Flew the Coop

[Sarah McFarlen]

26th March 836 – Barrier Gate Station, Coronado

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Sarah McFarlen should have been used to leaving home by now.

She had done all the essentials. Worked down the list like a show-hound through her hoops. Had done it often enough that she could have sketched out the process in her sleep. She had packed her life into neat, labelled boxes and watched them trundle, one by one, out the too-wide doors. She'd arranged fuel and food, docking clearances and flight plans, had run trials on the most essential of the Dunlin's petulant, sputtering systems until it felt like her eyes were ready to bleed more than her fingers already had.

She'd squared what debts she could and exchanged promises for those she couldn't. She had, ignoring the knotting in her gut, folded away the deep-blue dress she'd been so proud of when she'd slipped, flushed with newfound riches, into Curacao orbit with a promise that this life was behind her. That she was done with theft and revolutions and waking, wide-eyed, to the shriek of a decomp alarm and the infernal glow of emergency lighting. She'd believed it, then. Believed it with all the certainty of a heartbeat.

But, that was belief for you. Pretty to hold. Solid as smoke.

It wasn't yet morning on the ward's local cycle, and the corridor was stained the blue-black of pre-dawn light as she slipped from the penthouse. The cabin's quarter-G field relinquished its hold on her as she passed the threshold, the uncomfortable tug of station-normal gravity anchoring her to the deckplates with a ferocity that left her legs protesting the treatment inside a dozen paces. A breath. She should have been taking the steroids. Hadn't been. Hadn't seen the need. Hadn't thought she'd be going anywhere in a hurry. Ha.

She stuffed her hands into her jacket and pushed on.

She'd have to talk to James about that. How they set they gravity. Not the only thing to talk about. She felt a traitorous smile tugging at the corners of her lips. Ten years. Ten years, and he wasn't dead. Ten years, and he'd still answered when she called. God only knew what she'd done to deserve it, but the little ember of gratitude in her chest was doing her more good than the jacket was.

The lighting had been someone's hopeful effort to encourage something like a regular waking cycle for the denizens of this wing of Barrier Gate. It had, in her experience, only led to people doing the same sorts of things at night in orbit that they did at night down the well. But tonight was uncommonly quiet. There was distant laughter, and a rattle in the fans that told her that someone would be replacing a bearing before the fortnight was out, but otherwise she passed only a few on the way to the markets, made eye contact with none of them.

She bought two boxes of noodles from the cleanest-looking stall she could find, paid for them with the second card when the first failed and, steaming styrofoam carry-case in hand, turned for the docks to wait for James.

---

"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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