewed.

"Fine! 145!"

"Goodbye, Julien."

"Wait!" he cried, as Wren brought her bare heel down on a wide green button.

The call cut out and Wren smiled to herself. It was a muted smile. A subtle tightening of a few muscles at the tops of her cheeks. She slid her spoon into the bowl and reached over to tap rapidly on a keyboard at the edge of her reach. She'd passed scans, and departure was authorized. A few more taps, followed by a palm scan, and the maglock system released its hold. A hollow thud rang through the Daedalus.

Wren merely sat there in her chair, monitoring as the autopilot backed them away from the dock and swooped gracefully through space. She spent a few seconds scooping through the dregs, gathering all the last bits of her cereal in one bite. Her ship soared through the first navpoint, an intangible point in the vacuum surrounding Luna, while staying well within the approved exit channel. She looked down at her empty bowl and frowned.

"Nah" she said, deciding out loud against a second bowl right away. She set it down beside her chair, reclined, and logged in. She had hours to kill, traveling at sublight, before she reached the Minimum Safe Distance Jump Point, and took note that she'd slipped three places in the competitive standings while she'd been taking care of actual business.

***

Her console lit up when she finally passed the second navpoint, and Wren was surprised that so much time had passed. She didn't want to take another hit in her standings by quitting early so she had to wait to engage the jump. Quantum communications cost many times more than what she'd paid for her whole ship, which meant she had to stay in n-space if she wanted to play.

The HUD in front of her had multiple layers for important information; team score, personal score, and the number of players remaining. Her team had been ahead all match. All they had to do was hunker down and hold on, but in their desperation the enemy had become bold: resurgent in the waning minutes. Dozens of them ranged forward across the randomly-generated terrain, sacrificing a few points with each hit for the chance to knock out another of Wren's teammates, and if they eliminated enough of her compatriots the battle was lost.

The avatar beside her charged out to meet the nearest enemy and Wren followed right behind him. Dozens of balls flew past her, near as she was to her own team's front line, and her blood sang in her veins as she engaged a much bigger opponent. Her tactic was always the same; delay, delay, delay. Block, dodge, and stun. All she had to do was hold an enemy in place while they were pelted repeatedly, without being eliminated herself, and she would still contribute a net gain to her team's score even if they did end up getting the best of her eventually.

As the timer ticked down below a minute, her opponent's attacks became frenzied. Reckless. Wren smiled. Her own avatar was small, fast, and gifted in the art of the counter-attack. She ducked under a particularly wild roundhouse punch and went after the brute's knee. Her opponent dropped hard, and Wren quickly clamored onto his back to deliver a rare killing stroke. Her score soared.

A moment later, death came for her too. An enemy she hadn't seen attacked from behind, finishing the job that the first brute could not, but it was too late to matter. Wren sat back as her perspective joined the throng of spectators, and she gleefully counted down the final seconds.

Victory felt good, and Wren was feeling pretty positive as she logged out and entered her authorization code. The twinkling lights of distant stars blurred and swirled as the Daedalus shifted into t-space. Wren remained in the cabin for another minute, watching a few critical gauges that monitored hull integrity and her GA drive core, and nodded in vague approval.

A blinking light caught her eye just as she started to move. Apparently she'd received an in-game message right before shifting. She opened it and frowned.

'Finally got u back'

Wren thought she might have recognized the sender as the player who'd come up behind her at the tail end of the match, but she had no idea what wrong they thought they were righting.

She put her feet back down into her unlaced sneakers and flexed her toes, gripping the inner sole as she stood up. Her unruly hair swept across her brow, and Wren puffed out her cheeks and blew upwards in mild irritation. The blue curls were just starting to reach her eyes again, and she lamented not taking the time to stop at the station and have it cut professionally.

She stretched as she moved back through her quarters, trying in vain to fight back a yawn. Her oversized t-shirt draped over her frame, covering down to her thighs and completely hiding the dark blue shorts underneath. She frowned as she looked down at herself, suddenly realizing she wasn't sure where or when she'd acquired the shirt, with the large number nine in green lettering on the front and back. That got her thinking, and she came to a stop when she realized she wasn't sure where her shorts had come from either.

Her shoes, at least, she could account for.

Wren hopped nonchalantly down the stairs, not quite skipping and not quite dancing, and into the galley. Her stride had a cadence to it, but it was ill-defined and varying. She briefly cleaned her bowl and spoon, scrubbing them with a dry soap and vacuuming up the flakes, and left them to sit under the UV lamp. The orange and red tabby gave her a dirty look as it got up and stalked away, but Wren merely shrugged.

She couldn't think of a good reason to skip her morning workout, and headed into her makeshift exercise room.

***

Thirty minutes later, a much-sweatier Wren exited the galley with a towel draped around her neck and another bowl in her hands. Blue curls matted to her skull. She came to a stop just inside the hold and looked around.

The Daedalus was a decommissioned TriMark XN-92, and had begun its life as a UNS gunship designed for a crew of ten-to-fifteen. The piloting and use of the ship had then been automated enough to be crewed by just one, and much of the space normally taken up by the ground and gunnery crews, their gear, and the necessary supplies for so many, was taken up by her own proprietary equipment. At least half of the hold was occupied by two massive computer banks and the control unit for her sensor array. The rest of the hold was packed meticulously, with enough supplies to last her nearly a decade on her own.

Wren leaned against the railing, on the catwalk overlooking the hold, and chewed. It occurred to her that she'd forgotten to double check the manifest, but she wasn't likely to use any of the provisions she'd bought for a long, long time; they were backups for the backups to the backups of the backups. It wasn't a pressing concern, and more importantly, she had a lot of time to kill before she got to her real destination. If she took care of everything right up front, she'd have nearly a week to pass in boredom.

She chewed slowly, stretching out even the act of eating, and let her eyes unfocus. Time had less meaning when she could afford to let it slide by. After she finished her bowl, she walked back through the galley to the head. She frowned as she stood in front of the urinal, cock in hand, at how yellow her urine was, and tried to remember how much water she'd taken in since waking.

Or if she'd had any at all. She was back on the catwalk a few minutes later, sipping from a glass with a flat expression.

The hold was her favorite place on the ship. In addition to housing her custom, proprietary hardware (of which she was extremely proud), the room had an aesthetic and a sound that appealed to her that she had difficulty defining. It had a feel to it. It was by far the room she spent the most time in and, despite having converted one of the unused crew bunks into a meditation space, the hold was where she did most of her thinking.

There was probably something to the idea, she thought, that circling the hold on the catwalk made her feel powerful. Like she was up on high, looking down on the rest of her belongings, like an ancient lord over their fiefdom. She also liked that it absorbed the sound of her footsteps; the catwalk didn't creak or groan. The Daedalus was a solid ship.

Wren lost track of how many circuits around the catwalk she'd made when she first noticed one of the crates in the second aisle was open. She slowed to a stop and stared; a lid was slightly askew. Barely misaligned, almost insignificantly so, and yet there was a metaphorical buzzing in her ear. A nagging. It shouldn't be like that. Owens, her foodstuffs guy, was as meticulous as they came. All the packages are individually sealed, she thought, so it isn't like anything is going bad anytime soon, but still...

Wren blinked and started walking again, doing her best to look anywhere else, and just as she reached the door she saw a red blur coming up over the railing beside her. A human-shaped blur. She stepped through and shut the door behind her, and then tapped a few buttons on the console to lock it. And then took another sip of her water. The door thudded dully, and Wren looked up in the air thoughtfully as she tried to remember which other doors might need to be shut in the case of an intruder.

She calmly walked through the galley, into her quarters, and shut that door behind her. And then did the same in the cabin. Wren sat down in her captain's chair while she thought. Then she tapped at the console on her left.

"—right now! Do you hear me?! I'll fucking—"

Wren turned off the PA system and sat back while she sipped. After a minute, she made a soft 'oh' sound, and turned toward the console on her left. Her brow knitted in confusion as she tried to remember where the security camera system was within the dizzying array of menus and controls available to her.

Eventually the screen popped up in front of her, a two-dimensional holographic UI. Wren frowned, though, as she found herself staring down the length of the port side, with the eye-wrenching, blue-black blur of t-space as they passed through it. Or is it that t-space passes around us? she thought. I can never remember. She grunted as she cycled through the available cameras, all external, and found herself right back where she started; staring down the length of the port side.

Wren grumbled as she got up and grabbed one of the indexes from the shelf. And then sighed as she put that one back and grabbed a different one.

"Internal, internal, internal," she mumbled, as she sifted through a lengthy list. "No... no..." One hand typed while her eyes read, following poorly-worded instructions. She blinked and looked up, almost surprised to be looking at a fuzzy, out-of-focus view of her meditation room. "Huh." She stared at the list for a moment more, and tapped experimentally at the control panel in front of her. "Oh! Cool." Meditation room. Galley. Galley. Galley. Hold. "Coooool." After putting the index back on the shelf, Wren sat back down with her cereal and watched for a while.

***

Wren looked up from the index with a glint in her eye, and pushed the final button. In the corner of the frame, a door on the far end of the hold opened up. She smirked as she re-engaged the PA system, and leaned forward.

"Are you still there?"

No response, and no movement. The redhead had retreated somewhere the cameras couldn't find her.

"I thought you might be getting hungry, so I put some food through that door."

"In the airlock?"

"It's chocolate frosted cake!"

"Very funny."

Wren smiled softly to herself, and followed the instructions to shut the door again.

"Good to know I'm stuck in here with a sadist."

"Funny you should mention that."

"Funny how?" Strain in the redhead's voice.

"I couldn't help but notice, when you were trying to punch your way through my door earlier, you were favoring your right side."

"So?"

"Well, the resolution on these cameras is crazy good. I had no idea how good, actually, until I was trying to look at you. Like I can zoom all the way in. It's really neat."

"滚蛋!" shouted the voice. "How about this? Can you see this?"

Wren frowned and stared, and then cycled through the hold cameras again. On the fifth camera, she saw a hand sticking out from behind a few boxes with the middle finger extended.

"I can, actually."

"Good for you."

"Short story long, I saw the blood on your shirt there."

"...and?"

"And have you been shot recently?"

No answer.

"It looked like you've been shot, and I couldn't see an exit wound."

No answer.

"So here's the thing. I don't know who you are and I don't know how you got on my ship, so there's kind of a trust thing going on that's preventing me from just helping you outright."

"I didn't ask for your help."

"Well, I'm kind of already doing it."

"Doing what?"

"There's a greater than zero percent chance that I've been having the recycling system pump pure nitrogen into the cargo hold for the better part of an hour. I'm not sure if you're feeling it yet, but you will pretty soon."

"You're cutting off my oxygen?!"

"A little, yeah."

"That's fucking psychotic."

"A little, yeah." Wren took another bite of cereal and leaned forward. "Thing is, I'm not steppin' in they-uh unwess I'm sho-wah you-wah unconshus."

"Are you eating right now?"

"You're gonna wanna step out in fwont of one of the camewas so I can watch you pass out."

"Oh my god, you are a sadist!"

"Listen. If you want to suffocate in they-uh..." Wren paused to swallow. "Be my guest. Oxygen deprivation is a pretty easy cleanup, all things considered. If you want me to take care of that bullet in your side, though..."

"Is there a doctor on board?"

"Nope."

"Medic?"

"Nope."

"Is it just you?"

"Yup."

"Have you ever removed a bullet before?"

"Nope."

"他妈的 !"

Wren took another bite of cereal and watched.

"I hope I'm not interrupting your meal time or anything."

"No no," Wren said, mouth still half-full. "We've got time. That's a big room, so thinning out the oxygen is gonna take a while. I think."

"This is so fucked up!"

"Do you want to tell me how you got shot?"

No answer.

"How about why you're on my ship?"

No answer.

"How about how you got on my ship?"

No answer. After a few seconds, the redhead's hand popped out again with the middle finger extended.

"Ok. Your funeral."

Wren sat back and propped her feet up as she dug deeper into her bowl.

"我肏."

"It's cool that you speak Chinese."

"你做?"

Wren frowned, inferring from tone that there was a question in there she couldn't answer.

"啊呀!无知的虐待女人!我肏!"

A few more minutes passed. Wren referred to the index one more time, changing it so that the PA played throughout the rest of the ship, and went down into the galley to clean up.

"Are you still there?"

"I'm not sure if the mic can pick me up from—"

"Hey! Are you still there!?

"Guess not," Wren mumbled.

"Hey!"

"Hey, I moved in front of the camera, alright?!"

"I'm here! Hey! Hey, you fucking psycho!"

***

Wren stood at the bulkhead door, just outside of the hold, dressed almost completely in her exosuit —minus the helmet, which was tucked under her arm— and tapped through one of the control menus. She got the video feed to come up, and sure enough the redhead was sitting glumly in front of the third camera.

"Can you hear me now?" Wren said.

No response.

She frowned and changed a few settings.

"How about now?"

"我的妈呀!" the redhead rasped, head lifting a little.

"Hey! Alright! Finally!"

"I can... I can barely..."

"Hey. Real quick. Before you pass out. When you were shot, was it someone you knew?"

The redhead looked up in confusion.

"Like a friend?"

"Yeah." The redhead's chest rose and fell quickly, but her eyes drooped. " Yeah, it was... it..."

"Good enough. See you on the other side."

The redhead slumped back against the rack behind her, and that was all Wren needed to see.

***

"Ow," groaned the redhead. "What is that... Are-are we under attack?"

"You can hear that?" Wren asked, without looking away from her screen.

"Yes!"

"I was playing a game. Didn't realize that was broadcasting over the PA too" —Wren cut her eyes to the side— "although does explain some of the echoes I was hearing."

The redhead grit her teeth and grunted as she tried to sit up. "I can come back later if this is an inconvenient time."

"No no." Wren paused her game and stretched. "That was just a fun run against some AI. No penalty for quitting."

"It felt like I was drowning in air."

"Yeah." She folded her hands behind her head and reclined. "I would be sorry about that except there was this whole thing earlier today where someone broke into my ship, and it's just kind of soured my mood, you know?"

"Still, that was kind of-oh!"

"Hey, in case you didn't know, you have stitches."

"Got it," the redhead whimpered. "I'm not moving."

"I don't have any equipment for IVs, so you're probably low on fluids. I left you some bottles, and you're gonna want to drink. The manuals all said lots of fluid."

The redhead nodded and opened one, but only sipped as best she could while still on her back.

After a few minutes of quiet, Wren said, "I dig your sleeves."

The redhead looked down at herself. "My what?"

"The tattoos, I mean."

"Oh."

"They're pretty."

"Did you have to get me naked to pull a bullet out of me?"

"I guess I didn't have to, per se."

"Fuck."

"You probably can't see, but I was making air quotes." The redhead grumbled unintelligibly for a moment, and Wren smiled. "You've been shot a few times, huh?"