Image by Thierry Milherou from Pixabay
A knock on the door brings my attention up from the robot I’m repairing. Carcer, captain of The Wayfarer, stands in doorway between the storefront and my workshop. He’s an aged version of a holohero. The flight jacket hiding how narrow his shoulders are patched and worn, the synthetic blue jeans are more stain then blue, and while he’s clean shaven, his hairline recedes and what’s left is more grey than black. His smile is easy and undoes some of the age his wrinkles give him. He reminds me of my dad. Only he’s here and alive, instead of dead and in a jar on the mantle. “I have an offer for you, Lenore.”
“You need more repairs?” I put my spanner down on the workbench. The Wayfarer had been my focus for the past three weeks. I didn’t understand how it’d landed instead of crashed. “You got more off-world oddities?”
He stepped into the workshop and stood across from me. “No youngster, I was going to ask you to come with me. I could use someone with your repair skills.”
I laughed, even though his face said it wasn’t a joke. “You want me to trade my life of safety, fresh food, and friends for being stuck in a spaceship whose crew space is smaller than my house? And what about my cats? Everyone knows small animals don’t do hyperspeed travel.”
“We’ve spent three weeks together working on The Wayfarer. You have a taste for adventure that isn’t going to be feed living under the shield dome of a colony.” He leaned forward, willing me to take him up on his offer. he must have been so lonely out there. And then I think of my dad. He left the colony to be a spacer, to get us more money he claimed. All we got back was ashes and a bill.
“If I need adventure, I go outside the wall and explore alien ruins, or read a book. I like your stories, Carcer, but I am not going into space.” I shake my head and look down at the opened-up robot. “Space took my dad, my sister, my grandmother and my uncle. It’s not getting me.” My family was buried here, and I was dying here. Their ashes in the colony cemetery.
Silence sits between us. He’s never said it, but I think I might remind him of his kid the same way he reminds me of my dad. I wipe my hands off on a cloth. “I have a counteroffer for you, captain. Stay here.”
It was his turn to laugh. And even that reminded me of my dad a bit. “I’m a pilot. I don’t have any of the skills a colony needs.“
“You can do repair work. I’ve seen it, and we got two sister colonies we’d love to have more regular trade with.” I tell him. I want him to stay. He wasn’t far from dying of malnutrition when he got here. Nearly crashed here. he’s gonna die if he goes out there again. “In return, you’d get anything you need. Food, repairs, fuel, and a place to call your own if you don’t want to live in your ship.”
“Why would I want that?” He almost sounded offended. But not really. It was a routine, a thing he’d been saying by default. He’d stop thinking about it.
“Because it means you won’t die for at least another decade or so, and you’ll spend that time eating fresh food and real meat instead of nutrition bricks.” To drive the point home, I toss him an apple. Something I’ve taken for granted for most of my life, but was a scarcity in the life of a spacer.
He caught the fruit and bit into it with a crunch. Enjoyment plain on his face as apple juice wet his face. He wiped his face leaving another stain on his flight jacket. “And if I get bored doing deliveries between the same three colonies?”
“Maybe we do some exporting.” We didn’t have enough to spare for that yet, but the orchard was growing and so was the cowherd. “Eventually we’re going to want to buy another generator.”
He took another bite of the apple. Come on, Carcer, you know this is a good deal.
“I saw the state you were in when you first arrived. You were malnourished, had a leg that would have healed all wrong without our doctor, and had the start of pneumonia. If you go back out into the black, how long until that happens again, but there isn’t a friendly colony nearby?”
He stares at the apple for several moments. Then enjoys another bite, all while he’s thinking. “Tell you what, to finish settling the bill I’ll do a couple of those inter-colony flights you want.”
And he did, then a couple more. Then he accepted the offer of an apartment. Then he stayed grounded in the colony for a month to help with repairs after a pirate attack damaged the wall. He did the two-week trip to Alcantria four to trade a shipment of stasis field preserved fruits and meat for another shield generator and knew homesickness for the first time since he’d become a pilot.
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