the reluctant warship Night Service
Feb. 14th, 2024 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenSome of you may recall Quarren and Eden, last heard of falling cluelessly in love as the clueless leads of a spaceship romantic comedy?
That's a yuletide story that's basically original SF f/f, and enjoyed writing it so much that I decided they should have their own book. I have written a first draft of that book! It is a full 100k, surprisingly, and quite a lot more serious. "spirit falling" is for sure a romcom; this is a love story, but a big, sad, dramatic one, with a backdrop of old wars and trauma, and ghosts and homegoing and all manner of things. Quarren is a hopeless lesbian. It does still have jokes in it, and the two main characters are the same people.
The 100k is barely readable, of course, but here is a standalone bit that is.
[NB - if you've read spirit falling, note the ship's name has changed - in that, it was Spirit Falling because the town in the original piece was called Spirit Falls. Quarren now efficiently administrates the Luna Central Command community ship Night Service.]
Two days before her departure, Eden is fed up, tired out and sitting at her desk when the communicator bleeps. “Captain? Could you come down for a minute, if you’re available?”
That’s Lily again. She doesn’t sound panicked, but she’s not one of life’s panickers and this could be anything. Eden takes the grav tube down to Ops and is relieved when she gets there and most people are doing their jobs calmly. It’s very late, just before the night shift crew are due to come on. Lily and the ones and the last of the day crew are gathered around the navigation table, which has been set to show the ship itself, the upper part of its hull.
“What’s this about?” Eden asks.
“It’s an emergency signal,” Lily says. “Something is broadcasting danger on the ship’s outer skin, but we don’t have anything out there that can get a camera view on it.”
“That could be anything,” Eden says. “Thoughts?”
“We could send a drone,” Lily says. “But honestly, it would be quicker just to send a person out there. Whatever it is, it’s small, and it’s got a working transmitter in it so it’s probably not squashed or radioactive.”
“That’s reassuring,” Eden says, but she thinks Lily is right. “All right, I’ll deal with it. Thanks, Lily.”
“No worries.” Lily goes back to talking to the day shift, and Eden looks at the list of junior technicians and engineers who are currently on shift. Anthony, the kid who got into a punch-up because he didn’t know how what to do with the Theta Pyx, has been doing his best to make friends and fall in line. Maybe he deserves a treat. She pulls his name up, then changes his mind. Eden is fed up and unhappy. Maybe it’s her who needs the treat. She marks the job as assigned and waits.
Quarren turns up about ten minutes later, looking soft-edged and tired. “Outside?” she says. “Me?”
“I just need a spotter for a five-minute job,” Eden says. A strict service rule states that no one does outside work alone even if it is just a five-minute job. “You can do it, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” Quarren says. She grew up on board ship; of course she can, and for once she doesn’t argue. “I’ll do it.”
The two of them suit up in the ship’s tiny person-accessible EVA bay, accessed through the observation deck at the back of the temple so they have to apologise to the Sisters at the vespertine service. The Night Service EVA kit is old-fashioned, the suit fabric not quite flush with the skin, but you can at least get into it by yourself. The last step is the eerie silver helmets with their polarised faceplates. Quarren peers out through the glass and doesn’t speak much. Eden checks they’re both ready and pings the controller in Ops to start depressurising the bay.
“Tethers,” she says, attaches them both: one end to each of their suits and the other to the heavy iron floor rings. When she was young, Eden was used to seeing beasts of burden tethered that way. She makes a standard hand signal to Quarren. Ready?
Ready, Quarren signals back, and the Ops controller cracks the door seals. Side by side, they drift out into open space. It’s an old metaphor, the favourite postcard phrase of the Earth tourist, but it’s really is like being born. Like emerging from somewhere comfortable, warm, constraining, into the true glory of existence.
It’s a cliche. Eden clangs her boots against the ship’s skin. They’re electromagnetic and they stick, but between steps she’s floating, attached to the rest of humanity only by the carbon fibre tether.
“Hold onto that,” she says to Quarren, over the little helmet-to-helmet radio transmitter.
Quarren grips the tether—it’s attached to her by another loop around her waist, but it’s safer to hold it—and Eden settles her feet back onto the surface of the ship. She feels the vibration, rather than hearing the sound. Clunk. They start walking over towards the signal, being broadcasted into Eden’s helmet by the Ops controller. Clunk. It’s enormously satisfying. Eden knows the ship’s hull is much too thick for the people who live in the habitat deck on the other side to hear the sound, but she likes to imagine they could. Clunk.
Quarren, not troubled by stray emergency radio signals, is looking up. The way the ship is oriented means they can see the shining red point which must be Mars, and beyond it, Saturn, with rings edge-on. After that is only the bare elliptic plane and the enormous scatter of the galaxy. Eden has to remind herself to trundle on towards the emergency signal and not just stop and stare. Again, Quarren has no such concerns. She turns off the magnetic field in her boots and lets herself float. Swimming in starlight, Eden thinks, delighted. As free as any human can be from the old bonds of Earth.
“God, that’s better,” she says. It’s a treat to be out here, when she’s the ship’s captain and really should delegate; it’s better yet to just take along her favourite person, rather than one off the roster.
“Bad day?” Quarren asks.
“You have no idea.” Eden wasn’t meaning to, but she tells Quarren about what Captain Li showed her, about Mrs Percival, about Lily’s big dreams, and how worried she is generally about this trip. Quarren listens, and Eden can’t see her face through the helmet glass but can picture it perfectly. Quarren’s about-to-administratively solve-a-problem-expression is one of the delights of her heart.
“First of all, Mrs Percival is a judgement on us,” Quarren says. “If it cheers you up at all, today she asked me if I thought being a woman known by a surname was really ladylike.”
“Oh my God.” Eden can’t help laughing. “But your name is a ship’s name, not—”
“Believe me, I know,” Quarren says. “I don’t believe our friendly local social worker understands the distinction. Anyway, I told her my real name, and invited her to observe the consequences should she ever use it.”
“Oh my God,” Eden says again. She supposes she should really be stopping Quarren from making enemies and alienating people, but she’s only human. “You’re right, that did cheer me up.”
“Secondly,” Quarren says. “I like Lily, and I think everyone needs a jab in their complacency occasionally. But I will be here while you’re gone, and I can stop her putting the Night Service into lockstep if need be. And you’re not going to be gone that long, anyway.”
Eden nods before remembering Quarren can’t see her. “Right.”
“And thirdly—I don’t know, about what Captain Li saw. I don’t know what we can do about it, but I’ll annoy the Luna authorities if I have to.”
She will, Eden knows. “Thanks,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m finding everything so difficult.”
“I do.” Quarren’s smile is apparent in her voice. “Things are more than usually trying around here.”
“Quarren, hold that tether,” Eden says, interrupting. “I don’t want you to drift off into space.”
Quarren obeys orders, which must be a first. Eden smiles, looking down to check her own tether is in place. There’s something at her feet, something massive, thin and black, flush against the surface. It takes Eden a second to realise it’s the first I in Night Service. If she looks to the side of the giant name plate and the start of the N, she can make out the painted Luna crescent and silver stars. Twenty-one of them, one for each of the ship’s years in service, and the twenty-first is obscured with something unfamiliar.
“Got it,” Eden says to Quarren. “Come on.”
She turns down the electromagnetism in her boots so she can bounce happily over NIGHT, suddenly free and full of mischief. One of her favourite things about this sort of work is that it suits the space-born and Earth natives equally well, or badly; Quarren can move easily in three dimensions, but Eden can handle the heavy boots. On the painted star, she finds the problem, easy as pie to fix if it had only happened on the inside. A hull bot trying to do a plate boundary check has got stuck between the two plates it was inspecting. Even with the minimal toolbox Eden brought with her, she’s able to stun the poor thing—shut it down, really; it’s not alive, but is so cute that everyone assumes it is—and prise it out of the gap it’s got itself jammed into. She takes out its power source and throws the whole assembly into the toolbox. Inside her helmet, the beeping stops.
“Hey, check it out!” says a voice in her ear: the Ops controller who’s keeping an eye on this expedition. “Signal anomaly resolved, Captain, well done you.”
“Thanks,” Eden says, amused. “The old lady has still got it in her, huh.”
“No, skipper, I didn’t mean—” the Ops controller starts, but Eden laughs and cuts her off.
“I’m teasing,” she says. “We’re coming back in.”
She signals at Quarren, who acknowledges. They walk back across the hull, clunk, clunk, and take in the view in the other direction, a different vista of stars. “I never get tired of that,” Eden says, gesturing upwards. “You’d think, but no. Never stops being brilliant and beautiful and romantic.”
Quarren tilts her head. “Is that why you brought me out here?”
“No!” Eden says. “Well. I do say to everyone, you can bring a friend if it’s just a spotting mission. You might as well show the view to people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see it.”
“Because it’s very beautiful and romantic.”
“Shut up, Quarren.”
“Make me,” Quarren says tranquilly. “Can you imagine if we let people come on dates out here?”
“Wow,” Eden says, thinking about it. “EVA picnics. Soft music helmet transmissions. Champagne and strawberries in the N in Night Service.”
“Sounds perfect.” Quarren notices Eden’s gaze on her and grabs onto the tether. “I like picnics. Should we let them have picnics?”
“Definitely,” Eden repeats absently, looking in the direction of the sun. It’s hard to identify the constellations out here because of the strangeness of the point of view, but she can make out the plane of the zodiac. “Dates. Romance. Night Service baby boom.”
Quarren laughs, a little sadly. “I can give you picnics. I can’t give you that.”
“Babies?” Eden says, startled. “Quarren, you can’t give me enough sugar in my tea half the time, let alone that.”
She realises after she says it that it didn’t hit the tone; it wasn’t light and sweet like stuck hull bots and stars. But Quarren doesn’t seem upset. They drift back into the EVA bay, signal the controller to repressurise and get rid of the suits. On the wall, the ship’s time and clock time indicators are both indicating it’s very, very late. Quarren packs up and goes home, while Eden trundles down to Ops to dispense with the disabled bot. When she gets there, the techs and Ops controller are gathered around a console, chatting.
“They’re sweet, aren’t they?” one of the techs is saying. “Kinda like my mom and dad, they’ve been married for twenty years.”
“I don’t think the skipper and Administrator Quarren are, though,” the other one says thoughtfully, and Eden freezes in horror. She knows, and has always known, that radio communications between EVA suit helmets are, for extremely logical safety reasons, not private. They’re transmitted via the on-ship Ops controller.
The said Ops controller is studiously professional about it. So are the couple of technicians who need to listen to the last beamed transmissions of the bot. Eden signs off on everything, wonders yet again if she really is fit for command, and flees.
“Quarren,” she says, ten minutes later, sitting on her bed with her hands over her eyes. “They heard us. I forgot the Ops controller was handling transmissions. Shut up, it’s not funny.”
Absurdly, she wants to actually cry about it. Not fit for command, truly.
“It’s a little bit funny,” Quarren says. “Look, by the time you get back they’ll have forgotten. And at least we were just being middle-aged and not, you know. Young and consumed with intense passions, et cetera.”
Eden imagines that and briefly wishes she were dead. She watches Quarren pad quietly around the room, discarding hairpins and insignia. It’s past midnight, and she ought to just lie down flat and get her eight hours ready for another day of controlled chaos tomorrow. But she’s fed up, again. Fed up with middle-aged, and twenty-year clocks and baby booms and junior officers who think she’s a hundred and change. She looks around the room, the pictures on the walls, rumpled sheets and pillows, her jacket and toolbelt hanging off the back of a chair on top of Quarren’s cardigan and dress.
“Quarren, come here,” she says, patting the pillow beside her. “I’m done with today. Done with everything, except you.”
“Everything except me and intense passions?”
“Maybe, and haven’t I already told you today to shut up?”
Quarren laughs. She sheds the rest of her clothes deliberately slowly, and climbs in under the covers. It has just occurred to Eden that pretty soon she’s going to be sleeping alone, and she ought to take this opportunity while she can. She kisses Quarren, then props herself up on her elbows. She licks two fingers and runs them down her body, from the hollow between her collarbones, between her breasts, down her stomach and between her folds. Quarren jerks upwards at the touch, but doesn’t push her away. She looks up at Eden with an affection that feels like home. There was a brief period long ago when the two of them were trying to hide their relationship from the ship’s crew. Nothing will ever beat that for sexual excitement, but Eden prefers this quieter place, years on, where the two of them know each other down to the skin.
“Come here,” Eden says again, and Quarren snuggles up so Eden can pull her close. Eden buries her face in Quarren’s hair, trying to memorise the scent of soap, antiseptic and Sacred Infinite incense. She has no doubt that the two of them will find ways to talk when she goes; this, here, is what she won’t have. “What do you want, sweetheart?” she asks.
Quarren looks adorably thoughtful before answering, and a little while later she comes with her back arched and Eden’s fingers inside her. It takes her a minute to settle, and the sight fills Eden with an intense love edged with melancholy. Quarren wants to reciprocate, but Eden pushes her gently away. “I don’t know what I would do without you,” she says suddenly.
“What brought that on?” Quarren asks, sitting up. “You don’t have to do anything without me. You’re only going to be gone for a few weeks.”
“Yeah,” Eden says. “That’s right.”
That is right, she thinks. It has to be right. Quarren’s eyes on her are uncomfortably sharp.
The day after that is as chaotic as expected, and full of sidelong glances from her techs. And the day after that, Eden is woken at the crack of dawn by a subdued alarm. She gets up as quietly as she can and gathers her things. Quarren isn’t stirring, and Eden doesn’t want to wake her. She leans down and kisses her. “Be good,” she says. “Hold your tether.”
She stands there for a moment, and then decides on one more errand to run before she can leave the ship. Up in the hospital levels, it’s still overcrowded with the members of the Aster crew who haven’t been discharged or sent on to Luna Central, but peaceful and sweet-scented. The ship’s horticulturists have moved on to roses, rich and red, lining the wards and offices. Eden knocks on the door to the nurses’ station and is admitted by Sister Verity.
“Good morning, Captain,” she says, offering Eden a plastic chair next to the inevitable bowl of malted biscuits. ““Would you like to join us for the subhprabatam service?”
“No, thank you, Sister,” Eden says, smiling. “I’m a Muslim. ”
“Are you?” Sister Verity says. “Well, that doesn’t stop a lot of people. What do you need?”
“I don’t have much time,” Eden says, and stalls anyway, looking around at the plastic chairs, blankets and pillows for the medical staff to nap on between shifts. On the wall are the closest words the Sacred Infinite have to the Shahadah: to be always something in the way.
“You know I’m going to be away for a while,” she says, finally. “And, well, she says she’s fine and she is fine. It’s just, she’s not…”
A pause, as Eden can’t think of any word other than ‘fine’. Sister Verity doesn’t ask who she is.
“I’ll keep her busy,” she says, patting Eden’s arm comfortingly. “Travel safely, Captain. Take a biscuit.”
Eden takes the biscuit and gets to the door before Sister Verity calls her back. “Eden,” she says. “How long are you planning to be gone for?”
She says it mildly. She’s not even looking up, flicking through her papers. Not for nothing is this the only person on board who can overrule Quarren. Eden almost tells her the truth. She pulls it back and says, “For a while.”
“Right,” Sister Verity says. “Travel safely.”
Eden thanks her, and walks out to the sound of the subhpratam early morning service, the Sisters singing wordless into the void. Years from now, she will look back on this moment, and on the next time that she saw Quarren, and decide that there was nothing in the sequence between them that could be altered; that no word or deed could have diverted that path. Here on the hospital deck, she shakes herself free of fear and premonition. She accesses the ship’s computer and cedes command of the Night Service. She’s done everything she needs to, and Quarren is perfectly fine.
It’s time to go.
That's a yuletide story that's basically original SF f/f, and enjoyed writing it so much that I decided they should have their own book. I have written a first draft of that book! It is a full 100k, surprisingly, and quite a lot more serious. "spirit falling" is for sure a romcom; this is a love story, but a big, sad, dramatic one, with a backdrop of old wars and trauma, and ghosts and homegoing and all manner of things. Quarren is a hopeless lesbian. It does still have jokes in it, and the two main characters are the same people.
The 100k is barely readable, of course, but here is a standalone bit that is.
[NB - if you've read spirit falling, note the ship's name has changed - in that, it was Spirit Falling because the town in the original piece was called Spirit Falls. Quarren now efficiently administrates the Luna Central Command community ship Night Service.]
Two days before her departure, Eden is fed up, tired out and sitting at her desk when the communicator bleeps. “Captain? Could you come down for a minute, if you’re available?”
That’s Lily again. She doesn’t sound panicked, but she’s not one of life’s panickers and this could be anything. Eden takes the grav tube down to Ops and is relieved when she gets there and most people are doing their jobs calmly. It’s very late, just before the night shift crew are due to come on. Lily and the ones and the last of the day crew are gathered around the navigation table, which has been set to show the ship itself, the upper part of its hull.
“What’s this about?” Eden asks.
“It’s an emergency signal,” Lily says. “Something is broadcasting danger on the ship’s outer skin, but we don’t have anything out there that can get a camera view on it.”
“That could be anything,” Eden says. “Thoughts?”
“We could send a drone,” Lily says. “But honestly, it would be quicker just to send a person out there. Whatever it is, it’s small, and it’s got a working transmitter in it so it’s probably not squashed or radioactive.”
“That’s reassuring,” Eden says, but she thinks Lily is right. “All right, I’ll deal with it. Thanks, Lily.”
“No worries.” Lily goes back to talking to the day shift, and Eden looks at the list of junior technicians and engineers who are currently on shift. Anthony, the kid who got into a punch-up because he didn’t know how what to do with the Theta Pyx, has been doing his best to make friends and fall in line. Maybe he deserves a treat. She pulls his name up, then changes his mind. Eden is fed up and unhappy. Maybe it’s her who needs the treat. She marks the job as assigned and waits.
Quarren turns up about ten minutes later, looking soft-edged and tired. “Outside?” she says. “Me?”
“I just need a spotter for a five-minute job,” Eden says. A strict service rule states that no one does outside work alone even if it is just a five-minute job. “You can do it, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” Quarren says. She grew up on board ship; of course she can, and for once she doesn’t argue. “I’ll do it.”
The two of them suit up in the ship’s tiny person-accessible EVA bay, accessed through the observation deck at the back of the temple so they have to apologise to the Sisters at the vespertine service. The Night Service EVA kit is old-fashioned, the suit fabric not quite flush with the skin, but you can at least get into it by yourself. The last step is the eerie silver helmets with their polarised faceplates. Quarren peers out through the glass and doesn’t speak much. Eden checks they’re both ready and pings the controller in Ops to start depressurising the bay.
“Tethers,” she says, attaches them both: one end to each of their suits and the other to the heavy iron floor rings. When she was young, Eden was used to seeing beasts of burden tethered that way. She makes a standard hand signal to Quarren. Ready?
Ready, Quarren signals back, and the Ops controller cracks the door seals. Side by side, they drift out into open space. It’s an old metaphor, the favourite postcard phrase of the Earth tourist, but it’s really is like being born. Like emerging from somewhere comfortable, warm, constraining, into the true glory of existence.
It’s a cliche. Eden clangs her boots against the ship’s skin. They’re electromagnetic and they stick, but between steps she’s floating, attached to the rest of humanity only by the carbon fibre tether.
“Hold onto that,” she says to Quarren, over the little helmet-to-helmet radio transmitter.
Quarren grips the tether—it’s attached to her by another loop around her waist, but it’s safer to hold it—and Eden settles her feet back onto the surface of the ship. She feels the vibration, rather than hearing the sound. Clunk. They start walking over towards the signal, being broadcasted into Eden’s helmet by the Ops controller. Clunk. It’s enormously satisfying. Eden knows the ship’s hull is much too thick for the people who live in the habitat deck on the other side to hear the sound, but she likes to imagine they could. Clunk.
Quarren, not troubled by stray emergency radio signals, is looking up. The way the ship is oriented means they can see the shining red point which must be Mars, and beyond it, Saturn, with rings edge-on. After that is only the bare elliptic plane and the enormous scatter of the galaxy. Eden has to remind herself to trundle on towards the emergency signal and not just stop and stare. Again, Quarren has no such concerns. She turns off the magnetic field in her boots and lets herself float. Swimming in starlight, Eden thinks, delighted. As free as any human can be from the old bonds of Earth.
“God, that’s better,” she says. It’s a treat to be out here, when she’s the ship’s captain and really should delegate; it’s better yet to just take along her favourite person, rather than one off the roster.
“Bad day?” Quarren asks.
“You have no idea.” Eden wasn’t meaning to, but she tells Quarren about what Captain Li showed her, about Mrs Percival, about Lily’s big dreams, and how worried she is generally about this trip. Quarren listens, and Eden can’t see her face through the helmet glass but can picture it perfectly. Quarren’s about-to-administratively solve-a-problem-expression is one of the delights of her heart.
“First of all, Mrs Percival is a judgement on us,” Quarren says. “If it cheers you up at all, today she asked me if I thought being a woman known by a surname was really ladylike.”
“Oh my God.” Eden can’t help laughing. “But your name is a ship’s name, not—”
“Believe me, I know,” Quarren says. “I don’t believe our friendly local social worker understands the distinction. Anyway, I told her my real name, and invited her to observe the consequences should she ever use it.”
“Oh my God,” Eden says again. She supposes she should really be stopping Quarren from making enemies and alienating people, but she’s only human. “You’re right, that did cheer me up.”
“Secondly,” Quarren says. “I like Lily, and I think everyone needs a jab in their complacency occasionally. But I will be here while you’re gone, and I can stop her putting the Night Service into lockstep if need be. And you’re not going to be gone that long, anyway.”
Eden nods before remembering Quarren can’t see her. “Right.”
“And thirdly—I don’t know, about what Captain Li saw. I don’t know what we can do about it, but I’ll annoy the Luna authorities if I have to.”
She will, Eden knows. “Thanks,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m finding everything so difficult.”
“I do.” Quarren’s smile is apparent in her voice. “Things are more than usually trying around here.”
“Quarren, hold that tether,” Eden says, interrupting. “I don’t want you to drift off into space.”
Quarren obeys orders, which must be a first. Eden smiles, looking down to check her own tether is in place. There’s something at her feet, something massive, thin and black, flush against the surface. It takes Eden a second to realise it’s the first I in Night Service. If she looks to the side of the giant name plate and the start of the N, she can make out the painted Luna crescent and silver stars. Twenty-one of them, one for each of the ship’s years in service, and the twenty-first is obscured with something unfamiliar.
“Got it,” Eden says to Quarren. “Come on.”
She turns down the electromagnetism in her boots so she can bounce happily over NIGHT, suddenly free and full of mischief. One of her favourite things about this sort of work is that it suits the space-born and Earth natives equally well, or badly; Quarren can move easily in three dimensions, but Eden can handle the heavy boots. On the painted star, she finds the problem, easy as pie to fix if it had only happened on the inside. A hull bot trying to do a plate boundary check has got stuck between the two plates it was inspecting. Even with the minimal toolbox Eden brought with her, she’s able to stun the poor thing—shut it down, really; it’s not alive, but is so cute that everyone assumes it is—and prise it out of the gap it’s got itself jammed into. She takes out its power source and throws the whole assembly into the toolbox. Inside her helmet, the beeping stops.
“Hey, check it out!” says a voice in her ear: the Ops controller who’s keeping an eye on this expedition. “Signal anomaly resolved, Captain, well done you.”
“Thanks,” Eden says, amused. “The old lady has still got it in her, huh.”
“No, skipper, I didn’t mean—” the Ops controller starts, but Eden laughs and cuts her off.
“I’m teasing,” she says. “We’re coming back in.”
She signals at Quarren, who acknowledges. They walk back across the hull, clunk, clunk, and take in the view in the other direction, a different vista of stars. “I never get tired of that,” Eden says, gesturing upwards. “You’d think, but no. Never stops being brilliant and beautiful and romantic.”
Quarren tilts her head. “Is that why you brought me out here?”
“No!” Eden says. “Well. I do say to everyone, you can bring a friend if it’s just a spotting mission. You might as well show the view to people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see it.”
“Because it’s very beautiful and romantic.”
“Shut up, Quarren.”
“Make me,” Quarren says tranquilly. “Can you imagine if we let people come on dates out here?”
“Wow,” Eden says, thinking about it. “EVA picnics. Soft music helmet transmissions. Champagne and strawberries in the N in Night Service.”
“Sounds perfect.” Quarren notices Eden’s gaze on her and grabs onto the tether. “I like picnics. Should we let them have picnics?”
“Definitely,” Eden repeats absently, looking in the direction of the sun. It’s hard to identify the constellations out here because of the strangeness of the point of view, but she can make out the plane of the zodiac. “Dates. Romance. Night Service baby boom.”
Quarren laughs, a little sadly. “I can give you picnics. I can’t give you that.”
“Babies?” Eden says, startled. “Quarren, you can’t give me enough sugar in my tea half the time, let alone that.”
She realises after she says it that it didn’t hit the tone; it wasn’t light and sweet like stuck hull bots and stars. But Quarren doesn’t seem upset. They drift back into the EVA bay, signal the controller to repressurise and get rid of the suits. On the wall, the ship’s time and clock time indicators are both indicating it’s very, very late. Quarren packs up and goes home, while Eden trundles down to Ops to dispense with the disabled bot. When she gets there, the techs and Ops controller are gathered around a console, chatting.
“They’re sweet, aren’t they?” one of the techs is saying. “Kinda like my mom and dad, they’ve been married for twenty years.”
“I don’t think the skipper and Administrator Quarren are, though,” the other one says thoughtfully, and Eden freezes in horror. She knows, and has always known, that radio communications between EVA suit helmets are, for extremely logical safety reasons, not private. They’re transmitted via the on-ship Ops controller.
The said Ops controller is studiously professional about it. So are the couple of technicians who need to listen to the last beamed transmissions of the bot. Eden signs off on everything, wonders yet again if she really is fit for command, and flees.
“Quarren,” she says, ten minutes later, sitting on her bed with her hands over her eyes. “They heard us. I forgot the Ops controller was handling transmissions. Shut up, it’s not funny.”
Absurdly, she wants to actually cry about it. Not fit for command, truly.
“It’s a little bit funny,” Quarren says. “Look, by the time you get back they’ll have forgotten. And at least we were just being middle-aged and not, you know. Young and consumed with intense passions, et cetera.”
Eden imagines that and briefly wishes she were dead. She watches Quarren pad quietly around the room, discarding hairpins and insignia. It’s past midnight, and she ought to just lie down flat and get her eight hours ready for another day of controlled chaos tomorrow. But she’s fed up, again. Fed up with middle-aged, and twenty-year clocks and baby booms and junior officers who think she’s a hundred and change. She looks around the room, the pictures on the walls, rumpled sheets and pillows, her jacket and toolbelt hanging off the back of a chair on top of Quarren’s cardigan and dress.
“Quarren, come here,” she says, patting the pillow beside her. “I’m done with today. Done with everything, except you.”
“Everything except me and intense passions?”
“Maybe, and haven’t I already told you today to shut up?”
Quarren laughs. She sheds the rest of her clothes deliberately slowly, and climbs in under the covers. It has just occurred to Eden that pretty soon she’s going to be sleeping alone, and she ought to take this opportunity while she can. She kisses Quarren, then props herself up on her elbows. She licks two fingers and runs them down her body, from the hollow between her collarbones, between her breasts, down her stomach and between her folds. Quarren jerks upwards at the touch, but doesn’t push her away. She looks up at Eden with an affection that feels like home. There was a brief period long ago when the two of them were trying to hide their relationship from the ship’s crew. Nothing will ever beat that for sexual excitement, but Eden prefers this quieter place, years on, where the two of them know each other down to the skin.
“Come here,” Eden says again, and Quarren snuggles up so Eden can pull her close. Eden buries her face in Quarren’s hair, trying to memorise the scent of soap, antiseptic and Sacred Infinite incense. She has no doubt that the two of them will find ways to talk when she goes; this, here, is what she won’t have. “What do you want, sweetheart?” she asks.
Quarren looks adorably thoughtful before answering, and a little while later she comes with her back arched and Eden’s fingers inside her. It takes her a minute to settle, and the sight fills Eden with an intense love edged with melancholy. Quarren wants to reciprocate, but Eden pushes her gently away. “I don’t know what I would do without you,” she says suddenly.
“What brought that on?” Quarren asks, sitting up. “You don’t have to do anything without me. You’re only going to be gone for a few weeks.”
“Yeah,” Eden says. “That’s right.”
That is right, she thinks. It has to be right. Quarren’s eyes on her are uncomfortably sharp.
The day after that is as chaotic as expected, and full of sidelong glances from her techs. And the day after that, Eden is woken at the crack of dawn by a subdued alarm. She gets up as quietly as she can and gathers her things. Quarren isn’t stirring, and Eden doesn’t want to wake her. She leans down and kisses her. “Be good,” she says. “Hold your tether.”
She stands there for a moment, and then decides on one more errand to run before she can leave the ship. Up in the hospital levels, it’s still overcrowded with the members of the Aster crew who haven’t been discharged or sent on to Luna Central, but peaceful and sweet-scented. The ship’s horticulturists have moved on to roses, rich and red, lining the wards and offices. Eden knocks on the door to the nurses’ station and is admitted by Sister Verity.
“Good morning, Captain,” she says, offering Eden a plastic chair next to the inevitable bowl of malted biscuits. ““Would you like to join us for the subhprabatam service?”
“No, thank you, Sister,” Eden says, smiling. “I’m a Muslim. ”
“Are you?” Sister Verity says. “Well, that doesn’t stop a lot of people. What do you need?”
“I don’t have much time,” Eden says, and stalls anyway, looking around at the plastic chairs, blankets and pillows for the medical staff to nap on between shifts. On the wall are the closest words the Sacred Infinite have to the Shahadah: to be always something in the way.
“You know I’m going to be away for a while,” she says, finally. “And, well, she says she’s fine and she is fine. It’s just, she’s not…”
A pause, as Eden can’t think of any word other than ‘fine’. Sister Verity doesn’t ask who she is.
“I’ll keep her busy,” she says, patting Eden’s arm comfortingly. “Travel safely, Captain. Take a biscuit.”
Eden takes the biscuit and gets to the door before Sister Verity calls her back. “Eden,” she says. “How long are you planning to be gone for?”
She says it mildly. She’s not even looking up, flicking through her papers. Not for nothing is this the only person on board who can overrule Quarren. Eden almost tells her the truth. She pulls it back and says, “For a while.”
“Right,” Sister Verity says. “Travel safely.”
Eden thanks her, and walks out to the sound of the subhpratam early morning service, the Sisters singing wordless into the void. Years from now, she will look back on this moment, and on the next time that she saw Quarren, and decide that there was nothing in the sequence between them that could be altered; that no word or deed could have diverted that path. Here on the hospital deck, she shakes herself free of fear and premonition. She accesses the ship’s computer and cedes command of the Night Service. She’s done everything she needs to, and Quarren is perfectly fine.
It’s time to go.
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on 2024-02-15 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2024-02-17 08:23 pm (UTC)