Orbital Bid

Amelie had watched a lot of people win things. That was basically her whole job. Twenty-two years of managing campaigns on the Farnsworth Orbital, and every single one ended with somebody else crying happy tears in front of a camera while she stood off to the edge of the frame, holding a clipboard, smiling like a professional.

She was fifty-two years old and she was tired of holding the clipboard.

"Entry confirmed!" the terminal chirped at her, way too cheerful for a Tuesday. "Welcome to the Annual Farnsworth Dating Competition, contestant forty-one!"

"Oh, hush," Amelie told it. The terminal did not hush. It just blinked her match profile onto the public feed in the commons, big as life, right above the noodle stall where half the sector was already pretending not to stare.

Contestant forty-two. Drawbridge tender. Lock-gap bridge, module junction nine.

Jamie.

Well. Of course it was Jamie. She'd known it would be, ever since she'd spotted his handle in the preliminary pool three weeks ago and signed up five minutes later, which was exactly the kind of impulsive thing she hadn't done since... when, exactly? She did the math and didn't like the answer. She'd managed Reid's first council campaign eleven years ago, and his second one four years ago, and she'd spent every election night since Googling, sorry, searching, other people's futures.

And there was the other thing. The flirtation. Eight months ago, some matchmaking algorithm on the station net had matched her with a drawbridge tender who wrote messages like actual sentences, who asked questions and waited for answers, who'd said, once, "you sound like someone who'd argue with the rain about the schedule." She'd laughed for a week. Then the competition circuit had eaten her calendar, the messages had slowed, and here she was, fifty-two, signed up for a dating contest as a woman half her age and twice as foolish.

The feed cycled. Her own profile popped up next. AMELIE, 52, CAMPAIGN MANAGER. Her photo was nine years old and it showed, but who cared? Not her. Definitely not her.

"You're actually doing this?" said a voice at her elbow, and there was Olga, thirty years old, station entertainments officer, holding a tablet and a grin she'd clearly been practicing in a mirror.

"I am actually doing this, yes."

"It's going to be huge! The final round is live, the whole station watches, the last two winners got engagement offers within a month." Olga waved the tablet around like a fan at a match. "And a drawbridge tender. Nobody ever matches with the infrastructure people. The viewers are going to eat it up."

"Is that what I am to you, a ratings bump?"

"You're a narrative," Olga said, delighted, and Amelie realized this was not actually a denial, and also that Olga would get her promotion off this broadcast and Amelie would get... what? A punch bowl and a memory?

Fine. A risk was a risk. That was the entire point.

"The date's scheduled for tonight," Olga said, tapping the tablet. "Seven o'clock, the drawbridge booth. It's got the best view on the station, that glass bubble over the gap? Very romantic, very viral. Don't embarrass me."

"When have I ever embarrassed you?"

"Every single budget meeting." Olga was already walking backward toward the commons, waving. "Seven o'clock. Smile."

Amelie smiled. It was, she was fairly sure, the smile she used on donors, which was not ideal, but she had forty minutes to find a different one.

* * *

The drawbridge booth was, in fairness, gorgeous. A pressurized bubble of glass and grey metal, slung between two station modules with nothing under it but the gap and the slow neon churn of the gas giant below. Amelie stepped through the outer lock at 6:58 and the whole floor hummed faintly, and the clouds below were lit up like a city on fire, orange and violet and deep bruise green.

A man was standing at the control console with his back half turned. Tall, grey at the temples, sleeves rolled up over forearms that had clearly turned a lot of actual wrenches. Fifty-something. Her age and then some.

He turned around, and oh. Oh, it was worse than the messages. He had a good face. A face that had been quietly getting better for decades while nobody watched, which was exactly the kind of thing she'd have put in a campaign speech if she were crueler.

"Amelie," he said. His voice did something at the end of her name, like he'd rehearsed it and was annoyed at himself for rehearsing.

"Jamie. Fifty-five, drawbridge tender, terrible profile photo." She stuck out her hand, then thought better of it and stuck out her whole arm, like a plank. "Sorry. That's a handshake. I've been managing campaigns so long I greet people like I'm endorsing them."

"I noticed," he said, and his mouth did a thing that wasn't quite a smile but wanted to be. "You endorsed me very firmly."

"It's a firm endorsement. You should feel endorsed." She dropped the arm. "In person you're taller than your messages."

"You're shorter than yours."

"That's not even... how does that work? Messages don't have height."

"They had a kind of height," Jamie said, and now the smile actually landed, crooked and slow, and Amelie felt something in her chest do an unscheduled maneuver. "Like a tall fence. You read them and think, I can't see over this, what's behind it."

"So you signed up for a dating competition to climb the fence?"

"I signed up on a dare." He said it plainly, which she liked. "A pilot I was seeing online, years back, dared me to make a profile. She was thirty-eight and I was... no, I was thirty-eight too. That math's easy at least." He shrugged. "She stopped writing three months in. I kept the profile like a coat in a closet. Then Olga's office put up the competition notices and a coworker dared me again, so apparently my whole romantic history runs on dares."

"Well, mine runs on other people's ambitions, so we're a matched set." Amelie looked out the glass at the storm. It was a bad one, the kind the station crew called a synth-rain event, meaning the gas giant's upper deck was throwing charged slop at the hull and the shields were doing their tired best. Streaks of light slid down the outside of the bubble like the world's most expensive window washing. "How long have you worked this bridge?"

"Seventeen years." He tapped the console. "I open the gap for freight, close it for pedestrians, and I fix the things that break. Which tonight, speaking of, is a lot."

"A lot?"

"The seal on the outer lock has been tripping since noon. Storm pressure. I've logged it twice." He frowned at a panel near the ceiling, one of several, and Amelie noticed that one of the ceiling panels was not sitting flush. It had a hairline crack running along its edge, and where the crack was, there was a dark damp line. "Which brings me to the bad news portion of our date."

"This early? We haven't even done the awkward drink order part."

"The awkward drink order part might be interrupted by weather." Jamie pointed at the cracked panel. "That's a drainage channel from the module above. When the storm seal trips, the channel overloads, and..."

Right on cue, the seal chimed, three times, annoyed. The outer lock light went from green to amber. And the cracked panel gave up its long argument with gravity and started leaking, a thin bright thread of synth-rain water that hit the booth floor with a hiss and spread out in a gleaming fan.

"Oh, you're joking," Amelie said.

"I told you, logged it twice." Jamie was already moving, calm as anything, pulling a panel off the wall and hitting a manual override. The bridge door at the far end did not open. He tried it again. It really did not open. "Storm lockout. The whole booth seals when the leak trips the pressure sensors. It'll reset when the drainage cycle finishes."

"How long is a drainage cycle?"

"Forty minutes. Sometimes fifty." He looked at her, and there was a pause where they both did the same math, which was that they were two adults locked in a glass bubble during a storm with a puddle growing between them, and this was technically the worst first date in orbital history and possibly also the best one either of them had been on in years.

"Forty to fifty minutes," Amelie repeated. "Trapped. With you."

"With me." He hesitated, then nodded at a storage locker. "There's an emergency kit in there. Blankets, a flask of synth-brew somebody left in nineteen years ago, and, I swear this is true, a ceramic punch bowl the commons staff stashed during the last festival and never came back for."

"You're telling me there's a stolen punch bowl in this booth?"

"Technically the booth stole it. I just know where it lives." He opened the locker, and there it was, an enormous ridiculous white bowl with little painted roses, sitting next to a dented flask like they'd been waiting out the storm together for two decades.

Amelie laughed before she could stop herself, a real one, the kind she usually saved for after election results. "Well. This is either going to be a disaster or a story."

Jamie set the punch bowl on the console, right next to the leak's widening puddle, like a tiny dry island.

"Those are usually the same thing," he said.

Then Jamie peeled off his work shirt, standing there in a grey undershirt, and folded it into a neat wad, sleeve up like a flag. He wedged it against the cracked ceiling panel so the drips landed in the cloth and ran down into the stolen ceramic bowl he slid underneath. It was not engineering. It was barely improvisation. But it worked, and Amelie gave him full marks for style, which she suspected nobody on this station had done for him in a while.

"That's your work shirt?" she asked. "You're sacrificing your work shirt to a punch bowl?"

"It's a fair trade. The bowl gets dignity, I get a dry console." He wrung the wad slightly, adjusting its angle. "This thing's painted roses have been in service longer than half the modules. One more job won't hurt it."

"Twenty years of festival punch and now storm management. That's a career arc."

"It's a good bowl," he said, so defensively that she laughed again, and he grinned, and she thought, well, there it is, there's the actual face under the tired bridge-tender face.

She settled onto the bench with the flask between them. The synth-brew tasted like a fire drill held in someone's mouth, but it was warm, and warmth counted.

"So," she said. "You know the funny part? I actually know how this competition ends. I mean the format. I've read the rule packet."

"You read the rule packet?"

"Amelie. I am a campaign manager. I read rule packets the way other people read poetry." She took a swig and passed the flask. "And here's the thing everybody gets wrong. There's no elimination round. Nobody gets voted off the Farnsworth. It's all theater until the final, and the final is a show-of-skill."

"A show-of-skill?"

"Each pair gets a challenge on the live broadcast. Some useless-but-impressive task. Olga's office picks it. The audience votes on how you do." She shrugged. "It's not really about dating at all. It's about whether you and your match can do something together without screaming."

"Huh." Jamie looked thoughtful. "So the whole tournament bracket in the commons, all those couples holding hands at the mixer events..."

"Prelude. Advertising. Olga wants numbers, and numbers want a story." Amelie gestured with the flask. "The real game is one night. One task. In front of the whole station."

"So we just have to not scream at each other during one task."

"We also have to be good at it, ideally. There's a prize."

"There's a prize?"

"There's a prize." She grinned. "And before you ask, it's not romantic. It's practical. Last year the winning pair got a year of double rations and a repaired skiff. The year before, a sabbatical slot. The council funds it because it's cheap publicity and the winners always do something photogenic with it."

"Huh," Jamie said again. He turned the flask in his hands. "So what would you do with a photogenic prize, if we won?"

"I haven't got that far. I mostly signed up to prove I could still want something."

She said it lightly, or tried to, but it came out with more weight than she'd planned, the way confessions do when you've been carrying them around in a coat pocket for months. She looked at the storm on the glass rather than at him.

"Want something," he repeated.

"You know how it goes. Twenty-two years of running other people's campaigns. You spend so long aiming other people's wants at targets that you forget whether you've got any of your own." She picked at the bench seam. "Reid's first campaign, eleven years back, I wanted his win so badly I dreamed about it. Second campaign, four years ago, I wanted it because it was my job. Somewhere in there the wanting got outsourced." She looked up. "So. Dating competition, contestant forty-one. Midlife crisis by lottery ticket. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

"That's not a crisis," Jamie said. "That's maintenance. You noticed a part was worn and you ordered a replacement. That's just good practice. I'd know, I'm the replacement-parts guy."

"You're flattering me with plumbing metaphors."

"I'm a bridge tender, they're structural metaphors, thank you." He was quiet a moment. Then he reached into his coverall pocket and brought out something small, setting it on the console between the punch bowl and the leak.

It was a metal puzzle, the old-fashioned kind, two interlocking pieces of dented steel that had clearly been taken apart and put back together several hundred thousand times. The edges were worn silver.

"What's that?"

"A pilot's puzzle. She sent it to me, the pilot, back when we were writing every night. Said it was for when my hands got idle." He picked it up, thumbed the seam, and separated the two halves with a small click. "She ghosted three months in, but the puzzle kept coming apart and going back together, so." He shrugged. "I've been carrying it seventeen years. It's dented because I dropped it during a freight gap once, emergency open, whole console shaking, and it went skittering."

"Does it still work?"

"Course it works. Dents are just character." He held it out to her. "Want to try?"

She took it. The steel was warm from his pocket, and lighter than she expected. The two pieces interlocked in a way that looked impossible and wasn't, once you found the twist.

"Left and down," he said. "Then it just... there."

Click. The halves came apart in her palm.

"There," she said, ridiculously pleased with herself. "Look at that. Fifty-two years old and I've defeated a pocket puzzle."

"See, that's the skill-show thing right there. If Olga's office asked us to assemble something under a minute, I'd hold the parts and you'd do the twist."

"Is that a job offer? Are you merging our campaigns?"

"I'm saying we'd make a decent team, is all." He took the puzzle back, fitted it together with a click, and pocketed it. "Which is apparently the whole point of the competition, so maybe the algorithm knew what it was doing."

"Maybe it did," Amelie said, and then the ceiling panel dripped again, directly onto the punch bowl's roses, and both of them said "oh." at the same time, and then laughed at having said it, and outside the glass the synth-rain kept writing its bright slow sentences