Long Haul Ch. 04

Instead of customizing her body armor, which would have involved changing the colors of it in such a way that it would have rendered the grayscale camo style moot, she figured out how to weave some of those protective layers into her existing wardrobe. It wasn't a perfect solution, as it left her extremities exposed, but her torso was more bulletproof than it had ever been.

She tinkered with her gun, and she tinkered with Bonnie's smart CAR, and she tinkered with the water recycler system. She cleaned meticulously. She did not sleep much.

After the fifth day, Bonnie insisted they change destinations. It added time to their trip, as they'd been heading in the wrong direction, but it wouldn't matter. Jackson wasn't expecting them. Once the Daedalus had finished its reorientation, nav calculations, and shifted back into t-space on their new heading, Bonnie dragged her into bed and held her for a long time, only letting her go for long enough to take care of the necessities.

***

"Over there," Wren said, angling the flashlight built into the arm of her armored vacsuit, "I think."

"I can't believe you just found all this," Bonnie said, as she floated down the hallway behind Wren. "Oh my god, look at that."

"Yeah," Wren said. "That's all irrigation piping."

"So, what, you go find a comet, then, right? Aren't those made of ice?"

Wren laughed and spun around, floating backwards through the spacious area so she could see her girlfriend. "Yeah, but this is where it gets way more complicated than I know how to do. You can't just start growing green stuff all willy nilly. You need an ecosystem to help you balance the oxygens and the nitrogens. All the gens. For all I know, this ship might still have all that knowledge tucked away in a databank here somewhere, but I haven't gone looking. Really need to find a botanist or something."

"Ah," Bonnie said, "and we just passed that botanist store on the way here."

It seemed that, underneath her gruff and buff exterior, Bonnie had a dry sense of humor that was only just starting to rear its head, and Wren was glad to be a part of that unearthing.

Wren said, "I remember floating through here, that first time, and I got this feeling, like, 'this is the start of something. I don't know what, but...'"

She'd never been able to tell if the voice modulation, the reason other people always sounded strange over voice comm, came from the microphones in their helmets, that captured the higher pitches more readily, or if it was in the speakers in the helmets that just didn't have the muscle to reproduce the bass frequencies. It might have even just been the fact that they were in space, in a vacuum, and the limited air around them in their suits wasn't a good environment for sound. Regardless, it was always a little weird to hear how different Bonnie sounded, and she kind of wondered what she sounded like. She wondered if Bonnie wondered the same thing.

On such nonsense did Wren lose hours.

"Can you imagine?" she asked. "Being completely self sufficient? Getting away from everything?"

"Who would you want to bring?"

Wren scrunched up her face. "One of the first plans I had was to, like, save my parents. Save everyone they worked with. Old neighbors. Buy out their work contracts. Give them a fresh start out here, but..."

Bonnie pushed off and floated up closer to her. "But what?"

Wren just shook her head.

"Did something happen? To them?"

"There was an accident," she said, looking away.

After a few breaths, Bonnie said, "Wren, how long have you been alone for?"

The smile came easily. "Oh, I had plenty of company." Easy, maybe, but empty, and it faltered quickly under Bonnie's continued gaze. "Sorry. I..."

"Are there others there? People left that you knew? Anyone you'd want to go back for?"

After a few seconds, Wren said, "Not that I know of."

Before she knew it, she was running her finger along a seam on one of the irrigation pipes. What had appeared, from a distance, to perhaps be a crack turned out to just be a bit of buildup from some dissolved solids in the water source, and it flaked away under her finger. It annoyed her, more because her distraction had turned out to be nothing than because she was eager for there to be actual, problematic damage. Whoever had built that ship had built it to last.

"It could work again," she said, more finishing her thought out loud than answering anything Bonnie had asked her. "We can fix it."

Bonnie appeared next to her, focusing on an interwoven metal lattice that had once probably encouraged vines. Wren could see it if she closed her eyes.

"No," she said, eventually. "I don't think there were any survivors I knew. It wasn't a huge catastrophe. Barely made the feed. I... I actually hadn't realized that I was two weeks overdue to hear from them. We didn't have any kind of regular comm thing... and I'd been busy testing my, uh... the..." —she paused to swallow— "and then I got a notice of inheritance. Of debt." She made a sound in her throat, and shook her head. "I'm not mad about that. Not at them. They did what they could. I just..."

"You don't like how you found out."

Wren nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, after that I... I knew that the hull repairs were going to take years, with the way I was doing it, and then adding the scaffolding and connective framework between them to make it one big structure was gonna take another chunk of time, and I just... I stopped planning further ahead. I stopped thinking about it, except as a punchline."

"But... now you're thinking about it?"

"Yeah," she said, taking a deep breath. "Yeah, I mean, kinda. I dusted off some old plans I'd sketched out, and realized that I'd actually taken a lot of this as far as I could go on my own already. I'd need someone who knows more about structural engineering in a vacuum, and a materials engineer, and—"

"And a botanist," Bonnie added.

"Exactly," Wren said. "Do you know where I can find a pre-assembled design team that covers a wide variety of disciplines? I'm in the market."

"I'll put out some feelers," she said, dryly.

Wren said, "You know, I was actually thinking that it might be better to see if this is something Jackson wants. He and his people can live out here, away from it all."

Next to her, the redhead made a sound that was neither agreement nor acknowledgement.

"Are we gonna go through this again?" Wren said, sighing.

"I don't know why you keep going to him," Bonnie said, raising her voice.

"You're the one who introduced us!"

"Yeah," Bonnie said, snapping back, "reluctantly! As a last resort! And now, I'm kind of regretting it!"

"Why don't you trust him?"

Bonnie was quiet, eyes turned down.

"I mean, I know we've been through this before, but—"

"Why do you think we're suddenly famous?" Bonnie asked. "Why are people cosplaying as you? Why do people know our faces? Why are you the figurehead? Why you and not him?"

"It was—"

"And don't say 'it was my idea.' He put that idea there. I know he did."

Wren blinked, and reached for the wall because she was starting to float and rotate. "It was my idea!"

"God fucking damnit!" She punctuated this by twisting and punching the wall, but in null grav that sent her floating away. "Can't you see? He's using you. This is what he does!"

"I hate to ruin a perfectly good point," Wren said, "but it's in my nature to be used. It's sort of my thing."

Bonnie held her outstretched hands around her head, and looked like she was about to scream. "Did you... I mean, what the fuck, Wren? Have you learned nothing?!"

Wren just blinked. "Come on, I—"

"I want more for you than for you to be just a tool! I want you to want more for you! Is any of this ringing a bell?"

It was, and that made her hold her tongue.

Bonnie hit the other side of the hallway, planted her feet, and propelled herself toward Wren. She grabbed Wren's armored vacsuit tightly and pulled her in with both hands, until their helmets were pressed against each other. When she spoke, the vibrations carried through the material, making her transmission sound like a distorted echo.

"I need you to be looking out for yourself, okay? I need you to do it for me!"

"Okay," Wren said, throat a little tight.

"Every time you want to volunteer for something, I want you to think about how I'll feel if it goes wrong and you don't come back."

"I mean, you're usually the one going out and doing the—"

"Wren!" she screamed.

"Okay! Okay, but I stand by what I said."

"I'm a professional," she said. "This is what I do!"

"And if things go wrong," Wren said, fighting her lips from forming a smile, "I want you to think about how I'll feel when you don't come back."

"Fuck," Bonnie groaned, looking down and away.

"How about this," Wren said. "I want to talk to him about it. I don't have to tell him where it is, or what state it's really in."

Bonnie said, "Yeah, but that's going to come to a head pretty quick one way or the other. You either tell him and he does something with it or you don't and he holds it against you. And then we're out in the cold."

"Okay," Wren said, straightening and composing herself. "What are our other options?"

"Can we just fix it up for ourselves?"

Wren nodded slowly. "Yeah, sure. At my current pace, this place'll be operational in... like... thirty years?"

The redhead slumped.

"Give or take a decade? I told you," Wren said, laughing, "I can't do this by myself. Not really. Not well, anyway."

"Fine," Bonnie said, dragging the word out like it was causing her physical pain, "but we're doing your plan. We just talk to him about it, and if either of us gets the wrong vibe from his answers, then we walk away."

Wren narrowed her eyes. "Walk away and..."

"And do it ourselves," Bonnie said. "Labor of love, because you know what? Spending a few decades out here with you doesn't sound so bad. Do we have enough supplies to last us until we're a bit more self-sufficient?"

"No," Wren said, thoughtfully, "but we could get them. Preemptively. I have a guy. We could get that squared away first, just in case. I'm pretty confident I could learn what—"

"We," Bonnie said, sternly.

"...we... could learn what we need to start producing some food." It felt weird to say. Not because she didn't trust Bonnie to learn things, but because learning all the things on her own was usually how it worked.

This seemed to satisfy Bonnie somewhat, as she looked into the distance and nodded, and then nodded again.

"We need a plan, though."

***

The only way in and out of their private berth on Cheng Shih Station was an elevator. There were no obvious buttons to reach their floor, and the elevator would not pick them up if there were other passengers; it would simply pass them by and wait for the next empty trip through, and it was not uncommon for Bonnie and Wren to wait ten minutes or more after summoning the elevator.

Wren liked the wait, honestly. She was always pretty chill about meetings —she was pretty chill about everything— but it never hurt to take some time to center on the breath. Get right. The waiting was harder for Bonnie. Bonnie never took part in yoga with her, usually choosing to lift weights with makeshift objects or do pull ups on the frame of the bulkhead doors.

If Bonnie was doing that, it didn't matter how much Wren wanted to do yoga; she'd find somewhere to watch from. Shamelessly.

Their elevator always let them off on a random level, one of over a hundred, so there was often some creative pathfinding to get where they were going, and they were usually going to the same place. Level sixty five. The Merlion.

"Kuo!" Wren said, as she crossed the threshold.

Kuo, a lanky teen who was maybe verging on his twenties, got up from the bar and gave her a fist bump. "Heeey! Wren! Caught your match couple weeks ago! Damn good showing! Made a lot of creds. Where've you been?"

"You knew it was me?" she said, jaw going slack.

"Come on," he said, leaning back slightly. "Give me a little credit."

Wren narrowed her eyes. "Jackson gave you the accounts."

"Ohhhh," he said, smirking, "that would be cheating."

"Mmmhmm."

Beside her, Bonnie was pretending to make small talk with another operator, someone whom Wren knew she had a friendly rivalry with. They always had a strange kind of interaction, part checking in on each other, part scorekeeping, part sizing each other up. It was a whole thing, and sometimes Wren liked to just observe them. On more than one occasion, he had challenged Bonnie to arm wrestle, events which Wren had actually drooled to watch. He was perhaps a bit bigger than Bonnie, and if bulk alone was a good indicator he was probably stronger, but it was clear to Wren after watching them for five seconds that he didn't really understand the mechanics of how to win.

Bonnie did. She kept the match close to her body, making him stretch across the table to reach her. The more he extended himself, the harder it was for him to apply his strength at the edge of his reach. It was masterful, and the last time it had happened Wren had practically dragged Bonnie back to their bed afterwards and savaged her for hours.

As much as Wren was loving watching them out of the corner of her eye, hoping for a third rematch (the guy had yet to win one, and was pretty salty about it), there was business to see to.

Although the Merlion was technically a bar, it was usually more populated with older men playing mahjongg than customers there for just a drink, which made it kind of like a club. The floor was packed with four top tables, each with a built-in display and an interface for a variety of mahjongg variants. Local legend had it that Jackson had bought out and rerouted an entire air recirc unit, one of ten for the entire station, to make sure that they could smoke as they pleased and keep his shop smelling fresh, but no amount of recirc put a dent in the perpetual haze.

Of course, it wasn't certain that Jackson owned the place at all. Everyone else seemed to treat him like the owner, or at least an executive officer of some kind, but he frequently mentioned 'his friend, the owner' in conversation. Wren was pretty sure it was a ruse.

He had, of course, seen them the moment they arrived, but Wren and Bonnie both busied themselves with their conversations while he finished his game. It was bad form to quit halfway through.

Wren and Kuo had their heads together, discussing some of Wren's late game tactics and how that had coincided with events on the far side of the battlefield that she'd had no idea about, when the table in the corner cleared, and the other men that had been playing Jackson found other tables to join. None of them made eye contact with her, but she was pretty sure that every single pair of eyes in that bar was watching them.

"Come," Jackson said, in his halting way, while waving them back. "Come lah!"

Wren gave Kuo a parting fist bump, and turned to find Bonnie already sitting down. She looked grim.

"No, no," he said, tilting his head to look at her. "Like that, no good." He looked up at Wren with an expectant tilt to his brow. He was a hard man to read sometimes, and even more so with his sunglasses on, but this one was easy to interpret. "Tiagong hor—"

"No, it..." Wren sat down and exhaled. "It went. He's dead."

Jackson looked back and forth between them animatedly, and then sat back. "Told you already. That one, leave alone better. You never listen."

"You were right," Wren said.

"Ahh," he said, holding up both hands. "Never mind lah. Point finger also no use. Done, then done lor. May he rot in hell."

"Oh, he's rotting." Bonnie's voice was tight.

Jackson nodded slowly, adding, "Death first to vultures and scavengers. Good advice." He leaned over, and waved to the man at the bar.

"Did you just quote yourself?" Bonnie asked, skeptically.

"No lah! No!" he said, waving his arms emphatically. "I quote from... somewhere else lah. Not I say one."

A few seconds later, the bartender appeared with three shot glasses.

"Come, let's drink," Jackson said. "He die, we still alive. Hoseh."

Bonnie grunted before slugging hers back. Wren nodded solemnly, and made the mistake of trying to hold the shot in her mouth for some reason. It burned, and she made a face that both Jackson and Bonnie thought was hilarious.

"Eugh," she groaned, and was so busy wincing and trying to remember what air had tasted like before that she didn't see the gargantuan slap on the back coming.

"Who taught you how to drink?" Bonnie said, shaking her head.

And then, just as Wren was catching her breath, she saw Bonnie brush the tip of her nose, twice in rapid succession, with her thumb. That meant that, as near as Bonnie could tell, no one was close enough to eavesdrop if they were careful. They had theorized that Jackson's place was regularly swept for listening devices, based on some things he'd said here and there, so proximity was the one thing they needed to worry about.

"So," Wren said. She meant to add more, but had to stop to clear her throat, and when she continued her voice was much lower. "Jackson. Listen."

"Of course I'm listening lah, if not what, make cake ah?" He laughed long and hard, very amused with himself, and it wasn't until that moment that Wren realized that Jackson had maybe already had a few drinks. There was absolutely no telling what that meant.

Wren pulled out a flat panel display card, pulled up the footage of her four ships, laid it on the table in front of Jackson, and zoomed it in. Then zoomed it in a little more. "This is mine," she said. Then, pointing at them from left to right, she said, "Two hundred and fifty meters long, two hundred and seventy five, four hundred and fifty, and three hundred and sixty, though the last one will probably gain about ten meters when the repairs are done."

Jackson's smile slipped a little as he leaned in and looked at them. "This one is what? This one is..." He blinked and zoomed it in a little more. "Those small small lights... this one live ah?"

Wren said, "It's a recording, but it's recent. I'm repairing them. Sort of. That's welding."

He squinted and leaned in even closer. "That one is Persephone class. Grow plants one. Wah lau. You buy from where?"

Wren shrugged. "Does it matter?"

He gave her a calculated look, and then picked up the display, zooming it and rotating the angle. "You're making... what the hell is this ah?"

"A way out," Wren said, and her excitement shot right past her nerves. "I've had some drones out there working on putting them together into something livable. Something sustainable."

"What talking you? What you mean, a way out?"

"It's off the grid," she said, leaning forward. Her voice took on a hushed, but excited tone. "Deep space. Middle of nowhere. I've got most of a solar panel big enough to power the whole thing. We tow it to some out of the way little corner of the galaxy and get away from this whole shitty system. The corruption. The hypocrisy. Start over! Make something new! Something better!"