The Sky Full of Ghosts 4/? "Mail order omega in space" AU
(sorry it's been so long between updates. I have the cold/virus from hell)
Jamie does his best to hide his nervousness as Tyler fastens the seals on his shoulders and waist. He’s buffeted by a confusing mix of emotions. Excitement at having Tyler close enough that the acrid scent of the suppressants Tyler is on twists his stomach. Fear, to be going out again, so soon after losing Jordie to this job, to this place. He hadn’t thought about it, until Tyler is holding his helmet, his face tense and worried, what it would do to Tyler if something bad happened to Jamie too.
“Hey,” he says, forcing a smile as the helmet goes over his face, as a thin sheet of materia separates them. “Hey, I’ve done this a hundred times. It’ll be okay.”
Tyler swallows and nods, and steps back out of the airlock.
Hilary joins Jamie, fastening her backup tether to the hook inside of the ‘lock. She moves smoothly, even in the bulky padding-her safety-tape a bright gold where Jamie’s is bold green.
“Good luck,” Tyler says before the doors close, and Jamie meets his eyes for one last second before the atmosphere hisses out of the airlock and it’s just him and Hilary starting to float.
He triggers the magnets on his boots and starts to clomp his way towards the rift in the alien ship’s hull. The cut looks good. Accessible.
“Let me lead the way,” he says, the sound of his own breathing loud in the echoing closeness of the helmet, the whine of his safety-line unspooling at his back as he moves away from the Star. He tries to forget the sight of Jordie’s string floating in the air in the aftermath of that awful flash, tethering nothing, his brother just gone along with a perfect globe of the ship they’d been exploring.
“Got it, boss,” Hilary says, her voice coming from the speakers beside him, even as she is behind him. He’s never heard her so serious, and he has renewed confidence in bringing her onto the team.
This ship is less of a ruin than others he’s been on. He tries to wrap his head around the damaged location. Probably the engine room. No part of it looks like anything manmade that he’s ever seen, but those areas are full of big, bulky, enclosed systems that are too large for a picker like the Star to haul away.
His money is in the smaller things. Collectors trinkets, pieces of tech that one person could move even in earth-standard gravity. He moves finds a tube going out of the damaged area, down and into the deeper recesses of the ship.
The tunnels are just slightly uncomfortable for a human-sized being to pass through, narrower and organically curving, twisting around in ways that refused to map in Jamie’s head when he started doing this work. The light he carries dances over the ridged walls, distorting the dimensions even further.
He turns a corner and a corpse floats into his face, insectoid, huge faceted eyes and hairy mandibles, it’s long body curled into a C shape, seven pairs of legs curled inward in death. Slender straps crisscross the body, supporting pockets and bags of various shapes. It’s about twice Jamie’s size, and he thinks they must have traveled horizontally, all fourteen legs on the ground, where him and Hilary walk upright in the same space.
“Jamie?” Tyler’s voice crackles on his speakers, and Jamie takes a deep breath and gently pushes the body away. Some of the other pickers will take them home to sell, but Jamie and Jordie never did. Just seemed disrespectful to a people who gave them so much, even if they’d been extinct since humankind was still shitting in caves.
“Yeah,” Jamie calls back to Tyler. “Everything okay?”
Tyler huffs. “I was asking you the same thing. Your heart rate…”
Oh.
“Yeah. I’m good. We’re good.”
“I’ve got eyes on him,” Hilary reassures Tyler.
“It’s all quiet up here.”
Jamie isn’t surprised at the news.
A piece of debris floats around, disrupted by the Star bumping the ship. Jamie catches it, turns it over in his hands. Bulbous, with dimples where the creatures’ digits would fit in, possibly press. He reaches back and grabs a mesh bag off of his belt, nets the object and clips it to the tether line to float there until they were on the way back out.
After that, it’s just routine work. Prying open a door when they get to it. Grabbing everything that isn’t locked down. There’s a large console in the middle of one room. Jamie doesn’t know if it’s navigation or food-prep, but he thinks they might try to disconnect it one one of the last days. It’s the kind of gamble that might be worth everything else from the trip, or less than the piece Jamie already bagged.
“Hey, did I ever tell you about my friend Brownie?” Tyler’s voice comes from the speaker, and for a second, Jamie thinks maybe he’s talking to Roussel in the cockpit, with the mic open.
“Jamie?”
Oh. Tyler’s talking to him.
“No. I don’t think you did,” he says. It’s only partly a lie. He’s sure Tyler never mentioned his friend because Tyler has never talked to Jamie at all. Not about his life before Jordie at least, and very little of his life during their courtship.
“We were friends since I was five,” Tyler says, and Jamie glances to make sure this isn’t disrupting Hilary-she’s the one who could actually be in danger if one or both of them were distracted, but she shrugs and seems to be tuning it out.
So Jamie works, and listens to Tyler telling about his best friend who was the only one who didn’t change on him when he presented as an omega when he was thirteen, who stood by him, who watched all of Jordie’s vids with him, looking for any lie, any malicious intentions. Brownie who got him the suppressants and took him to the transport and didn’t want to let go.
“You could. You could vid him if you wanted to,” Jamie says when Tyler seems to be running out of story.
“It. I don’t have the funds,” Tyler says, and Jamie wonders how he was not clear, that whatever Jamie has, Tyler has a right to share. That Tyler has a right to talk to the people who love him, who support him. To share his grief with someone who isn’t a stranger.
“We’ll take care of that when we get back to a station,” Jamie says. A ship like the Star does not have the comms to push a message that far.
“Yeah,” Tyler says, something off about his voice, and Jamie wishes they knew each other enough to be entitled to ask about it.
He passes a netted artifact back to Hilary, and she bumps his hand, meets his eye and gives him a sad smile.
I’m doing my best, he thinks. Wonders when it’ll stop feeling like his best comes up short every time.
=============
Jamie doesn’t let Tyler get too close to the objects him and Hilary bring back from the alien ship, but he gets to sit in the hold as Jamie untangles them from their netting one at a time, scans them and waits for the fabricator to extrude a custom-shaped padded receptacle for each one, soft padding on the inside, contoured to the object’s shape, dense on the outside, hard and straight enough to be stacked neatly in the hold, filling the space in the most economic manner.
The cargo bay is almost full, and Tyler thought he would be happy it was time to get back to civilization, away from undependable, potentially dangerous alien technology.
It’s just that everything seems easier out here. Simpler. Jamie and Hilary have their finds of the day to talk about, and Roussel babbles on about the something something converter thing and Tyler can just be there with them, letting the easy comfort of the conversation soak into his aching heart.
“Hey,” Jamie says, drawing Tyler’s attention to the here and now, to Jamie checking the label on the last box and then putting it in the stack. “I was thinking. After Hils and I come up from the last pick, we’ve got more fuel left than I budgeted, and we’re in no rush to head back. You want to play around with the ship some? I’ll take it out a ways and you can practice where there’s not much to bump into.”
Tyler shivers at the idea, such a huge machine under his control. All of their lives held safe inside it.
He licks his lips in nervousness, but nods. “Yeah. I. Yeah.”
==============
Tyler watches Jamie’s hands as he disengages the Star from the larger alien ship, the magnetic tethers slowly winding back up into the Star. The proportions of the Star’s control panels are a little off-the sim game he had been playing adjusted the display size to fit the physical limitations of his space at the time. But even watching Jamie, the movements, the sequences are familiar.
Jamie fires up the short-range engines and picks his way through the debris field, his eyes focused on the screen in front of him. He finally must see what he’s looking for, because his shoulders relax and he steers with more purpose towards a large flat spanse of decking. He catches it with the harpoons, and slowly drags it out of the belt, out until they’re a couple hundred miles from the nearest object.
He sets the object to slowly spinning, cuts it free and then pulls the Star back to a comfortable distance.
“It’ll find its way back to the belt eventually, but we can use it as a marker for you to handle around.”
Tyler wipes his hands on his thighs, takes an unsteady breath. He’s never flown anything real before. Never even got to pilot a personal transport back on New Boston.
Still, it’s more thrill than terror in his chest as he trades seats with Jamie, as he buckles in and does the pre-flight orientation exercises. Neither Hilary or Roussel complains at the delay, and Jamie murmurs “Good, good,” while Tyler gets his bearings here in a physical version of the game he’s spent so long on.
The engines fire at the push of a button, a near-subliminal vibration up through the soles of his feet and the base of his spine. He rests his left hand on the control globe, nudges it with the tips of his fingers and the ship moves, tilting and spinning in space. His right hand moves the speed setting and they drift forward, still spinning, a slow dizzying donut roll.
“Holy fucking shit,” he breathes, and he can’t even be concerned with the crass language slipping from his lips, the utter impropriety of an omega saying things like that.
Jamie huffs out a laugh beside him. “You having fun?” he asks, and Tyler stops the twist, turns the forward propulsion into a smooth arch around and back to where they started.
Jamie lets him play for a long time, trying out every angle and direction of movement possible, orienting himself between the expanse of the belt and the platform Jamie dragged out for him. He cuts swoops around the marker, slides where he passes it as he turns to keep it directly in front of them.
“I’d say you’re a natural, except for all the work you put into it,” Jamie says.
Flying feels amazing. Like the best thing Tyler has ever done.
“You think you’re ready to try to land it?” Jamie asks, and Tyler fights back an immodest grin.
The controls are coming easier now, the weirdness of having physical resistance under his fingertips fading. He comes in, matches speed and rotation just like Jamie did with the alien ship days before, catches it even with the harpoons and slides into place.
His heart is pounding, his hands shaking from adrenaline.
“Jamie, you are fired” Roussel says in the resulting silence.
Jamie laughs. “Oh no, no more double-duty? I think I can live with that.”
Tyler’s face aches with smiling, with blushing, and he’s not even sure why.
He gets them to a safe float and starts to unbuckle his harness. “Here, that’s…we can head back now,” he says.
“What are you doing?” Jamie asks, still grinning. “Didn’t you hear? I’m fired. It’s all you. Are you comfortable with the jump protocols?”
Tyler swallows and clicks the straps around his chest back together. Oh shit, they were serious. They’re. He’s doing this thing. They want him to do this thing.
“Yeah. I mean, watch to make sure I don’t fuck it up, but…” the settings and switches are simple, and he lays in the orders even as he offers to let Jamie take it.
When the drop out of jump, hours later at Vegas station, Tyler is still in the pilot’s seat.
Jamie does his best to hide his nervousness as Tyler fastens the seals on his shoulders and waist. He’s buffeted by a confusing mix of emotions. Excitement at having Tyler close enough that the acrid scent of the suppressants Tyler is on twists his stomach. Fear, to be going out again, so soon after losing Jordie to this job, to this place. He hadn’t thought about it, until Tyler is holding his helmet, his face tense and worried, what it would do to Tyler if something bad happened to Jamie too.
“Hey,” he says, forcing a smile as the helmet goes over his face, as a thin sheet of materia separates them. “Hey, I’ve done this a hundred times. It’ll be okay.”
Tyler swallows and nods, and steps back out of the airlock.
Hilary joins Jamie, fastening her backup tether to the hook inside of the ‘lock. She moves smoothly, even in the bulky padding-her safety-tape a bright gold where Jamie’s is bold green.
“Good luck,” Tyler says before the doors close, and Jamie meets his eyes for one last second before the atmosphere hisses out of the airlock and it’s just him and Hilary starting to float.
He triggers the magnets on his boots and starts to clomp his way towards the rift in the alien ship’s hull. The cut looks good. Accessible.
“Let me lead the way,” he says, the sound of his own breathing loud in the echoing closeness of the helmet, the whine of his safety-line unspooling at his back as he moves away from the Star. He tries to forget the sight of Jordie’s string floating in the air in the aftermath of that awful flash, tethering nothing, his brother just gone along with a perfect globe of the ship they’d been exploring.
“Got it, boss,” Hilary says, her voice coming from the speakers beside him, even as she is behind him. He’s never heard her so serious, and he has renewed confidence in bringing her onto the team.
This ship is less of a ruin than others he’s been on. He tries to wrap his head around the damaged location. Probably the engine room. No part of it looks like anything manmade that he’s ever seen, but those areas are full of big, bulky, enclosed systems that are too large for a picker like the Star to haul away.
His money is in the smaller things. Collectors trinkets, pieces of tech that one person could move even in earth-standard gravity. He moves finds a tube going out of the damaged area, down and into the deeper recesses of the ship.
The tunnels are just slightly uncomfortable for a human-sized being to pass through, narrower and organically curving, twisting around in ways that refused to map in Jamie’s head when he started doing this work. The light he carries dances over the ridged walls, distorting the dimensions even further.
He turns a corner and a corpse floats into his face, insectoid, huge faceted eyes and hairy mandibles, it’s long body curled into a C shape, seven pairs of legs curled inward in death. Slender straps crisscross the body, supporting pockets and bags of various shapes. It’s about twice Jamie’s size, and he thinks they must have traveled horizontally, all fourteen legs on the ground, where him and Hilary walk upright in the same space.
“Jamie?” Tyler’s voice crackles on his speakers, and Jamie takes a deep breath and gently pushes the body away. Some of the other pickers will take them home to sell, but Jamie and Jordie never did. Just seemed disrespectful to a people who gave them so much, even if they’d been extinct since humankind was still shitting in caves.
“Yeah,” Jamie calls back to Tyler. “Everything okay?”
Tyler huffs. “I was asking you the same thing. Your heart rate…”
Oh.
“Yeah. I’m good. We’re good.”
“I’ve got eyes on him,” Hilary reassures Tyler.
“It’s all quiet up here.”
Jamie isn’t surprised at the news.
A piece of debris floats around, disrupted by the Star bumping the ship. Jamie catches it, turns it over in his hands. Bulbous, with dimples where the creatures’ digits would fit in, possibly press. He reaches back and grabs a mesh bag off of his belt, nets the object and clips it to the tether line to float there until they were on the way back out.
After that, it’s just routine work. Prying open a door when they get to it. Grabbing everything that isn’t locked down. There’s a large console in the middle of one room. Jamie doesn’t know if it’s navigation or food-prep, but he thinks they might try to disconnect it one one of the last days. It’s the kind of gamble that might be worth everything else from the trip, or less than the piece Jamie already bagged.
“Hey, did I ever tell you about my friend Brownie?” Tyler’s voice comes from the speaker, and for a second, Jamie thinks maybe he’s talking to Roussel in the cockpit, with the mic open.
“Jamie?”
Oh. Tyler’s talking to him.
“No. I don’t think you did,” he says. It’s only partly a lie. He’s sure Tyler never mentioned his friend because Tyler has never talked to Jamie at all. Not about his life before Jordie at least, and very little of his life during their courtship.
“We were friends since I was five,” Tyler says, and Jamie glances to make sure this isn’t disrupting Hilary-she’s the one who could actually be in danger if one or both of them were distracted, but she shrugs and seems to be tuning it out.
So Jamie works, and listens to Tyler telling about his best friend who was the only one who didn’t change on him when he presented as an omega when he was thirteen, who stood by him, who watched all of Jordie’s vids with him, looking for any lie, any malicious intentions. Brownie who got him the suppressants and took him to the transport and didn’t want to let go.
“You could. You could vid him if you wanted to,” Jamie says when Tyler seems to be running out of story.
“It. I don’t have the funds,” Tyler says, and Jamie wonders how he was not clear, that whatever Jamie has, Tyler has a right to share. That Tyler has a right to talk to the people who love him, who support him. To share his grief with someone who isn’t a stranger.
“We’ll take care of that when we get back to a station,” Jamie says. A ship like the Star does not have the comms to push a message that far.
“Yeah,” Tyler says, something off about his voice, and Jamie wishes they knew each other enough to be entitled to ask about it.
He passes a netted artifact back to Hilary, and she bumps his hand, meets his eye and gives him a sad smile.
I’m doing my best, he thinks. Wonders when it’ll stop feeling like his best comes up short every time.
=============
Jamie doesn’t let Tyler get too close to the objects him and Hilary bring back from the alien ship, but he gets to sit in the hold as Jamie untangles them from their netting one at a time, scans them and waits for the fabricator to extrude a custom-shaped padded receptacle for each one, soft padding on the inside, contoured to the object’s shape, dense on the outside, hard and straight enough to be stacked neatly in the hold, filling the space in the most economic manner.
The cargo bay is almost full, and Tyler thought he would be happy it was time to get back to civilization, away from undependable, potentially dangerous alien technology.
It’s just that everything seems easier out here. Simpler. Jamie and Hilary have their finds of the day to talk about, and Roussel babbles on about the something something converter thing and Tyler can just be there with them, letting the easy comfort of the conversation soak into his aching heart.
“Hey,” Jamie says, drawing Tyler’s attention to the here and now, to Jamie checking the label on the last box and then putting it in the stack. “I was thinking. After Hils and I come up from the last pick, we’ve got more fuel left than I budgeted, and we’re in no rush to head back. You want to play around with the ship some? I’ll take it out a ways and you can practice where there’s not much to bump into.”
Tyler shivers at the idea, such a huge machine under his control. All of their lives held safe inside it.
He licks his lips in nervousness, but nods. “Yeah. I. Yeah.”
==============
Tyler watches Jamie’s hands as he disengages the Star from the larger alien ship, the magnetic tethers slowly winding back up into the Star. The proportions of the Star’s control panels are a little off-the sim game he had been playing adjusted the display size to fit the physical limitations of his space at the time. But even watching Jamie, the movements, the sequences are familiar.
Jamie fires up the short-range engines and picks his way through the debris field, his eyes focused on the screen in front of him. He finally must see what he’s looking for, because his shoulders relax and he steers with more purpose towards a large flat spanse of decking. He catches it with the harpoons, and slowly drags it out of the belt, out until they’re a couple hundred miles from the nearest object.
He sets the object to slowly spinning, cuts it free and then pulls the Star back to a comfortable distance.
“It’ll find its way back to the belt eventually, but we can use it as a marker for you to handle around.”
Tyler wipes his hands on his thighs, takes an unsteady breath. He’s never flown anything real before. Never even got to pilot a personal transport back on New Boston.
Still, it’s more thrill than terror in his chest as he trades seats with Jamie, as he buckles in and does the pre-flight orientation exercises. Neither Hilary or Roussel complains at the delay, and Jamie murmurs “Good, good,” while Tyler gets his bearings here in a physical version of the game he’s spent so long on.
The engines fire at the push of a button, a near-subliminal vibration up through the soles of his feet and the base of his spine. He rests his left hand on the control globe, nudges it with the tips of his fingers and the ship moves, tilting and spinning in space. His right hand moves the speed setting and they drift forward, still spinning, a slow dizzying donut roll.
“Holy fucking shit,” he breathes, and he can’t even be concerned with the crass language slipping from his lips, the utter impropriety of an omega saying things like that.
Jamie huffs out a laugh beside him. “You having fun?” he asks, and Tyler stops the twist, turns the forward propulsion into a smooth arch around and back to where they started.
Jamie lets him play for a long time, trying out every angle and direction of movement possible, orienting himself between the expanse of the belt and the platform Jamie dragged out for him. He cuts swoops around the marker, slides where he passes it as he turns to keep it directly in front of them.
“I’d say you’re a natural, except for all the work you put into it,” Jamie says.
Flying feels amazing. Like the best thing Tyler has ever done.
“You think you’re ready to try to land it?” Jamie asks, and Tyler fights back an immodest grin.
The controls are coming easier now, the weirdness of having physical resistance under his fingertips fading. He comes in, matches speed and rotation just like Jamie did with the alien ship days before, catches it even with the harpoons and slides into place.
His heart is pounding, his hands shaking from adrenaline.
“Jamie, you are fired” Roussel says in the resulting silence.
Jamie laughs. “Oh no, no more double-duty? I think I can live with that.”
Tyler’s face aches with smiling, with blushing, and he’s not even sure why.
He gets them to a safe float and starts to unbuckle his harness. “Here, that’s…we can head back now,” he says.
“What are you doing?” Jamie asks, still grinning. “Didn’t you hear? I’m fired. It’s all you. Are you comfortable with the jump protocols?”
Tyler swallows and clicks the straps around his chest back together. Oh shit, they were serious. They’re. He’s doing this thing. They want him to do this thing.
“Yeah. I mean, watch to make sure I don’t fuck it up, but…” the settings and switches are simple, and he lays in the orders even as he offers to let Jamie take it.
When the drop out of jump, hours later at Vegas station, Tyler is still in the pilot’s seat.