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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 4.

Mughali, wearing an ornately decorated mustard sari of silk over her red tights, came from her cube to wash a few items of clothing in the laundry sink. "Looks like it's going to be a busy day," Mughali said in her lilting Universal Anglo. One of those laughing, happy, impromptu conversations about nothing and everything instantly ensued among the crewmembers. Ridge smiled to himself. He saw Mughali at the sink; Tomson and Yu playing chess; Lantz whistling as she swept from the showers in to her cube, wearing her carrot hair in a turban and a fluffy white robe over her newly exercised musculature; Brenna rowing away; Mahaffey curled up in front of his movie with his stocking feet outthrust; and now Jerez, the other woman, a Cyber-Engineer 2, emerged from her cube.

Each of the eight members of WorkPod01 had a round tunnel to crawl through, leading to the quiet and privacy of his or her personal space. Each cube was 20 feet to a side, and arranged as each person saw fit. Typically, it resembled a college dorm room with holos and a thousand little personal mementos attached to neutral beige walls, plus lounging space, a small collection of light recreational drugs approved by the home corporation, enough holofilms to last hundreds of hours, and access to a world's library. One could slide shut what Yu referred to as a moon door made of translucent plast, and be alone.

Jerez emerged from her moon door to find something cold to drink in the kitchen. Jerez was a slender, dark-haired woman of Filipino-Spanish extraction, who'd grown up in Singapore but married a Norwegian and had holos of her several blond children alongside a smiling Oslo businessman who, but for his buckteeth and daffy smile, might have been a Viking in some earlier age.

"Section Leader Ridge, are you there?" said the voice of Captain Venable.

Ridge ran his hand across the wall, and a cube of light flicked on. There was the image of the ship's handsome, graying captain who was from Paris and vaguely resembled Cary Grant. "How are you doing, Sir?" He added apologetically. "I'm working on my report about yesterday's repairs. I'll have those to you before we walk out the door today."

"No hurry," Venable said. "I'll take your report for both days if you want to pass that to me later this evening."

"I'll be tired," Ridge said. "I'd rather not fall behind."

"A sensible policy," Venable said. "Are you ready to go out?"

Ridge shrugged. "Sure, we all are."

"How are the crew taking the work?"

"You mean the disaster?"

Venable nodded. "Just a little concerned. I know you're all professionals but this was a close call for all of us."

Ridge nodded. "I think we are all calm and self-assured, Captain. No panic, nothing like that." He winked. "Your leadership, Sir, is exceptional, of course."

Venable winked back. "Flattery will get you everywhere, Ridge." Venable was an easy-going, confident captain of many years' experience on the Luna-Neptune run. His home was in Miami, where his wife still lived, although his two daughters had grown up, moved away, and married. Though only visible from the chest up, with a bland background in his office in the Bridge Command Post (CP) area forward, as opposed to WorkPod01's location amidships, he looked tanned and fit as always. His bluish-white uniform shirt looked well tailored and crisply ironed, and his little color-garden of decorations sat snugly above his shirt pocket. On his shoulders were four gold stars on a black epaulet, in contrast to Ridge's humble one black bar on a collar tab. In matters of rank and service, the gulf between the two men was vast, but both were graduate cyber-engineers and that made them colleagues and equals on some level. Venable said: "I'll speak to the group again when you are assembled and ready to move out for the day's work."

"Thank you, Sir. I hope by then to have this..." (Ridge made a show of gritting his teeth and preparing to toss his digital tablet into the screen where Venable's image glowed) "...Damned piece of scribbling finished and out of my hair."

Venable chuckled. "There are all sorts of artificial writing systems available on the market if you wouldn't be so damned stubborn, Ridge. Do things the easy way." He signed off, and the screen beside Ridge went blank.

Behind him, during that conversation, the dynamic of banter and conversation had whirled about some unseen axis. The crew one by one disappeared into their cubes. They soon stepped back out of their moon doors, fastening up the tabs on their jumpsuits. In normal working conditions, everyone wore white work suits or jumpsuits with orange trim on the shoulders for safety and visibility. Depending on their occupational specialty, their collar tabs might be tan (bio) or light blue (cyber) or gray (chemical, only Brenna in this workpod), and so forth. Ridge was the only one with a black collar and a black bar edged in white.

Brenna emerged from the shower and sat briefly beside him, drying her hair. She wore a thick, fluffy blue frotte robe and toweled her hair with a white towel. "Am I bothering you?"

"You're never bothering me. You're taking me away from this report thing that I hate."

"I'll write them for you."

"You're kidding. You'll do that for me?"

"You look so helpless."

"Gee, thanks. I didn't know it showed." He sat back in his chair, folding his hands over the flat of his belly. "Talk to home?" It was a standard question. There was no weather here to make small talk about. Calling home was the big event in everyone's daily life.

She nodded. "Ricardo bought a new car."

"What kind?"

"He didn't say."

"Did he look sad?"

She laughed. "No." She had a lovely way of rolling her eyes and smiling so that her teeth glowed and there was warmth tumbling all around her. And all around Ridge, who did not wish she would go away.

"Well, then it must not be too expensive, and it must be a nice car."

She nodded. "I would imagine that's what it is." Her features grew faintly more serious. "How are Dorothy and the kids?"

Ridge thought for a second. "Oh hell. I need to call home, don't I? This report has kept me so busy. Dorothy was fine, when last we spoke. My son and daughter are fine." He added. "In school, doing well." He added. "My girl plays goalie on her soccer team, and my boy is in Cub Scouts."

She leaned her head to one side and toweled in her ear. Then she repeated the procedure on the other side, turning her head that way. Her dark hair lay glossy and wet and tousled against the perfect shape of her head. She had a wide, tall forehead that made her look intelligent, he found as he studied her skin. She had fine, clear skin, without any particular scars or deformations, although her nose had a strong frontal edge and a nice knobby bridge. She saw him staring at her and looked away. As she did so, she twirled the towel and did a dervish thing from the waist up to form a huge fluffy turban in one smooth, practiced motion from having done it many times over many years. He smiled, thinking about all those little habits each person acquired over a lifetime and how they made everyone unique. He wondered again why she made him feel warm and energetic, and why he wasn't frightened since he had a wife at home who would not like to know the truth of such a diversion in his affections. What could he say to her? He placed his hands on his knees, preparing for her to leave and himself to get busy with other things. Should he say, we've got to stop meeting like this? How did one not have small talk with a person on a space ship a billion klicks from home? And what had they really ever done together but sit close, over cups of hot steaming tea in the lounge among all the other crew, and talk softly together about their own wives and children? She had never been to San Diego, but he had filled her with tales of strolling with Dorothy and the children along the sandy paths on Fiesta Island or among the goldfish ponds and botanical gardens of Balboa Park. Likewise, she had told stories of walking with Ricardo and their children along the Plaza de Mayo, on the breezy Avenida Emilio Castro in Liniers, on the beach near Cantilo in Belgrano, or motoring north for the weekend though Pueyrredon. In a sense, all cities and families, all lives and desires, had a universality that made them at once unique and interesting to tell about, yet interchangeable like clothing; or so Ridge had once remarked, and she had laughed that sensual, throaty laugh of hers while throwing her head back aglow with fond teasing. You are too much, amigo. So she had said, still dripping from the fountain of laughter, and he had said with much pretense of wisdom: Better too much than not enough, carissima.

She rose, pressing her turban between her palms, and said: "I'll write your report for you later when we get back. Just leave it there on the table for me."

"Thanks." He rose. "You're a life saver."

"You are a life worth saving," she said, walking to the privacy and secrecy of her cube in long, languid strides. She left him a sultry afterglance, a mix of innocence and hidden meaning he could not fathom.

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