‘Anywhere you’d like,’ Kiku said.
‘What about that one?’ Tamsin pointed at the pilot seat, serious as could be.
Kiku played right along. ‘Can’t have that one,’ she said without cracking a smile.
‘You sure?’
‘Super sure.’
‘Tsk,’ Tamsin said, shaking her head. ‘Well, this was a bust.’ She started to head back toward the door, then chuckled, scrunched her nose at Kiku, and picked the second row behind the pilot’s seat. Far enough to not be crowding the pilot, but close enough to give her a hard time.
Kiku started her prep, and Isabel took the seat beside her wife. Tamsin leaned over, speaking in a low whisper. ‘Y’know, if she’s used to kids on dates, I bet she won’t mind if we make out.’
Isabel smothered a laugh and slapped Tamsin’s leg. ‘We’d traumatise the poor kid.’
‘What? No. We’re gorgeous.’ Her eyes narrowed in thought. ‘Didn’t we make out on the Sunside once?’
A very old memory dusted itself off: a pair of women, younger than their pilot was now, drunk on bartered kick and eyes full of nothing but the other, cosied up in the back row of a shuttle as if no one else was there. ‘That was the ferry, not the Sunside,’ Isabel said.
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Okay. You’re the archivist.’
Isabel leaned a little closer. ‘How would you make out on the Sunside anyway? You’d knock your teeth in.’
Her wife snorted. ‘But if you didn’t, you’d be a legend. I’m surprised that’s not a thing.’
‘What? Go to town as long as you can without needing medical attention?’
‘Yeah,’ Tamsin laughed heartily. ‘The Sunside challenge.’
The sounds of conspiratorial merriment made Kiku look back. ‘You two gonna be trouble?’
Tamsin sat up straight and folded her hands across her lap. ‘No way, M,’ she said, like a school kid caught with cheat codes. ‘No trouble here.’
‘Mmm-hmm,’ the pilot said, returning to her switches and buttons.
Isabel reached over and held Tamsin’s hand. ‘No trouble from me, anyway,’ she said.
‘Traitor,’ Tamsin said. She gave her fingers an affectionate squeeze.
Kiku slipped on a navigation hud. ‘Oh,’ Isabel said. She reached up to her face, remembering that she’d been wearing her own hud since work. She removed it, and gave Tamsin a facetious glare as she slipped the device into a pocket. ‘How long were you going to let me run around wearing this?’
Tamsin shrugged. ‘Until now, I guess.’
The engines outside whirred, their ion jets starting to glow. ‘All right,’ the pilot said. ‘Everybody ready?’ She paused. ‘I assume you two don’t need the safety lecture, yeah?’
Tamsin tugged on her fastened seat restraint in response. ‘Sit down, strap in, hang on.’
‘And let the pilot do her job,’ Isabel added.
Kiku pointed a finger back toward Isabel as she began to pull out from dock. ‘I like that bit,’ she said. ‘I’m adding that bit.’ She switched and pressed and made adjustments. ‘You two want grav or nah?’
Isabel raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re allowed to switch it off?’
Kiku gave a mischievous shrug. ‘Not officially.’
‘We’ll stick with grav,’ Tamsin said. ‘I like to feel like I’m actually upside down.’
‘You got it,’ Kiku said. She leaned into the vox. ‘Sunside One, requesting a spot in line.’
‘Granted, Sunside One,’ the traffic controller replied. ‘Have fun.’
The skiff pulled out and headed for the nearest airlock exit. A queue of private shuttles and long-haul transports each waited their turn. ‘It’ll be about half an hour until we reach the course,’ Kiku said, easing into the queue. ‘So just kick back and relax.’ She took a hand away from the controls and dug around in a storage box strapped to the side of her seat. ‘Either of you like salt toffee?’
Tamsin and Isabel spoke in tandem: ‘Yes.’ Kiku grinned, retrieved a tin, and gestured at her controls. A cleanerbot deployed itself from its dock in the corner of the craft, its tiny stabiliser jets firing friendly green. It hummed over to Kiku, who balanced the tin on its flat housing. ‘Second row,’ she commanded, and the bot complied, uncaring of the extra cargo.
‘Now that’s a creative use for a cleanerbot,’ Tamsin said, retrieving the tin from the idling machine.
‘Works, yeah?’ Kiku said.
‘Sure does.’ Tamsin looked at Isabel as she opened the tin. ‘I’m never getting up to fetch you something ever again.’
The queue moved forward without much wait, and the skiff entered the airlock. One gate slid shut behind them, another opened ahead. Metal made way for space and starlight. Tamsin held her hand a little tighter, and Isabel didn’t need to look at her to know she was smiling. She shared the feeling. The open was always beautiful.
And so they made their way to that old classic: the Sunside Joyride. A break-neck, full-throttle, sun-facing jaunt through whichever designated patch of rock the Fleet was orbiting closest to. A just-for-fun extravagance unveiled after GC citizenship expanded trade routes, and maintained by private donations after it became obvious that resources weren’t as freely flowing as hoped. The courses were safe, obviously. They were mapped out well in advance, and every rock was equipped with proximity alarms and backup proximity alarms and stabilisation thrusters that kept them from straying into the track. The pilots were exhaustively trained, and traffic control back home watched their every move on the tracking map. But none of that changed the way it felt to be strapped into a small craft, looping and leaping in three dimensions, the clear wall around you playing the convincing trick that there was nothing between you and open sky. Some people hated it. Some people tried it once and decided they preferred keeping their lunch down.
Some people were no fun.
‘What course are we hitting tonight?’ Isabel asked.
‘The Ten-Drop Twister,’ Kiku said.
Tamsin looked at Isabel. ‘I don’t remember that one.’
‘It’s new,’ Kiku said. ‘Replaced the Devil Dive.’
‘Aw, really? That one was great.’
The pilot nodded with sympathetic agreement. ‘Yeah, but they found tungsten in that one.’
‘Hard to argue that,’ said Tamsin.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kiku said. She put on a pair of pilot’s gloves, the kind you only wore for manual control. Isabel’s heart raced with anticipation. ‘The Ten-Drop’s a real kick in the pants. You won’t be disappointed.’
The skiff pulled up to an asteroid patch, filled with tell-tale lights and markers. A big circle of light buoys wreathed the entrance point, blinking in an assortment of colours. Kiku activated her hud. The engines burned loud and hot. ‘You two strapped in?’
Isabel tugged on her restraints, and her wife did the same. This had scared Tamsin the first time, Isabel remembered. She remembered a row of painful semi-circles embedded in her palm, where Tamsin had gripped tightly in fear. She remembered rubbing her then-girlfriend’s back as she threw up on the dock the second they left the skiff. And she remembered the next day, when she awoke to find Tamsin’s open eyes looking back from the pillow beside her, a who-cares grin in her voice as she asked Isabel if she wanted to go again.
Isabel had. From then on, if Tamsin was there, she’d be right alongside.