Flew the Coop

[Sarah McFarlen]

A row of hard metal chairs, the low static laced hum of arrivals, and the antiseptic tang of recycled air. She shifted in her chair, seeking an angle where the framing didn't stab at her. There wasn't one. There never was. She'd done this enough that it should have been familiar, hadn't she? That awkward, lurching, half-moment between one life and another. Had hopped that void more times than she cared to recall. Had come through it before. Danced across it, even. Had found her feet on the other end, caught herself, kept on keeping on.

She found her eyes creeping back to the arrivals board on the minute, all the same.

Found herself worrying at the loose threads on her cuffs, slow picking them away, stretching out another protesting piece of polyester. Found herself squinting out into the encompassing gloom of the Barrier, beyond the surgeon's mess of umbilicals and lines. As though she could out-spot the sensors. She should have loaded a book. She had loaded a book. She'd read the same paragraph six times. She tried a seventh and, distracted by the tantalising shudder of a docking clamp, gave up midway through an eighth.

Instead, she watched the slow filter of humanity through the blue-lit bay.

A man with a face like gnarled wood and a scorched databad he could not help but turn over and over in his twisted hands. The shadows of tears crawled down his face like rain. Outbound.

A pair of off-duty IC reps bounced bad jokes off each other at the front of a departure bar, lack of uniform rendered irrelevant by the duplicate company-issue headsets, company-issue datapads, company-issue laughter. Inbound.

A family huddled in the shadow of a mooring umbilical as children ignored whispered instructions not to stare at an implant-studded bounty-hunter lounging four rows back, the dull plastic sheen of her forearms a promise sure as sharpened steel. Outbound. With an unlucky guest before the night was out, if she was a betting woman. Which, she reminded herself, she was in no position to be.

Then, silent as a sunrise, James Arland.

The years had left him no less wolfish. No less a creature that carried the whisper of violence in the tension of his shoulders and the corners of his eyes. No less a uniform, whatever clothes he chose to wear. She spotted, incongruously, a paper bag where memory would have supplied a rifle and felt a smile tug at her lips. No less a friend.

"Hey, Spookshow." She hugged him. Brief and sudden and so tight that her arms ached. She half-expected the smell of cordite, was pleasantly surprised not to find it. Finally she stepped back, hands loose at her side, styrofoam box at her feet. "Trip out was okay? Lanes're getting a little twitchy, with the blockade. Wasn't sure you'd make it."

A jerk of her chin towards a shadow beyond the window. "I set aside a room for you on Windward, but there's - Uh. No shortage of choices. It's still a bit of a mess. Not due to sail for a week yet and I had a time fighting the transports for shore power, so still need to set to work a lot of the electronics. Aux generator's still waiting, need trials on long and short-range comms - "

The words spilled out. Plans and problems and rough, hopeful suppositions of schedule that she'd left unsaid in her solitary labouring for fear that they'd melt away on exposure to air. She'd done all the work. Knew that she had. It felt undone, all the same.

"I bought dinner." She said, finally. Cradled in her hands, the box was still the right side of warm. Barely. "Still have the room upstairs for a few days, if you have - Things."

---

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

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

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