Echoes in the void

[Rian Carpenter]

Rian couldn't stare out at the infinite horizon a minute longer. Getting the ship into the black wasn't too much trouble. But knowing the ship, and its contents, were all now directly under his care, the temporary captain and pilot could hardly tear himself away from the cockpit. But having had enough of contemplating the vastness of the eternal darkness staring back at him in the cockpit, Carpenter made his escape.

- LOUNGE -

His restless feet brought him to the lounge, a well-worn paperback book under his arm: Fires of La Romana. It wasn't light reading but it was a dense contemporary history from Earth that was in the late 21st century. A Dominican/Haitian American returns to his birthplace to lead an armed insurrection on the sugar plantations that harvested much of the world's sugar on the backs of indentured and near-slave labor. Racial politics, global supply chains being disrupted, questions about the morality and implications of homemade firearms being used in the field by guerillas for the first time on a large scale. It was the type of reading his father would tell him was turning him into a "weak-willed intellectual".

Finally starting to relax slightly as he sat down and laid the tome out on the table, the killer cook tried to find his place or at least the paragraph he left on. It was first hand-account of an early battle in the Batey Wars. The author was quoting first-hand accounts of the fighting in the sub-standard housing blocks of bare concrete.  Ricochets of splintered bullets and creole shouted through lungs coated with concrete dust. Battle scenes, if accurate, are chaotic and hard to describe. The author cleverly tried to make you connect with an immediate, and sensory truth of the experience of those guerillas.

Just as Rian was feeling immersed, forgetting his own preoccupation with the ship's auto-pilot and it not killing them all, he was snapped back to reality by the tell-tale thud of Mattie Rooney boots entering the lounge. It was an interruption, but at least he was fairly certain she wasn't arriving with "captainy" things for him to do. She wasn't a book, but the former criminal was getting better at reading her. Sort of.

[Mattie Rooney]

As the Darling took off into the black, Mattie found herself between a rock and a hard place. The four-day journey ahead stretched before her as a black void where she had two options: option A, socialize with the grieving crew she was stuck with and let their misery rub off on her, or option B, isolate herself and marinade in a misery entirely of her own making. She had to begrudgingly accept that option A might be the lesser of two evils; her mind, when left to its own devices, took her to much darker places than the second-hand sadness of others could ever do.

When Mattie poked her head into the lounge, she expected to find a small gathering she could join as a silent bystander who soaked in the comfort of company without having to contribute to the conversation. Instead, it was just Rian, immersed in a book by the looks of it. She considered turning around and walking out before he could spot her, but it was already too late; he'd looked up the moment she'd appeared in the doorway. The sharpshooter could move quietly in a life or death situation that called for stealth, but had a bad habit of stomping around the ship in her free time. Especially when she was in a less than stellar mood.

"Hey."

Mattie bit the inside of her cheek, considering her approach. She still didn't know what Rian becoming the captain meant for their dynamic, but it felt significant somehow. For one, she wasn't in the habit of trading banter with captains the way she did with her immediate superiors. Would she have to stop ribbing him? She liked ribbing him. What was even the point if she couldn't do that?

"Didn't mean to barge in. I figured you'd be in the cockpit, steerin' us into an asteroid or somethin'."

Alright then. Apparently she wasn't going to lay off the ribbing. At least not for now. She'd worry about appropriate conduct once they got to their destination and it was time to get back to work.

"Can't say that I'd mind too much. Might as well put us out of our misery, y'know?"

She walked over to the table but stopped short of taking a seat, just in case Rian wanted to be left alone.

"Whatcha readin'?"

[Rian Carpenter]

"Hey."

Rian shot back Mattie a smile and a friendly reply that only lightly hinted at the stress running through the background of his mind.

"Howdy."

Just that faint worry of work beckoning him, Carpenter was ready for her friendly jab at his flying ability. She'd seen a few of the times he'd flown the simulator and the Darling did not fair well in those virtual flights.

"Didn't mean to barge in. I figured you'd be in the cockpit, steerin' us into an asteroid or somethin'."

He laughed out loud and lowered his book.

The amateur pilot shrugged his shoulders a bit to concede the point.

"Can't say that I'd mind too much. Might as well put us out of our misery, y'know?"

Chuckling lightly he motioned with his free hand that wasn't holding his book for Mattie to sit down.

"I aint quite there yet. Ask me again though once we've got our cargo and passengers aboard."

"Whatcha readin'?"

Holding up the cover of the old soft-cover book he read it aloud anyway.

"Fires of La Romana. It's about a labor uprising on Earth. Paid too much for it at a used bookstore on Iscariot back in the day. Finally getting around to reading it."

He spun her question back around at her slightly.

"You the history book type? The writer's pretty good. He really drops you into things and uses the drama of battle to highlight the larger themes of the struggle he's covering. Fascinating stuff. What makes normal men and women start building homemade guns and bombs, what makes the man holding them down think he can keep pressing."

Feeling a moment of self-reflection as he waxed on about the book he was enjoying.

"Reminds me I should be happy to be here. Trying not to kill you with this spaceship we all live in."

The cook/pilot/captain paused for comedic effect.

"For now. I've still got a pretty comet picked out we could atomize ourselves smacking into."

[Mattie Rooney]

Mattie took a seat when prompted, her demeanor relaxing at knowing that she wasn't intruding.

"You the history book type?"

Mattie shrugged. Was she? She hadn't read enough to know if she was. Hell, she wasn't even sure if she was the book type in general, never mind the genre.

"The writer's pretty good. He really drops you into things and uses the drama of battle to highlight the larger themes of the struggle he's covering. Fascinating stuff. What makes normal men and women start building homemade guns and bombs, what makes the man holding them down think he can keep pressing."

"Sounds a lot like the War." Her immediate reaction was intrigue, followed by hesitation on whether she'd actually like to know more. The topic certainly struck a chord with her -- she was a browncoat at heart, despite being a child at the time and therefore having a rather shallow understanding of the whole ordeal. Perhaps it would be interesting to gain more insight. On the other hand, the topic dredged up bitter memories. The browncoats hadn't succeeded in taking down the man. What if the rebels in Rian's book suffered the same fate? Did she want to relive that?

"Reminds me I should be happy to be here. Trying not to kill you with this spaceship we all live in... For now. I've still got a pretty comet picked out we could atomize ourselves smacking into."

Mattie chuckled, more out of acknowledgment than amusement -- her mind was wandering, the talk about history books and uprisings jogging something in her memory.

"I never was much for books," she confessed. "Well... My pa used to read me Moby Dick when I was little. I s'pose liked that."

Mattie was almost taken aback herself by the casual way those words fell out of her mouth. Her childhood was dangerous territory that she didn't like treading into; it didn't make for a fun topic of conversation anyway, consisting mostly of dreary drudgery and being forced to grow up too soon. What she was sharing now was one of the few bright spots she could recall.

Of course, that might have made it even more dangerous.

For now, Mattie allowed herself to reminiscence, her expression softening as she continued her story.

"To tell you the truth... I didn't really care for the book. Matter of fact, I hated it. At first it sounded so excitin', y'know, sailin' and whale huntin' and all that. Turns out it's just boring."

She let out a little snort. It wasn't derisive as one might expect, just amused. Nostalgic.

"I s'pose what I really liked was spendin' time with him. He never could get my brothers to sit still long enough to listen to him read, so it was just me and him. And I didn't care that the book was boring, 'cos just for a moment, I got to have pa all to myself. That was before he..."

A dark cloud passed over Mattie's face when she realized she'd come full circle, her trip down the memory lane leading her right back to the dark place it had started from.

"...went off to War. I guess... I just never really picked the habit of readin' myself after that." She shrugged, playing off the implied loss of a parent like it was just a footnote in the story of her hobby preferences. Which it was. It wasn't like she was so deeply traumatized that she avoided reading because books reminded her of better times. She just had better things to do these days. Usually. She had to admit that now that she was on the Darling, she found herself with a lot more downtime than she was used to.