Well, I’ve debated about whether or not to do this. Why the hell not?
So here’s the thing. I’ve written not just a short story, but a full novel. I still have a lot of work to do with it. For one thing, I originally wrote it in first person and decided the story wasn’t working. So I’m in the process of converting it to third person. This will allow me to better expand some of the characters and action.
So why am I posting the first chapter?
I’d like some feedback. Please leave comments. Is this something you’d want to read more of? Is something not working? Let me know.
And who knows? I may throw more chapters your way…
Oh, and the title is just a working one at the moment. Not sure I’m 100% sold on it, but I don’t have anything better.
So here goes…
DON’T CRY WAR
by Robert Wurth
©2016 by Robert Wurth, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Mindy excitedly pulled herself along the wall by the railing until she was close enough to the viewport to press her face up against the glass. “Mom!” She gasped. “You can see it now!”
Through the viewport, the massive shape of Jupiter was slowly coming into view as the Orion Travel Industries space ship Jovian’s Folly approached for final orbit. Passengers of the massive cruise ship gathered around windows to finally see the majestic planet up close.
The intercom crackled. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. Those of you with port side access will be able to see Jupiter coming into view as we make our final turn for orbit. Those of you on the starboard side won’t have long to wait. Once we have our orbit solution, all observation decks will be open for your enjoyment.”
Nearly 500 million kilometers away, another ship moved through the dark of space. It was propelled by constant acceleration that increased its velocity with every passing second.
It was a bizarre vessel. The front resembled an elongated dodecahedron, behind which it narrowed to a long column, then flared out to the large propulsion system. Attached to the dodecahedron and propulsion bulbs were eight “petals” filled with ordinance. For the ship’s journey, they were folded down along the center column, but could extend, four in front and four in the rear, when required. Whatever the strange ship’s origin, it was obvious that it existed for one, deadly purpose.
At this moment, there was nothing in front of it but space. However, in 5 weeks, it would intercept Jupiter’s orbit.
Part 1: Bode Station
Chapter 1
Sol Asteroid Belt
February 9, 2144, 1:25 pm (System Standard Time)
Douglas “Jinks” Jenkins sipped luke-warm coffee through a straw as he peered through the cockpit window. Part of his view was obscured by the glare from the cabin lights, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t specifically paying attention to the stars.
His ship hurtled through the asteroid belt at an impressive velocity. The engines had cut off two hours ago, bringing the ship out of constant acceleration. With a now stable speed, there was nothing to press him against his seat, no artificial gravity, no sensation at all of movement. Outside, the backdrop of stars remained ever static, and there were no other objects close enough to be seen visibly rushing by.
The ship might as well have been hanging dead in space.
Had Doug been actively looking at the stars, and had his sense of wonderment not been dulled by years of exposure, he might have found the view to be spectacular. The Milky Way cut diagonally across the cockpit window like a massive glowing scar.
Up ahead was a rock filled with ore, upon which a drilling module sat in standby. Attached to his ship was a service module anchored to an extraction boat. Doug Jenkins was hurtling through the Asteroid Belt in a space ship.
The 10-year old Doug, who spent many free nights gazing up at the stars, would have found this to be mind-bendingly exotic and adventurous.
Teenager Doug would have had different ideas. At 17, his focus was completely on becoming a military pilot. He couldn’t have been sold on a job as a rock jockey if the contract was delivered by whoever his celebrity crush was at that moment, she was carrying bags of cash, and delivered the promise of undying love.
For 39 year-old Doug, he was simply content to be piloting a space craft nearly every single day. But even so, he rarely took the time to notice the spectacular light show outside that had taken his breath away the first time he saw it from outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
At some undefinable point, piloting a space craft millions of miles from planet Earth became just another day on the job.
The mind had a peculiar way of making even the most extraordinary seem normal.
The control panel beeped. With a practiced motion, Doug flicked his coffee bag toward the side of the console. The bag gently impacted with a click as the magnet grabbed hold of the metal edge of the flight console, preventing the bag from bouncing and drifting away. It had landed at just the right spot to let the bottom half bounce against the touch panel exactly where the button was to shut off the alarm. The alarm went silent.
Doug smiled in satisfaction.
“Show off,” said Ashley Williams, his co-pilot.
“Looks like we’re getting close, Ash.” Doug said to her. “Give me negative acceleration to approach velocity.”
“Aye, aye, boss,” said Ashley. She emphasized the word “boss” with just the correct amount of sarcasm to make Doug cringe. He glanced at her just in time to see her punctuate the comment with a wink.
Ash keyed in the command to flip the ship. There was a brief jolt as front thrusters fired from the bottom and rear thrusters fired from the top, kicking the ship into a spin. The jolt came again 180 degrees later when the thrusters fired again to stop the spin.
“Ready?” Asked Ash.
“Light it up,” said Doug.
Ashley fired the main engines. Their pilot couches inclined backward and then the thrusters fired. This time the jolt was much stronger. They felt themselves pressed heavy into their chairs, a result of the 3g’s of gravity generated by the thrusters.
Doug and Ash looked at each other and grinned, sharing a moment of giddy pleasure at the effect of the g-forces on their bodies. Other pilots got it. Anyone not a pilot usually found the jerking of any thruster activity to be annoying and thought the pilots were a bit crazy. Which they, of course, were.
Ash turned her attention back to her monitors, but Doug kept looking at her. Ash’s long auburn hair was pulled back into a tight bun, not strictly necessary per company policy, but much more convenient when in null gravity. His eyes traced the line of her jaw down around her chin and up across her lips, slightly shiny from moisturizing gloss. They naturally curled up slightly as though she were constantly amused with life. Her jade green eyes narrowed slightly and her eyebrows furrowed as she examined the instrument panel. Not even the puffy appearance brought on by micro-gravity, nor the distortion of elevated g-forces could diminish her beauty, he thought.
When he first met Ash, it took Doug awhile to realize just what it was he found so irresistible about her. That she was physically attractive was without question, but he had known a lot of pretty people. There was something about Ashley’s personality, however, that amplified her appeal to him and everyone else who met her.
There were people out there who wore their physical attributes like a badge of entitlement. Ashley was entirely aware of her appearance, and she certainly never tried to hide or diminish it, but she never acted like it earned her something. Likewise, she came from a great deal of money, but never flaunted that privilege, either. She was genuine, warm, and friendly to everyone. It was something people picked up on within seconds of meeting her.
When Ashley came aboard the station almost two years ago, she received a number of offers for companionship, both long and short term. Ash’s polite charm allowed her to turn them down and still make them feel glad they asked.
Doug never asked.
He had been bantering back and forth with her for weeks, enjoying the teasing and flirting, but not yet entirely convinced it was more than just playful. Finally, one morning on the way to reporting for work, Ash cornered him and with the subtly of a brick asked, “So when are you taking me out to dinner?” That was almost a year and a half ago.
Ash arrived on Bode Station as a pilot candidate. As with all new hires, it took months before she was actually worked into the training rotation. Rumors floated around that Doug used his position of seniority to gain the spot as her trainer. He refused to confirm or deny said rumors, but he also believed that anyone else would have done the same thing.
Doug tore his eyes from Ash’s profile and turned his attention back to the console. He swiped a finger across the main display, clearing the readouts. “Quiz time, Ash. Dead module out there. All we know is that it’s stopped responding, stopped drilling, and the boat has gone missing. How do we proceed? No guessing.”
Ash rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Doug?”
“Procedure?”
She shook her head and smirked. “I hated these quizzes even when I was a trainee.”
Doug shrugged. “Better come up with something fast. We need to make the solution for our approach path.”
“You know I know this stuff.”
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“You signed my endorsement, for Christ’s sake!”
“You’re stalling.”
Ash rolled her eyes again, this time more exaggerated. “You’re a jerk.”
“Stating the obvious won’t get you off the hook.” Doug said.
There were pilots who trusted their ships and computers for everything. They knew the controls, knew the systems, could troubleshoot some basic problems, but if you took all of that away, they’d be lost. The familiarity of space travel had bred complacency.
Doug knew better. He forced himself to remember that no matter how well engineered a ship was, space forgave absolutely nothing. Dirt side, most mistakes didn’t kill you. In space, most mistakes were fatal. It was something he had tried to drum into all of his trainees over the years, but never so much as with Ashley.
Likely she would never be in a situation where she would have to fly into a repair job without a computer and sensors to guide her every movement. And if it were anyone else, he would have made sure they passed his tests during training, but let it go once the endorsement was signed. You can’t mother hen everyone forever.
Maybe it came down to a point of pride as her instructor. He had a desire to push her to be even better. An actual stick jockey, instead of a sensor jockey. Mostly, though, he just wanted her to be the best she could be because he knew she came to Bode to learn how to pilot. And Ash had real talent.
Resigned to play Doug’s game, Ashley sighed. She closed her eyes as she pulled the manual’s protocols from her memory.
Doug tapped the screen and a hologram showing their destination popped up in front of them. “Here you go, champ,” he said.
Ash gazed at the slowly rotating image. Her green eyes squinted. She bit her lower lip.
At about a kilometer in diameter, the rock was nothing special. It didn’t appear to be a rubble pile, a group of small rocks all lumped together by gravity to give the illusion of a larger asteroid. There were no other known bodies around it. By all appearances, the danger was nominal and this was only a mechanical failure.
After a few seconds of studying the image, Ash started to speak–
–and was interrupted by an alarm.
The hologram of the rock vanished and was replaced by flashing text announcing an urgent call coming in from Bode Station.
Ashley and Doug gave each other quick looks. It was unusual for Bode to make contact in the middle of a work shift. Doug keyed open the comm. “Probe two-three responding,” he said.
The flashing text was replaced by a floating head. It was Andy Jorgensen, the boss of Bode Station. Normally he would be too busy flying a desk to take time out to personally contact a work ship, so from that alone, Doug knew something was up. Even without that, Jorgensen didn’t look happy. “Doug,” he said. “We have a situation with Tagawa and Phillips.”
The look on his face and the tone of his voice was enough for Doug to guess the problem.
Decades earlier, prior to the governmental unification, two of the larger military-backed governments entered into a conflict over control of the Belt. Hostilities lasted barely two years, and its resolution was one of the catalysts that led to unification. However, in that time, fighting was fierce and ruthless.
A tactic favored by one side was the placement of proximity mines on rocks throughout the belt, as a deterrent to the other side attempting mineral mining.
When a cease fire and peace treaty was later negotiated, the use of the mines was at first outright denied, and then downplayed. Documents were classified and no one knew just how many were ever put in place.
Unification brought the documents under the control of the new worldwide government. By this time, public attention and outrage had waned and moved on to other issues. Bringing the documents to light was deemed a potential embarrassment to the fledgling government, especially considering that the newly elected president was a representative of the former offending government.
The classified status of the documents was extended and the matter was considered resolved.
Years later, when the exploration and exploitation of resources in the Belt amplified. The heaviest activity came from private enterprise, and it wasn’t long before a civilian exploration vehicle encountered an explosive devices and all 10 lives were lost.
The government acknowledged the problem, but employed spin-doctors to suppress and twist the story. They claimed that all devices had been rendered inert following hostilities and implied that this incident was the result of accidental tampering on the part of the exploration crew. When pressed for information about the number of remaining devices and how the government planned to clean them up, they claimed that prior to unification, the records were destroyed.
The unofficial, official party line was, “watch where you step.”
However, the companies working in the Belt weren’t without influence. The government depended on the mining operations and some not-so-subtle threats from union representatives finally sparked a compromise.
The government secretly admitted knowledge of the remaining devices, however the partial truth of their story was that some records were actually destroyed. The locations of all of the remaining devices was unknown. The government grudgingly granted ex-military mining company employees of who passed specific background checks the clearance to have the deactivation protocols if and when a proximity mine was encountered.
The result was that there were now only a handful of people on Bode Mining Station expected to drop everything in the event that a ship found itself ensnared by something with teeth.
Douglas Alan Jenkins, call sign “Jinks,” was ex-military.
“Oh hell,” said Doug.
“Yeah,” Jorgensen said, following the slight delay of the transmission back to Bode. His lips formed a thin line and his eyes blazed. Andy Jorgensen was not known for suppressing his emotions and the few times his crews ran across leftover military junk, he took it as a personal insult. He placed it on roughly the same level as a neighbor’s dog crapping on his porch. “You’re closest and you’re on duty, so you win the prize. You have your kit?” Standard operating procedure called for everyone with clearance to carry along a deactivation kit whenever they left the station.
Doug nodded. “Yep. Send their location. We’ll get situated here and head over.”
“Thanks, Doug.”
“Per aspera ad astra,” said Doug.
Andy smirked. “Understood. I’ll have a pitcher of the good stuff waiting when you get back. Bode Station out.”
Doug turned to face Ashley. Her green eyes were burning with concern. “What’s going on?” She asked. “Andy looked pissed.”
Doug summed the situation up for her as quickly as he could. “Should I be worried?” She asked.
“No. It shouldn’t be a problem. Set us to relative zero-vee while I update the duty log and prepare to disconnect the tick.”
Ash hesitated as though trying to decide whether or not to believe him. Finally, she nodded and reached for the controls. “Setting to relative zero-velocity,” she said flatly.
Doug put a hand on her shoulder. “Really, no worries.” He then reached over and touched the record icon on the panel for the duty log. “Probe two-three. Nine, February 9, 2144, 1:41 pm. Duty log addendum. Crew of two. Captain Douglas Alan Jenkins and Pilot Ashley Anne Williams reporting. We are diverting from duty assignment of drill module investigation and repair, and delivery of replacement extraction boat. Reassignment to sector ten-one-six to deactivate a military explosive. Extraction boat and Service Module will be abandoned at this location for later retrieval. Captain Jenkins out.” He tapped the screen a few more times. As soon as the ship reached zero relative velocity, the current position and exact destination coordinates would be linked to the log entry and transmitted to Bode.
Supposedly these logs would let someone figure out what happened if they wound up lost or dead. Many on the station saw the logs as a waste of time and to protest they recorded rather colorful entries. Doug discouraged this because as a shift supervisor he often had to listen to the logs before they went into the company archive, and censor out the inappropriate comments as necessary.
He unbuckled from his seat, gave Ash a quick kiss on the cheek and floated aft to the airlock.
Doug and Ashley were in a Probe ship. Its primary purpose was to transport the service modules out to the rocks and, if necessary also transport extraction boats and drilling modules. A number of other ships also serviced and frequented Bode Station. There were transports that loaded up ore and ice for shipping back to Mars or Earth. The occasional science or tourist ship visited the station. Work skiffs did localized station maintenance. But the day-to-day grind at Bode was handled by Probes.
Almost all ore and ice extraction was automated. Once rocks were scanned and determined to be viable, a drilling module and extraction boat were sent out. If all went well, a few weeks or a few months after landing on a rock, the boat would be full and it would disengage the drilling module and return to Bode.
The drilling module not only performed the actual ore extraction, but also the initial processing. And there were actually different modules depending on whether ore or ice was being mined. Each was specialized, and performed roughly seventy percent of the processing before anything ever got back to the station.
The extraction boat was the second part of the drilling operation. It attached to the drill mod after the module was docked to the rock and assembled the robotic mining station. Material passed through the drill mod and filled the boat. Extraction boats were designed to hold a lot of material, but also to be easy to transport and store. Empty, boats were folded and compact. They expanded as they filled. Doug liked to think of them like the paper origami balloons he made as a child, the kind that lay flat and puffed up into a ball when he blew into it. However, it was common on the station to just refer to the boats as ticks, as if the drilling module were a dog.
The system of drill mod and boat was designed to be as self-contained as possible, fully equipped to make a wide range of self-repairs should something go wrong. Even so, it was necessary to maintain a full time crew to travel out to the mining locations when something surpassed the capabilities of the automated systems.
Doug was mildly concerned with abandoning the boat and the service module. Ideally he would just link the boat to the drilling module’s beacon and send it on its way, lugging the service module with it. But the drill mod had somehow lost its original boat and they had no idea why. It might have been sending faulty telemetry data, in which case the new boat would probably suffer the same lost fate.
The second option was to take the boat with them. However, the course change to intercept and rescue Phillips and Tagawa was unplanned and they were already going to be stretching their fuel capacity to burn over to them. The mass of the boat just simply had to go if Doug didn’t want them to wind up stranded.
Doug floated down the tunnel of the probe, past the crew lounge and back to the lower airlock. He gently guided and pushing himself along with his hands and feet with practiced ease. The ship’s manual referred to it as the Main Access Hallway, but “tunnel” was a more accurate term. It was large enough to fit a person in a full Extravehicular Mobility Unit, and yet somehow managed to feel small even when not wearing a bulky EMU suit.
Despite the fact that the cockpit was technically the “front” of the ship and the service module was attached at the “rear,” Doug and all other pilots viewed it in terms of up and down. Constant thrust created artificial gravity and gravity always pulled down, so when under primary thrust, the rear of the Probe was “down.”
Doug arrived at the lower airlock and logged into the service controls. It was against company regulations to dump equipment like he was about to do, so the computer wasn’t inclined to let him decompress and detach the module and boat in free fall, versus on a rock.
“Location logged, Doug,” said Ashley. “I forecasted this space out to thirty days and it will remain clear. No rocks in non-standard orbit.”
“Thanks, Ash. Stand by while I detach.” Probably the forecast was unnecessary. People had the misconception that the Asteroid Belt was a densely packed mass of rocks, all hurtling about at high speeds and smashing into each other. It was true that all of the rocks were moving, and at a decent velocity. It was also true that sometimes rocks impacted one another. And yet, there was a lot more space than there were rocks, and there were fewer rocks yet that deviated from Standard Belt Orbit. However, since the chance of a deviant asteroid intersecting the drill mod was not zero, it was policy to forecast out the space using all available data.
Doug went through the sequence of passwords with the computer, told it what he wanted to do, and then suffered through a series of “are you sure?” prompts. Finally, the system relented and the decompression of the service mod completed. He punched in the key sequence and listened for the clank as the four magnetic locks disengaged. A laser sensor confirmed that the module and extractor weren’t moving. The last thing he wanted was for the damn things to drift while they were gone. It wasn’t a matter of getting lost, as they could always be located by beacons. It was that the company would get a little grumpy if the module and boat were damaged because they wandered out of forecasted space.
The next trick was to pull away carefully enough so as not to nudge it.
“Everything OK?” Ashley asked.
“Golden.” Doug waited for the confirmation that the location of the equipment was marked, beacon activated, and the process was recorded in the log. “OK, let’s get under way.” He remained at the lower airlock instead of returning to the cockpit. Despite the fact that his mass was fairly negligible compared to the ship, there remained slight chance that even pushing off the wall to float up the main hallway could nudge the ship and bump the free-falling drill mod.
The Probe vibrated and Doug felt a miniscule sensation of weight as the ship accelerated slightly. “How we looking?” He asked.
“Twenty seconds to clear.” Acceleration was agonizingly slow to minimize a course fluctuation. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Service mod and tick confirmed at zero relative velocity.” Said Doug.
“We are in the clear.” Ashley reported.
Doug let out a sigh. “Stable orbit,” he said.
Doug went back to the cockpit and strapped in. He took over the controls and eased the ship to a new vector. “Ready for one-quarter constant burn?”
“Aye, boss.”
He gave Ash a quick smirk. “Engaging main thrusters.” The ship rumbled as the engines throttled up and the acceleration pressed Doug and Ash back against their seats.
They would reach one and a quarter over Earth’s gravity and would remain so under constant acceleration for half of their trip. Then the probe would flip around and burn the opposite direction to slow down. Constant acceleration was the fastest way between two points in space, and the only feasible way to cover the vast distances.
Normal acceleration was kept to roughly half Earth gravity. With the urgent situation, however, the added fuel cost was necessary. Even so, Hari and Tagawa were facing about a 7 hour wait for a rescue.
“I mean, explosives?” Ashley said suddenly, as if they had been in the middle of a conversation.
As soon as their course was set, the Doug and Ashley decided to use the first half of the trip for a sleep cycle. It had taken Ashley nearly an hour to fall asleep, even with the sleep aid, as she considered the consequences of their new mission. It still weighed heavily on her mind when they awoke, but she didn’t say anything.
She got dressed and ate her meal in silence. At first Doug didn’t think much of it, but with every passing minute the tension became more palpable. It was clear that as the implications of what they were doing sank in, Ashley was becoming more and more agitated. Upon returning to the cockpit, both of them pretended to be intent on their instruments or just about anything else but the very obvious gulf of silence growing between them.
Ashley’s outburst startled Doug, then he shrugged. “I know,” he said. He was relieved she had finally spoken.
“That war was over 20 years ago and we have to deal with it? We have to risk our lives? Why is this even a thing?”
“Politics,” Doug said. “Politics and budgets. But mostly politics.”
“That’s exactly my point.” She said, her voice rising a bit. “These things have already killed people and they lied about the danger! What happens when one of these things finally blows someone else up? Is that a good political position? Are the lawsuits in the budget?”
“Someone, somewhere, determined that cleaning it up would be like admitting fault. Denial better protected them against liability,” said Doug.
“That’s a load of bullshit,” barked Ash. “Irresponsible bullshit!”
Doug nodded. “I don’t disagree,” he said. “But they are playing the averages. Like the odds of flying through the middle of the belt and actually hitting a rock.”
“Right,” she said, “but you don’t see anyone putting faith in those odds. They still plot a course no matter how unlikely a collision is. They still take preventive action.”
“Since when have you known the government to be any damn good at prevention? Most governments are reactive, not proactive.”
“It’s just irresponsible,” she repeated.
Doug turned his chair to face hers and placed a hand on her knee. “Look, this bugs the hell out of me, too. I disarmed four of these things before you ever came to the station. It’s nerve-wracking. I won’t lie and say there isn’t any danger. You’re too smart for that. But what are we going to do about it? What good will it do Terry and Hari if we sit here and get all worked up and pissed off?”
Ashley nodded slowly and the angry crease in her brow softened. “Well, it’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you, you know?”
Doug raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
She smirked and shoved him in the shoulder. “Yeah, well, I may need you as a reference when my work contract is up.”
“Brat.”
“But I’m cute, remember? That makes up for it.”
He considered her point for a moment and concluded she was correct.
They were silent for a few moments, then Ash swiveled her chair toward to face Doug. “So, I was wondering. You think any more about that conversation we had a few days ago? Seems to me that this would be a good time to consider it.”
Doug had been dreading this. It was a conversation he really didn’t want to get into. Especially in the middle of a tense situation. He sighed.
“Well?” She pressed.
“I don’t know, Ash,” he said slowly, stalling.
Ashley never intended to make a career out of Bode. She came to the station for pilot training and experience, and to pay for her continued education, but had told Doug early in their relationship that her ambitions were elsewhere. She intended to take advantage of the exploding space tourism trade by starting her own business.
They had been together for nearly a year when she began to drop hints about wanting him to come with her after her service contract was up. At first Doug was able to remain willfully ignorant of the hints. Undeterred, Ash started becoming less subtle.
“What’s not to know? Partnership. Fifty-fifty.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “But I don’t know if I’m cut out. I’m not a businessman.”
Ash frowned. “How are you not cut out? You wouldn’t be just a businessman. I’m not even asking you to be involved in that side of it if you don’t want. You’d be the captain, Doug.”
“Why don’t you captain it? Isn’t that why you’re here?” Even as he said it, Doug knew his comment wasn’t fair.
In fact, Doug actually admired Ash’s motivation for coming to Bode. To run her tourism business Ash didn’t need to know astro-navigation, or how to pilot, or any of dozens of other skills she was intent on learning. She could sit in an office somewhere, but that wasn’t for her. She wanted to be hands on, to know how things worked.
It was possible to learn to pilot from any number of sources, some decent and some not so much. Nubium Colony on Luna offered a cheap community college course that would teach someone just enough to get themselves killed as soon as a situation deviated from the textbook. But Ashley didn’t need to resort to that. Her family was wealthy and could purchase extremely high quality instruction. Ash refused to go for that. She insisted on getting her hands in the thick of it. She insisted on real training. So she signed on with Bode, fully aware that it required a 5 year work contract.
“I’m not interested in being the captain, Doug. I never was. I was always going to hire someone. But now, I’d rather it was you. I want you to pilot.”
Doug snorted and his words escaped like oxygen out of the hull following a micro-meteor puncture, and equally as damaging. “That’s not piloting, Ash.” He immediately wished he had a seal to slap over his mouth.
Ashley raised her eyebrows. “Oh?” She said, her tone defiant and challenging.
Doug looked quickly to the ceiling of the cabin and tried to think of how to phrase his thoughts without digging a deeper hole. Or maybe he was looking for a way off the ship. Suit optional.
He decided to try to change the subject. “Look, Ash, I like it here. I live here. My friends are here. This place is my home and guys like Hari and Tagawa, and even Andy Jorgensen? They’re like family.”
Ashley’s features softened slightly. “I get that Doug. I really do.”
“I’ve been here 11 years. I’ve had plenty of offers to leave.”
Ashley shrugged. “Yeah, but I was hoping I wasn’t just any other offer.”
“You’re not, but you’re expecting your dream to be my dream. I mean, we happen to start dating and now you want me to uproot everything I know?”
Ash’s expression went stony and Doug winced. He immediately realized he’d again said the wrong thing and any hope of diffusing the situation was lost.
“Really,” Ashley said flatly. “Happen to start dating? Just happen to? You think I’m asking you this because… because… fuck, I don’t know, because you’re here?”
“Jesus! That’s not what I meant!”
“What do you mean then?” She snapped. “Because after a year and a half I sort of assumed this wasn’t completely casual, you know? Is there a time limit we have to reach before I’m allowed to think that maybe I’d like a little more for us than the just the ability to work well together and a mutual appreciation for fucking?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ash! That is not how I view our relationship!” Doug said. “And that’s not the issue at all!” He took a deep breath before continuing. “Look, this is something you’ve wanted for some time. I haven’t. I’ve come to terms with my life on Bode and now I just don’t know that I’m ready to uproot and leave. I’m a pilot. It’s what I do here and I’m damn good at it!”
“And you can still be a pilot!” She snapped.
“What? For a couple of minutes on either end at port? And even then only as a back-up for the tower’s guidance systems? Because they don’t actually let you fly something that big into port by yourself. I’d be a glorified abort button if something goes wrong. And what do I do for the weeks or months in between, when the ship is just aimed at its destination and needs nothing more from its pilot than to sit at the Captain’s table and listen to blue-haired old ladies tell me how much I remind them of their grandsons? What am I piloting then?”
Ashley just stared at him for several long moments. Then finally, she looked away and spoke very quietly. “I don’t know.”
At that moment Doug hated himself.
He obviously never wanted to fight with Ash, but especially not then, with nerves already frayed. The worst part of it was that Doug knew his point was a valid one, and that made him feel like it was even more of an asshole piece of ammunition to throw at her.
Putting himself elbows deep inside the guts of the explosive they were heading toward seemed preferable at the moment.
It also wasn’t that he didn’t believe in her. He was proud of everything she had accomplished. Ash had already nabbed a master’s degree in business administration, with a minor in astronavigation. She was taking remote classes while on Bode with the intent on upgrading Astronav to a master’s also. Astronav was a tough path just by itself. To juggle it with a full time work contract on Bode was remarkable. That alone told him that no one would be wise to try to stand in her way.
“Look, Ash,” he started to say.
She cut him off, still speaking dangerously softly. “Don’t, Doug. If you’re too much of a coward to consider leaving your job here to take a business risk with me, then there’s nothing more to say about it and I’ll stop asking.”
Her words couldn’t have stung him more if she had printed them out, wrapped them around plank of wood, and slapped him across the face with them.
He realized that the only thing that would prevent this from degenerating into something far more damaging would be if, for once, he kept mouth shut. He unbuckled from the pilot’s couch. “I’m heading down,” he said, climbing onto the ladder built into the floor. He descended to the back of the ship with neither of them exchanging another word.
So that’s it. The end of chapter one. Again, I would really appreciate your feedback. Thanks for reading!
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