Worlds Apart Pt. 02

The airlock cycling slowed the process down a little, but before too long, the crates were piled beside the inner door. Higgins fetched a trolley for them, and they began to stack them, throwing their bags on top of the heap. There was almost enough there to warrant a second trolley, but they managed to make it all fit.

"We called ahead when we entered the system," Cassidy said. "The UAS should have booked you passage back to the surface. Check your messages. There will probably be a boarding pass in there somewhere."

Jamie lifted his phone, sparing Liz an excited glance. He had been disconnected from the intranet for almost a year, unable to look up a fact or check an email. After learning to get by without it, he was excited to make up for lost time. There were dozens of messages awaiting him, and one of them was indeed a boarding pass. The UAS had even paid to increase their baggage allowance to what was presumably the weight of the crates from Jarilo. Bless Bradley and his obsessive love of manifests. The requisitions officer must have forwarded the information to them.

"Our crawler arrives in three hours," Jamie said, turning to Liz. "We'd better be on it if we don't want to wait around on the station for another few days."

"Then, this is the last we'll see of you," Liz said as she glanced down at the crew.

"We'll be keeping tabs on you as much as we can," Cassidy replied. "I expect those baby pictures to be waiting for me next time I get a line to Earth."

She extended a hand to Jamie, which he took, the Captain giving him her customary iron-gripped handshake. Liz turned her eyes to Bradley and Higgins, her lower lip starting to tremble as a surge of emotion overwhelmed her. The Borealan reached down, catching one man in each arm, lifting their boots off the ground as she trapped them in a bear hug. They were clearly alarmed, but they tolerated the unexpected show of affection, Cassidy laughing at their expressions as Liz set them back down on the deck.

"We'll miss you," Liz choked, Cassidy waving her off.

"Off you go, kids. You don't want to be late for your ride. Bradley, Higgins, let's get back to the ship. We'll need some bags for our supply run."

Jamie and Liz gave the crew one final wave as they returned to the umbilical, Liz wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

The station was just as Jamie remembered it. There were more airlocks spaced out at intervals along the curved hull, a few other waiting passengers peering over at Liz from the seating near the back wall, the carpet beneath their feet a shade of UN blue.

"Let's find out where we're supposed to be going," Jamie suggested, gripping the handle of the cart. He had to lean into it to push it, the weight of the crates almost more than he could handle. After watching him struggle for a moment, Liz nudged him out of the way, taking his place.

They walked back in the direction of the concourse, soon finding a large display that listed departures and arrivals. There was one column showing the serial numbers of ships and another that showed the crawlers that came up and down the tethers. The American Terminus serviced both the North and South American continents, and there were anchors all over the place. Most of the cargo tethers ended at artificial islands off the coast. He knew that there were several large ones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Hudson Bay, and the Sacramento Bay. The passenger tethers usually came down in major cities. He could see itineraries for Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Lima. There were also crawlers coming from Mexico City, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and Kansas City.

"There's our crawler," Jamie said, cross-referencing the boarding pass on his phone. "We need to get to dock F-three, that's right at the bottom level."

They made their way past the storefronts on the concourse, weaving through the crowds of travelers. It was so strange to see so many people in one place. Back on Jarilo, there had never been more than a dozen people in a room at once, but there were probably enough people clogging the concourse to fill the settlement ten times over. They arrived at the elevator and rode it down to the bottom level of the station, where they had originally boarded, stepping out into another corridor. After following the colored lines that were painted on the walls, they soon arrived at the customs area.

One couldn't just bring any old thing back to Earth. Plants and their seeds, alien meats, and unidentifiable liquids weren't permitted. Jamie was somewhat worried that the customs agents might confiscate the crates, as the kitten food was certainly made up of some hitherto unknown combination of alien ingredients, and his heart was racing as Liz pushed their cart up to the security gate.

After a small holdup where the agents inspected one of the crates, running a handheld scanner over one of the amber packets to check its chemical makeup, they were allowed through to the boarding area.

Just like in the crawler itself, there was seating suitable for a Borealan, Jamie sitting down beside Liz as they waited for their turn to board. It was a perfect opportunity to answer some emails, Jamie scrolling through his list. It seemed that the bank had been forwarding his rent payments as he had requested, which was good. It would be a pain in the ass to arrive back at the apartment only to realize that they had been evicted months prior and that all the codes for the locks had been changed...

There were some messages from his parents, too, mostly well-wishes and inquiries about Liz's pregnancy. He remembered when Liz had told him that babies were a good way to reel in wayward relatives. Maybe she was right.

"I enjoyed cooking during the trip," Liz sighed, reaching down to place a hand on the subtle bump of her belly. "But I'm looking forward to some good old Earth food. The first thing I'm gonna get is a plate of cheeseburgers loaded with salt and grease."

"You said pretty much the same thing when you came back from Borealis," Jamie chuckled, looking up from his phone.

CHAPTER 9: ANTEPARTUM

The crawler finally arrived, and after its passengers had been unloaded, the people waiting in the boarding area were ushered through another door and into the dock. Inside the circular platform was the car, just as Jamie remembered it. The crawler was vaguely conical in its design, tapering at the top, where the massive cable emerged to extend deeper into the ceiling above. It was secured by a series of bulky docking clamps that held it in place, the airlock far below tightly closed. Through the series of reinforced portholes that ringed its off-white hull, Jamie could see the stewardesses milling about inside as they prepared for the next load of travelers.

The crowd of maybe a hundred people began to walk up the metal gantries that led to the open hatches, Liz having to duck under the low doorway as she stepped through. The interior was the same white color as the hull, the deck carpeted in the usual blue. Jamie wasn't sure if this was the same crawler they had ridden up on. Considering that it was built around the tether, it seemed likely.

One of the uniformed stewardesses guided them over to the Borealan-sized seats that faced out from the cylindrical bulkhead at the center of the car, Liz starting to load their luggage into the compartments above. They had only their bags on hand now, as they had checked the crates, which would probably have been loaded into the car's cargo bays by now.

About half an hour passed before the seatbelt signs above the windows flickered on, Jamie and Liz fastening their harnesses. The voice of one of the stewardesses crackled over the speakers, running through a series of safety instructions, Jamie listening as he refreshed his memory.

"This is it," Liz said, giving him a nudge with her elbow. "We'll be back home in a few hours."

"Is the ride down any different from the ride up?" Jamie asked warily.

"Not really," she replied with a shrug. "It just means the bumpy part is at the end."

The mag-lev system that the car used made the ride a relatively smooth one, but the reverberation of the docking clamps above them releasing the crawler still made his seat shake. His stomach lurched as they began to descend, the industrial interior of the docking bay quickly sliding past the windows, giving way to the blackness of space.

Liz reached over to take his hand, and he realized that he had been gripping the armrests of his seat tightly.

"You're still just a little muddy," she chuckled, giving him a reassuring squeeze.

It was only a matter of minutes before the seatbelt signs shut off, and the voice of the stewardess informed them that they could start moving about again. They were still tens of thousands of kilometers above the atmosphere, so there was no danger of turbulence. Jamie rose from his seat and stretched, preparing himself for another few hours without much to do other than eat the in-flight meal and watch space fly past them beyond the frost-encrusted windows.

***

The Earth was finally in sight, the curving, blue horizon rising up from beneath the crawler. Jamie watched from the window, transfixed by the view, admiring the blanket of swirling clouds that stretched out before him. He felt an unexpected swell of nostalgia. As much as he had enjoyed the strange journey that he and Liz had embarked upon, it was a comforting feeling to be coming home again, where everything made sense.

"It's nice to be back," Liz said as she sidled up beside him, taking a sip from a drink that one of the stewardesses had brought her. "I've visited three planets now, and this one is still my favorite."

"It's going to be strange being anonymous again," he replied.

"What do you mean?" she asked, cocking her head at him.

"On the Magellan, in the settlement, everybody knew each other by name. There were so few people around that you recognized everyone who passed you in the street or in the corridors. Now, we're going back to a city where tens of millions of people live, where we pass by a thousand strangers just walking to the coffee shop."

"I'm never anonymous," Liz chuckled. "I kind of like not knowing everyone, though. There are no expectations, you can just go about your business without having to spare a thought for anyone's opinion of you."

"I guess that's one way to look at it."

"I think they're bringing the cart back around if you want anything to eat," Liz said. "You have to be hungry by now. The last time we ate a square meal was back on the ship."

"Yeah, I could eat," he conceded as he turned away from the window.

***

The turbulence slowly abated, Jamie gripping his harness as the crawler cleared the cloud layer. Beyond the windows, he saw only blue skies, the rays of Earth's sun bleeding in through the glass. He had been gone from Jarilo for too long to remember the exact quality of the light there with any clarity, but Sol's light seemed more golden to him, somehow warmer than its alien counterpart.

The spires of towering high-rises and skyscrapers seemed to sprout from the ground as they rose up on the horizon, forming a familiar skyline, rolling fields of green separated by scattered pockets of woodland coming into view. The sight gave him a kind of vertigo that he hadn't felt when viewing the Earth from space. Being able to see so far without dense forests or metal bulkheads blocking his view, actually being able to see the way that the atmospheric haze obscured distant objects -- it was something he hadn't experienced in months.

The metal cage of the anchor soon obscured the sight, blotting out the sunlight, Jamie feeling the tug of inertia as the crawler slowed. A rumbling sound shook the deck beneath his feet as the car docked, the seatbelt sign turning off. A woman's voice crackled over the speakers, announcing that they have arrived at the spaceport and informing them of the local time. The passengers rose from their seats and began to retrieve their baggage, Liz doing the same.

"I'm looking forward to feeling a few trillion tons of rock beneath my feet again," she grumbled, thrusting one of the duffel bags into his arms.

"I'm about ready to collapse," he replied. "It's five PM on Earth, but my internal clock has been scrambled. I feel like it's four AM, and I've been awake for forty hours..."

"Jump-lag," Liz added. "We'll be messed up for a few days, but it's not like we have anywhere to be."

They filed out of the crawler with the rest of the passengers, making their way down the gantries and onto the ring-shaped platform that surrounded it. After heading out of the dock, they emerged into the mag-lev station, the roof above their heads made from panes of glass. They paused to admire the sky, as did a few of their fellow travelers.

There wasn't much time to linger, as the train was already boarding, Liz and Jamie finding seats on one of the cars. As they pulled out of the station, gliding along one of the curving rails, Jamie turned to look back at the anchor. It was the size of a building, surrounded by a sturdy frame, its supports digging deep into the ground. Above it extended the black tether, its warning lights blinking intermittently.

They rode the train to the spaceport terminal, and after collecting their bags and piling them atop another cart, they finally left the building. The sun was starting to set now, painting the horizon in shades of pink and orange, the distant spires of the city silhouetted against the glow. The air here had a distinct flavor to it, not as fresh as how Jamie remembered Jarilo, but it filled him with nostalgia. Something deep inside him told him that this was where he belonged, where he was supposed to be. He glanced up at Liz, watching the wind blow her blonde hair.

She filled her lungs, sighing contentedly.

"Smells like home."

"I'll call us a taxi," Jamie said, pulling up his phone. A few minutes later, a van in a similar style to the one they had ridden in before leaving Earth pulled up beside the curb, and they began to pile their crates into the back. They had a lot more luggage this time, and there was just enough room for Liz to squeeze in. Fortunately, she discovered that the sturdy resin the Bugs had used to make the crates could easily support her weight, so she had a more comfortable seat this time.

Jamie climbed into the driver's seat, keying their route into the nav system, then sat back as the vehicle pulled out onto the road.

***

"So," Liz began, standing beside the van with her hands on her hips as she peered up at the towering high-rise before them. Jamie had come to think of Jarilo's trees as impossibly tall, but being at the foot of this edifice of glass and steel again made them look like toothpicks in comparison. "How the hell are we going to get all of these crates up to our floor?"

"How many can we carry at once?" Jamie asked. "I can only carry one."

"I can probably carry three if I stack them," she replied, turning to peer into the back of the van. "We've got twelve crates, so that's...three trips. We can manage that."

"Make it four with the rest of the luggage," Jamie added.

"Alright, just make sure the damned taxi doesn't drive off with our stuff in the meantime," she said as she leaned down to pick up a crate. She piled four of them on the curb, Jamie locking the doors at the rear of the vehicle to make sure that no passers-by got any funny ideas.

"Are you sure you can lift that many?" he asked, watching as Liz stooped to pick up three of the crates.

"What, I'm supposed to be all fragile because I'm pregnant?" she chuckled, leaning around the stack to grin at him. "It's kinda cute how you keep fawning over me. Reminds me of when we were kids."

He lifted his own crate, trying not to blush as he followed her into the building's cavernous lobby. It was late in the evening, so there were fewer people milling about than usual, but the sight of the eight-foot alien hauling what looked like her weight in cargo drew a few curious stares. They made it to the elevator terminal, setting their haul down as they rose up towards the higher floors, Jamie pressing his nose against the glass as he watched the bustling commercial plazas zip past.

The beauty of nature was one thing, but the city had its own unique charm, his eyes drawn to the pointed spires that scraped the red sky. It was like a forest of glass and steel, the myriad windows reflecting the vibrant colors of the setting sun, mag-lev trains sliding along the winding rails that snaked between them like vines in a jungle.

"I'd almost forgotten how high up our apartment is," he muttered.

"What do you think Hollyhock would say if she could see this?" Liz mused, following his gaze. "On Jarilo, the only things that get this high up are shuttles."

"I'm glad we came back," he said, Liz reaching down to ruffle his blonde hair with a furry hand.

The elevator soon arrived at their floor, Liz and Jamie hauling the crates down one of the corridors. Jamie remembered the way as clear as day, even if he had been away for almost a year, months of routine imprinting it into his brain. When they arrived at their door, he set down his crate laboriously, his thighs starting to burn from all the squatting, and fished in his pocket for his phone. He scanned it across the reader that was embedded in the frame, loosing a quiet sigh of relief as the panel slid aside to let them pass.

"Glad to see the landlord has been playing ball," Liz said, ducking through the aperture. Jamie followed after her, stepping into the apartment, his eyes playing about the room. It was just as they had left it, but everything had been coated in a fine layer of dust, and the air had a musty quality about it. Liz set her crates down near the kitchen area, then ran a padded finger across the counter, grumbling as she examined it.

"I guess we should have hired a maid to come clean the place," she said, wiping her finger on her pants. "We won't be spring cleaning as much as spring excavating."

Jamie chuckled, placing his crate beside hers. He eyed the couch, then made his way over to it, collapsing into the faux-leather cushions with a puff of dust.

"I could fall asleep right here," he sighed.

"Well, don't," Liz chided. "We've still got plenty of crates to move."

***

When the last crate was safely stacked in the kitchen, Liz and Jamie settled into the oversized couch together, finally able to relax. As dusty as the apartment was, it was still home, and it was a relief to be back.

"I feel like I walked the sixty light-years from Jarilo," Jamie grumbled, Liz snickering at him.

"I'm hungry," she added. "We got anything to eat?"

Jamie slid off the couch and made his way to the fridge, the light bathing him in its yellow glow as he opened the door.

"Nothing," he called back to her, Liz giving an exaggerated groan of despair in response as she let herself slide partway off the couch. "We cleared it all out before we left, remember? I wouldn't have wanted to come back home to a carton of year-old milk."

"Let's go out to eat," she insisted, Jamie trying to stifle a grin as he watched her wriggle back into her seat.

"I dunno, I'm pretty tired. I don't have a night on the town in me."

"Doesn't have to be a night on the town," she grumbled. "We could get takeout, how about that?

"Fuck, I spent so much time in the forest that I almost forgot that the service industry exists. Alright, what are you hungry for?"

"Hoagies," she replied, collapsing onto her side and stretching out to fill the couch.

"Hoagies it is," Jamie said, pulling up his phone. He found the nearest place, marveling once again at the conveniences of modern technology as he read through the menu. "What do you want on that?"

"Cheesesteak," she replied.