Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who wishes they could roll down the windows
The aerostat is almost entirely automated, save for the fallback decision-making authority of the Harbourmaster. These platforms are awful for smuggling, unless they have a sympathetic guy in charge; the worst of all possible worlds of cargo offload automation and watchful eyes.
This Harbourmaster does not seem like a sympathetic guy in charge. Ze is tall, with a long liquid fall of hair and side shaves, uniform immaculately to standard, despite being the only official — the only person aboard, floating over a mining world with a human population in the low hundreds of miners. Ore goes up the mass drivers; offworld supplies come down this way. This would be the route for tax-evading alcohol, non-corporate-approved pornography, all the magical light goods there's a market for on mining planets. If not for zer.
Saturday Lateral rolls a toothpick between her teeth, sweats in her stuffy, dingy little cockpit, and wonders if the Harbourmaster's uniform is actually starched. It can't be much more comfortable on the aerostat. Outside the narrow strip of five-inch armourglass window, the sky is blue enough to choke a poet. Little brushstroke clouds are scudding across it.
Saturday clamps her teeth around frustration and calculates, in a back-of-envelope kind of way, how much it would cost to engineer a ship like this with cockpit windows you could roll down to get a breeze in atmosphere.
"Captain Lateral," Harbourmaster Zinn says, scrupulously polite as always.
Saturday's been running this route for a year, now. It's lousy. There are ways round the system — there always are, in the end. But there's only so much you can smuggle through under cover of shell company "private mail corporations" shipping "batched low-priority mail". There's no shortage of actual companies making a killing by gouging people to ship birthday cards to the miners in the family; but the small companies don't plausibly ship that much volume.
Low supply pushes up prices, but the small number of physical shipments drives the risk impact of random crate inspections high. The middlemen groundside need compensation for their risk exposure. The eventual margins, topside, are crap.
"Harbourmaster," Saturday says, and ignores the way her own voice goes smoky over it, and the way she could have put in the paperwork for eventual route reassignment at the six month mark, and still somehow hasn't. Her hair sticks unpleasantly to her face; fucking planet. Always too hot.
"Captain Lateral," Zinn says, and...hesitates.
"Something wrong?" Saturday says casually. It's been an absolute bitch of a run; gunships busted in on a meet with one of her suppliers a couple of months back, so she's down on profitable cargo and the general heat's up, even if nobody got a good scan of either her or the ship, thank fuck.
"You seem to be injured," Zinn says, apparently trying to look at her through the vu without being seen to look at her. "There's a dressing under your shirt, and an arm sling tucked into your G-couch cushions."
Zinn's attention to detail is a professional curse, and Saturday absolutely shouldn't be melting under it.
"Depending how many drinks someone's bought me," she says, "I was in a bar fight with a Hoxtian. Or two. Or three and their robot mate."
"I haven't bought you any," Zinn says, and doesn't smile, not with zer mouth, but—
"You know what the profit margins are like in cargo shipping," Saturday tells zer. "I got a good deal on some refurbed power couplings, like, a year back. Turns out not such a deal when they pop under surge load. Got some foil shrapnel in my shoulder. It's fine."
Zinn nods, calm and polite. That seems like about the right amount of interest, for their working relationship.
"Have you seen a doctor?" Zinn says, and Saturday blinks and stumbles over it and hadn't thought to think far enough ahead for a lie about that. She panics, maybe, a little. Risks saying something technically true.
"I was running the Satori Loop," she says. "You know, the Loop. Where there's the on-books way to fly it, that takes two days, and the six-hour jump that nobody's insured for. I wasn't — I'd have to log my position. For medical coverage."
Zinn looks up, above the camera zer end of the vu. Zer expression does something too subtle for Saturday, like trying to blind taste the nominal flavour of expensive canned carbonated water drinks. "Solo manned stats," Zinn says, eventually, "are necessarily equipped with very good medbots."
Saturday blinks at zer some more. What a perfectly terrible idea, she thinks hazily. Perfectly terrible.
"Oh, I couldn't," she says feebly, and ten minutes later she walks through the airlock into Zinn's aerostat for the first time ever, and then she sits with her face on fire and her shirt off while the medbot hums and prods and does some kind of deep tissue regeneration therapy.
It's no cooler on the aerostat. How Zinn doesn't die from wearing zer immaculately proper uniform, Saturday doesn't know. She's sweating, running with it, even shirtless; sloppy and disgusting in front of the cool, pristine, law-abiding Harbourmaster.
And then, at the end of it, Zinn pulls a hairpin out of zer hair and bends over the medbot's console, Saturday not realising what ze's doing until ze's smoothly swept elegant fingers along, looking for the reset hole, and pressed the end of the wire in for five seconds already. The holographic boot logo swirls, and Zinn doesn't look at her as ze picks Factory Reset.
"There's an annual maintenance visit," Zinn says. "I don't know if it would phone home logs about a Bremstovian Navy splintergun wound."
Saturday picks up her shirt, feeling slow and panicky like she's underwater and running out of air. "I'll just go," she says.
"Lateral," Zinn says, trying to catch her eye now, but Saturday's already halfway to the door.
"Captain Lateral," Zinn says, scrupulously polite, next visit and the one after and the one after that, and Saturday solely picks ACK and NACK and STATUS OK and REQ FLIGHTPLAN out of the traffic control assistive on-screen keyboard, as appropriate, to communicate with zer.
Too hot, she thinks. It's too hot. She should file for route reassignment. Ice worlds, right? They drive lesser Harbourmasters to petty corruption and an easy life for smugglers. Just buy an extra blanket and some thick socks, simple.
"Fly safe, Captain," Zinn signs off, tone unimpeachably professional, and Saturday bruises her knuckles against the bulkhead.
The knock on the airlock, after autodocking, makes her freeze. You can't NACK that. She clutches her upper arms as the hatch rolls back.
"Captain Lateral," Zinn says, and you'd have to have spent unreasonable time staring at zer to see the guarded look around zer eyes, the nerves. Ze's standing tall and neat and unbending, with a bottle of wine in one hand and the stems of two glasses in the other. "I'm hoping you could briefly join me."
Apparently nobody's ever explained the words perfectly terrible idea to Saturday's legs, which hesitantly walk her straight out. Which is how livestock get themselves slaughtered, she scolds them internally.
"Thank you," Zinn says, and turns to walk with her into the stat's main walkway, and Saturday gets a good look at the bottle in zer hand and chokes.
"No," she says, horrified. Saturday knows exactly what wines get imported here legally, which means that—
"Peace offering," Zinn says levelly.
"You bought that from the surface?" Saturday says, reeling at what kind of horrific markup that additional round trip added. "They robbed you, Zinn."
"For wine? Probably." A door hisses out of their way, and Saturday realises, dizzyingly, that she's looking at the Harbourmaster's dim personal quarters. And in the centre, pride of place, probably the Harbourmaster's entire weight-and-power budget for personal effects, humming away: the shocking miracle of a portable cooling unit. "For wine that you'll sit and drink with me, as equals?" Zinn adds, as the door closes behind them, ensnaring Saturday in blessed cool and, she belatedly realises, wiles. "Money no object."