In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 32: Happy Returns, Big Changes

A display opened on the windshield to show Orson Station, and Joseph smiled. They were finally home. Garden Variety Animal returned to her registered home port once a month, and this month had been unusual. It was almost a surprise that the station was unchanged.

"There's a happy sight." Tyrone had barely been speaking for the last hour. He lounged in the copilot's chair, doing nothing to help Joseph guide the ship in. "It feels like we were gone longer this time."

"Yeah, it does. Are you going to keep coming back this often?"

"I don't know." Tyrone almost stopped there, but at a look from Joseph explained. "Well, I'll have to look up the local requirements for having it as the home port. Once a month seems like a lot when there's no other reason to visit."

"Fair, it is pretty frequent for a ship that does long hauls like us. For the regional transports once a month isn't that much." No response came from Tyrone, who gazed into space or at the sation's HUD image. Joseph shook his head and gave up on the conversation, glad he didn't need his partner's help to fly.

Little of Joseph's attention was needed to maintan their course. Thirty minutes of steady deceleration as they drifted toward the station would put them at a moor near Tyrone and Justine's apartment. He amused himself trying to spot places he recognized on the sation. On the uneven cylindrical center section that was difficult. Shops and dwellings occupied most of that structure, and while some levels had larger or smaller diameters, there wasn't much to tell you what was on the inside of the wall. A few familiar locations jumped out at him from the three rings around the cylinder. Most were distribution warehouses, the main industry on Orson Station.

Tyrone recovered a bit when they came close enough to see the sation without electronic aid. He flipped off the artificial gravity as they closed, before they passed through the rings. The gravity fields there were poorly-contained. Sure enough, as they passed upside-down between the top and middle rings the ship lurched and gravity tried momentarily to tug the starmen to the ceiling.

"Figures." Tyrone pulled himself snug in his seat again and tightened his restraints. "I wish they would fix that, it's a nuisance."

"Oh, but the rings don't need better gravity containment." Joseph rolled his eyes. "Don't you know that the gravity is almost always off or reduced there anyway?"

The station council had insisted the poor containment wasn't a problem since before they had moved to the station. It was a pet peve of many pilots that lived there, but most others didn't care. Passenger flights were always routed to the bottom of the station where the interference didn't occur. Only ship-owning residents and occasional freighter pilots had to worry about it.

Clear of that obstacle, they proceeded toward the moors, a jumple of protruding corridors with airlocks at their ends. A few minutes later, mindful of their damaged thrusters, Joseph connected to their assigned mooring slip.

"I'll let Justine know we're here," Tyrone said. "We should be just in time for dinner."

Joseph started shutdown procedures for the ship systems. Most of them didn't need to be active while connected to the station any more than in a docking bay or resting on a planet's surface.

Tyrone unstrapped and stood in the restored gravity, looking at his phone. His reaction to the device's alert tone said what the message was before he spoke a word. "Justine is here." He hurried from the cockpit without waiting for a response.

Joseph smirked at the heads up display. The two had been married for just over a year and apart for most of that time. He lingered in the cockpit, waiting for all the shutdown cycles to complete. They deserved a little time for a nonverbal greeting in private.