Chapter Forty-Three - Spacekward

Spacekward.

It was a term that had appeared during the early cultural zeitgeist of space exploration and travel, and while it had never penetrated the more serious academic discussion and was generally side-stepped in favour of more officious terminology by more serious people, the expression existed anyway.

It existed to represent the awkward feeling unique to spacefarers stuck in a tin can, hurtling through space while completely unable to escape the presence of someone they had just committed some social faux-pas with.

It was the whispered expression that two crewmates would shoot at each other when the married first mate was caught sleeping with the navigator. It was accidentally admitting to a co-worker that yes, their body odour was noticeable, and yet having to work next to them for the next nine months.

That's what the Sappho was experiencing at the moment, and Ivil wasn't enjoying it.

She was used to a certain level of... perhaps ostracization wasn't the right word for it, but it felt close to that. People frequently avoided her, perhaps because she had a well-earned reputation for disassembling annoying people into their constituent atoms and spreading their remains across a body of space whose area was best calculated in astronomical units.

The day after her confession, the Sappho was supposed to meet up with the Held Together. The freighter was in dire need of her mechanic back, but the exchange wouldn't be possible. More importantly, the ship was running out of fuel.

The captain had filled up on enough fuel to make it from Ceres to Callisto and for additional manoeuvres. That didn't include a detour to a pirate station and the subsequent hard-burn escape from there.

Bringing more fuel to begin with would have been smarter, but it wasn't an entirely uncommon move. For a spaceship, mass was everything, and fuel was both dense and heavy. It made sense to bring just what was needed for a trip. Every added litre of fuel meant that more fuel would have to be spent to move that extra litre.

The Sappho had full bunkers when they left, and now she still had nearly eighty percent of her fuel left. Transferring that from the Sappho to the Held Together took half of a day. It required that Twenty-Six extend the ship's fuel line out, then override its safeties so that it would vent the liquid fuel out into space.

On the other end, after manoeuvring so that both ships were almost touching, Sonic Spectre brought out the Held Together's fuel line and with a combination of cores from both the Tech-Maid and Ivil, they managed to syphon fuel out of empty space and into the Held Together's tanks.

It was a stupidly dangerous and risky move, but not one that was entirely unheard of.

Ships ran out of fuel sometimes, and unlike a terrestrial car, a ship in motion and out of fuel wouldn't just stop and sit there, it would keep on moving forever, or until it rammed into something.

There were ships across the solar system designed to fly fast and hard and carry enough fuel to refill the tanks of wayward vessels. Then the pilots of these refiller ships would send in an invoice with so many zeroes on it that some captains had aneurysms on the spot.

All that to say that while it was a difficult trick to pull off, it wasn't entirely unconventional. There were overrides and systems in place to accommodate for an in-motion refuelling, even for a ship as old as the Held Together.

Once that was done, they adjusted their flight. The hard and quick burn away from their piratical friends hadn't been aimed all that accurately, and so they needed to make adjustments on the fly.

By the end of the day, a mentally exhausted Ivil returned to the captain's cabin and laid down on its bed, fully clothed. She didn't need sleep, of course. She had some three dozen cores that all worked in different ways to prevent her from needing to sleep, and the exhaustion she felt at the moment was more... emotional than purely mental.

She had cores that kept her mind sharp as well. They were necessary, actually. It was all well and good to have reflex enhancers, time dilators, and a dozen abilities that let one think faster, but if a core user couldn't keep focused, then all of the thinking speed in the world wouldn't matter for much.

Right now, however, she was feeling the kind of tired that no core could fix.

Actually, that wasn't true. She was aware of and had once had access to some cores that could fix emotions. Some of them played on the user's mental state, allowing them to regulate their own feelings, and others were empowered by certain emotional cues. She'd once discovered a core that made a person's eyes light up when they were happy, another that allowed the projection of heat when angered.

She didn't want anything to do with those. They were only a step away from the kinds of cores that turned someone into a sociopath, into someone who was more machine than man, and while that might be the end-goal for some, she didn't desire power to the detriment of sanity.

It was why she was on her current quest.

After a decade of relaxing herself by watching her favourite soaps and reading raunchy romance novels, Ivil realized that she wanted what she was reading. It wasn't a desire borne of lust--not entirely, nor was it just some whim.

Ivil had spoken to her therapist about this at length. She wanted to experience companionship and before that, romance. But failing at that would be utterly unacceptable. Not only would it be somewhat frustrating, it would also lose her precious time, and perhaps jeopardise her reputation.

Her therapist had proposed that she buy a dog.

She had proposed a long walk out of a short airlock.

Her therapist had, at that moment, crossed out the next suggestion--get a cat--without bringing it up.

The therapist was a professional, however, and had easily shifted tracks. First, they tried dating apps. Ivil found these entirely insufficient. She had seen a few interesting prospects, of course, but after sending MINT in to inspect these under the guise of national security threats, she found all of them to be liars or entirely unsuitable, no matter how suggestive their profile pictures.

She couldn't believe how many people simply lied on their profiles. How could these people expect to start a relationship if they were outright lying from the start?

So, she had started looking elsewhere. The thought of visiting a pleasure world like Phobos had crossed her mind, but she wasn't looking for sex, she was looking for love. There were plenty of people in the Martian navy who were somewhat interesting as well. Many of the women and some of the men were rather attractive. The navy had strict standards for physical fitness, after all, and it was filled with bright-eyed young hopefuls but... well, that would be dating a coworker, and a subordinate at that.

Not to mention, over a decade of heavy propaganda led most of them to be rightly terrified of her.

There were a few that were brave enough to flirt with her. She'd been asked to dance once or twice on the rare occasions where she attended that sort of political event. But more often than not the flirter was just trying to climb the ranks. It wasn't love, it was sex with power plays.

Ivil didn't want sex... well, okay, she did, but that was easy to procure. She wanted a life partner, someone to grow old with, someone who would be tender and kind to her, that she could bicker with, that she could dote on.

Ivil kicked her legs up and down on her bed, safe in the knowledge that no one would ever know that she, a perfectly grown woman, was throwing the equivalent of a tantrum.

The seer had tricked her!

Why did she have to find so many potential lovers here? Why not just the one?

But then, the choices were good! Twenty-Six was the cutest little genius. Ivil wanted to pinch her freckled cheeks and give her an entire shipyard.

Missy was dark and daring, with a dangerous, sexy past, and the way she wore that jumpsuit had Ivil thinking unwise things. She was the kind of woman that would encourage Ivil to do some truly dangerous things, but they'd be fun!

Aurora was a calm, cool beauty, the sort of princess-like woman that would be the star of any soap, only she was real. Shrewd, too, with a whip-fast mind and the sort of ambition that would lead her to taking over the entire solar system if given the chance.

Ivil grumped into her pillow.

At least, on the bright side, she only had to pick between three cuties.

***