Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who has bugs on the windshield
Halfway through the evening watch, Roxy slides down the cockpit ladder and lurks nervously at Dervish.
"I think we're haunted," Roxy announces, preemptively cringing from the expectation that she'll be told to shut up and fuck off and stop being stupid.
There are people — not people Dervish knows, but people Roxy does, or has — people whom Dervish wouldn't mind seeing kicked in the head. She wipes the sleep out of the corners of her eyes, takes a sip from her water bottle, considers the genuine anxiety on Roxy's face.
"Why do you think that," she says, and Roxy wriggles uncertainly under the regard of being taken even minimally seriously.
"Well it's nothing," she says uncertainly, "and I probably imagined it and—" so Dervish presses the back of her wrist into a jaw-cracking yawn, and slides out of the chart table bench seat.
"Show me," she says.
Up in the cockpit, Roxy fidgets. "It's hard to see unless the lighting's just right," she mumbles, fiddling with the cockpit illumination. "It's — look!"
Dervish follows where she looking over her shoulder, and for a moment doesn't see anything, but then — as she cranes her neck to try to get close to Roxy's own eyeline, a misty outline shimmers off the aft port quarter, somewhat above their lateral plane. It's something like another vessel, but the outline is vague and shifts as she does, phantom spars and angles unfolding and dissolving, maybe imagined altogether.
"Huh," Dervish says, and half climbs onto the rear console, cranes upward to peer at the armourglass of the cockpit bubble. She digs out a penlight and gets as close to wall as possible, peering sideways at the surface of the glass. "...That's a bug."
Roxy's eyes widen, as if she's imagining some kind of horrible spaceborne insect.
"Display bug in the in-glass HUD drivers," Dervish clarifies dryly. "You know how the computer draws an outline around ships it has on radar, so they're easier to get visual on? I think there's an alpha compositing error, something to do with the anti-aliasing. Old data slowly building up a fog on the aftglass."
Roxy nods solemnly in the way of someone who didn't understand a word, and expects to be savaged for ever admitting it.
"...Haunted?" she says.
Dervish slides onto the floor, unlocks a terminal, checks the man pages, and cobbles together a command line to clear the display buffer. Roxy claps her hands.
"Not haunted!" she says happily.
They make portfall at Castra Boston Zeta, and Dervish slides up to a pharma counter while Roxy's casually trying not to cry about the current price tag on her hormones, and silently taps over the requisite number of Standard Dollars. StanDolls go a long way out here.
"I don't," Roxy says, face flushed and not sure whether to smile or sob, clutching the bag, "I don't have—"
"We got a bug bounty for the display driver," Dervish says. "You spotted it; half yours."
"The." Roxy clutches the bag tighter, stumbles closer into Dervish. "The ghost?"
"The ghost."
Roxy's smile bubbles up, eyes shining. "You got paid for ghostbusting," she says delightedly, and leans all the way into Dervish, warm and adoring. "You can do everything!"