Permanent Docking

I woke up with an arm across my ribs that wasn't mine.

For a second I just lay there and did the math. Rec lounge. Zach. My berth. Yeah. That happened.

Zach is thirty-five, transit controller, been on Hub 7 longer than me and I've been here four years. I'm thirty-four. We've shared coffee shifts and complaints about the recycled air since my first week. Nothing else. Until last night, when it turned out there was something else.

The bunk in my berth is a converted storage locker, so the mattress sags in the middle like it gave up years ago and nobody filed the paperwork. We'd both ended up in that sag by about two in the morning, and I'd slept hard after, the way you do when your body decides it's finally off shift.

His arm was heavy. Warm. I could hear him breathing, slow, still under.

Well, I thought. That happened.

Here was the problem. I don't do mornings after. Three years ago I had a thing with a cargo pilot on the Ganymede run, back when I was crew chief. I liked him fine. I walked out before dawn anyway, because the leaving part is easier than the staying part, and I've always been good at the easy thing.

Now the guy was in my bunk and I couldn't leave. It's my bunk. That's the joke of it.

I shifted and his arm tightened a little, then he made a noise and opened one eye.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

He looked around the berth like he was confirming where he was. The walls sweating condensation, the biolume strip flickering in the corner the way it always does, my tools stacked on the shelf because I had nowhere else to put them.

"So," he said. "This mattress. It's got a crater in it."

"Yeah."

"We both rolled downhill all night. I kept waking up thinking the station was listing."

"That's the docking berth experience. You get used to it."

"I don't think anyone gets used to that. That's a hull breach waiting to happen." He was propped up on one elbow now, hair a mess, and he wasn't reaching for his clothes. I waited for him to reach for his clothes. He didn't. "Also I think your blanket has a hole in it. I kept finding my foot through it."

"That blanket has been through three stations. It's earned the hole."

He laughed at that. A real laugh, not a polite one. And I realized, standing there in my own head with my hand halfway toward my boots out of pure habit, that he was not bolting. He was staying. He was going to ask for coffee, I could feel it coming.

"You have synth-caf?" he asked. There it was.

"One packet. Maybe two."

"Then I'm not leaving until it's brewed."

That's how we ended up in the rec lounge at oh-seven-hundred on a slow rotation, sharing one packet of synth-caf because the second one had gone stale and I didn't want to admit I'd been meaning to throw it out for a month.

The rec lounge has one viewport, warped at the bottom left corner so Saturn looks like it's melting. Most days nobody's in it at this hour. Today it was just us and the hum of the air recyclers.

Zach held the cup first. I told him to keep it. We sat across from each other at the bolted-down table and the silence went on a beat too long.

"So," he said.

"So."

"That happened," he said, and I nearly spit my caf, because it was exactly what I'd been thinking in the berth and hearing it out loud was strange.

"Yeah. It did."

"I'm not..." He turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. "I didn't plan that. Last night. I will state that up front. Not that it wasn't..."

"No, I know. Me neither. It just kind of..."

"Snowballed."

"That's the word."

He nodded and drank. The caf was weak because one packet for two mugs is one packet for two mugs, and we both pretended it was fine.

"How do you rate last night?" he asked. "Scale of one to ten. I need data."

"You want me to grade you?"

"I want to know if I get a transit slot out of your berth or a docking hold."

I laughed before I could stop it. That's the problem with knowing someone four years. They know your jokes and you know theirs and there's no protection in it.

"Eight," I said.

"Eight." He looked wounded. "Eight?"

"The mattress crater cost you a full point. And the blanket."

"Okay. Fair. The blanket was a hazard." He was smiling into his cup. "I'd have gone nine without the crater."

"You give yourself nine?"

"I'm a generous grader."

The recyclers hummed. Out the warped viewport, Saturn sat there being enormous and useless the way it always is. I turned my mug around the table the same quarter turn he'd done earlier and hated that I noticed I'd done it.

"Can I ask you something," he said.

"You'll ask either way."

"Why last night? I mean, why now? We've been doing this coffee thing for four years."

I had about six answers to that and none of them were ones I wanted to say out loud at oh-seven-hundred with weak caf. The honest one was something like: because you were there, and because slow rotation nights on this rock make you feel like the whole universe is two people in a storage locker, and because I've been leaving things before dawn for three years and I got tired around midnight.

"I don't know," I said. "You were there."

"Is that the entire answer?"

"That's the answer you get before caf number two."

He took that. He's good at taking things, Zach. He watches ships come and go for a living, all day every day, and I think it taught him not to grab at stuff.

"Okay," he said. "My turn to answer. You were there too."

"That's my answer."

"It is. I'm borrowing it. It's a good answer." He drained his mug and looked at the packet, the empty one, like it had failed us personally. "We should do this again."

"Do what. The caf? Because the caf was bad."

"The whole thing. The... package."

"The package."

"You know what I mean."

I did know what he meant and that was the problem. I looked at the viewport. Saturn's rings were doing their thing, which they do whether you're watching or not.

"Maybe," I said.

"Maybe's fine," he said, too fast, like he'd been braced for worse. "Maybe's a docking hold, not a refusal. I can work with a hold."

"You would turn this into work talk."

"It's the only language I've got." He stood and rinsed his mug in the little sink, and then he stood there with his back to me for a second. "Hey. Helene."

"Yeah."

"Last night wasn't nothing. Just so you know where I stand. You don't have to do anything with that."

And then he left. Just like that, no awkward shuffle, no pretending he'd forgotten something in my berth so he could come back for it later. He just said his piece and walked out like a man who'd filed his paperwork.

I sat there with my half mug of weak caf and thought about how I'd planned to wake up first and be gone. That was the plan, three years running. Wake up, boots, out, done, nobody hurt.

Instead I was still sitting in the lounge a full hour before my repair shift, thinking about whether maybe's a hold or a refusal, and knowing that I'd been the one who said maybe, not him.

My shift started at oh-nine-hundred. I had a coolant line to reseal on the hab ring and about six hours to not think about any of this, which is exactly how much thinking I did about it. All six hours.

Lis caught me at the tool locker around eleven-thirty.

"You're rechecking that seal for the fourth time," she said.

"The seal is stubborn."

"The seal was fine two hours ago. You've got your thinking face on."

"I don't have a thinking face."

"You absolutely have a thinking face. It's the one where you look like you're arguing with somebody who isn't there." She leaned on the locker. "Who won?"

"Nobody won."

"That's usually the answer when it's somebody." She didn't push. That's why I like Lis. She just took her torque wrench and left me there with a seal that was already fine.

I reseated it a fifth time anyway.

The call came at fourteen hundred. Stuck air-recycling valve, Ring 2, quadrant C. The kind of job that's either twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, and you don't know until you've got your hands in it.

I grabbed my kit and went. Ring 2 is a ten-minute walk from the hab ring if you don't dawdle, and I dawdled, which should tell you something about my mood.

The valve was where the valve always is, behind a panel nobody's repainted in a decade. I had the panel half off when I heard footsteps behind me.

"Tool's wrong," Zach said. "You've got the mid-size spanner out."

"How do you know what size the bolt is?"

"I don't. But I carried your big kit from the locker, so I know what's still in it."

I turned around and there he was, holding my spare kit like it was the most natural thing in the world. He'd followed me from the lounge corridor. He wasn't even pretending he hadn't.

"You followed me."

"I heard the call on the net. Ring 2 is on my patrol loop. Figured you'd want a second pair of hands."

"I've done this valve alone maybe a dozen times."

"Sure. Hand me the light anyway."

And that was the issue. He didn't hover. He didn't make it weird. He just held the light where I needed it, and when I said bigger, he handed me bigger, and when I said hold that, he held that. Four years of coffee shifts and somehow I'd never noticed how easy it is to work next to him. No talking. None needed. Just his shoulder near my knee and the two of us breathing the same recycled air, which, okay, we'd done a lot more than share air the night before, but this felt like its own kind of familiar.

"You're staring at the valve like it insulted you," he said after a while.

"It's crusted. Somebody's been letting scale build up for months."

"Somebody on the day shift."

"Somebody on every shift. Nobody reports it because it still works, until it doesn't, and then it's my afternoon."

"Tragedy of the commons."

"Don't get educated at me. Hold the light."

He held the light. I got the scale cracked off and the valve moving, and my hands knew what they were doing even when my head didn't. That's the thing about mechanical work. It's honest. The bolt turns or it doesn't. There's no maybe.

That's probably why I like it.

"There," I said. "She'll hold."

"How long?"

"Long as nobody lets scale build up again."

"So, a year."

"So, a year." I sat back on my heels and looked at him. He was crouched there with the light still on, being patient. "You're good at this. The holding and handing."

"I've watched a lot of ships dock. You learn to anticipate."

"You're comparing yourself to a ship?"

"I'm comparing myself to the tug that gets them lined up. Nobody notices the tug."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I wiped my hands and started packing the kit, and he packed with me, and that was easy too. That was the part that scared me a little, if I'm writing this honestly. The work was easy. The packing up was easy. Nothing about him was hard to be around, and I've spent four years making sure everything stays a little hard to be around.

We were in the corridor outside Ring 2 when Bruno caught up to us. Bruno's a tech, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, all elbows and opinions, and he'd clearly heard about last night, because on a station that size everybody hears about everything by fourteen hundred the next day.

"Hey, it's the mechanic and the controller," he said, grinning. "Finally docking, huh? Somebody ought to log it in the transit schedule. Must've been some slow rotation night."

Zach opened his mouth and I don't know what he was going to say, because I got there first.

"Bruno." I said it flat. "Do you see any cargo here? Any freight? Anything at all that's your business?"

"I was just..."

"Because if there's freight, I'll log it. And if there isn't, you've got a scrubber fault in quadrant D that's been sitting on the board since Tuesday, and I'd rather you went and did that than stand here making jokes about my sex life."

He went. He went fast. And I stood there in the corridor with my kit feeling like I'd hit a valve bolt with a demolition hammer.

"Okay," Zach said.

"That was too much."

"It was maybe too much."

"I shut him down like he'd touched my tools."

"He made a dumb joke."

"He made a dumb joke and I took his head off. Why did I do that?" I really didn't know. I'd been fine in the berth. Fine in the lounge. Fine with the whole thing being a thing that happened. But Bruno said it out loud, docking, like it was a status change everyone could see, and something in me just