Long Haul Ch. 04

Wren's jaw fell open. She'd asked for a hundred, and Jackson had delivered promptly. It had taken her hardware nearly a month to calculate the proper starting points and trajectories for the given masses of each asteroid, so that they all travelled close to-but-not-too-close-to Port Houston. If there had been thousands of them, she would still be calculating. But then she realized, that wasn't the point.

There were so many more volunteers than she knew about. Bonnie and Wren had never been the only sticks he had in the fire. He'd had other agents on site to take care of her display when she'd left it behind. She had been able to help, but her way of doing it was just one way, not the only way. He was going to be fine without them. That made her feel a little bit better about what she was going to say next.

***

Wren stood on the bridge of the Daedalus, distant stars blurring and swirling as it shifted into t-space, and marvelled. Not at the sight, but at how small her life had been once. That so simple a thing as light bending had once made her so happy. It was still a fascinating sight, and would probably always live on in her memory as one of the coolest things to watch, but she didn't love it like she used to. Her understanding of the word had changed so dramatically.

She paused, to take another mouthful of her cereal and make sure all the indicators were reading green, and turned back toward the galley.

Jackson had given her and Bonnie a lot in payment, but he preferred to phrase them transactionally. For Singapore Station, for example, he gave them a little nugget of knowledge he'd been sitting on for years: the location of a lost terraformed planet. According to him, it had been done by a corporation that had set the machinery in place to do the work, and then become insolvent, and the planet had been accounted simply as an asset. A line in a ledger that meant nothing to anyone anymore. When he found out about it, he'd sent a scout to verify. The trip had taken months in t-space, which made it far too remote to serve the purpose that Singapore Station would, but the scout had returned right on time and with good news. It was ready. It was livable. Everything they had thought to scan for was there, except people.

Jackson had called the planet Phuture, and when she'd asked what it meant he'd just smiled at her.

For the first time in what felt like forever, the galley was spotless. Not a single disassembled gun part to be found. No oil blacking the surfaces. Mr. Cat still sometimes tracked some litter in behind him, because he was old school and refused to use the high tech, litter-free replacement she'd tried to foist on him, but Bonnie was zealous about cleanliness now and it was endearing as hell.

The guns weren't gone: merely carefully stowed, and there would likely be a need for them again. Eventually.

Wren paused, looking to her right toward where their quarters were, and the unused crew bunk, and her meditation space. All of them were dark, which meant that Bonnie wasn't there. Which meant that Bonnie was down in the hold, as she often was of late. Wren took another bite of cereal, shrugged, and headed through the bulkhead door and into the hold.

The hold was still her favorite part of the Daedalus, but for a completely different reason now.

The hold of the Daedalus was still divided roughly in half. The left side, as she entered, was still filled with foodstuffs and provisions, although it was much more densely packed than it had been before. Where she had once stored food enough for her and Mr. Cat for ten years, there was now enough food to last thirty years for six. Where she had once been able to use the catwalk to look down on her rows of storage, those racks now rose clear to the overhead.

It had been hard to give in and give up her scanner, relinquishing the hardware to Jackson, but they'd needed the space. It had taken a lot of time to restore some of the original functions of her Trimark XN-92, functions she'd meticulously reassigned to her scanning hardware, but the whole process had been much less painful than she'd hoped. Like most well-designed military hardware, once she had the right pieces it was plug and play.

Jackson had put her original scanner in the hands of one of the first pilots to volunteer to set up her temporary asteroid corridor. That pilot, a man named Lim, had wept at the honor, which had made Wren very uncomfortable until she realized it wasn't because he was owning something of hers but because of what he could do with it on behalf of Singapore, and she once again had to confront the idea that she perhaps didn't understand the significance of Singapore Station. Not the whole of it, anyway.

In its place, in the hold of the Daedalus, now sat two very different pieces of equipment. The first one was smaller, and significantly sleeker. It seemed like there were no edges on it at all, although Wren knew better. She had the plans, and knew how to take it apart, and it was in front of this aseptic white piece of technology that Bonnie now sat.

Wren still liked to move around on the catwalk, but half the time it was because she was spying on Bonnie during moments like this.

She popped back into the galley once she was done with her cereal, 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. It was fun to watch Bonnie, but it was even better to go down with her.

In the chaos after her raid on Port Houston, and with Wren's motivations for all her pirating activity still mostly an unknown, a corporate war the likes of which had never been seen lit up across the human systems. Which is to say, corporate espionage reached new heights. There was very little blood shed, but the paranoia and distrust were so delicious and palpable, and Wren couldn't believe some of the things that the media laid at her feet. It was almost appalling, but there was nothing for it but to laugh.

Near her workshop sat a little piece of pirated technology whose appropriation she'd had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a small scale fabrication unit, capable of replicating a mind blowing array of bits and pieces and doodads, and it was frightening to Wren to realize that even that, a thing she would have given at least one limb for to have at her disposal once upon a time, was still not her favorite part of the ship.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you a watched pot never boils?" Wren said, jovially, as she slid down the ladder.

Bonnie casually flipped her the bird. "She's three months today," Bonnie said, staring into the little incubation chamber. Wren moved up alongside her, wrapped her arm around Bonnie, and let her head rest on the redhead's shoulder.

Wren had always known that genetic modification and manipulation were possible for the very rich, ensuring 'the right genes' —a phrase which had made her want to puke the first time she'd heard it— but she hadn't known the extent to which some biotech companies had pushed prenatal technology. On the servers for UAE, Wren had found a cloning machine, capable of storing and mixing thousands of genetic samples.

The cloning unit, it turned out, was easier to steal than to build from scratch, and so Jackson had seen to it that one was stolen for her, but it took finding out that they existed for her to know it was something she wanted. Badly.

Once the unit was in place, it was as easy as pressing a few buttons to splice Bonnie's genes onto an egg, and Wren's onto a sperm.

"What do you think about Katja?" Wren asked.

Bonnie blinked, and nuzzled the top of Wren's head. "Where did that come from?"

"It was my mom's name."

The redhead's arm slipped around her waist, and it was like coming home. She said, "You've never really talked about her. Either of them."

"We had a complicated relationship," Wren said, "and... it didn't end well when I left. Thought I knew everything, and they just wanted what was best for me." Then because she felt like she needed to say it, she added, "They were good people."

"How about Katja Huian?"

Wren turned her head, just enough to be able to look up at Bonnie through her lashes, and the redhead kissed her brow. "Yeah," she said, settling back on Bonnie's shoulder. "I like that."

"还要给它取个名称," Bonnie said. We still have to name the planet.

Wren thought for a second, and said, "Well, what about... just... Home?"

She couldn't see it, but she felt Bonnie nodding.

"You know," Bonnie said, "what you were saying about having a complicated relationship with your parents... and maybe not always seeing eye to eye?"

Wren narrowed her eyes, because she actually hadn't said that last part, but then it occurred to her that maybe that was part of Bonnie's experience. Very similar. Which made her hug Bonnie just a little tighter. "Yeah?"

"We're gonna have our chance to do it differently."

"Yeah," Wren said, and her smile got very, very wide.

"A lot of things we could do differently."

"I have some ideas about that," Wren said, "and I'd like your input."

Bonnie drew her in just a little tighter, and it was perfect.

//Author's note: Three years and nine months. That's how long it took me to complete this one, which is nine months longer than it took me to complete fifteen chapters of Terrible Company. Good grief!

This story was mostly inspired by a picture I found. I was so enamored with it that I started trying to imagine the world that it lived in, and suddenly I had all these ideas. I could see this woman's whole life stretching back to her childhood, and what she wanted in life and where she was going, and it was sad. Which was fine, because I was sad. I don't mind admitting that in 2017, when I started working on this, I was in a pretty bleak place and the ending I was originally working toward reflected that. By the time I finished the second chapter, I'd started to want to make some changes to the end, but I wasn't really ready to let it be happy.

I also knew that it needed to be happy, so I waited, and yeah, it took me two years to get back to work on chapter 3. I still didn't know how I was going to wrap everything up better, but I felt like I was at least laying some foundations and doing some foreshadowing of things I wanted to happen. From there, it took me almost another year.

In the meantime, between chapters 2 and 4, I worked on a deeply personal series of stories. Almost everything I worked on between Lafayette Hills and The Beast In Me was helping me deal with depression, and an autism diagnosis, and my simple PTSD, and my complex PTSD, and just a mountain of stuff. Every time I finished one of those stories, I'd start work on Long Haul, and it wouldn't be right. I'd get a couple hundred words down, and put it aside, because I wasn't ready to be happy.

I'm ready to be happy now.

This story has had numerous beta readers, editors, second pairs of eyes, and contributors over the years. If I tried to name them all, I'd sure leave some out. Instead, to all of you, please know that I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you.

To all the readers who've stuck with this through the time it took me to put it together, thank you so much. I appreciate every comment, every favorite, every follow, and every single page view. Thank you so, so, so much.//