Archive of Our Own ^beta

Well, this sucked.

Because he lost the crew's straw-pull, Steve had to go answer all of Customs and Reg's stupid, pointless questions. He didn't think he ought to be part of the straw-pull in the first place, since he was, after all, captain and ship-owner, but his crew were obnoxious and insistent on egalitarian treatment in all things.

"Sorry, man," Robin said as the four of them were dressing after the decontamination spray. "You know how these things go."

"Never my way? Yeah." He pushed a little Gwenn Factor pomade through his damp hair and tried to arrange it back into a semblance of its usual shape. "I know."

She clapped him on the shoulder. "Self-pity's incredibly unattractive, cap."

"Yet apparently irresistible for some rich prettyboys," Dustin, their genius engineer, contributed as he passed. Erica, their other resident genius, snorted as she followed in his wake.

Robin shrugged when, stung, Steve turned to her. "Kid makes a good point."

"Shut up," Steve muttered. His stomach rumbled and his mouth felt parched; he was mildly allergic to whatever aerosols this place used for decon. He didn't bother asking her to come with him to Customs and Reg.

He made his way from the decontamination cells toward port offices. His way was blocked by a much larger crowd than he'd seen in a long time; music was playing loudly, clamorously, as celebrants in red shifts danced and shared packets of steaming, fragrant food.

"Lady Mo's birthday," the robot running the elevator informed him, not that Steve had asked. "This station's tutelary spirit and inspiration, born...."

It was still spitting facts at him when Steve stepped out into the broad, crescent-shaped space studded with conference capsules. These barrels, two and a half meters tall and a little over a meter across, hovered just over the floor.

One glowed as he approached and sank a little, like a buoy bobbing in water. After it read his retinas and pinged the decon tag in his left ear, its hatch whispered upward and Steve climbed inside.

The small, delicately-built Brebisian inside started reciting her questions as Steve checked his balance and tried to sit without tipping over the capsule. (That was impossible, everyone said so, but he didn't like officials and bureaucrats, and it would be just his luck to be the first sentient across seven sectors to do so.)

"Harrington, Steven, captain. Modified and upgraded Karjamish 733i."

He finally made it onto the curved seat. The Brebisian crouched on her hindlegs as she read from the glowing display between them.

"Crew of four."

"Sure," he said. "All we need, right?"

She didn't acknowledge that. "The 733i is a luxury craft designed with a two-being complement in mind."

"We get by with four," he said. When she didn't say anything, he added, "family, right? What can you do?"

Brebisians budded in the dozens and were self-sufficient hours after birth. She probably didn't have much, if any, sympathy for the "family" excuse.

Steve opened his mouth, thinking maybe he should apologize, but she cut him off. "Ship's corporate designation is Hauling and Retrieval, is that correct?"

"Yes. With a little, you know..." Steve shrugged, as if helplessly admitting an unfortunate truth. "Entrepreneurial wiggle room."

"Wiggle room," she repeated flatly.

"Flexibility, call it."

"Flexibility."

Steve smiled at her. When in doubt, Robin liked to tease him, go for the charm. She didn't know what she was talking about; a guy with limited options and talents had better use all of them.

The Brebisian official's compound eyes clicked as she subvocalized a command. The sound raised the hairs on the back of Steve's neck, but he kept smiling pleasantly. Even a little flirtatiously.

The display shifted then: the bureaucratic lines and boxes twisted into a single, spiralling point that then expanded into a rough model of the galaxy. Corporate stations and natural planets were represented by flickering orbs. Sail-course routes arched and braided between the destinations.

"You were out by the Ceraso cloud earlier this cycle," the official said, reading off the display in front of her. In response, the smudge of light representing the cloud enlarged briefly.

"Yeah," Steve replied when he realized the silence meant she expected an answer. He straightened up. "Yes, that's right. Ma'am."

The display rotated. "Yet then you turned up in S'kaakwa to off-load several hundred kilos of spent irrigation nozzles."

He grinned, scratching the back of his neck. "Never said we were a glamorous outfit, ma'am. We take the jobs we can get. Flexible, remember?"

"You completed a three-system sail in roughly ten standard cycles." Brebisians didn't do sarcasm; Steve had always doubted if they even had senses of humor. But this one might have been different. There was an edge to her tone — or, maybe, he was hungry and allergic and still shaking off the effects of their last sail.

"Sure did," he said now. "Took a lot out of us, but we did."

"Your ship is not classified for UD plunges." She pronounced the abbreviation as a single syllable — "ud" — not the "ewe-dee" that he was accustomed to. "Only standard sail-skips."

"She's a tough cookie," Steve said. "She gets us where we need to go."

"In record time, with little to no drag effects."

He nodded several times. She had no proof. All she had were details of logistics: times and dates of arrivals and departures, freight manifests and weights. "We're good. Our crew. Work great together."

"Indeed," the Brebisian replied as the display dimmed, then shrank down into nothing. "Your hangar berth rental is good for three full cycles. We're impounding the three Centauri seeds uncovered during inspection, the fine deducted from your account. Your crew is limited to the station zones alpha through gamma. Welcome to Queen of Heaven, may you have a pleasant and profitable visit."

Steve's seat flattened and pushed him, stumbling, to his feet. The meeting, it seemed, was over.

They'd gotten away with it, one more time.

*

Dustin and his weird friends found her when they were off exploring somewhere they shouldn't be. Everyone who grew up on Hawkins Station knew that there was much more of the place than appeared on any schematic; they knew, further, that to go poking around was courting trouble.

That had never stopped Dustin and his crew. Weirdos, Steve had always figured, were weird precisely because they persisted in playing by different rules. Getting to know Dustin, and then Robin, just confirmed this. Those kids went where they pleased, banged on hatches decked with caution lights, shimmied down closed ducts, and generally made severe nuisances of themselves.

"You're asking for trouble," Steve told Dustin the second or third time he found himself getting the kid out of danger and bandaging him up. He was trying to make nice with his ex-girlfriend, but somehow kept getting delegated to babysitting and first-aid.

Dustin launched into an overly-detailed explanation about stealth and preparation, only to break off into a hiss when Steve got to work swabbing clean the nasty scrape on Dustin's left palm. "Motherfucker!"

"You want to develop some creepy deep-space bacterial infection, be my guest."

Dustin sagged a little, suddenly looking all of his fourteen years. "It stings, that's all."

"Yeah, yeah," Steve replied. "Maybe stop these stupid excursions."

"Never," Dustin swore.

He sounded so fervent that Steve paused to look up. "What's the compulsion, anyway?"

Dustin shrugged. He looked away, just for a moment. "There's a lot they're not telling us."

That just stood to reason, Steve figured. Why would ordinary residents be privy to the inner workings of the station and its mission? When he realized Dustin was glaring at him now, waiting for a response, Steve said, "Yeah, so?"

"So?"

"Yeah. So what?"

The tendons in Dustin's neck stood out; his mouth opened and closed. Finally, his expression softened, crumpled, broke apart. "You're never gonna get it."

"One of these days," Steve said as he dropped the used wipes and bandages into the compost hatch, "you'll end up lost and never come back."

His soot-smeared face breaking into a grin, Dustin nodded. "Let's hope so!"

*

They were both wrong. Steve did get it now, deeply, and Dustin was far from lost. None of which was to say that life was going well.

Robin liked to point out that they still had all their limbs, a good ship, and each other: things could be so much worse. She was not, however, very good at maintaining such a positive attitude. Soon enough, she lapsed back into wry sarcasm, a move that Steve always welcomed. Upbeat Robin was as strange and unsettling a presence on the bridge beside him as a quiet Erica or dutiful Dustin would have been.

When Hawkins Station exploded, Steve and the other three were three terametres out on one of Dustin's fool's errands. This time, they were scouting for what he claimed had to be traces of xeno-drift within a small meteorite cloud. Even that far away, the destruction of Hawkins was dazzling: the entire swath of darkness crumpled, then cracked apart under the brilliance of — whatever it was consuming the station.

Official word, they'd learn later, was that Hawkins suffered a cataclysmic reactor failure that propagated through all the secondary systems.

At the moment, however, as they huddled before the viewport, as their world vanished before them, they didn't know a thing. Dustin moved first, to the emergency-supplies locker, and tossed broad-spectrum goggles at them.

"Put those on, and strap in," he said as he dashed down the short passage, toward the engine room. "This is going to hurt."

For once, no one wisecracked back. No one thought of doing so; they moved slowly, as if through syrup, but they complied. What else was there to do? Steve's skeleton felt heavy as lead, as something inert and unyielding. Tears coated his cheeks; Robin's, too. Erica had her chin jutted out, lower lip bloody in her teeth. The blinding glow of what had been Hawkins played across their faces, repeated in their eyes.

They fumbled their goggles on. Dustin yelled across the comms.

And then, for several long, fraying moments, there was nothing. They were nothing, silent and weightless, and terribly alone. Steve could not remember his name, let alone anything more complicated; Robin said she thought she was screaming.

The ship tipped; their harnesses caught them fast, but all the loose stuff that accumulated went sliding away. It tipped again, Steve's mind returned to himself, and he recognized Robin beside him, and Erica beyond her, but that was all. He couldn't see the nav boards and lights, or even the viewport. They were dashing through a red, pulsing landscape, riddled with pustules and jagged, broken upthrusted forms.

Steve had no grip on the controls. He couldn't see them. Yet the ship raced forward through the maw. Oily black clouds and clots of gristle reached for them, but never made contact.

That was their first trip through the Upside Down.

When the ship reappeared in normal space, it was eight and a half parsecs away, on an entirely different arm of the galaxy. No one could travel that far, that fast, without suffering miasmas of bonemelting agony and spending budgets worthy of the oldest, most powerful corporations.

By way of explaining what he'd done, Dustin brought them down to the engine room to introduce them to Jane.

She was small and hungry, spooky in the eyes and sweet in the smile. Dustin and his weird friends had found her hiding in some forgotten nook of the station and adopted her, partly as mascot, mostly as friend.

She hurtled them effortlessly, dropping the ship out of spacetime into what Steve was half-convinced is a demon dimension (a superstition that enraged Dustin, though he couldn't quite dispute it entirely), then yanking it back up like a kid with one of those self-righting angling bots. She read minds, she ate them out of house and home, she followed Robin around like a nestling.

"Forever the babysitter, huh?" Robin would say when Steve got to complaining. He didn't mean it, much, and she knew that. "Too young to be a dad, too old to be a kid."

"I'm a hero," he'd reply, then pretend offense when she laughed at him.

*

The celebration had increased while he was cloistered with the Brebisian; the mezzanine and plaza below on his way back to the hangar were thronging now with red-draped celebrants. He wove his way through their dancing and singing, and when he couldn't move forward, twirled a little and shuffled his feet as best he could.

By the time he emerged at the hangars, he had two red shawls thrown over his shoulders, a clinking necklace of synth-amber beads tangled in his hair, and his arms full of food and drink. To celebrate, he'd bought a five-pack of steam noodles and deep-friend legume discs as well as a double tuop full of local punch. All in the name of the bountiful lady, the merchants had pressed on him some wet-looking salads and a sack of sprouted star-nuts.

The ship was silent as he entered. The lights were off, just the emergency patches glowing along the rampway. He caught a whiff of alien cologne as he made his way through the public areas — something heavy, oily, almost tar-like. Probably Gentlefolk's Mystery line; it was popular among masc-leaning types older than Steve. The port inspectors had done a damn good job to uncover the Centauri seeds they'd hidden as distraction, but their taste in personal grooming products left a lot to be desired.

Behind the crew quarters, below the engines and tucked just above the fuel tanks, a hatch for electronics creaked open. Steve tipped back his head and held up two legume discs.

"Got some tasty treats," he said, grinning. A real grin this time, no strategy or desperate hope behind it. He was relieved and a little giddy, to be honest, and celebrations were definitely in order.

The young girl who stuck her head out the hatch was pale, livid in that particular way that those born out in the dark, never knowing planetary gravity and truelight, were. Big-eyed, too, big dark eyes that saw way more than Steve could ever have dreamed or begun to comprehend.

Beaming, she made to grab the food, but Steve held it out of reach. "You come hang out, you get all the snacks you want, how's that sound?"

She clambered through the hatch and dropped soundlessly to the mesh walkway before he'd finished speaking. She was reaching for the food again, and Steve let her.

She crammed half a legume disc into her mouth and chewed messily; she couldn't have possibly swallowed it all before she was tearing off another big piece and chewing that.

"You hid okay?" he asked as they climbed up into the galley and then to the crew lounge. (It had once been the yacht's parlor, panelled in synth-teak and draped with plasto-silks, and Steve had tried very hard to keep it for himself, but Dustin and Robin managed to wear him down before they were even half a cycle out from what used to be Hawkins Station.)

She nodded, still chewing, her cheeks distended. Without speaking, she told him, they were loud and nosy, but stupid. Steve heard it at the back of his skull, as if reading graffiti there.

"Good to know," he said, and pointed at the rest of the food. "Help yourself, but maybe leave a little for the others?"

She grinned around the wad of noodles hanging from her mouth down her chin; it looked like nothing so much as a Deleb male's mature barbel spill.

Laughing, Steve unzipped his tuop of punch and collapsed on the seating platform across from her. "You're so gross, you know that?"

She slurped up her noodles. I know you are, but what am I?

"Fair enough," Steve said and saluted her.

Jane's lopsided smile, her chin sticky with fritter grease, grew and grew.