The Fifteen-Year Crossing

*I wanted to write something quiet... about people old enough to know what they're doing, who still don't quite know what they want. Thanks for reading.*

The freighter settled onto the pad with a groan that Janice felt through her boots more than she heard. She ran the shutdown checklist out of habit, flicked the switches she could have flicked in her sleep, and unbuckled.

Lysara. Fifteen years of hops and rotations, and this was where her new contract put her. Rust-colored flats out every window, a pale green sky, and the whole settlement squeezed into a string of domes along the equator. The manifest said the science wing took priority cargo, which meant she'd be dealing with the xenobotany people at some point.

She didn't think about that until she was walking back through the cargo bay to check the tie-downs.

There was a viewport in the bay door, a big one, because loading crews liked to watch the cranes. Janice glanced through it the way she always did, half looking for ground crew mistakes.

Neal was out there.

Stooped over a sample case on the pad apron, bracing against the wind that Lysara never seemed to stop making. He was forty now, which she knew on paper, but she hadn't done the math in her head until she saw him do that exact thing with his shoulder, that little shrug he did when a latch fought him. His hair was shorter than she remembered. Everything else looked about the same.

She froze with her hand on the tie-down strap and just looked at him for longer than she meant to.

Then she pulled her hand back and turned away like she hadn't seen a thing.

"Stupid," she said to the empty bay. "Real stupid, Devlin."

The problem was that she had signed a paper three weeks ago that named this colony as her base. And the problem on top of that problem was that Neal Browning had a doctorate in salt-brush ecosystems and there was exactly one colony in this sector that studied them. She could have done that math before she signed. She hadn't.

Or she had, and she'd told herself it would be fine.

Janice finished her walk-through, kept her eyes off the viewport the entire second time past it, and went to find her liaison.

* * *

The supply office was a cubby off the main corridor, all shelves and cargo manifests, and the woman behind the desk was maybe mid-thirties, dark hair pulled back, a tablet in each hand.

"You'd be Devlin," she said. "Keri Osei. Sit anywhere that isn't that stack, it's holding up the shelf."

Janice sat on the edge of the desk instead of a chair, which was a pilot habit she'd never bothered to break. "Janice. Good flight?"

"Boring one, I hope. Boring is what I like." Keri thumbed through her tablet. "Okay. You're on the rotation, so your contract base is us. First assignment is a standard freight drop, four-day layover while they unbolt your module and swap it for the water reclaim unit. You'll fly the return leg Friday."

"Four days," Janice said. "That all?"

"That's all. Colony pay covers the dorm block, third corridor, and the commons has decent food if you don't mind it gray." Keri looked up. "Questions?"

Janice had about six, and none of them were about food. "The science wing. They taking deliveries off my manifest?"

"Some. The botany team gets priority on crate space." Keri scrolled. "You'll probably meet them at the freight window eventually. Supervisor is a guy named Brandon Hollis, been here twelve years, thinks the whole colony exists to keep his salt-brush alive. Then there's a handful of researchers. One of them is Neal Browning, he does the field work." She said it the way you'd read a weather report. "You know him?"

Janice had prepared for this exact question for the whole two-week transit, and what came out was, "We've met."

"Huh. Small sector." Keri didn't push it, which Janice appreciated, and went back to the tablet. "Anyway, that's your sheet. Anything wrong with the module, flag it before Friday or I'll hear about it from four different people."

"You'll hear it from me first," Janice said, and got out of there before Keri could look at her too close.

* * *

The dorm block was a bunk and a locker and a window onto the salt flats, which was more view than most colony rooms gave you. Janice dumped her bag, changed into civvies, and told herself she was going to go get food the way someone would who had not seen her ex-husband through a cargo window an hour ago.

The commons was a wide room in the middle dome with long tables and a galley counter and windows on three sides. Green sky, flat horizon, the usual. Janice got a tray of whatever the stew was and sat where she could see the doors, because that was another habit, and ate.

The stew was gray, like promised. It was fine.

She spent the first evening deliberately doing nothing. She walked the main corridor end to end twice. She looked at the notice board, which had a lost jacket on it and a sign-up sheet for something called brine yoga, which she chose not to think about. She went back to her bunk at what the colony clock called evening and read half a chapter of a paperback she'd been carrying for two years.

The whole time, the science wing sat at the north end of the main dome, and she did not go near it. That was the point. That was the entire point, and she stuck to it like it was flight discipline.

The second morning she got up early, on purpose, to use the galley before the day shift crowded it. The galley shared a wall with the science wing's breakfast room, separated by a clearseal partition, and of course that was where Neal was, sitting alone with coffee and a data pad, hunched the way he hunched when he was reading.

Janice got her coffee and took it to the far end of the commons and drank it facing the window, at the flats, at nothing. Her neck hurt a little from not turning her head. That was dumb. She knew that was dumb.

"Morning," Keri said, appearing beside her with her own cup. "You look like you slept in a freighter."

"Close enough."

"Four-day layover," Keri said. "Any plans?"

"Sleep. Read. Stay out of everyone's way."

"That's the spirit." Keri leaned on the counter next to her and looked out at the flats too. "You want the honest version of this colony? There's nothing to do and everyone knows it, so people invent stuff. There's a movie night in the commons Thursday, if you're still here."

"I fly Friday."

"Then Wednesday's cards in the rec room. Wednesday's usually my night off, so I play, badly." Keri sipped. "Anyway. That's the tour."

Janice nodded and watched the green sky get a little brighter and thought about how Neal used to make coffee back when they'd shared a kitchen, badly, too strong, and how she'd complained about it every morning for four years and how she'd give a fair amount right now for one cup of it.

"So," Keri said, and there was a different note in her voice, casual but not careless. "This is none of my business, and I'm making it my business because I have to work with both of you. The freight window schedule has him coming to your bay Thursday for the sample crates. You going to be weird about it?"

"No," Janice said.

"Okay. Because Hollis will notice weird, that's all. He notices everything, it's his one talent."

"I won't be weird."

"Great." Keri drained her cup. "See you Wednesday, maybe."

She left, and Janice stood there with her cooling coffee and did the arithmetic she'd been avoiding. Thursday. Her bay. Her cargo bay, her viewport, Neal stooping over a case not ten meters from where she'd be standing.

Two more days. She could do two more days not knowing anything, or she could do what she actually wanted, which was walk down that corridor right now and ask him why he'd never said a word.

She rinsed her cup and went back to her bunk and read another chapter of the paperback, and understood maybe a third of it.

The hydration lounge was a narrow room off the dorm corridor with four stalls, a bench, and a dehumidifier that ran loud enough to make conversation a choice. Janice picked it because nobody used it mid-morning, which meant it was safe, which meant of course that was where Neal found her.

She was filling a bottle at the dispenser when the door cycled and she knew before she looked up. She'd have known the footstep anywhere, which was its own kind of embarrassing after six years.

"Hey," he said. His voice was rougher than she remembered. Too many years of field dust, probably, or just age. He was forty now. She was thirty-eight. Those were just numbers, but they sat in the room with them anyway.

"Hey," she said, and capped her bottle. "You still drink water like a person who forgot coffee exists?"

"I drink plenty of coffee. Bad coffee."

"That I remember."

He leaned on the wall by the dispenser, not close, hands in his pockets. "So. Lysara."

"So. Lysara."

"This is weird, right?"

"It's a little weird." She turned to face him and made herself do it. Shorter hair than she remembered, a few lines around his eyes she didn't. Same hunch. "The water here has a funny taste. Somebody should tell the engineers."

"Brine filtering," he said, and seemed almost relieved to have the topic. "The whole aquifer is salt. They run everything through three stages of reclamation and the last stage still smells faintly of the flats. You get used to it."

"I've been here two days."

"Give it a week. You'll stop noticing. I did."

"You've been here how long?"

"Two years. Cycle's up next spring." He said it flat, like a fact on a manifest, and she heard the thing he wasn't saying underneath it, which was that he'd known her rotation schedule. Or hadn't. She couldn't tell which and hated that she was checking.

"You didn't know," she said, because the alternative was circling it for the whole layover. "When I signed. Three weeks ago. You didn't know I was coming here."

"I didn't know." He met her eyes. "Brandon put in a freight contract request, Keri's office matched a pilot, and none of that touches my desk until it lands in my bay."

"Okay."

"That's it. Okay."

"Okay." She believed him, which was somehow worse, because if he'd known he could at least have been lying to her. Something to work with. "Because I've been doing the math since the pad, and it felt like too small a frontier to be coincidence."

"It's too small a frontier for anything," he said. "Half the dome is botany team and the other half is people waiting to leave."

There was a silence, and the dehumidifier filled it. Then a woman came in for water, nodded at them both, and left, and the moment went with her.

"Thursday," Neal said at the door. "The sample crates. I'll be in your bay."

"I heard."

"It's just work."

"I know it's just work." She paused. "I'll be professional."

"So will I." He almost smiled. "Good to see you, Janice."

"Yeah," she said. "You too."

* * *

The observation blister was at the east seam of the main dome, a bulge of clearseal with two benches facing the flats, and at shift-end it was empty. Janice went there because it was the farthest point in the colony from her bunk and her cargo bay and the science wing, all at the same time, and because the sun going down through the pale green haze turned the salt pink and she figured she was owed one pretty thing this week.

She was alone for about fifteen minutes. Then the door cycled.

"You know I came out here to be alone," she said, without turning.

"I know," Neal said. "I'll go if you want."

She didn't say go. He sat down on the other end of the bench, a body's length of space between them, and they watched the light do its thing on the flats.

"Keri says the salt-brush is adapting," she said, because somebody had to say something. "The jointed ones. She said it like I'd know what that meant."

"They're weeping less brine. Seasonal adjustment. It's actually," and then he caught himself and laughed, short. "You don't care. Nobody outside the team cares. I've been boring people about this for two years."

"You were always boring about something. It was compost once. You had a whole bin."

"Two bins," he said. "The second one was better."

The sun went down another degree. Janice pulled her jacket sleeves down over her hands, an old habit from cold cockpits.

"Fifteen years," she said. "I did the crossing last month. Inner frontier to the hub, back routes. Fifteen years since I started flying these hops."

"You were twenty-three."

"Twenty-three. And you were what, twenty-four?"

"Twenty-five. I was in the doctoral program and you had a freighter and we thought we were going to do everything."

"We did some of it."

"We did some of it," he agreed.

They let that sit. Out on the flats the salt had gone from pink to violet and somewhere under it the stalks were weeping