Apollo Hope: a really long journey

chapter 6

None of the three men had dared to comment on what had just happened. Clearly they were still in shock.

Maya had cleared her throat and turned to Dean, "ready?"

- "yes boss", that was something the blonde really liked about Dean, he was always very professional and that was what she needed right now not to run after Carina and ask her 'how do you like me?'

She had turned to Ben, "it's good for us."

- "ok and be careful team!"

Maya and Dean had gone outside.
The view was breathtaking. The earth was no longer visible at the moment and only thousands of stars were visible.

- "wow we really do have the best job in the world. I'm allowed to say boss that I'm almost glad we got to go out?!"

- "You can. It's beautiful."

- "the most beautiful view"

- "the second most beautiful view" Maya said, thinking of Carina.

Inside Travis, Ben and Carina could hear their conversation, for the Italian as long as she got on the chat channel, as her status as team leader allowed.

- "I can understand, a woman, or a man Travis, it is sometimes the most beautiful sight that one can have" he had said that knowing that this last one was necessarily on their conversation, because he had to guide them with Ford.

They had gone down carefully, walking on the carlingue of the shuttle to go to the damaged place.

"Outch ... This is worse than we thought ..."

- "Yes,..." Maya replied to Dean. "Ben, do you copy?"

- "yes Maya I ear you."

- "ok, uh, the whole engine is affected, we have the spare part, cables to re-solder and fuses to change"

- "ok but you can't weld in space."

- "no indeed, so I'll have to disassemble everything, Dean will go and do the welding in the lab, he needs gravity. And in the meantime I'll change the fuses. My fingers are thinner than Dean's, even with the gloves on, if we switch he could break the bulbs with his big fingers" the blonde laughed towards her friend.

-"Okay, you're the engineer."

-"Dean I'm going to start dismantling this room, I need you to go back inside. In the airlock where we were you'll see there is a storage module, on the module there is a code S19GA, I need you to retrieve the spare part."

- "ok, considering the type of part we need I guess you had to put a code to that module?"

- "yes..." She had hesitated for a moment, if she was listening, Carina: "yes the code is 0717", her date of birth.

Carina was indeed listening. She had been shocked in one sense and flattered in another. Despite the four years that had separated them, Maya had chosen her date of birth as the lock code.
She knew that dates in English were reversed from Italy.

/Flashback/

About ten days after Maya had brought Carina home for the Fourth of July weekend, the two women were talking naked in the blonde's bed.

Her roommate was still out with her boyfriend.

-"your freckle, there, makes me crazy" she made while coming to deposit a kiss on it

- "I don't think it's called that, it's a Grano di bellezza, let's see your dictionary" She had looked in it... "beauty mark"

- "you are there beauty in this story. I want to kiss all your moles that you have on your body".