Chapter 7

I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE EIGHT CELESTIAL MOTHERS: MACI. MAIA. MARA. MARY. MAYE. MENA. MIRA. MONA. AND TO THE UNIFIED REMNANTS ALLIANCES. I DISAVOW IMMIGRATION, I PLEDGE FEALTY AND HUMBLE SERVICE. I AM BORN OF MY STATION, AND I DIE FOR, AND WITH IT.

-PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE.

.•° ✿ °•.

“So. If you worked on the original Faering,” my voice was steady and sure as it navigated dot to dot through the words and realizations, “that would mean you were a... a teenager? When the program got funded?” I clarified, curiously, blinking as though my eyes needed to see the bigger picture that my words had painted. “That’s way back at the original conception of the stations, Lilt.”

A part of me was always going to be ten years old, the part of me that needed to follow concepts like those pretty connect-the-dots drawings I loved as a child. I could always remember filling them out in the warmth of the rural sunshine growing up. Dots were easy to follow. And just like my words connected to one another, I was following Lilt the way I followed dots; through endless prefabricated corridors of station, looking down at my feet while I walked, ever certain of my surroundings and my company to the point that I didn’t need to watch.

The steel floor was colder today than usual, and I should have connected that dot, too - the station lost micro amounts of heat whenever there was a Rendezvous because of the contrast between two vessels. The grating made contrast, bringing out the purity in my doll-like skin, and while it gave me cold, I had nothing to give in return: No skin cells, no oils, no footprints, none of anything like that - like I existed just outside the physical realm of being. I was the living walking doll, yet Lilt still felt incredibly magical to me in that moment.

She smiled. I could tell from the inflection in her voice, but I could feel it, too. “And you were a part of the Skipper Pilot Program, which...” she paused, and probably crinkled up her nose, amused by her own cleverness, “Seems like a redundant term, doesn’t it?”

I looked up from my feet and nodded, laughing, because it turned out that maybe she was as clever as she thought she was. “Right! Skipper Pilot Program? Who names this stuff?” I wondered out loud with a big smile on my lips, like for the first time in my life someone got me! Or got it. It seemed like any annoyance I’d had with her over lunch, over the pool, over pretense, had faded, and any frustration over the fact Laurent had still not contacted me or answered my comms was in the back of my mind.

Lilt Jackson created the Faering, I was fascinated, fixated, and it was hard to really care about much else by comparison.

“So...” I had to wonder, “all that junk about you not knowing about Skippers, and you freaking out about my arm...?” I pouted mid-ponder, like that one dot had snagged my pretty line of thought like a loose thread on a uniform. “I felt really crummy when you sketched out you know...” My voice dropped with that admission, waiting for sympathy, maybe.

“Well, you should have kept up your maintenance, maybe?” She quipped, unapologetically.

“You know,” I balled up my hands, but it wasn’t anger, it was much more minor than that - embarrassment, maybe? It leaked into my words, I was sure of it, “I get enough lectures as a Skipper, I don’t need one as a friend!”

“Friend?” Lilt asked, amused at the term and tilted her head thoughtfully, “Well, yeah, I guess it’s alright to be friends with your new handler. I mean, you and Laurent are friends, right?”

What.

Excuse me.

What?

“Handler? Oh no, no-no, Laurent is my handler,” I explained, like a child explaining the role of the dolls in her make-believe household, “Laurent knows me, Lilt, he knows my schedule, my routine, he... he knows how to handle when I have sensory problems! So...” I felt warm, flustered, “So if I took your new job offer thingy...”

“Then I’d be your handler.” Lilt filled in that gap handily, confidently, and I frowned in response and realization, with a little pout across my pursed lips.

“He doesn’t know, does he? That you want to take me away for this project?” I’d gone quiet, again. This dumb cherry-headed woman had my emotions all over the place.

“He does not.” She replied, matter-of-factly. I looked up at her and posed my next question with the full knowledge of inevitability.

“And he can’t know, can he?”

She confirmed my suspicion with the shake of her head, and although she offered me a smile, it felt a lot less consoling than I would have hoped for. I needed to think about something else, or think about nothing at all, because Skippers were not made for thinking.

“Where are we going, Lilt?” I queried, trying not to sound sullen. I needed the distraction of another topic, although my tone combined with my pout and my little yellow dress made me seem about fifty-two inches of sookie-lala, no matter what I would have said to her.

I didn’t come to this part of the station very often, so I wasn’t intimately familiar with it - usually when there was a Rendezvous, I was at the other end of the station, preparing for a Run.

Lilt didn’t answer my question, but when we crossed through two sets of heavy doors and passed into a long narrow transparent tube I quickly realized where we were. I stopped in place, and she watched me like a parent at the zoo as I pressed my fingers to the curved surface to look out into the abyss of nothingness.

To my right was Maci Station, a sight that I’d seen so many times before; long mismatched panels that once-upon-a-time would have all been identical, with seams that stretched and stitched over a utilitarian oblong shape. The station had more in common with the weave of a bedsheet than it did some wonder of humanity. The only lights across the exterior were aimed down at the umbilical that we were standing in, like a large hypodermic needle grotesquely piercing the skin. I didn’t need more like than that to know that I was looking my home.

And to the left...

“Holy smokes...” Sometimes the illusion of my childishness was easily broken by my words, but my genuine sense of wonder did nothing of the sort this time.

I’d already connected that if we were in the umbilical, and Maci was to the right, then that meant Lilt’s vessel had to be across the divide, but that deduction did nothing to prepare me for what I saw. While Maci Station was squares and panels, harsh lines and patch repairs, vast and enormous enough to sustain the population in this dark reach of space and a tribute to utilitarianism by way of brutalism; Lilt’s ship was like space itself had taken form.

Two or three hundred yards long, sleek and dangerous and infinitely beautiful. Bony and elegant and feminine as a ship could be. Dark shadows made it difficult to discern precise shapes exactly, but I recognized the brush of the architect. I recognized the elegance, the flow, the way that the dart-shaped ship looked like someone had painted it into the scene.

“You designed this, didn’t you?” I asked in wonder, in amazement, my words soft and barely making it out of my lips. I was breathless.

“I designed this.” She affirmed, proudly.

I peeled myself away from the glass tube wall and looked down the length of the umbilical toward the docking hatch of the sleek obsidian vessel. It didn’t even seem like we were in the same era of human evolution, like the umbilical connected two disparate points in time like an anachronism through infinite space.

Oh.

“We’re not leaving right away, are we?” I wondered out loud, more to myself than to her. The question was a practical one; there was a lot I had to do, so many affairs to get in order, I had to make sure there was another Skipper who was even half as good as I was! I was about ready to start pouting, but Lilt’s reply brought calm.

“We are not.”

I wasn’t ashamed to admit that a small part of me wished we were.

Her hand touched my shoulder the same time her words touched my ears, and I shrank slightly into myself. Nobody but our techs were supposed to touch Skippers because we couldn’t usually deal with the sensation. I wasn’t sure that I minded when it was Lilt, though. I didn’t mind it when she touched me, I decided. Maybe it was hero worship. Maybe she just had a way about her.

“But you did want to see your new Faering, right?”

Right. She was right. I knew she was right.

I nodded my head and looked back at Maci Station where the umbilical pierced the steel like a thorn, where the hatch had already closed to leave us in the dimly illuminated darkness. In the distance, I saw the glinting shimmer of the two Faerings standing vigil over my home in my absence - I couldn’t see who the Skippers were, but I could feel with absolute certainty everything about them.

And they could feel me, too.

They could feel that I was scared. Scary was long forgotten, I couldn’t remember the last time I was afraid of something; it just wasn’t a useful thing for us to feel.

So, I gave them excitement.

And they gave me curiosity in return.

Then I gave them love.

And what I got back was encouragement.

I shared with them gratitude, and I looked up at Lilt, then at the ship at the other end of the chasm of space.

“Show me to my Faering, Handler Lilt Jackson.” My voice was filled with the final thing my Skipper

Sisters had given me in that moment of feeling: pride.

They were proud of me.

And I realized that I was a very small girl about to be a part of something so much bigger.