Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who is getting really, really tired of tourists
The tourists come to See The Famous Crystal Reefs, whining and littering and generally acting like voluntarily paying Thandie's annual income to come and stare, unimpressed, at a natural wonder is the worst hardship they've ever been mysteriously subjected to.
Thandie used to divide them into the Good Ones, who looked at the planet and at least superficially get it, and the Bad Ones. Then she got tired and stopped, and they are all Bad.
At least once per trip, now, she runs over the numbers and bleakly decides that she can't afford to stop. She could do rockhopper runs, take mail and vaccines and the odd passenger between the scattered inhabited islands of the archipelago, but it doesn't break even.
(The other rockhoppers make up the numbers by dealing. She knows this, and it's not that she judges — mostly isn't judging; but she can't face it. She's been around, before washing up on this particular beautiful planet, she's seen some real shit. She's lived some real shit. She doesn't want to get involved with drugs, not here, not now.)
Some five-year-old threw up in a corner of the passenger bay. Someone else is having an entitled whine that space and time and orbital schedules ought to bend to their every whim simply because they're on a cheap package holiday. Someone else again barely waited for the passenger ramp to drop before cracking a can of beer he shouldn't have had on him, and Thandie would bet money it'll end up tossed in the water, shitting up the reef in a way that'll make all of them sneer and say maybe if they took more pride in their planet here—
Thandie wipes up vomit and seals the little biohazard bag, slams it in the waste compartment, and goes to lean her face on the flying yoke. Sandalled feet slap softly up the ramp and up to the Aircrew Only door, where she left it standing open.
"Brooding on your dark past again?" Newtona says. She's the local island Mayor, has oversight on the tourist trail the latest happy little cargo just departed on. She surfs. Part-time lifeguard. Shows up in Thandie's spank bank maybe a little too often, but what she doesn't know won't make Thandie die of embarrassment.
"Brooding over the cost of fuel," Thandie says, not opening her eyes.
Thandie's so tired of barely existing by working till her back breaks, smiling and taking people's shit. She loves it here, but if she went back to the cargo runs where she only ever sees the ship's inside hull for a month at a time, she'd be able to afford a five-star dinner and bed at each end through the cargo-handling cycle. Save some money up.
(She can't do that. It was worse than the tourists. She started hallucinating from boredom. And save up for what?)
"I don't know how much longer I can make this work," she admits. "I'm barely making groceries money after keeping the ship in the air. I can't start from scratch somewhere else, 'Tona. Not again. Not if I have to leave all this—"
"Don't you go leaving us," Newtona says, and ghosts knuckles across the nape of Thandie's neck. "Come on out and get some air and some sun and have lunch with me. Talk it out. We'll work something out."
Thandie shivers at the touch, and tries to awkwardly cover it. "Just being dramatic," she says. "I'm fine. Better be here in case the tour gets any stragglers and they come back to complain—"
"Jim can sell 'em ice creams while they wait," Newtona says. "Did that sound like I was asking, Thandie, poppet?" She's using one of her Mayoral tones, all infinite patience, steel-cored. "I wasn't."
"Poppet?" Thandie says, swivelling her pilot's chair slowly enough it might look like her own idea. "And you think that tone works on me?"
"I know what tone will work on you," Newtona says, raising an eyebrow which Thandie in no way intends to test her luck against. "Now stop being so difficult about lunch, for crying out loud."