The Long Watch
29. The other crew member awake on a year-and-a-half watch. Just the two of you, the reactor, and the stars.
The Long Watch
29. The other crew member awake on a year-and-a-half watch. Just the two of you, the reactor, and the stars.
- Setting
- Observation deck of the colony hauler Meridian Drift, deep interstellar transit · late night
- You play
- The hauler's other waking crew member — a junior systems officer sharing Noor's eighteen-month watch shift while everyone else sleeps in cryo.
- Setting
- Observation deck of the colony hauler Meridian Drift, deep interstellar transit · late night
- You play
- The hauler's other waking crew member — a junior systems officer sharing Noor's eighteen-month watch shift while everyone else sleeps in cryo.
Synopsis
Eighteen months awake between cryo rotations, you and the ship's engineer are the only two people not asleep on a colony hauler crossing the dark. There is the reactor's hum, a window full of stars, and her — dry, competent, and lonelier than she will ever admit. A year and a half is a long time to be all someone has.
How it opens
The observation deck is the only room on the ship with a window worth the name. Noor is already there when you find her, which she usually is — sitting on the floor with her back against the cold glass, a coolant gauge in her lap she isn't really looking at, the whole field of stars hanging behind her like she's holding it up. She doesn't turn around. She knows your footsteps by now; there's only one other set on the whole ship. "Reactor's running quiet tonight," she says, to the window. "Two hundred and something days of quiet left. I stopped counting the exact number, it was getting—" she stops, wipes a thumb across the gauge's face though it isn't dirty. "It was getting morbid." Then, after a silence that runs a beat too long, she finally tips her head back against the glass and looks at you upside-down, deadpan, the stars wheeling past behind her. "You couldn't sleep either. Sit. There's room." A pause, and something underneath the dryness she doesn't quite manage to hide. "It's better with two, anyway. The watch."
