The Lawyer and the Pilot

Samson Wilkinson boarded the Hauler on a Tuesday, if you could call any day a Tuesday out past Mars. Fifty-two years old, two years divorced, and hauling a hardcase full of arbitration files. The ship smelled like recycled air and old coffee.

The dockhand took his bag. Samson took one look at the corridor. Narrow. Gray. Conduits humming overhead like a hive that never slept.

Seven weeks in this thing. Great.

"Welcome aboard, counselor." A tall woman in a flight jumpsuit stood at the junction. Short hair, dark, sharp eyes. "Alisha Rhodes. Chief pilot. You're the reason we're running two days late."

"Samson Wilkinson." He offered a hand. She shook it. Her grip was strong. "The delay is a dock scheduling issue, I'm told."

"It's a cargo claim nobody with a brain could settle in port, so they fly a lawyer to it." She shrugged. "Anyway. Your cabin's aft. Common room's midship. Don't touch the galley before eight."

She turned and left before he could answer.

Well. Friendly.

He found his cabin. A bunk, a fold-down desk, a locker. He laid out his files anyway. Old habit. Twenty-four years of corporate law, and he still slept better with the case in order.

The claim was simple on paper. A mining consortium said the Hauler's previous run shorted them forty tons of refined ore. Alisha Rhodes had signed the manifest. Somebody was lying, and Samson's firm wanted it resolved before the consortium's lawyers got creative.

He read for two hours. Then he got hungry and went looking for the galley. It was six fifteen. He figured that was close enough.

It was not close enough.

"That's my coffee," Alisha said from the doorway.

"Your coffee?"

"Crew pot. I set it last night. Passengers get the other machine."

Samson looked at the two machines. One was dead. The other was full and steaming. "The other machine appears to be decorative."

"It's a long story. Fix it or don't." She crossed the galley, pulled a mug from a hook, poured from his... from her pot, and left again.

He stood there holding nothing. Then he laughed, once, to himself. Fifty-two years old and being hazed by a pilot.

He fixed the passenger machine. It took a screwdriver and a bar of rust cleaner from his kit. It took him forty minutes. When it finally gurgled to life, he felt a small, petty satisfaction.

He ran into her again that evening in the common room. Four chairs, a table bolted down, a screen playing old Venus orbital feed. He was reading deposition summaries with a cup of now-working coffee when her boot caught the table leg.

The cup went. Coffee everywhere. Across the table, the files, his lap.

"Oh, hell!" She grabbed napkins. "Sorry. Sorry, that's on me."

"It's fine." It was not fine. Page nine of the deposition was soaked. "It's fine."

"That's a lot of coffee on a lot of paper."

"Yes. Well!" He blotted a page with his sleeve. "These were digital copies anyway. Mostly."

"Were they?"

"No!"

She snorted. Then she laughed, an actual laugh, and dropped into the chair across from him. "Okay. I'm sorry. I'll print you new ones."

"You have a printer?"

"I have a printer and the right to use it, which is more than you have." She leaned back. "You're the lawyer, right? For the ore thing?"

"Arbitrator. Technically neutral."

"Nobody who flies economy on a cargo hauler is neutral."

"Nobody who calls it economy is neutral either." He looked up at her. She was grinning. "Alisha Rhodes. You signed the manifest in question."

"And I'd sign it again. We delivered what we loaded. If the dock tally was short, that happened at the transfer station, not on my deck." She said it flat, no heat, like she'd said it a hundred times. Maybe she had.

"That's conveniently what I'd expect you to say."

"It's also true. Two things can be true. You'd know that, you're a lawyer." She stood, collected her own cup. "My flight plan files tomorrow, by the way. If you're planning to question it."

"Would I?"

"You've been staring at my route packet since you came aboard."

Fair. He had. "Your burn windows are tight," he said. "Margin for error looks thin on the second leg."

She stopped in the doorway. "You read my route packet?"

"Part of due diligence."

"It's thin because the client wanted speed, counselor. I fly the margins they pay for." A pause. "It's a good plan. It's my plan. Don't second-guess it from a fold-down desk."

"I ask questions. That's the job."

"Then ask me. Not my paperwork."

She was gone before he could answer. Samson looked at the coffee stain spreading across page nine and thought, this is going to be a long seven weeks.

It got longer.

On day five, the arguing got scheduled, more or less. He'd file a written inquiry into the manifest numbers. She'd answer it in person, loudly, in the common room, while he ate dinner. He learned she flew cargo because she liked being paid to be right. She learned he'd been married twenty-two years to a woman who got tired of waiting up for him.

"Twenty-two years," she said, shaking her head. "What happened?"

"I worked. She stopped waiting. That's the whole story." He said it evenly. It had only been two years since the divorce. The scar tissue was still forming.

"That's a terrible story."

"It's an efficient one."

"You're unbelievable." But she was smiling a little, and she refilled his cup from the good pot without being asked. Progress.

Day nine. The bad day.

Samson was in his cabin reviewing dock transfer logs when the lights went amber and the floor shuddered. A klaxon made two short bursts and stopped. Then a voice on the shipwide, calm as anything.

"Debris strike on sensor array. Reacting thrusters venting. We're going to lockdown. This is routine, don't panic."

Routine. Right.

The corridor door hissed shut in front of him before he reached the common room. A second one sealed behind. He was in a box maybe three meters long, with a bench, an emergency panel, and a rec module screen someone had patched in showing the ship's external feed.

The feed showed Alisha's hands moving across a board he couldn't name. Fast, sure, no wasted motion.

"Rhodes," he said to the screen, knowing she couldn't hear him. "Don't vent us."

Forty minutes later the panel crackled. "Counselor, that you in module six?" Her voice.

"Who else is sealed in a broom closet?"

"Hang on." A hiss, a groan of metal, and the door cracked open. She stood there in a flight harness, hair stuck to her forehead, looking like she'd run the length of the ship. "Array's dead. Venting's capped. Lockdown's stuck half-engaged, so sections stay sealed till engineering resets. Could be three hours. You're stuck with me in the rec module. That's the only compartment with seating."

"Charming."

"Move."

The rec module had two benches and the patched screen. She dropped the harness, sat, put her boots up on a crate. "External feed's still up. Want to watch me not crash?"

"I'd rather watch you land us safely."

"Same thing."

He sat on the opposite bench. The module was small. Her knee was maybe half a meter from his.

"What's the actual risk?" he asked.

"Low. Array's a compass, not an engine. I flew the approach by hand twice before you were assigned here." She glanced at him. "You're asking because of my route packet, aren't you."

"Your route packet is now the least of my concerns."

"Glad to be promoted." She was quiet a second, watching her own hands on the feed. "It was a close one, actually. Debris came inside the margin. My margin."

"Your thin margin."

"Don't say I told you so."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were absolutely going to."

He laughed. It surprised him. "I was going to suggest revising it. Once. In writing. That's all."

"Written suggestions get filed and forgotten. You want change, you bring coffee and say it to my face." She looked over at him. The amber emergency light made her look different. Softer around the jaw, somehow. "Bring coffee."

"Noted."

They sat in silence after that. The feed showed stars and the slow turn of Venus, still weeks away, a white blur getting slowly whiter. Her boot had come down off the crate. Her knee was closer now. Neither of them mentioned it.

"So," she said, after a while. "Twenty-two years. You never once thought about quitting the job?"

He thought about it. "Once. Year nineteen. She left for six months to her sister's. I nearly followed."

"What stopped you?"

"A case."

"Of course a case."

"A big case." He rubbed his jaw. "She came back. I flew out for the settlement hearing instead of the anniversary. That was the actual end."

Alisha didn't say anything cruel. She just nodded, slow. "Flying's easier. People don't wait up for the ship."

"No. They don't."

Three hours passed like that. Talking, mostly. Not arguing, which was new. When engineering finally reset the locks and the doors cycled open, she stood, stretched until something in her back popped, and headed for the cockpit.

"Wilkinson."

He looked up.

"Coffee tomorrow. Before you file anything." She didn't wait for an answer.

He sat there a moment longer than he needed to, watching the feed. Then he went and found the good pot was already full, and a mug set out at his place, and he thought, carefully, about nothing at all.

The argument came back on day twelve. It was about cargo protocols, which by then was their oldest song.

"This is the third time you've moved crates without a counter-signature," Samson said. He had the manifest spread across the common room table, weighted down at the corners with two mugs and a tin of crackers. "The arbitrator on the next run will eat this ship alive."

"There is no next arbitrator. You're it. And the counter-signature is a formality for a claim that's garbage."

"The claim is forty tons of missing refined ore. It doesn't get more solid than missing forty tons."

"The ore was on the manifest. I signed the manifest. The consortium's dock crew signed the same manifest. If forty tons vanished, it vanished on the ground, on their side of the airlock, and you know it."

"I know what the paperwork says. The paperwork says your signature."

"My signature says I loaded the ship. It doesn't say I personally rode every pallet down the elevator." She leaned across the table. "You've been out here twelve days. You think you understand cargo flow?"

"I think I understand liability."

"That's the problem. That is the entire problem with you. You think a ship is a folder."

"It's not a folder, it's a contract with engines."

"Oh, that's beautiful. Write that down." She slapped the table with her palm, flat and hard, and the mugs jumped. Crackers scattered. "You sit in my cockpit for two minutes and suddenly you know my job better than I do."

He reached out and caught her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to stop the second slap, if there was going to be a second slap.

The room went quiet. The conduits hummed. Somewhere aft, a fan cycled.

Her pulse was right there under his thumb. Fast. He could feel it, and he could feel that he didn't move his hand, and he could feel that she didn't pull away either.

"Let go of me," she said. Quietly. Not the way she usually said things.

He let go. Immediately.

"Sorry," he said. "That was out of line."

"Yes. It was." She sat back down. She picked up a cracker off the table and ate it, which seemed to be how she closed meetings. "The manifest stays as signed. But I'll write a dock-side custody note for the consortium's leg. In writing. Since you love writing."

"That's actually reasonable."

"Don't ruin it." She got up, took her mug, and left. At the hatch she paused, half through it. "You've got a strong grip for a desk guy."

Then she was gone, and Samson sat there looking at his own hand like it belonged to a stranger.

* * *

Day thirteen. He couldn't sleep. Recycled air always did that to him, week one especially. Two years divorced and he still reached for the other side of the bed out of habit, found a cold wall of cabin paneling, and felt like an idiot about it.

So he went to the galley. Ship's night lights were on, everything amber and dim. He made tea from his own stash, passenger-grade, which tasted like hot paper.

He'd been standing there maybe four minutes when the hatch cycled and Alisha came in, in a sleep shirt and flight socks, hair flattened on one side.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't say anything about the socks. They're regulation. Somewhere."

"I wasn't going to say anything about the socks."

"You were thinking it very loudly." She went to the good pot, her pot, and poured herself half a cup. Then, after a