Going to Ground
07 May 2022Aurora Bael
Deep space is never not beautiful. It's never drab or boring for me. Even the endless RICE fields I find jumping through countless star systems, there's always something stunning and new to see. Just the majesty of a ringed planet or the canyons and cliffs of a rocky moon are enough to enrapture me. Having a ship that's both nimble and sturdy to twirl around mountains and asteroids takes a hell of an edge off of the hours of scanning and travel. On this trip I found my first hard-vacuum dwellers in the barely-there nebulae huddled in tiny clumps near some Lagrange point or another. Mostly I've found crystals so far, but in Colonia proper there was an enormous "mollusc" colony out among the spindles of shimmering metallic hues.
Peace is returning steadily to my heart. After leaving a Long Range Array for Lily to keep (and a few days for her techs to figure out how to install it), we've been in regular contact. She's a very busy woman on this trip, so there isn't much time for in-person quality time, but you know what? I don't mind. The desperation has calmed. Way out here in the black there's no one to hassle me. No check ins to complete. No missions to run. I am on leave, and free to spend my time as I wish. And what I wish? Is to jump neutron stars in search of new life. Malcom mans the FSS while I steer around to the points of interest he highlights and together we're mapping planets and charting systems by the sackful. It's pure bliss. Including this: my first ever Earth Like World. Never seen before by anyone. Just the two of us.
I also touched the center of the Galaxy the other day. I remember in Mintaka where Rory 1.0 had her first encounter with a black hole. It was so small and yet so powerful. I felt the void reach out and call to me and I expected that this would be much the same. Bigger, but the same. How naïve. Sagittarius A* was not just bigger... It was unfathomable. But unlike Mintaka, there wasn't any despair here. There was power. Indescribable power. Sitting outside the exclusion zone, the black hole distorted every part of my field of vision. I spent forty minutes in orbit thinking I was moving away from it when in reality my geodesic was warped so badly that I looped back upon myself. Perpendicular was the only sure path away. So I trusted the vectors of my guidance system to carry me to safety instead.
For a few days we hopped merrily around the core, making a quick stop at Explorer's Anchorage to stretch our legs and breathe larger air than the bottled shipboard and suitside stuff we carried with us. It was a good time to do some maintenance and refill our supplies before setting out to find... We'd missed our carrier. To be honest? I was tickled pink at the idea of flying on my own again. The Gambit has already paid itself off. Everything from here on out is raw profitability. Not that money is what drives this quest. But peace.
...There's something else I want to relate. Something happened. Something that feels really important, and I'm so anxious to share it. I... I don't know how it will go but... Fuck, never mind this pussyfooting around bullshit. I'd better just come out with it, hadn't I?
We jumped into a system to fuel up, me flying while Mal ran the FSS, and the both of us just too content for it to feel quite... real. It was already a long trip, and things were starting to get a little goofy. "Alright, Mal, anything alive on any of these rocks or are we moving on?"
"Yeah we got uh... We got two with six biosigns each. We're also about 2000 lightyears ahead of the carrier right now," he said, and made some funky 'tchthchtchtch' sounds with his mouth as he marked both the planetoids on the ship's HUD for me to see. "Only about 4500 LS out... you wanna drop in on 'em?"
I didn't even answer, I just grinned like a little kid and pressed the throttle forward. The FSD distorted space farther and farther around us and like some kind of goddamn magic we only feel the slightest push as we break light speed. The other cool part about flying in supercruise is that the ship can steadily accelerate "upward" at about 0.3 g so you don't have to run the gravimetrics. It's not a lot, just enough for liquid to make sense and coffee to taste real. "You got any bets on what's on this one?"
Malcom smirks and says "You don't pay me enough to gamble... But if you did... I'd say tubers, fungoids, and a frutexa variant. Fuck it, 200 credits."
And I'm thinking 'O no! How underpaid is this guy? Fuck, I can wipe my ass with 200cr on the daily and never feel it. For the rest of my natural life. So, I slam an all-stop and space around the ship rapidly reforms to keep us at a much more modest speed. Ignoring the warnings, I unfasten my harness and climb the ladder down to the lower flight deck just as Barrett looks back over his shoulder, thermal mug still at his lips.
"Be serious with me. Is 200 a lot to bet for you, yes or no?"
"What? No! ...yes. Sometimes." Barrett, rakes a hand down his face and holds his chin. For a second he's just staring out over the Holo gauge cluster and puffing a long breath out his nose. "Alright... You remember I had a lot of debt, right? I'm still working on paying a lot of it off and sometimes the Pilot's Federation will collect when I'm not expecting it. So sometimes 200 credits is... A pretty big chunk of what I've got left."
That hit me right in the gut. I try and play it cool, sweeping my hair back, hand on my hip, turning around... alright, I didn't manage to play it cool at all, but come on! That wasn't just bad, it was unac-fucking-ceptible. I've been thinking about how I've been barking orders at him, treating him like garbage, how I don't pay him enough, and what I ought to do about it...now to hear this? "I'm sorry Mal," I said, "I don't think I have a good model for how employment is supposed to work."
Mal rolls his eyes and kinda laughs at me, stands up and says "Rory, you're already paying me 20%. That's way above industry standard with a rating like mine."
"Yeah, but by industry standard I wouldn't be hiring another commander, either," I shot back. Not that I would likely feel differently about it if he wasn't... The wage gap is too high. And he puts too much into this business to have such a small stake. So I asked him how much he had left to pay off.
He trills his lips as he thinks about it and says "Ooh, about 150 million, plus whatever interest. Probably close to 200 million by the time I'm done."
Like Jesus Christ! What did he do, wreck a Corvette without a rebuy? You know what, it didn't matter. It's too much. At 20% it would be quite a while until he made that up with how slowly we've been getting paid. So, I pulled up our account information and instantly transferred 150 million. Didn't hurt at all. Felt right.
"As of right now, I'm considering you entitled to 50% of company profits. We'll have to draw up a contract for how much more you're getting of current assets, but I think it's about time."
Mal's eyes blow up like balloons and he holds his hands up in front of him saying "Whoa, Whoa! Rory, slow down. You're... You're not quite well yet, I'm not going to take advantage of you like that. That's ridiculous amount of money to just give away."
"Malcom, since I hired you my net worth has nearly doubled, and I couldn't have done that without you running my errands while I babysat Mammon. I'm not giving you shit. This is back pay." I felt my cheeks flush suddenly looking into those deep black eyes of his, and suddenly I'm overwhelmed and I had to turn away. "I just... I'm tired of being your boss. You've been a way better friend than ...that. I want to be your friend first. I... need to know you really want to be here. That's it's your choice. I can't know that if I'm holding money over your head so... There. Now you can get your own ship again if you want."
Without the slightest hesitation, Mal closes the distance between us and wraps his arms tight around my quivering mess. His quiet shushes and gentle rocking felt so tender as he held me. "...Do you remember when I found you in those quarters in Bresnik Terminal? All those wrappers and bottles scattered around the couch, bed not even slept in. You remember that?" He didn't let go as I started crying softly and nodding my snot on his jacket, just kept rocking back and forth. "You remember when we went mining in the Python after that? How fast you went from hating everything to smiling and laughing with me? I think you even fell asleep in the chair for a bit." I think I almost felt a smile come across my face as I nuzzled a bit closer into the crook of his neck. "Well... It hasn't been about the money since then." Then he stepped back, looked me in the eyes and said. "Rory, I l-like you. I like working with you. I even liked going into combat with you. I wouldn't keep putting up with your shit if I didn't think you were an amazing person. You don't have to do this to keep me around; I'm here on purpose."
So I... I snorted some of my snot back up my nose and I said. "There are things about me... If you heard them... I've done a lot of bad shit and been through a shit ton. I don't think I've even told you the half of it yet."
He reached up to brush the tear off of my cheek with his thumb and said "Tell you what, chief. You go strap yourself in back in quarters. I'm gonna set this bastard down on one of them planets and we're gonna forget about working today. No more. Tomorrow we can go chase life-forms all you want, but tonight, I want you to get as much as you can off of your chest and put some of this shit down, ¿está bién?"
And the sheer shock of hearing someone else speak Spanish after so many months snapped me clear out of sad town, and I'm like "¿En Serio? ¿También hablás Español?"
Slick ass says "Eh, solo del corazon. En mi familia es un tradición que los niños aprendan, porque mi abuelita insiste. I'm surprised you know it! Is there a story behind that, too?"
...and yeah... Yeah slick, there was. We hashed the whole thing out over dinner and a few drinks after he landed. Dinner and drinks turned into just drinks. I told him all about slavery. He told me how shitty being the youngest of six in a Federal slum was. I went into detail on Imperial indoctrination tactics, and he shared about his over-protective mother and his father who one night went out for cigarettes, never to return. I laughed about Mercs breaking chairs over one another over a game of fucking Uno. He tells me about the day his sister actually tried to date two boys at the same time. Drinks turned into comedy holomovies and a few ancient campy sci-fi movies I managed to get my hands on. I don't know exactly when I fell asleep, but I woke up with us curled up together on the couch and... I'm pretty sure both of us pretended to still be asleep for a while.
I don't know if that's ever going to become something... We'll see. It was nice, though. Warm. Safe. Comfortable. That's enough for now.
We did, of course, get back out to work after. It's been a long time since I posted any of my lifeform finds in this journal with any intention. These are a few of the highlights from the trip. Ones I meant to pick up on the way when I had the time. I've really enjoyed searching for them and finding them again. Some of them I even found around a neutron star while we were huffing it. All of them are also first reports, which is amazing considering how well traveled these routes are.
Anyway, Malcom and I have a long way to go. Still several thousand light-years to meet up with our ride out of the Collection of Wonders and back toward the Bubble. It's a long journey, and not an easy one. Our paint is all but stripped and the outer hull is all pock-marked with microcraters from 30kLy of space dust and cosmic rays. But over all? I feel like we're on the right track... In more ways than one.
See you space cowboy. Don't forget to look up.
-Aurora Angelica Bael