Long Haul Ch. 02

***

Wren was sitting in the middle of the mess that was her once and future work space, staring blankly at a burned-out brushless motor, when she heard footsteps out in the ship. She made no move to protect herself. Bonnie had still been unconscious when Wren drifted past the bathroom earlier, and she'd left the door unlocked. She half-hoped that Bonnie would arrive with a magazine full of righteous fury so she could stop seeing the twisted, broken wreckage every time she closed her eyes.

In between one blink and the next there was a shadow in the door. Wren looked over, from her spot in the middle of the floor, but could not look up. The longer Bonnie stood there, the worse it felt.

"I... um..."

The silhouette in the door remained still and, after a few seconds, even staring at her boots was too much.

"I had a weird day today."

Wren found herself staring at the brushless motor again, and for at least the fifth time since picking it up she twisted off the aluminum casing. The motor itself was fried, and had been when she'd initially found it, but she often took it apart to stare at it. It seemed like such a small distinction between working and broken. A little bit of carbon scoring here, or too little flux there, and suddenly this wonderful piece of technology was a literal waste of space.

Movement in her peripheral vision. Bonnie brushed her booted foot across the floor, sliding an assortment of hand tools and a broken soldering gun aside, and promptly sat down in the cleared area. Wren ran the tip of her fingernail through a groove. The coils in the motor were brittle and flakey.

"Are you familiar with the term 'catastrophizing'?"

Bonnie shook her head.

"It's a cognitive thing," Wren said, tapping her temple with an extended finger. "It's where something happens, something small, and we fear the equally-small repercussions of this small thingso muchthat we extrapolate even worse outcomes that could potentially be triggered by this initially small thing. It's a paralyzing problem. Ask me how I know all about that."

Bonnie licked her lips and waited.

"That kind of happened, and I think I killed a lot of people today. Like, alot of people, and... and at each step it felt like I was doing the only thing I could. You know? A completely logical progression of worst case scenarios."

Bonnie tucked a few stray red hairs behind her ear and smiled, but that brought the bruise at the corner of her mouth into stark view and Wren had to look away.

"It's not like me to be so down on myself. Not anymore. That was... that was old Wren. And... and new Wren is saying 'oh yeah, well what about the fact that a lot of people were trying to killyoutoday?' And... and that's valid too. I don't have an answer for that."

Wren twisted the aluminum casing back onto the motor and held it in her palm. Some oils had transferred from her fingers to the smooth outer shell, and she fretted for a moment while brushing it clean with her shirt. Suddenly Mr. Cat was there, nudging his way under her arm and into her lap.

"I don't really know what to think right now. I kind of... don'twantto think right now." She brought her hand in to stroke the orange tabby, and when she couldn't quite bring herself to comfort another living creature the cat took it upon himself to lean into her palm and do it for her.

"How damaged is your ship?"

Wren blinked. "Umm..." She swallowed hard and turned, looking around. "I need to replace a few hundred ablative shards. There's... uh..."

After a few moments of quiet, Bonnie asked, "Do you have the materials to do that all by yourself?"

Wren shook her head.

"Okay. Come on."

Wren was surprised that Mr. Cat did not immediately leap out of her arms, and instead curled into her body as she stood. It took some awkward leaning to and fro to get to her feet using only her legs, but she had learned long ago that her feline companion was not easily swayed once he picked a place to squat.

"I tried to turn you in," Wren croaked.

Bonnie stopped, just outside the workshop, and gave her an unreadable look.

"To Jyi Bao. So they'd come and... and I'd..." She shook her head as words failed her. "You should know."

"And that didn't work out very well?"

Wren shook her head, and she followed when Bonnie started walking again. Up the stairs, through the galley, and into the cabin. Wren slowed to a stop a meter behind the pilot's chair and focused on running her fingers through orange fur.

"Okay," Bonnie said, as she sat down. "Now. Where are we?"

It was rhetorical, and Wren knew that. On a different day she would have started explaining what the displays were already very clearly telling Bonnie.

"Wow, we are in the middle of nowhere, aren't we?"

"Mmm-hmm," Wren said quietly. She held off on calling it 'her little piece of nowhere'. It didn't seem like Bonnie noticed the four parallel blips parked in a row ahead of them, and they certainly weren't visible to the naked eye.

"Alright. I know a port that can get you patched up. No one will know you're there. It won't be cheap, but I think I can pull in a favor or two."

Wren nodded quietly.

Bonnie punched in some coordinates. On a different day, it would have annoyed Wren to watch the redhead hunt and peck with two fingers. Eventually, the galaxy map zoomed out to show the rough path it was calculating: a zig-zagging route to a bright spot further out on the Orion spur. It would take days, at least.

"And then I need you to confirm this, I guess?"

Wren shook her head. "I was bluffing when I said everything in here had biometric scans. Just push that... um..."

Bonnie nodded once. And then, before she knew what was happening, Bonnie was beside her. Ushering her back through the ship. Through the galley and into her quarters. Wren unfolded her arms beside the bed, but as soon as she laid down on her side Mr. Cat curled up against her middle.

"Now," Bonnie said, as she sat down on the side of the bed. "You're in shock. It's not going to help you to tell you that you're in shock, or to explain what that means. It just doesn't."

Wren nodded slowly. It occurred to her that nodding while laying sideways produced a kind of skull movement that more closely resembled shaking her head than actually nodding, but nodding would require a range of motion her neck simply was not capable of producing.

"So instead, I'm gonna talk for a while and I just want you to listen. Do you think you can do that?"

Wren nodded again, and again found herself thinking very hard about the physiology of necks and spines. Disks. Shoulder musculature.

"I enlisted when I was 18. As far as I'm concerned, that's when I was born. I don't count the years before that. When I enlisted, I found my family. I found purpose. I found..." Bonnie took a deep breath and shook her head. "I foundmyself the first time I held a rifle. I didn't even know I was missing.

"Now, I'm not saying I took to it right away, or even all that well. 故事可多了..." She paused to laugh and shake her head. "I was hungry, tired, and alone when I got there, and I'm pretty sure just about every other recruit in my unit was the same. We came together, right? Do you know what I mean?"

Wren nodded.

"Our unit was outfitted by Chandless Industries. They're a heavy construction equipment conglomerate out of the Regulus system, and I remember the first time their guy came in the room with us. We'd been there... I don't know. Three weeks? We were all starting to come together in basic, and now here's this haircut and a suit and he's talking to us like he's one of us. We were having none of it... at first. He starts showing us our equipment, standard issue stuff yadda yadda, and then the sergeant gets called away. It's just us and him, and he starts talking lower. Conspiratorially.Hey guys, he says,I want you to know that Chandless is gonna take care of you guys.

"And we were like wait, wait?Extra body armor, he says.Deadlier munitions. Top-of-the-line frigate. You'll be one of the best equipped units in the Navy. And we believed him."

***

"So then Rodriguez, she starts running. The rest of us were all already at the door, and we're waving her on.Come on! Come on! Rodriguez had this bizarre gait. Big on the arm swings, right? Almost comical."

Wren smiled and nodded.

"The manager didn't notice any of this until we were all already out the door, but once that happened he starts screaming at the top of his lungs.Police! Police! Stop, thief!

"Now, at this point, the smart thing to do is keep running because we're already pretty far ahead. We just need to get away and lay low for a little while. Nobody is going to run you down to the edge of the galaxy for skipping out on a meal andnone of the patrons were gonna try to get in her way. Rodriguez was a beast, but..." Bonnie paused to laugh. "God bless her, she was not a smart woman. As soon as she heard him calling her all sorts of names, just cursing her out, she stopped on a dime, enraged, and started runningback at the manager."

Wren took their bowls over to the sink and started cleaning them, and Bonnie hopped up on the counter next to her.

"Now at this point, she's running away from me so I can't see her face, but Ican see the way the manager's face goes from blustery red to sheet white in about two seconds flat. Another second after that, and he's running back inside with Rodriguez right behind him. Big stupid arms swinging for all they're worth."

Bonnie laughed and shook her head, and then looked around the room.

"I think we got most of this cleaned up. Are you ready to start putting that work desk of yours back together?"

Wren nodded as they started walking.

"Alright. Where was I? Oh. So the rest of us bug out for the barracks. We get back in one piece, and we're trying to keep our mouths shut. The Captain is asking where Rodriguez is, and we're trying to make excuses. Her shift is coming up, and she's still not back. An hour, a half hour. No sign of her. Ten minutes before her shift comes up, here comes Rodriguez with the biggest fucking grin I've ever seen in my life, and right there with her is the goddamn manager. And he's grinning too. She barely has time to shower and change, but that doesn't stop her from turning and laying a kiss on him that had even me squirming. Turns out Rodriguez had chased him into..."

***

"Ten mm," Wren said, holding out her hand.

Bonnie turned and rummaged. Chrome-plated steel tools clanking against chrome-plated steel tools. "That next morning," she said, "everyone was pointedly not staring at us, or gawking, but they also weren't ribbing us. Usually, at chow, everyone is fair game, but he and I were immune for a little while. That was how we knew they heard us."

A socket wrench landed in her palm, and Wren winced as she jammed the crescent wrench in on the other side and braced it against a crossing support beam.

"They didn't say anything, but they knew. We knew they knew. By the end of the day, they knewwe knew they knew. That was when things started to get back to normal. You know what I mean?"

Wren nodded.

"Are you sure? Because I'm not even sure I explained that right."

"I'm sure."

"Okay. Good. I think they were happy for us. Anyway, the day after that was when Thierren and Rodriguez started floating around the idea of a unit tattoo for the first time. It took us a while to settle on something we all could agree on, and..."

***

"Why not?" Bonnie asked, as she looked up from the darkened panel.

"Ireally don't want to mess with the grid back here while we're still in t-space. If we short something and that fucks with the grav generator inany way, we'd get—"

"Okay, okay." The redhead delicately closed the panel and turned around. "Alright. Well... what else is there to fix?"

Wren frowned and turned around. She'd been dreading this moment.

"I think we've cleaned up everything we can."

"Yeah," Wren said softly.

"And everything else we'd either need to be outside for or we'd need things powered down, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Well." Bonnie leaned against one of the racks and looked around. "Where was I?"

"You guys were on Tamblin station."

"Right. So Tamblin station was one of those early stations that, everywhere you turn, it was trying to look like it wasn't a station at all. It had 'buildings' inside, and space to look up. Incredibly inefficient use of inner environment. Pretty, though, but we had trouble with that. We were used to moving through a completely different kind of area, and having that much open space to cross, or where someone might see us coming from way above, it was like... like we didn't have the tactics for that, you know? We weren't prepared for planetside combat."

Wren nodded.

"But they had a problem too, see? They were thinking about protecting themselves on two dimensions. Front and back, left and right. Maybe from above too, I don't know. They were used to being on a planet, where there's ground underneath them, and tunnelling isn't exactly a quick solution. So we're pinned down, and ops can't get anyone further up the chain to respond. Suddenly, out of nowhere, here comes Haircut and a Suit—"

"No," Wren said incredulously.

"He's not there, not on Tamblin, but he gets on our secure comm with this big shit-eating grin because who should have a bunch of huge, idle, automated construction drones two decks below butfucking Chandless."

"No!"

"Yeah."

"That's... that's pretty convenient."

Bonnie's smile flattened, just a little. "Yeah."

***

"You know, I had a sick feeling, when that building started collapsing, that the whole thing was going to come down on us, and I had no idea how right I was. The Navy dismissed all of our reports as 'lacking credibility'. There was no record of any Chandless equipment on site, no record of Haircut and a Suit working for Chandless at any time, communicating with us at any time or having contributed to the deaths of all those..." She trailed off with a small sound in her throat.

"He didn't exist?"

"Conor P. Hillenbrand did not exist. Not according to Chandless, anyway, and the Navy weighed their testimony heavier than ours. Every single one of us was dishonorably dischargedvery quickly. We were out on our asses inside of... a week? I think?"

"What the fuck?"

"I know. It was over just like that. Or at least, that's what we thought. Turns out, the Navy had also blacklisted all of us. It wasn't even like we could go find other jobs with the skills they'd taught us. Not legal ones, anyway." She took a few deep breaths and sighed. "It was easy to blame the insurgents. Some of us did. I mean, they'd started a shooting conflict, but really they were just trying to be heard. They thought if they holed up in a bunker with a bunch of kids as hostages, they could finally get someone to listen."

"And Chandless dropped a building on them."

"More or less," Bonnie said, looking down.

"I think I missed something. What was it they were demanding?"

***

Wren fidgeted nervously, picking at the skin beside her fingernails. It made her uncomfortable to have Bonnie at the controls.

"UPNS Aught-Eight-Six-Four-Two-Two, this is Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight."

"Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight, we have no scheduled flight plan listed for you and your IFF is FUBAR. State your business."

Bonnie cleared her throat and smiled. "UPNS Aught-Eight-Six-Four-Two-Two, we got hit by scavengers and suffered some damage. Requesting permission to dock for repairs."

"Permission granted, Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight. Do you require any special accommodations or have any exotic cargo to declare?"

"No cargo," Bonnie said, "but we do have some passengers from Angstrom Station that sustained injuries on the flight. Mostly scrapes and bruises, but one man went intocardiac arrest. We have himthoroughly sedated."

The comm was quiet for a moment, and the hairs stood up on Wren's neck. Bonnie had explained how all this would work, but it was quite another thing to see it happen.

"Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight, please switch to channel Zero-Point-Seven-One-Seven-Zero."

"Here we go," Bonnie said, under her breath, as she reached over and adjusted the comm.

"陈述你的目的."

"I've gotta learn Chinese," Wren lamented.

Bonnie smiled and held her hand over the mic. "I might be biased, but I think it's beautiful." She cleared her throat and adjusted her posture. "郑氏车站, 这是 JBH Daedalus."

"...Daedalus?"

Bonnie frowned, brow lowered. "是的."

"我们认得你的呼号, 你们的到来实在让我们非常棘手."

Wren did everything she could to refrain from asking Bonnie to translate line by line, and to a certain extent, Bonnie's nervous body language said enough.

"我是李宝钗," Bonnie said, "Jackson Chua Kim Huat 会代表我说话."

"请保持位置!"

Bonnie sat back and exhaled loudly.

"And?!"

The redhead shrugged. "And... now we wait."

Wren bounced up on her toes and watched the display beside the pilot's chair. The auto-pilot had received and confirmed an approach vector and a specific berth was pending. "That sounded like it went well. Did it go well?"

"We'll see."

"We'll see?That's all you've got to tell me?"

Bonnie held up her hands and smiled. "I'm not a pilot. I don't usually bring ships in. I know how this works in theory, but I usually just have to sneak on board."

"JBH Daedalus, 把你的飞船停靠在大门口 Alpha-Gamma-One-Zero-Four-Four."

"谢谢你." Bonnie said, nodding her head slightly.

"抵达后，站在开口处，所有乘客都将被搜查."

"了解." Bonnie licked her lips and turned. "Wren, if you have any secret compartments in this ship, now would be the time to tell me."

Wren shrugged and shook her head. "Nothing like that."

"Okay. We've got... a couple hours before we dock."

The auto-pilot made adjustments to their course as they were directed around to the far side of the station. Bonnie watched the readouts for another minute, and then turned the chair around.

"So..." She swallowed and sat back, eyes drifting upward. "The next call never came. A few days, a week. I started worrying. A few weeks. I waited, like he asked me to, but with every day, I felt more and more sure he'd gotten in over his head. I tried not to look at it, but eventually I started sifting through the copies he'd made. Personnel files. Strategic memos. Tons of documents.

"He'd made notes on some of it, and that was really helpful because I do not have a head for putting stuff like that together. This report over here is itemizing the value of a bunch of assets and this memo here is talking about a very different value for a different set of assets with some items that might be on both lists, and it took me a while to realize that not all of these are under the same name. It's the same ship or, you know, sometimes a piece of property, but these two companies are both claiming ownership of these things."

"What companies?"

"Several. Chandless was the name on most of them, but I saw a few others I recognized. Jyi Bao was one of them. And most of these assets had these RA numbers attached to them. Kel had marked 'risk assessment' with a big question mark next to it."

"Did he ever get in contact with you?"

"Yes," she said gravely. "About a month later, I got a cryptic message from him. 'Everything is fine. Can't wait to see you.' I got out of there so fast, and was heading out of the system on a passenger ship within the hour."

"Yeah, that's not creepy at all," Wren laughed, nervously. "No clues about where he'd been or what had held him up?"

Bonnie shook her head. "I don't even think it was him that sent it. That wasn't what we'd agreed on. I don't have the skills to take apart a message and read the, like, what-do-you-call-it?"