Chapter 21: Chapter 4 – Part 4

“Over there,” Wren said, angling the flashlight built into the arm of her armored vacsuit, “I think.”

 

“I can’t believe you just found all this,” Bonnie said, as she floated down the hallway behind Wren. “Oh my god, look at that.”

 

“Yeah,” Wren said.  “That’s all irrigation piping.”

 

“So, what, you go find a comet, then, right?  Aren’t those made of ice?”

 

Wren laughed and spun around, floating backwards through the spacious area so she could see her girlfriend.  “Yeah, but this is where it gets way more complicated than I know how to do.  You can’t just start growing green stuff all willy nilly.  You need an ecosystem to help you balance the oxygens and the nitrogens.  All the gens.  For all I know, this ship might still have all that knowledge tucked away in a databank here somewhere, but I haven’t gone looking.  Really need to find a botanist or something.”

 

“Ah,” Bonnie said, “and we just passed that botanist store on the way here.”

 

It seemed that, underneath her gruff and buff exterior, Bonnie had a dry sense of humor that was only just starting to rear its head, and Wren was glad to be a part of that unearthing.

 

Wren said, “I remember floating through here, that first time, and I got this feeling, like, ‘this is the start of something.  I don’t know what, but…’”

 

She’d never been able to tell if the voice modulation, the reason other people always sounded strange over voice comm, came from the microphones in their helmets, that captured the higher pitches more readily, or if it was in the speakers in the helmets that just didn’t have the muscle to reproduce the bass frequencies.  It might have even just been the fact that they were in space, in a vacuum, and the limited air around them in their suits wasn’t a good environment for sound.  Regardless, it was always a little weird to hear how different Bonnie sounded, and she kind of wondered what she sounded like.  She wondered if Bonnie wondered the same thing.

 

On such nonsense did Wren lose hours.  

 

“Can you imagine?” she asked.  “Being completely self sufficient?  Getting away from everything?”

 

“Who would you want to bring?”

 

Wren scrunched up her face.  “One of the first plans I had was to, like, save my parents.  Save everyone they worked with.  Old neighbors.  Buy out their work contracts.  Give them a fresh start out here, but…”

 

Bonnie pushed off and floated up closer to her.  “But what?”

 

Wren just shook her head.

 

“Did something happen?  To them?”

 

“There was an accident,” she said, looking away.

 

After a few breaths, Bonnie said, “Wren, how long have you been alone for?”

 

The smile came easily.  “Oh, I had plenty of company.”  Easy, maybe, but empty, and it faltered quickly under Bonnie’s continued gaze.  “Sorry.  I…”

 

“Are there others there?  People left that you knew?  Anyone you’d want to go back for?”

 

After a few seconds, Wren said, “Not that I know of.”

 

Before she knew it, she was running her finger along a seam on one of the irrigation pipes.  What had appeared, from a distance, to perhaps be a crack turned out to just be a bit of buildup from some dissolved solids in the water source, and it flaked away under her finger.  It annoyed her, more because her distraction had turned out to be nothing than because she was eager for there to be actual, problematic damage.  Whoever had built that ship had built it to last.

 

“It could work again,” she said, more finishing her thought out loud than answering anything Bonnie had asked her.  “We can fix it.”

 

Bonnie appeared next to her, focusing on an interwoven metal lattice that had once probably encouraged vines.  Wren could see it if she closed her eyes.

 

“No,” she said, eventually.  “I don’t think there were any survivors I knew.  It wasn’t a huge catastrophe.  Barely made the feed.  I… I actually hadn’t realized that I was two weeks overdue to hear from them.  We didn’t have any kind of regular comm thing… and I’d been busy testing my, uh… the…” —she paused to swallow— “and then I got a notice of inheritance.  Of debt.”  She made a sound in her throat, and shook her head.  “I’m not mad about that.  Not at them.  They did what they could.  I just…”

 

“You don’t like how you found out.”

 

Wren nodded.  “Yeah.  Yeah, after that I… I knew that the hull repairs were going to take years, with the way I was doing it, and then adding the scaffolding and connective framework between them to make it one big structure was gonna take another chunk of time, and I just… I stopped planning further ahead.  I stopped thinking about it, except as a punchline.”

 

“But… now you’re thinking about it?”

 

“Yeah,” she said, taking a deep breath.  “Yeah, I mean, kinda.  I dusted off some old plans I’d sketched out, and realized that I’d actually taken a lot of this as far as I could go on my own already.  I’d need someone who knows more about structural engineering in a vacuum, and a materials engineer, and—”

 

“And a botanist,” Bonnie added.

 

“Exactly,” Wren said.  “Do you know where I can find a pre-assembled design team that covers a wide variety of disciplines?  I’m in the market.”

 

“I’ll put out some feelers,” she said, dryly.

 

Wren said, “You know, I was actually thinking that it might be better to see if this is something Jackson wants.  He and his people can live out here, away from it all.”

 

Next to her, the redhead made a sound that was neither agreement nor acknowledgement.

 

“Are we gonna go through this again?” Wren said, sighing.

 

“I don’t know why you keep going to him,” Bonnie said, raising her voice.

 

“You’re the one who introduced us!”

 

“Yeah,” Bonnie said, snapping back, “reluctantly!  As a last resort!  And now, I’m kind of regretting it!”

 

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“Why don’t you trust him?”

 

Bonnie was quiet, eyes turned down.

 

“I mean, I know we’ve been through this before, but—”

 

“Why do you think we’re suddenly famous?” Bonnie asked.  “Why are people cosplaying as you?  Why do people know our faces?  Why are you the figurehead?  Why you and not him?”

 

“It was—”

 

“And don’t say ‘it was my idea.’  He put that idea there. I know he did.”

 

Wren blinked, and reached for the wall because she was starting to float and rotate.  “It was my idea!”

 

“God fucking damnit!”  She punctuated this by twisting and punching the wall, but in null grav that sent her floating away.  “Can’t you see?  He’s using you.  This is what he does!”

 

“I hate to ruin a perfectly good point,” Wren said, “but it’s in my nature to be used.  It’s sort of my thing.”

 

Bonnie held her outstretched hands around her head, and looked like she was about to scream.  “Did you… I mean, what the fuck, Wren?  Have you learned nothing?!”

 

Wren just blinked.  “Come on, I—”

 

“I want more for you than for you to be just a tool!  I want you to want more for you!  Is any of this ringing a bell?”

 

It was, and that made her hold her tongue.

 

Bonnie hit the other side of the hallway, planted her feet, and propelled herself toward Wren.  She grabbed Wren’s armored vacsuit tightly and pulled her in with both hands, until their helmets were pressed against each other.  When she spoke, the vibrations carried through the material, making her transmission sound like a distorted echo.

 

“I need you to be looking out for yourself, okay?  I need you to do it for me!”

 

“Okay,” Wren said, throat a little tight.

 

“Every time you want to volunteer for something, I want you to think about how I’ll feel if it goes wrong and you don’t come back.”

 

“I mean, you’re usually the one going out and doing the—”

 

“Wren!” she screamed.

 

“Okay!  Okay, but I stand by what I said.”

 

“I’m a professional,” she said.  “This is what I do!”

 

“And if things go wrong,” Wren said, fighting her lips from forming a smile, “I want you to think about how I’ll feel when you don’t come back.”

 

“Fuck,” Bonnie groaned, looking down and away.

 

“How about this,” Wren said.  “I want to talk to him about it.  I don’t have to tell him where it is, or what state it’s really in.”

 

Bonnie said, “Yeah, but that’s going to come to a head pretty quick one way or the other.  You either tell him and he does something with it or you don’t and he holds it against you.  And then we’re out in the cold.”

 

“Okay,” Wren said, straightening and composing herself.  “What are our other options?”

 

“Can we just fix it up for ourselves?”

 

Wren nodded slowly.  “Yeah, sure.  At my current pace, this place’ll be operational in… like… thirty years?”

 

The redhead slumped.

 

“Give or take a decade?  I told you,” Wren said, laughing, “I can’t do this by myself.  Not really.  Not well, anyway.”

 

“Fine,” Bonnie said, dragging the word out like it was causing her physical pain, “but we’re doing your plan.  We just talk to him about it, and if either of us gets the wrong vibe from his answers, then we walk away.”

 

Wren narrowed her eyes.  “Walk away and…”

 

“And do it ourselves,” Bonnie said.  “Labor of love, because you know what?  Spending a few decades out here with you doesn’t sound so bad.  Do we have enough supplies to last us until we’re a bit more self-sufficient?”

 

“No,” Wren said, thoughtfully, “but we could get them.  Preemptively.  I have a guy.  We could get that squared away first, just in case.  I’m pretty confident I could learn what—”

 

“We,” Bonnie said, sternly.

 

“...we… could learn what we need to start producing some food.”  It felt weird to say.  Not because she didn’t trust Bonnie to learn things, but because learning all the things on her own was usually how it worked.

 

This seemed to satisfy Bonnie somewhat, as she looked into the distance and nodded, and then nodded again.  

“We need a plan, though.”

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