Strangely, I'm finding it difficult to write truly obnoxious characters. And I don't think there's really a lot of variety in my characters anyway - I'm too afraid of stereotyping to go overboard with the characterisation. In the meantime, I've only written 5,000 words in 7 days. Shit.
Landed and docked, she was a fat cylinder laid gently on top of an intricate jeweller’s scrapheap, one that sparkled with standby LEDs and semi-intelligent IR chatter. And the icing on the cake was the stumpy, single-piece pitched roof plonked on top. At least, that’s what she looked like from outside when Bernard called up the view. From the inside, she was a warm, fuggy chaos with alternating smells of play-doh, solder, and the acrid tang which always accompanied any sort of liquefied hydrogen system. Access panels of all shapes and sizes had been removed and haphazardly piled. It only took one clumsy knock to send the whole pile skittering and scraping across the gantry, as they discovered.
“Sorry ‘bout the mess,” Annie called over her shoulder. “We’re trying to track down a fault in the Inerts backbone. Faulty bus somewhere, I reckon. Minor problem, anyway, nothing life-threatening,” she added absently.
They ducked down a narrow corridor, with sealable doors on either side. “Boys on the left, girls on the right!” Annie called cheerfully. “That works, doesn’t it, numberswise?” she added. Bernard nodded as he squeezed past her. There wasn’t room for his shoulders and the bag, so he had to judo-throw his bag over his head into the narrow cabin. Miguel and David had already claimed the two top bunks, and had climbed onto them. Bernard tossed his bag onto one of the bottom ones. There was a muted series of clangs from somewhere off to their right, and a distant “Bugger!” It was another female voice.
“Annie,” Bernard poked his head out, to see her grin. “how many crew does the Tabitha Jute hold?”
“Our complement at this time is eight crew, six passengers, and a few tonnes of stuff.” Annie pronounced. “The good ship Tabitha Jute also runs a semi-autonomous AI, nine maintenance drones and fourteen von Neumann TMPs, of various types. Tabs?”
A mellifluous female voice came out of the air. “Annie?”
“These are our guests. You know who they are, don’tcha?”
“I do, Annie. Mr Sawyer, welcome to the SV Tabitha Jute. If you need anything, or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you.” Bernard replied formally.
“Same goes for me, too, of course,” Annie added. “Any questions, give me a shout. I’d appreciate it, though,” she said, raising her voice slightly so everyone could hear, “if you wouldn’t bother crew members while they’re discharging their duties. They’re sure to be polite, but a distracted man is sleepwalking to the Deep Freeze, as the saying goes. Okay?”
There was a scuffling noise at the end of the corridor, and high-pitched giggling. Annie yelped, dived across Bernard and dodged round the corner in an awkward, bent-over scuttle. “You two rascals!” she cried. “I told you to stay in the mess! What are you doing down here?”
There was more gigging, and she re-emerged with a tousled child under each arm. One shared Annie’s cloud of blonde curls; the other’s blonde hair was straight, with a fringe that bounced up and down stopped only just above his (her?) eyes. They struggled happily, giggling as Annie growled, and plonked them on the floor. “Mr Sawyer, I’d like to introduce our two youngest crew members; Pieter and Nabuko. Pieter, ‘Buko, this is Mr Sawyer. Say hello.”
Suddenly confronted with a big group of strangers, the two children managed to mumble “’lo, Mr Sawyer.” Pieter surreptitiously reached out to grip Annie’s trouser leg. She rolled her eyes, gave them both a gentle slap on the rump.
“Now git! Back to the mess with you. Where are Alan and Orestes? Pieter, where’s your brother? Honestly, those two. And you two! Go on, back to the mess with you. Ask Tabitha to put on Wonderland for you.”
The two kids ran, giggling. Bernard noticed that they both ran with their arms making rapid swimming motions, grabbing and hauling wherever they could. They were nimble and fast. It was a rapid, efficient, and curiously inhuman motion.
“Woo hoo!” Miguel whooped. “Fantastic. What a beautiful machine. I can’t wait. This is going to be a lot of fun. Annie, wasn’t it? Annie, what’s the langest trip you’ve done on the Tabitha Jute?”
Annie regarded him with amused toleration. “Well, we went right out to Kiviuq once, taking a shipment of Helenic champagne out there for a Border Raid party.”
Miguel looked suitably impressed. “Bet they didn’t let you stay for the party, huh. Too bad, I bet you’d have put them all to shame.”
Annie gave him a motherly smile, and patted his shoulder. “You’re a sweet man. I can see we’re going to get along famously. It’s gonna be a very pleasant sixteen days, I reckon.”
“So, you think we’ll be okay on board the Tabitha Jute for three weeks?”
Xin groaned. “Two and a half. And I will probably kill someone.”
Benard swirled his drink idly. “Miguel…”
“Bernie, don’t even mention it. He’s going to be intolerable. My only consolation is going to be watching him trying to score with a lesbian collective. How long do you think it’ll take before he learns to stay out of spanner range?”
“I think Annie’s clocked him already.”
Xin snorted gently. “Yeah, I noticed that too. Well, good. And bad. Hopefully Lizabet will be enough of a distraction for him.”
Bernard wrinkled his nose, and looked away. Eventually he said, “I’m sorry to drag you into this, Xin.”
She leaned over. “Don’t be daft, Bernie. For a start, there’s good work to be had out of this. And hey, it’s further out than most people get to go! I’m looking forward to it, actually. I want to see the gas habitats. You know, the Floating World? I’ve always loved the idea of that. Actual flight, using pressure differentials to provide lift… fascinating.”
Bernie nodded. “It would be pretty special to take a flight in atmosphere. Titan’s coming along, now. I’ve seen some pretty impressive pictures of the outgassing from the South Pole.”
Xin snorted. “As long as we make it that far. Spaceships always seem so… insubstantial to me. It seems to me amazing that something so flimsy can travel such great distances on its own.”
Bernard raised his glass. “Well, then, to impossible journeys.”
The Tabitha Jute wasn’t actually going to Titan on her own. The little group of crew were actually part of a much larger collective, heading out on a seasonal migration to pick up some of the excess hydrocarbons mined during the Titanic winter to ferry back in to the inner planets. So they were to travel out to a rendezvous three days out, and join up with the collective’s heavy lifters, which would use their bigger, more efficient engines to boost the whole community out into an intersecting orbit with Titan.
“Those three days will be the worst.” David predicted. “After that, some of the crew will transfer to other ships, and there’ll be a lot more space to breathe in this shoebox.”
He was only half right. But it didn’t really matter by then, because by day three Miguel had already gotten into a fight with Annie’s long-term partner Bernie and landed himself in the ship’s brig.
“This is going to cost you extra,” Annie told Bernard sorrowfully. Bernie glowered from the far side of the cabin, a big bruise across one eye. “We had to make a brig, and that takes material and time. That means we’re one cabin down, and he’s made a pretty mess of that now, too. We’re not a rich collective, we’ve gotta make ends meet.”
“I’ll talk to him.” Bernard promised. “I’ll calm him down.”
Miguel’s cabin wasn’t exactly remote; it was next door to the one that Bernard was now sharing with just David and Marcus. The newly-spare bunk made the cabin considerably more comfortable. Miguel now had an entire cabin of the same size to himself, but nobody was complaining about that. Except Miguel, who couldn’t leave it. He regarded Bernard balefully. “Come in, please. Welcome to my humble abode.” He bowed sarcastically.
“’Gel, don’t be an arse.”
“Fuck off, Bernie. You’re not stuck in here twenty four seven. That AI has a sexy voice, but not a lot of conversation.”
Bernard sighed. “I talked to Thanet yesterday. He was asking for your input on a couple of things. That might take your mind off it.”
But Mguel’s mind wasn’t about to let go of the topic so easily. He grunted. “That bitch.” He mused. “Do you not think there’s something unnatural about this whole setup, Bernie? Four girls, four kids, no guys? That’s not normal. They need a man about the place.”
“Miguel…”
“Do you not think, Bernie? It’s only natural. They’ve just forgotten what it’s like.”
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