RavensDagger

  Interlude Ohe Twenty and Six

  She was born in a desote little station, stu the rings of Saturn.

  Stud desote were not pulling nearly enough weight in that statement. She'd been born on a station whose name was a string of letters and numbers, and whose owners lived way ba Earth. Or maybe Mars? It was hard to tell.

  It wasn't like they really mattered. Twenty-Six was born to a cozy little family, and that was, maybe, enough.

  Her name was given to her iation's hospital. She was the twenty-sixth baby born there, and was, teically, pany property from the moment of her birth.

  That, like many other things, olite fi.

  If she was pany property, then she was also the pany's responsibility. It meant that the number's corporation that owned her had to write off her 'maintenance' as a normal expense. Diapers and her first shots, the medication that all babies born in zero-g he special little pace-maker for her infantile heart to be able to beat. Her first clothes, then her education.

  It was all a calcuted game of putting the responsibility on someone's shoulder.

  That was a good analogy for life around Saturn, actually. Everything was teetering on the edge of being a disaster, and it all had to be someone's fault.

  It wasn't all bad. She was one of some eighty thousand people living in and around the rings of Saturn. That was a small city's worth of people, so many that it was impossible to know everyone. But it ossible to know each other's families.

  They formed a strange sort of society that had felt pletely natural to her at the time. s as and tightly knit family groups, eae with their own speciality. Her family were meics. Her grandparents, all four of them, were engineers, and her parents both meics. They devoted themselves to keeping the stations running.

  Others had s of security officers, or ining operators, drone trollers, life support specialists, dock workers, officers... there was a sense of... pce, in the rings.

  You were born into your slot. You'd live and work in it, responsible for keeping that cog turning until you iably died at the median age of twenty-nine.

  When her parents passed--the bme had fallen on a young man called Forty-Seven, from the Life Support Subsystems , she had decided that maybe... maybe life around Saturn wasn't the best.

  There was nothing actually keeping her back. She was pany property, but that olite fi and everyone k. So she made some calls, took the small amount of time allotted to her to grieve and got herself a berth on the Held Together.

  She was happy to admit that she fell in love with the ship.

  There was so mu, so much life, so mubsp;motion. Sure, it was even older than some of the stations she'd lived on and repaired, but old wasn't always bad. It had a weight of history to it, and the captaied her right.

  Missy was there too. Stern and gruff and... kind of hot. Twenty-Six had developed a crush on the older woman almost as grand as her love for the ship.

  Both loves had sted for a while, and both seemed to be going nowhere fast.

  Missy didn't return the feelings. Twenty-Six wasn't sure she was able to. The woman had history of her own, and she'd leave at many of the ports they found themselves in and find a man, or a woman, to spend the night with.

  The Held Together... didn't always live up to her name. She was a ship in rough shape, and it often showed.

  The romance faded a little. There were other ships out there, some that weren't death-traps. She'd seen stations, even moons, that she never expected to see before, and discovered first-hand that her experiences in the rings weren't... normal.

  Sure, life was shit all across the sor system, but there were big pockets where things maybe weren't so bad.

  She'd never live on a p, or on one of the moons with a heavier gravity well. Her bones a couldn't take it. But one of the smaller moons? One of the newer, ations? Maybe... maybe one day.

  Twenty-Six could say a lot about Saturn, but she couldn't say that the pce had stomped out her ability to dream.

  None of those dreams had ever included someone like Evelyn Ville.

  The woman had e aboard the Held Together and acted in a way that didn't fit the little boxes that Twenty-Six usually put people in. They'd had guests and passengers before, but never any who were that ied in their homely rust bucket.

  She'd never had someoerested in her before.

  Twenty-Six might have been... a little i, but she wasn't stupid.

  Evelyn was hiding a whole heap of stuff. She owerful, way strohan was normal, she robably rich, she was well-educated, and she was... kinda hot, but in a very domineering, overp kind of way. Even if she acted very maternally towards Twenty-Six herself.

  She was uain about her emotiarding everything that had happened, and the act of st a pirate station, eliminating hundreds, and theing Twenty-Six with a core did nothing to crify her feelings oter.

  Cores were expensive. Cores were worth a fortune. The one she had robably even useful, which meant that if she figured out how to split it ahat split, she might be set for life. Well, life as long as she lived humbly.

  In under a standard week, Evelyn had swept into her life, flirted with her (she retty sure), flirted with all the other pretty girls on the ship (she was more certain of that), then murdered a heap of pirates, gave Twenty-Six aire core for no reason, and now they were waltzing into a ship that looked like it couldn't be any more than two years old.

  Twenty-Six khat if it wasn't for the adrenaline pumping through her right now, she'd be a hyperventiting mess in a er.

  " you open the door, Twenty Six?"

  She jumped, then looked over to Evelyn. The woman was standing, as if there was gravity, o the final airlock door leading into the Sappho. "Oh, uh, yeah," she said while cursing herself for not being more articute.

  The door was new, sure, but it wasn't operating on anything too sophisticated. The hardware was nice, but the software was dated, and whoever had put it together had never patched out the exploits that could get the door open.

  She tapped into the ands, checked in the maintenance log, took note of the st name on the registry, then tapped out. Then it was as easy as opening the maintenance menu again, typing in that name as a pass, and running a physical diagnostics test. That same test included the door opening and closing, which... made it all terribly easy.

  "Well done," Evelyn said.

  Twenty-Six tried to suppress the happy thrill that those words sent down her spine. She wasn't a dog to go all happy just because she got a little praise!

  She... she'd need a lot of praise for that.

  Pouting to herself, Twenty-Six allowed the others to get past her into the ship before she followed them. Evelyn was still floating the corpse of that pirate captain with her, for whatever reason, though she did open up a locker just on the inside and tossed it in without a care.

  She floated around it as she followed the others deeper in. The airlock shut behind them, and they were all inside what might have been their brand-new ship.

  It was geous.

  Sleek panels with evenly pced handholds. Brushed aluminium grating over maintenance access points. The air exge quickly syphohe air from the lock out of the room, with barely a rattle and no signs that there was an active fan.

  The ship was only partially active at the moment. Life support was on, but everything else seemed to be on standby. Still, it was quiet, far more so than the Held Together ever was.

  "I'm not sensing any life onboard," Evelyn said.

  "You do that?" Twenty-Six asked.

  Evelyn looked back to her, amber eyes, almost the same colour as a warning light, meeting her own. She gulped.

  "I ," Evelyn said simply. "I suspect the bridge is above. That's usually where those things are. Will you be able to give us trol?"

  "I'll try," Twenty-Six said.

  She didn't want to pin. Right now, there portunity the likes of which she never had before, oo turn her life around, to make it so much better... but why did it have to e from the scary hot dy?

  ***

  RavensDagger

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