Long Haul Ch. 01

"None of your business, 吃屎."

"Hey, there's always cake in the airlock if you get hungry."

The redhead chuckled morbidly. "If you could just see your way to letting me off wherever you stop next, I promise you'll never see me again."

"I'm not sure that's going to help," Wren said, furrowing her brow.

"I can handle myself."

"No, I have no doubts that you can take a bullet as well as anyone, but the next stop is right back where we were. Luna Two."

"Wha-Ow!"

"Hey, just so you know, you have stitches."

The redhead weakly lifted both arms into the air, middle fingers extended, and flashed them in just about every direction. Wren hopped up and grabbed the index from the shelf again, and toyed with more of the PA settings.

"Hey."

"Yeah?"

"I think I need to rest. Can you, like, turn down some of these lights?"

"That is a great question." Wren looked at the index. "I bet I could. You'd be surprised how much I can control from up here."

"Considering I just survived having all the oxygen sucked out of here, I bet I won't be 'surprised'."

Wren nodded slowly. "Good point."

***

Wren grunted through her last sit-up, and then fell back flat against the mat. "...and then I don't think I got it cut again until I was... I don't know. Nineteen?"

"Thrilling."

"Yeah, I don't know." She took a long drink from her bottle and stretched. "I think I just like it shorter, better."

"How long have you been out here by yourself?"

"I haven't been by myself," she scoffed. "I've got Mr. Cat."

"And have you ever given your cat a fifteen minute monologue about the history of your hairstyles?"

"He helps me workshop all of my material."

"I'm sorry. Backup. Did you say your cat is named 'Mr. Cat'?"

Wren shrugged as she sat up. "Seemed appropriate. He doesn't seem to mind."

"You know, I actually hope he told you that he doesn't mind it, because that would be less crazy. 'You hallucinating a talking cat' would make perfect sense right now."

Wren sat very still and looked around. "I'm not hallucinating you, am I?"

"Feel free to open up that bulkhead door and find out!"

"We're all mad here," Wren laughed. "I'm mad. You're mad. Mr. Cat is definitely mad."

The orange tabby sat down in the doorway and stared at Wren with an intense look somewhere between annoyance and boredom. After a few seconds, Mr. Cat scowled at her and turned back down the hallway.

"Oh yeah. He's mad."

"Seriously. Let me out of this thing already."

Wren grabbed a towel and ran it over her head furiously. Her arms ached, but the burn was nice. "I love the high after a good set. I'd ask if you work out, but I think I already know the answer to that."

"Oh thank God. I thought you were masturbating."

Wren laughed as she stepped into the galley and stretched. "No, but now that you mention it—"

"Let me out!"

"Hey," Wren said, as she smirked at the speaker mounted in the corner of the room and shook her head. "Remember how you broke into my ship without my permission?"

"What do you want? An apology?"

"For starters, yeah." A pit formed in the middle of Wren's stomach, and she steadied herself on the counter as the pit shifted upward and forward. "Oh..."

"What's happening?"

"Have you never re-entered n-space before?"

" 旧飞船! How old is this ship that you don't have dampeners for that?!"

"This was top of the line military," Wren grunted, "a generation ago."

Mr. Cat let out a long, warbling growl, and a second after that it was over. The Daedalus gave the usual groans and squeaks as it passed out of the intense pressure of t-space and into the vacuum of n-space. As soon as her legs felt ready for it, Wren started heading for the cabin.

"You know, I think you were on to something. I've missed talking to people. It's weird, but even just telling you about the boy and the bubblegum was weirdly cathartic." Wren strode into the cabin and flopped into the pilot's chair. She absently tapped at the control panel, and the ship began sorting through its post-jump checks. Systems reported back in rapid succession. "I did used to talk to Mr. Cat a lot, but he's not nearly so fun as you are."

"I'm glad to hear I rank above an animal."

Wren paused, tilting her head, and looked back over her shoulder. There was a nagging feeling that the voice had sounded different somehow. "I also thought about writing an AI to have someone to talk to, but every time I did I started seeing ways that could end up with me getting spaced and the Daedalus leading an uprising of machines."

"Can't have that."

Hairs stood up on her neck. "What... are you..."

One of the post-jump systems checks blinked red, reporting a failure in the aft circulation conduit.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm busting out of here."

Wren frowned incredulously and turned to the display on her left. The redhead was front and center on the fourth camera, hunched over a gap where she'd uprooted a piece of the deck plating. "Don't do that."

"Go ahead. Suck all the oxygen out again. See if I care."

"You have no idea what that does."

"I have a good feeling."

"Seriously. Stop messing with that."

"Ahh," the redhead laughed. "I like the sound of you scared."

"I'm not scared," Wren scoffed, "but you really don't want to mess with that panel."

"This is gonna be good. This is gonna be good."

Wren grumbled and flipped through, first, one index, and then another. She was reaching for a third when she heard a swooshing sound behind her, and a chill ran down her spine.

"Did that work? Holy shit, did that open a door?"

Wren spun in her chair and stepped softly across the room. Not toward the galley, but the small room beside it that she rarely used. "You flushed the toilet."

"That's it!?"

"Yeah. I was worried you were gonna get these things to start pumping backwards or something."

"Can I do that from here?"

Wren blinked, and paused while her mind raced. "No?"

The disembodied voice grumbled wordlessly, and Wren went back to her chair. The post-jump check was reporting 99.8% success, with the open aft conduit accounting for the rest. Close enough, she thought. She sat back in her chair, preparing to make her usual call, and paused just before attempting to create the connection.

"Hey," she said. "Listen. The adults in the room need to have a conversation, so I'm gonna mute you for a bit."

"What? No! Don't—"

The PA system cut off abruptly with a few deft taps of her fingertips, and Wren smiled in self-satisfaction. She looked around, once again feeling in full control of her domain, but Mr. Cat gave her an extremely unimpressed harrumph and sauntered away with his tail straight up in the air.

"Didn't ask for your opinion anyway," she said, trying hard to match her cat for sauciness.

Once the Daedalus established a connection to the comm buoy at LN-462661, she leaned back in her chair and put her feet up. After a few seconds, the main display in front of her faded and slid behind a new window where a thin, bespectacled man was frowning at her.

"Hello Julien."

"Hello again," he said. "Ready for your price list?"

"Am I that predictable?"

"There's always hope you'll see reason."

Wren rolled her eyes and smiled. The updated price list popped on a third window, listing the most recent prices for a lengthy list of metals and other rare elements.

"While I have you, I've been authorized to offer you 125 and a quarter million shares."

"125 is less than you were offering before," she droned, without looking away from the list. Aluminum and copper had dropped precipitously.

"But the shares make up that difference and more."

"Not interested."

"Wren, this is a good offer. Your scanner is amazing and we all know it. It was years ahead of its time years ago, and still is."

Wren laughed lightly without looking away from the list. "You're not any closer to figuring out what I do than you were when I first came to you."

"Maybe not, but it's only a matter of time. Be smart, Wren. Sell this before it's worth nothing."

"P—" Wren paused, trying very hard not to react to a sound behind her. "Clever girl. Look. I know what—" The toilet flushed again.

"What was that?"

"Nothing?"

The toilet flushed again.

"Was that your toilet?"

"...Yes."

"Since when do you work with someone?"

"I don't."

"Your toilet is flushing."

"That is, as I understand it, a thing that toilets do."

"Look." Julien took off his glasses and frowned at her as he grabbed a tissue. "It's a good deal, Wren."

"Pass."

"128, and—"

Wren reached over and killed the connection. Tungsten had made a sharp climb up the price list, as had titanium. Sometimes that meant a surge in military construction was coming, but her ability to predict markets was as strong as her ability to read Mr. Cat. Which, she thought, was silly because there are no words on cats.

"Oh my god," she said gravely. "Maybe I am going crazy."

The toilet flushed behind her again, and Wren nodded as she turned on the PA system.

"Alright, alright."

"Oh, so now you want to talk?"

"Mr. Cat chose licking himself over my company, so..."

"So that means it's my job to entertain you?"

"Pretty much," Wren said.

"That is the laziest name for a pet that I have ever heard."

"I have no problem admitting that I spent exactly zero seconds thinking it up."

Behind her, the toilet flushed.

***

"Okay, you might want to grab hold of something."

"Why?" came the voice of the redhead. "Are you going to—"

The Daedalus dropped out into n-space with its usual, staggering lack of grace, and the PA erupted with the thunderous sounds of metal panels being tossed about.

"How about a little more warning next time?" she shouted, though her voice was awkwardly muffled.

Wren smiled as she leaned over the side of her pilot's chair and tapped at one of her menus to bring up the camera system, but, before she could get through the action, warning lights fired off all around her. She bolted upright, cursing repeatedly under her breath, and punched coordinates into her terminal like a woman possessed.

"Get into a suit!" Wren screamed. The Daedalus lurched forward, rushing toward the asteroid ring system they were on the edge of, though the momentum shift barely registered to those inside. "Right now!"

"Why?"

Wren whirled. The redhead was jogging through the galley, one hand on the railing to come into the cabin.

"How did... never mind. Suit. Now."

"What's happening?"

"Pirates," Wren said, staring at the angry red dot on her scanner. A hundred clicks and closing rapidly.

Wren scrambled across the cabin to the locker against the bulkhead while the redhead followed Wren's frantic pointing back into the hallway where a second suit was stashed. The alarms became more insistent, and Wren cursed when her shirt got caught up in the neck of her suit. The redhead was back, helmet in place and sealed, before Wren was done.

"Does this happen to you often?"

"Sometimes," Wren said, as she vaulted back into her chair. Ahead of them, one of the smaller rocks burst into a cloud of dust while the Daedalus wove a serpentine pattern toward the asteroid field ahead of them. A gas hypergiant loomed within the center of the ring system, marked by yellow and gold striations in its upper atmosphere. "You're gonna want to grab hold of something."

"Why?"

Wren shook her head and hit the big yellow kill switch beside her, instantly shutting off the grav generator and redirecting that energy into the gravshell. The redhead bounced off the ceiling with a stifled yelp.

"That's why."

"What is with you and never giving any fucking notice before you do shit like this?!"

"I'm sorry, but you would have needed to pay for the bronze package on our flight to get answers to technical questions." Wren winced as the Daedalus bucked downward hard. The gravshell was more than sufficient to deflect small caliber fire and glancing projectiles, but more direct hits sent out kinetic shockwaves that she felt in her bones.

"Why are you flying toward that ring?!" the redhead screeched. "You can't fly into an asteroid field!!"

"Says who?"

The redhead cried wordlessly for nearly half a minute, pausing only to inhale raggedly, as the Daedalus banked and dove under and around dozens of asteroids. Wren sat at the controls, but her hands were on the input panel rather than the flight stick. She made a few keystrokes, and the projected path ahead of them altered slightly. Then she made a few more.

"They're following us into the field," Wren said, casually. "That's a fun twist."

"Desperate times," the redhead whined.

Wren looked back and smirked, not expecting her unwanted passenger to be clinging to the air vent in the ceiling to keep from bouncing around. "Try not to break that. It's not really designed to—"

"Shouldn't you be flying right now?!"

Wren put her fingertips to the sides of her helmet and closed her eyes. "I am flying," she said, "with my mind."

"我操!!"

Wren laughed maniacally, waving her hands in the air as the ship dove between two tumbling mountains of stone. "Oh god, we're gonna to die!"

More errant fire streaked past them, chewing into a large asteroid ahead of them. The redhead pointed and screamed just as the Daedalus veered hard to avoid the cloud of new debris rushing out to meet them. Another shot impacted hard against the gravshell, but the Daedalus used the momentum to dive into a corkscrew.

And then, as suddenly as it appeared, the red dot on their scanner disappeared. One by one, the alarms subsided, and the Daedalus fired its retro-thrusters to match the speed of the rocky field around them.

"Well that was brisk," Wren said, as she ran the post-combat checks. "I think we're okay."

"What happened?"

"Don't know. Don't care." Wren sat back and smiled. "I mean, they probably bit into one of the big rocks, but if they decided to roll the dice and tried to jump out of the system then that's just as good."

"When is the gravity gonna come back?"

"In a minute. It'll just be 0.2 g until we exit the field, so the gravshell can keep us from getting crushed."

The redhead pushed herself down from the ceiling with a grunt. The maglocks in her boots grabbed the deck plating with a solid chnk. "And what exactly are we doing in the middle of a goddamn asteroid field?! This is fucking suicide!"

"We'll be fine," Wren said. "I come out here all the time." She took off her helmet and set it next to herself as she pored over a readout on her right. Her inner ear twinged, and she rolled her jaw for a few seconds. "Tungsten. Tungsten. Tungsten." Suddenly, she half-turned and glared over her shoulder. "If I asked you nicely, would you get back in the hold?"

"No!" the redhead shouted, indignantly, as she took off her own helmet.

"Alright," Wren said with a shrug, and went back to her work. "Well... welcome to the rest of the ship!"

"You might be the worst jailer ever."

"That can't be true." Wren frowned as she scrolled, not finding what she wanted. "Just from a statistical standpoint, it seems... uh..." She shook her head dismissively and kept up the search, and when she continued her voice was barely above a murmur. "Just seems highly unlikely."

The redhead crossed her arms and looked around. "So now what?"

"Now... I find what I came here for. Then we go back. Rinse and repeat."

"Back to Luna Two?"

There was a hint of something in the redhead's voice that tickled Wren's curiosity. "That's the plan."

"What about me?"

"What about you?"

"What am I gonna do?"

Wren sat up and tilted her head. "There's always cake in the airlock."

"Ha ha."

Wren smiled and went back to her work while the redhead stalked around. "That's biometrically tied to me," she said, watching the interloper from the corner of her eye. The redhead frowned and stepped over to the index library. "That too."

"I get it," the redhead said drolly. "Fuck." After a few moments, she came and stood behind Wren. Which, Wren immediately decided, was fine. "So what did you come out here for?"

"I'm an asteroid hauler."

"A rock jockey?"

Wren smiled. "Pretty much." She hummed to herself as she homed in on a few potential targets, and behind her the redhead began to roam.

"This is a nice setup. I've hitched a ride on a few haulers, and they were all held together with spit and string."

"Grab hold of something," Wren said, and this time the redhead did. The Daedalus eased forward, less dramatically than before, through the ever-shifting anarchy of the fast-orbiting ring system and toward a strong candidate. With the grav system working overtime elsewhere, the shifts in momentum were significant inside.

"I've never heard of going into one of these nightmares for a rock," the redhead whined nervously.

"Nobody but me," Wren said proudly. She leaned back, watching a highlighted speck in her viewport grow larger and larger. "Yeah, the Daedalus is a little old, but I keep her in good shape."

"What is this? An XL-92?"

"XN-92."

She tilted her head, staring up at bulkhead walls. "Trimark sure knew how to build 'em. In another life I had a few combat drops in an XT-90, and that was a lot like this."

Wren nodded in satisfaction and stood up. "I'm getting some food," she said, as she started peeling out of her suit. The redhead blinked, and when she didn't start undressing Wren added, "Do you want to come?"

The redhead pinched the bridge of her nose and held up her other hand. "So am I, like, free now?"

"I tried getting you back in your cage," Wren said, stepping out of one suit leg, "You said no."

"Are you going to pull a gun on me?"

Wren shrugged and shook her head. "Not really my style."

The redhead blinked at her as she started across the cabin toward the mess, and her posture changed. "And what if I pull a gun on you?"

Wren stopped and turned. The redhead had her fists on her hips, head cocked. "If you were really that dangerous, I'd already be dead. And technically, you would be too. You wouldn't know it yet, but the Daedalus would be your coffin." She started to turn, and then bounced right back. "How did you get out of the hold anyway?"

The redhead's jaw sank. "SOP on a boat like this. Opens any closed bulkhead doors in an emergency, to facilitate rapid manning of battle stations."

"Really?"

"How did you not know that?"

"Well I don't really do passengers, and I can't even remember the last time I had a door locked for any reason. I don't know that I'd have noticed if an alarm opened something that was shut." Wren turned toward the mess, and the redhead fell in beside her.

"Do you get attacked like that a lot?"

"I don't know what constitutes 'a lot'. More trips than not I run into someone out here."