The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Six

This is me in Service. This is me working. And yeah, I know that basically Service is the two years of your life when you do all the jobs that no one wants to do, the real grunt work, and you're mainly stuck in Domestic or Maintenance or Production, but I am still glad of it because I am just so tired of Education, of being stuck in that little classroom with those same people and those same teachers telling us basically the same stuff over and over in different ways: you're stuck here; you're stuck with this; do what you do; don't complain; our whole existence is about keeping this thing going, for us, for Earth, for humanity, for the future, for God, whoever he is.

So even though I get to the board and find out my first posting is in Maintenance, refilling vending machines, and even though I have to wear a hairnet under my hat, I am more or less on a high that first day. I even get first session and that is a serious plus since I don't have to swap my sleep patterns or anything yet. Just as I'm checking the board one last time to figure out how to get to where I'm going, I hear someone, and when I look it's Ezra saying hey and standing in behind me super close so that he is reading the posting list over my shoulder and his breath is moving my hair. And for a second I am looking at his jawline and ear and hair at point-blank range.

'You really should think about going a little easier on the hair wax, you know.'

He breaks into a smile and puts his hand on my shoulder and says, 'Check you – looking after me already. The devoted wife.'

But I'm shrugging his hand off like it's diseased and walking away and wishing he wasn't following me but he is.

'I guess you noticed I got Engineering – straight into Flight Training. Don't hate me. They just know talent when they see it.'

'Sure, Ezra.'

'I mean, it'll be skivvy work at first, we all know that, but it's about getting your foot in the door, getting known. What did you get?'

'Maintenance. First session.'

'Well, of course first session.'

'Why of course?'

'You think they'd put a sixteen-year-old girl on nights with everything that goes down in this place after hours? Seren, come on.' Before I even get a chance to ask him what he means by this he has his arm round me again, pulling me into his side where his hipbone drives into my rib and he is talking into my hair, making it wet, and he says, 'Whenever you want me to put a bun in your oven and take you away from all this, just let me know, baby.'

So I elbow him in the groin, not as hard as I could but it's enough to get him off me and have him rolling into the wall while I walk away and tell him he can keep his stinking buns.

I get to the Maintenance offices in North and buzz at the door even though it's open anyway and there's this girl I half recognise in there filling up a trolley with nut bars and packets of nachos and she doesn't really look at me before she says, 'Junior Technician Seren Hemple, Service starter, right?'

'Yeah.'

'Petty Officer Mariana Moreno. And you're late.'

'Sorry.'

'Stop wasting time – come in and help me with this trolley.'

For today Mariana makes me follow her around North on her circuit, learning the ropes.

'Basically the population of this ship have an insatiable appetite for synthesised junk so we can't refill these things fast enough. By the time you get to the last one on your circuit the first one will be empty again. It's the most colossally futile exercise the universe has ever known and for the next six months it is your life.' This is the kind of thing, I learn, that Mariana says a lot, so yeah, I pretty much like her right away. Not that she seems to like me very much.

The cool thing about doing the machines is the fact that they're all over the place, in a whole bunch of places you need clearance to get into so of course I've never actually been in them before. Mariana has this special Maintenance pass that she just scans on the door fobs and they open right up. So at one point we're up in Science and it's kind of quiet and smells weird and you pass doors that are open where people are talking quietly and looking at brightly coloured computer screens and saying things like: 'But where's that ferrous scan? Why can't we do the overlay?'

And man, they have the most awesome windows. Actual windows, not portholes, so they can just goggle the hell out of Huxley-3 in the most intense way. At one point Mariana tells me to get some paper towels and while I'm doing it I just stand there at the door to one of the labs that's empty and I edge in a little and to the left so that the sunlight is falling on my face and it is actually starting to maybe feel a little warm. And there she is, Huxley-3, a beautiful jade and aqua-blue, and she has clouds, CLOUDS, that move and swirl, slow but sure, a living thing as sure as I've ever seen one.

We even get to go down to Engineering, only about three bays away from flight deck, where the recons are leaving and arriving, and we hear them leave, hear them arrive, a sound like some type of explosion, combined with the grinding metal-on-metal of the bay doors. And in between times we see guys walking in ones or twos down the corridors in flight suits and harnesses, depressurisation masks under arms, on their way back from the recon, and I strain my ears like crazy but they are always talking quietly or even not talking at all, except for one and all I hear him say is, 'I don't know, man, that's how it looked to me.'

At this point Mariana says, 'Hey, recruit!' so shrilly at my back that it makes me jump. 'You going to stand there checking out the flyboys all day or are you actually going to do any work?'

So I come back over to her just as she hurls a box of protein bars at me and I fail to catch it.

'Look,' she says, standing and dabbing the black oil residue from the inside of the machine off her hands. 'You know, I'm not asking you to be in love with this job. I am simply asking you to not suck at it. All you need to do is not suck for long enough to make it to the end of the few shifts you last before you decide to marry your little boyfriend and get pregnant and go on leave for the next several years.'

I pick up the box of protein bars and pull it open on my way to the machine. 'Well, don't hold your breath on that one,' I tell her.

More coming later this week for Seren and Dom! If you enjoyed this chapter, please don't forget to vote – thanks.

The Loneliness of Distant Beings has been published, but to get it in front of as many people as possible I'm posting it to the lovely Wattpad community. The plan is to have it all up before the publication of my second book - The Glow of Fallen Stars - in August.

If you can't wait to read the ending, or just love the feel of real pages, then you can purchase Loneliness from your local bookshop or online retailers!