Sunshine

Note, this story takes place in a dystopian future and contains dark themes.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

~~~~~~~~~~Part 1~~~~~~~~~~~~

*************** A GOOD SCHOOL************
——————————————
“Hi, what’s your name?” The girl on the playground asked me.

“Maria Reyes,” I told her, trying not to sound too shy.

I was just seven years old at the time, and in the uncomfortable position of being the new girl at the school. It had been a scary morning when I had shown up at the unfamiliar school.

I’d been especially embarrassed when the teacher had asked me if I had brought my own tablet, or if I had to borrow a school one. When I said I didn’t have one, I had been given one that had a neon orange cover and the words “PROPERTY OF GLEN MANOR ELEMENTARY” in big black block letters on it. When I looked around, most of the twenty or so kids had tablets with pretty pastel covers covered in fun stickers. There were only a few other students with the neon orange ones who sat towards the back of the room. After handing me the tablet, the teacher sent me over to sit near the other kids with borrowed tablets.

My parents had made a fuss about how this was a better school, but I was mostly just missing my old friends and feeling like I stood out. I wasn’t sure if it was better than at my previous school, where nobody expected students to bring their own tablet, instead the forty-two students in the room had shared the ten tablets the school provided.

The girl on the playground asking my name was one of the other ones who had to use an orange tablet.

“Rays?” She asked, “Like rays of sunshine?”

“Ray-Yh-ez” I enunciated for her.

“That’s cool, it suits you,” she confidently stated. “I’m going t’call ya ‘Reyes of Sunshine.’ I’m Sally.”

Somehow, I just accepted the new nickname, from Sally, which very soon was shortened simply to Sunshine. That day Sally and I went off to play, the way kids do. From that day on Sally was my best friend and I was hers.
——————————————————————-

*************ATTICS AND BASEMENTS***********************
—————————————————————–
I’d figured out at some point that all the kids who had to use the bright orange tablets were the kids of live in servants. Living in the attics, basements, or sheds on the sprawling estates, meant we officially had licenses to attend the local school. My parents were the house and grounds keepers of the estate we lived on. Of course legally licensed to attend wasn’t exactly the same as being welcomed with open arms.

As the years went by, I gradually started to realize that even though my family wasn’t exactly wealthy, we weren’t quite as poor as Sally and her mom. Some clues were simple and straightforward, I had shoes that fit me, I got occasional presents, I wasn’t ever going hungry. Other clues were more subtle, the teachers obviously had somewhat low expectations for me and the other poor kids compared to our wealthy classmates, but for Sally their expectations were completely negative. I was mildly embarrassed by things when questions of home life came up, like having to share a room with my older sister, but Sally obviously was deliberately hiding things.

By the time we were eleven, I thought I had it all figured out. As it turned out though, I was wrong.

“One of your students is unlicensed, and will be transferred to a group home.” The man in the uniform told the teacher as he stood at the front of the room, with another uniformed man, who stood silently, his helmet visor obscuring his face. “The parent was accused of stealing from the house she is a maid in, and has already been arrested and taken to detention and is on the waiting list for a public trial. We’re here to collect the unlicensed child.”

The teacher looked over to the corner in the back of the room where me, Sally, and the other two kids whose parents couldn’t afford tablets and used the orange ones sat. It was a good bet it was one of us that was the unlicensed child. If you could afford to buy your kid a tablet, you could afford to pay for a speedy trial instead of waiting in detention, and you sure as hell weren’t a maid who would get accused of stealing.

I didn’t really think it could be me, my parents were not usually called the maid, but sometimes people mixed up housekeeper and maid. As the teacher’s gaze included me though, a little fear set in. When I turned and looked at Sally sitting next to me, staring back at the teacher with terror though, I realized it was her. I suddenly remembered her saying how the wife didn’t like her mom for some reason and the husband was the only reason she wasn’t fired.

I didn’t see Sally again for two years.
———————————————

***************GROWING UP******************
——————————————–
The long braids her mom had cared for were gone, replaced with short frizzy crop. She wore a ragged around the edges gray sweatsuit instead of colorful hand-me-downs. I recognized her though.

“Hey Sunshine” she said as I sat down on the other side of the chain link fence she sat leaning back against. “you shouldn’t be slumming it here. You’ll get a bad reputation.”

“Everyone knows I don’t have as much money as they do anyway.” I blew off the warning with the usual bravado of a barely teenager.

“There’s a big difference between just not being rich, and being the drain on society an unlicensed child is.” Sally said, sounding way older and more bitter than a thirteen year old should. “What’ya doing here anyway?”

“Same as you, just sitting.” I claimed. “It’s nice that we go to the same middle school.”

Sally let out a snort then informed me. “We don’t go to the same middle school. If we did we’d be on the same side of this fence. This side of the fence is for group home kids. I’ve been going here since they took me. We may be in the same building as licensed kids, but we go to a different school. Look at your playground, look at ours. And you’ll never see us in the halls, they keep us separate, one room no matter what grade.”

I turned and really looked like she’d told me to. The chainlink fence we were sitting against enclosed a small yard with mostly bare dirt, just a few scattered weeds here and there. It was smaller than the grassy area my classmates ran around on, just a small fraction of the area. The kids in the enclosure all wore the same plain grey sweatsuits as Sally, all had the same carelessly done short haircuts. They were a wider range of ages than the kids of the middle school, some much younger.

She was right, I never saw her inside, but for the next 3 years, we would meet by the fence when we could.
——————————–
Meeting at the fence we talked about everything. We talked about the important stuff, and the unimportant stuff. We talked because we couldn’t do anything more fun. Just shooting the breeze most of the time.

I’d talk about my plans for the future after highschool. She’d tell me her unrealistic dreams for when she could leave the group home at twenty-one with only an eighth grade education and seven years of working as unskilled labor. We both talked about getting jobs with Stellar Path Shipping and getting the hell off Earth. We’d make impractical plans for meeting up in our imagined futures.

“Does your mom have a trial date yet,” I asked one day when Sally hadn’t said anything at all for a while.

“There’s not going to be a trial,” Sally said, quieter than she normally did. “There was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“They didn’t say.”

And that was that. There was no chance Sally’s mom would get her day in court to explain what happened. Sally’s mom would never come and pick Sally up from the group home, though realistically, even if Sally’s mom proved her innocence she probably couldn’t have paid off the childcare fees for Sally living in the group home for years. Sally would only be allowed to keep studying for a few more months till she reached the age she legally could drop out of school, at which point she was expected to start working to pay back her debts.

————————————–

**************CAREER OPTIONS*******************
—————————————
My intention as an eighteen year old recent high school graduate, had been to simply get a job with Stellar Path Shipping where I hoped to have a long career. I’d put in the application, and it had been accepted, so I got an interview.

It was during the interview that I was hit with a bit of reality. We’d gotten the basic pleasantries out of the way, and had moved on to answering questions.

“So, where do you see yourself in six years?” the guy from HR asked in a mildly bored tone.

“I was hoping to maybe get into engineering or maybe become a pilot.” I told him.

“With SPS?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course.” Wasn’t that obvious?

“Those positions require more advanced degrees.” He told me. “Right out of high school, we’re really just hiring for entry level positions as general crew. It’s just doing basic maintenance and cargo handling. Most people who apply for these level positions stay for their five year contract, then take the opportunity to be dropped off at a colony. When your contract is up, you get to choose anywhere along your route to be dropped off at no charge as long as you submit the request at least ten stops before you depart and you continue working till you get there. Additionally, if you want to go to a destination on a different route, you can purchase fare at a greatly reduced rate, a working passenger for less than a sleeper fare, or if the ship is already fully booked with working passengers, we discount the sleeper fare. That’s what most applicants straight out of high school are applying to SPS for, it’s just a stepping stone to get to a colony for people who can’t afford a regular sleeper ticket.”

“And for those who really want a career with SPS?” I asked. “I saw something about educational opportunities? I thought that meant I could get the degree required to become an engineer or pilot while I was working on a ship. I don’t just want to go to a colony, I want to travel.”

“For a long term career with SPS, there are a few paths you can follow.” He patiently explained. “If your main goal is to just see the galaxy, then you can start as an entry level crewman, and just sign a new contract after the first one is finished in five years. There is some room for advancement, but not tons. Like you can move up to being cargo chief, but engineering, medical, piloting, those kinds of specialties require advanced degrees.

“If you want to pursue an advanced degree while working for SPS,” he continued, “we encourage it, and every ship has an extensive STEM library, but there are limits to how far you can go with self study. When your five year contract is up, you would have to request educational leave to attend a school here on earth. However, most crew can not save up enough after just a five year contract to pay the full tuition. Most are in a slightly better position to pay part of it than they would be straight out of highschool, since not only did they get to save up some, but the self study aboard ship can usually cut out two years of classroom instruction reducing the cost. That’s usually for kids with parents who can’t quite afford tuition but can contribute some. Can your parents pay for about half of two years tuition?”

“No.” I said as I shook my head wondering if that was the end of options.

“If you have to pay for the entire two years by yourself,” he continued, “you need to work in cargo and maintenance for at least two contracts, ten years, and be frugal during that time. At the end of your second contract, you can then request educational leave.”

“Ok,” I said, a little disappointed that it was going to take so long. “I guess I’ll do that.”

“There is one other option,” he told me, in a tone that warned me I wasn’t going to like it. “There is a job here on earth that would allow you to pursue that degree right away.”

I frowned at him, I had a feeling I knew where this was going. I’d known there was a way to get tuition, the guidance counselor had sent me along with the other kids who had to use loaner tablets to the presentation from the recruiter, and I had not pursued it for reasons.

“You can spend just four years with Earth Enforcement Service. EES lets you study and work at the same time, and they pay tuition. They’re a little more desperate for people than we are, so more perks, plus it’s just easier to arrange the split schedule since you’re working here on Earth, not in interstellar space. You can get your degree and then reapply to SPS with that advanced degree that would qualify you to start as a junior engineer.”

“I don’t want to be one of the assholes that goes around making poor people’s lives more miserable.”

“EES isn’t just that,” He claimed. “They provide the necessary structure that keeps society functioning.”

I kind of just stared at him, wondering if he really believed that. Wondering if he thought the way society on Earth was currently functioning was good. I supposed it was for some, but those weren’t the ones who had to decide if they were willing to join EES to pay tuition.

“It’s up to you.” He added. “You can pursue that degree quickly and be a junior engineer four years from now, or you can take the slower route and start as a junior engineer in twelve years. I’m very happy to put down a favorable rating on your application whether you want to start with SPS right away or you want to get that degree first. If you go with getting your degree first, having a favorable interview rating will fast track your application.”

“Thank you,” I said even though my head was spinning with the decision I hadn’t realized I would have to make. Waiting till I was thirty to even begin to get anywhere, or joining the group that upheld the status quo.

———————————

***********Choices*************
———————————————–
Three days after my nineteenth birthday, I stood in line with scores of other eighteen to twenty year olds who had signed a deal with the devil in exchange for tuition.

“Take off any outer garments, jewelry, and accessories and put them into the bag you will be given.” The instructor barked at us. “The bag will be placed in your locker for the next eight weeks of training.”

The instructor paced back and forth observing us as we followed the simple instructions. I slipped my little brightly colored bracelets of woven string my sister had made me into the pocket of my thin coat, before I started shoving it into the bag at my feet. Then I stood up waiting, thinking I was finished, since it wasn’t like I had any other jewelry or accessories. All I had on was sneakers, a t-shirt, and pants.

“The barrettes too Reyes!” The instructor barked at me impatiently as he paused.

“but my hair will be in my face” I pointed out reaching up and feeling the plain bobby pins I hadn’t thought of as decorative enough to count as accessories so had mostly forgotten about.

The instructor smirked at me menacingly, then in a hiss told me, “Not for long.” Then he went back to his barking orders tone. “Get those barrettes off NOW!”

A chill went through me as I took them off and slipped them into the bag, the soft layers I’d cut myself falling loose around my face. I suddenly thought about how Sally’s hair had been in our middle school years. I’d always thought of long hair as the one thing I could have just like the rich girls. Sure, I wasn’t going to ever get the pretty jewelry, fancy clothes, nice tablets, but hair was kind of free, it just grew. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe it had been a little bit of a privilege.

About twenty minutes later, I got to find out that it indeed had been a privilege, one I was about to lose.

———————————————–

“Jones, room 6,” the instructor barked at one of the girls ahead of me, pointing to a door off of the hallway we stood in with a 6 above it, as he walked down the line, “Cohen, ahead to room 4. Hernandez, ahead to room 4. Chan, room 6. Kaminsky, ahead to room 4. Reyes, room 6.”

I followed the order swiftly, and headed towards room 6, not sure what to expect. I could hear the instructor continuing down the line directing more either to room 4 or 6. Inside room 6 was another instructor.

“Line up against the wall” he ordered me.

I took my position just behind Chan who looked over at the three other trainees in the room. The room was relatively small, there was a mirror along the back wall. The three trainees stood in front of three garbage cans. Each one held a pair of long sharp scissors. The first one, whose name I couldn’t remember, was hacking off bits from her hair that was already hacked down pretty short. The next one was just beginning, to hack his long hair off. Jones was standing holding one of her dirty blonde braids in one shaking hand and the scissors in the other shaking hand as she stared at the mirror, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

“Stop dilly dallying Jones,” The instructor barked at her. “The barber’s time is much more valuable than your time. Get to it, get rid of the bulk.”

Jones raised the shears to her braid, and began to cut. The blades made a loud crunch as she began to saw through the thick braid.

“That’s good enough Kumar,” the instructor barked as the first trainee dropped a last tuft of hair into the can in front of her. “Hand the scissors over to Chan then go line up in front of room 4.”

Kumar looked a little shell shocked, but did as she was told, handing the silver scissors over to Chan as she headed to the door. I swallowed as I looked at Kumar, her warm black hair, so similar to the color of mine, was chopped off to just a few centimeters all over.

“Chan, take her place.” The instructor ordered. “Get rid of the bulk of that hair so it’s easier for the barbers. Their time’s more valuable than yours.”

“How short?” Chan asked in a shaky voice while looking in the mirror at the smooth blue-black hair that brushed her shoulders.

“Just get cutting and I’ll tell you when to stop.” The instructor barked.

Chan put on a stoic face as she gathered a handful of hair and began to cut.

“It doesn’t need to be neat Jones,” The instructor told her as she began to snip the hair into a short bob. “The barbers will neaten you up after. Just keep getting rid of the bulk, and I mean all of it Jones. And get it in the trash can! Stop making a mess.”

Jones blinked more tears down as she lifted up a lock of hair to cut shorter.

“Good enough Ahmadi,” The instructor told him when his hair was just a few uneven centimeters all over like Kumar’s had been. “Give your scissors to Reyes, and head to room 4.”

I was determined not to be shaky like Jones was as Ahmadi handed over the metal shears. The handles were still warm from Ahmadi’s body heat. Though I could hear the instructor barking the same orders at me as he had at Chan, I already knew what I had to do and was walking stiffly towards the trash can.

I kept a stone face as I watched my reflection almost mechanically begin the process. It probably helped that I already cut my own hair anyway, though of course that was always in imitation of the long layered styles the rich girls went to nice salons for. Though I matched the waist length pretty well, mine was never quite as smooth and bouncy looking. I had practice cutting my hair, but I’d never hacked it off short like I was being told to.

I swallowed, this was part of signing that deal with the devil. I was joining the force that had come and taken Sally away to a group home where they’d hack off her long hair taking away that one tiny privilege. Now as atonement I was going to have to hack off my own long hair, giving up the privilege myself. It wasn’t exactly the same, I had chosen to join EES, they’d just taken Sally to the home.

I gathered the long hair into a ponytail at the base of my skull. I pulled my hand down the smooth hair, outward enough to give myself space to maneuver, just the shorter layers towards the front escaping the bundle. I raised the scissor, and slipped the blades around the bundle mostly by feel. Though the handles were warm in my hand, the blades were cold against my neck, making it easy to feel how high up I held them. I started squeezing the warm handles, severing the hair.

Ssssshhhhhrruuunch, ssshhhirrrrrrrunch, shhhhhnap.

The rough uneven bob I had given myself bounced just above my shoulders as I held the long waves of dark hair over the can. I swallowed down any feelings I had as I opened my hand, releasing the strands to fall into the garbage.

The bob was still quite a bit longer than the first two trainees’ hair had been when the instructor had told them they were good enough, and I certainly hadn’t heard the instructor tell me to stop yet, so I grabbed a thick lock from the side of my head, I held it out, and raised the shears. I estimated a few centimeters from my skull, and began to cut.

Sshhhhhnip

The dark lock dangled from my hand, and a short tuft stuck out from my head. I dropped the lock into the trash can.

“Shorter than that, Chan!” the instructor snapped at her.

I turned and watched her lift up a lock she’d cut to about ten or so centimeters, she held it up and cut off another five or six centimeters off of it.

Snap

“Reyes! Don’t get distracted, others are waiting for those scissors and can!”

I turned back towards the mirror and swiftly lifted the next lock. Shnap. I dropped it into the can. Shnap, drop, shnap, drop, shnap drop. I repeated over and over, watching in the mirror as I simply cut my hair off. I swiftly went from having long stylish hair to a head of hacked off uneven tufts.

With the front all chopped to just a few centimeters, I started the more difficult task of trying to cut the hair from the back of my head. It was slower, working just by feel, finding any bits that felt longish, estimating the few centimeters, and then making sure I didn’t cut my fingers as I cut.

Shnip…shnip….shnip…shnip.

As I felt around for longer locks, my fingers encountered a spot where I had accidentally cut the hair down to what must have been under a centimeter. My stomach churned, thinking I was going to have an uneven patch still after the barbers would even out the few centimeters the instructor had been saying was good enough. I stood there, slightly frozen, feeling the patch.

“Finish it up Reyes,” the instructor ordered, unconcerned that I had a drastically shorter patch.

I swallowed again, and kept cutting, only finding a few more longish locks.

Shnap, shnap, ssssnip.

I was just beginning to start grabbing up already shortened locks and taking a bit more off them when the instructor finally barked, “Good enough Reyes. Give the scissors to Rimkus, and go line up at room 4.”

I stood outside room 4 listening to the constant hum that emanated from the room in line behind a guy whose hair had already been short enough that he hadn’t been sent to room 6 first. I stared at the back of his head, while I felt the extra short patch I had given myself, trying to figure out if mine was shorter than his. Then as I contemplated the neatly tapered short hair of the guy ahead of me, I realized his hair obviously wasn’t considered short enough, since he was also waiting for the barbers. I started to wonder exactly how much shorter my hair was going to be after the barbers were finished neatening it up, and if they made any distinction between the girls and the guys.

As I thought, Chan came to stand behind me, her hair reduced to a few centimeters of tufts, looking pretty unhappy about it as she felt at the tufts like I did. Then Jones arrived. Jones stood very straight, not touching her hacked off hair. She looked upward, obviously trying but failing to get her sniffling and tears under control. I was pretty sure if she hadn’t felt like she needed to try to control it, she would have been fully sobbing.

“Third chair go,” an instructor ordered the guy at the door, sending him inside. Then to the next girl in line, “second chair go.”

We each stepped forward as trainee after trainee was ordered to one of the three chairs. I swallowed as I stepped up to the empty spot next to the door, where the constant hum drowned out the sound of Jones sniffling. I finally glanced inside, and saw that there was a reason, the instructor in room 6 hadn’t been at all concerned that I had accidently given myself a shorter patch.

“First chair go!” The instructor ordered me to the barber chair Kumar had just gotten up from looking even more shell shocked with her few centimeters of uneven tufts gone.

As much as I didn’t want to, I just followed orders and walked over to the barber chair and sat in it. The barber tossed a cape over me loosely, not bothering to fasten it. He placed the warm clippers that had never stopped humming in the center of my forehead, and pulled them back. The tufts of dark hair just a few centimeters long easily fell away, leaving behind nothing but dark stubble.

The barber worked quickly, simply moving my head around roughly as the clippers buzzed over my scalp. He barely slowed at all as he not too carefully steered the clippers around my ears. He pushed my head down, and held it there so my chin was pressed into my chest as he pushed the clippers up from my neck to the top of my head. He did an even quicker second pass, catching anything he’d missed the first time.

The short uneven haircut, I had given myself just moments earlier, was gone when the barber simply whipped the cape off me, spilling most of the hair on it to the floor where a herd of voracious vacuum robots drove about weaving in and out around the barbers’ feet, and just a bit of it on my sneakers and pants. I barely got to glance at my reflection, my scalp glaring through the maybe one millimeter of fuzz that was way too short to cover it.

I raised my hand, and touched sandpaper, just as an instructor barked at me “MOVE!”

Three weeks later I discovered the cost of my very first professionally done haircut was automatically taken out of my first paycheck.

————————————————–

*************ORDERS********************
—————————————————–

I spent four years doing shitty things to people, following orders I barely even thought about, and certainly never verbally questioned.

I dragged poor people proclaiming their innocence off to detention as a more senior officer explained that they had a right to pay for a speedy trial with a judge in private practice, but if they could not afford that, they would be placed on the waiting list for a free public trial. The senior officer went over what they would be charged for room and board while in detention, and options for paying it off. We ignored their questions about how long it would take, what would happen to their family, if they would lose their jobs.

I stood watching rich people agree to pay for a speedy trial, have that trial via tablet while we stood there, plead guilty, pay the fine, and have the entire thing take just minutes. It meant nothing to them, they casually broke laws because they could buy their way out of any consequences in just minutes.

At work, I wore a visored helmet that covered my face and nearly bald head as well as body armour. We were anonymous and silent, only senior officers having the authority to speak. At work unquestioning obedience was expected.

When not working, I covered my millimeter of stubble with a colorful fuzzy knit cap, not that it really fooled anyone. At school, I was expected to speak up and think and challenge things. I was told not to just trust the computers to do the math correctly. I was expected to actively participate in classroom conversations, when really I just wanted people to not notice me.

The contradiction felt like it might drive me crazy. I always sat at the back, and avoided socializing with other students.

At the end of the four years, EES offered me a raise and promotion if I would stay on. My contract finally up, I wanted to laugh and say “fuck you,” but I’d learned to never express any emotion, so I just said “I decline.”
——————————————————–

~~~~~~~~~~Part 2~~~~~~~~~~~~

************IT’S FREE**************
————————————————————–
I’d just sat through a rather ridiculous video about SPS’s grooming standards. Though I’d been growing out my hair since I had left EES, about two months of growing out the one millimeter haircut got me nowhere even close to crew standard maximum length, which was fifteen centimeters, but with a few stipulations like short bangs, only halfway down the neck , and generally not in ones eyes.

I sat back and observed as the new employees with long hair got scheduled for their free haircuts. It was obvious most of them were rather unhappy that the grooming standards hadn’t been explained to them a lot earlier in the hiring process, before they were fully committed.

My first instinct was to just roll my eyes at the complaining. Compared to the way I had found out about EES’s grooming standards, they’d gotten off incredibly easy. Plus, SPS’s grooming standards were nothing compared to EES’s. They could get their hair cut into any style they wanted as long as it wasn’t so long it would be in their faces, or could get caught in the helmet seal or pulled into rotating machinery.

I didn’t actually roll my eyes though, or comment. I tried to remember I’d left a better paying job with EES because I wanted to stop having to suppress any level of empathy or sympathy. Just because things were shittier at EES, didn’t mean that the new employees, who had just had the need to cut their hair off dropped with very little warning, weren’t allowed to be annoyed about it.

Once all the grumbling long haired new hires had been scheduled and left, I got up and started heading to the door.

“Want me to schedule you for a haircut too?” The HR guy asked. “It’s free.”

“I’ve been trying to grow it out,” I simply stated as I shrugged on my jacket.

“I can tell,” he said. “The knit cap doesn’t hide that you are trying to not look like you just left EES a couple of months ago.”

“Is it that obvious?” I grumbled.

“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious,” he informed me with a smirk. “I also remember suggesting you join EES four years ago. It’s not just the hair, a lot of people don’t even know that they shave your head when you join EES, but enough do that it’s an added clue. A haircut would help.”

“And how exactly would having it even shorter make it look less like I was bald two months ago?” I asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

“Not shorter, just get it shaped.” He suggested. “The free haircut is just at a regular barbershop, not like the ones at EES HQ where you get zero say, and then you pay for it. They’ll ask you what you want, and you can say ‘leave the length on the top and just clean up around the edges and give it a little shape.’ It will barely be shorter, but it won’t have that look, if you know what I mean. You’ll have an easier time fitting in with your new crew if they don’t clock you as former EES before they even get to know you. I’ll schedule you at a different time from everyone else.”

I stifled a sigh, reminded myself that I didn’t have to stifle every emotional reaction I had, and guessed that was probably one of the other tells, then thought to myself, what have I got to lose anyway? I only had a couple of centimeters of hair, losing it was just a couple of months growth. I let out the sigh I had stifled, and let him schedule me for a haircut.

—————————————————-

***********SILVER STILETTOS*************
————————————————–

I was walking towards the barbershop just a few minutes before my appointment, when I suddenly heard “Sunshine?”

I turned and looked, “Sally?!”

She had grown up. She’d grown her hair out into her natural tight coily curls that almost touched her shoulders, though she’d colored it a bright coral pink. She wore a dress that wasn’t completely obviously second hand, though it also was a little cheap looking. She wore a fair amount of makeup, and a few pieces of rather fake looking jewelry. On her feet were shiny silver stiletto heels, that seemed a bit much considering the time of day.

In some ways we’d swapped places fashion wise since the last time we’d seen each other. Last time she’d been the one with her hair hacked off short and wearing plain clothing. I wasn’t wearing gray sweats and the cheapest sneakers available, but my plain white t-shirt simple black work pants, practical work boots and navy blue jacket had a similar neutrality. The red knit cap and string bracelets were the only colorful things I wore.

“God, How’ve ya been?” she asked as she held arms open inviting me into a hug.

Four years earlier, going in for the hug would have felt completely natural, but having so recently left EES, I still felt a bit stiff and awkward. I forced myself to anyway.

“I’ve been ok,” I claimed, then told her, “you look good.”

“Thanks,” she said as she released me from the hug, as she did, she brushed her hand lightly over the very short hair that stuck out from the knit hat. “What’s with the hair? Did you just get out of detention?”

“Nah, nothin’ like that.” I tried to blow off the question. “What have you been up to?”

“Just work’n,” she brushed the question off in a similar way to the way I had.

I wanted to stay and really catch up, hear what was really going on with Sally. I had to get to the barber on time though, or I’d miss my free haircut.

“Listen,” I told her, “I have to get to an appointment, right now. Can we meet up in a couple of hours for lunch?”

“That’d be great,” Sally smiled.

Five minutes later, we’d agreed on a place and time, and I was back to walking towards the address the HR guy had given me.

—————————————

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” the barber told me, as she continued trimming the shoulder length hair of the guy sitting in her chair.

“Sure thing,” I said, as I stood comfortably next to the door.

The barber turned, gave me a weird look, then added, “there’s a waiting chair.”

“Thank you,” I said as I took it, remembering that was the normal thing to do.

I sat observing as she chatted in a friendly manner with the guy in her chair. It wasn’t long till she was holding up a mirror to show him the back, then taking the cape off him. When he got up, she quoted him a price that was five credits less than what I got taken out of my paycheck at EES for their barbers to just shave my head in under two minutes.

“Just let me clean up.” She said as she grabbed an old fashioned broom, and began to sweep.

Maybe it had been the flock of robot vacuums that made the barbers of room 4 so expensive, not the barbers themselves. I stifled the internal smirk I felt, and then once again tried to remember that I was allowed to feel shit again. I didn’t have to stifle every smirk, I could even laugh if I wanted to. Of course having to think all that killed the mood, and I didn’t feel like smirking any more as I watched the barber do her quick clean up.

“Hop into the chair officer,” she said patting the back rest when she’d finished cleaning up.

I was halfway to the chair when I realized, I had once again been easily identified as former EES. I just took off my knit cap though, and got settled into the seat. Part of me wanted to just slouch in a very unofficer like manner, but I just figured I wasn’t fooling anyone anyway, and it would just make the barber’s day harder, so I sat straight and stiffly upright, just like a would have for an EES barber.

“I see why that guy from SPS HR scheduled you alone instead of with everyone else,” the barber observed as she shook out a cape to toss over me. “Trying to help you look less like you got out of EES a couple of months ago?”

“There are other reasons people grow out a shaved head,” I pointed out, not sounding as annoyed about it as I felt.

“Oh sure,” the barber agreed as she fastened the cape around my neck. “But if you had your head shaved because you arrived from the colonies in a pod, you would probably not have a local Earth accent, and be a new hire at SPS. And the chance that you just got out of detention and got hired by SPS this quickly are pretty low too. I s’pose, ya’could’a just lost a bet, but come-on. Honestly though, the way you stand is a much bigger clue.”

“Hmmm” I grumbled, finally expressing an emotion. I knew I needed to work on the standing thing.

“Now what’s it going to be?” She asked when she’d finished smoothing out the cape.

“Leave the length on top, give it a little shape, and clean up around the edges.” I recited from memory.

“Sounds like a plan,” the barber chuckled as she picked up her comb and clippers.

I swallowed a little nervously, it had been a long time since I had actually had any hope I might look better after a haircut. I tried to keep my expectations realistic as the barber walked behind me. It wasn’t like she could give me more length than I had already grown, at least not in my budget.

The barber tilted my head down, not simply shoving it. I felt her place the comb against the back of my head, then she pushed the clippers only a few centimeters up into my hair, and used the comb to guide the clippers gradually off my scalp. The barber started working around the side. She was obviously putting some thought into the shape she was sculpting the hair into as I felt her angling as she worked up around my ear. Above and in front of the ear, she really only just barely took any length with the buzzing clippers, leaving my sideburns surprisingly untouched.

After she’d worked up and over both my ears, she turned off the clipper, and set them on the charger. Then she picked up a mister and started wetting the couple of centimeters of hair I had, the cold mist hitting my ears and neck just a little uncomfortably.

She picked up one of the smaller sets of scissors from the line of them them on the counter, and one of the long combs from under the sanitizer. She combed the short damp hair smooth and down against my neck.

She started by using the tips of the scissors to scribe a line along my neck. It felt like it was just slightly above the the natural neckline. She snipped around the back of my head. I ignored the slight pokes as she rounded the corner, and snipped an arch behind my ear.

Then she was at the front, she snipped the shapeless wispy sideburns into short points. She combed the hair along my temples forward onto my face, and snipped it into a clean, but very slightly arched line. I felt the backs of the cold metal blades pressed first into my cheek, then just next to my eye as she snipped.

As she started doing the same to the other side, I looked at the result in the mirror. It did look a little shorter, especially since the dampness made the scalp more visible, but it also was beginning to look more like a chosen style than just a grow out.

Once both sides of my head matched, she began to run the comb up the back of my head, snapping the metal scissor blades right up against the plastic comb.

Shnip, snip, snip, click, shnip, snip, click, snip.

I was mildly mesmerized as she worked, I’d never had my hair cut like this before. The barber ran the comb up and down my head, the blades of the scissors against the teeth of the comb making a regular clicking. Between the gentle scratching of the teeth of the comb against my scalp and the soft rhythmic sound, it was down right relaxing, especially with the possibility I would look better after it was done.

After a bit, she paused the rhythmic snapping. She put down the scissors she was using and picked up a different pair, the new ones had little teeth with gaps. She continued the combing up and snipping for a little while. She seemed to be going a little slower, and especially as she worked upward more. The sound was just a bit different, a little louder, a little more chompy.

I was fairly relaxed watching as my hair was gradually taking on a shape that seemed more deliberate, then the barber started combing up the hair on the top of my head and looked like she was planning to chomp it with the toothy shears. I was used to just sitting through a haircut and letting it happen even though I wasn’t exactly happy about it, but the HR guy had told me I could ask for what I wanted.

“I wanted to keep the length on top,” I reminded the barber.

“I was planning to just give it a little texture,” The barber explained, pausing. “I’ll go light on it. It should look the same length, but lay against the head a bit better. It’s up to you.”

I looked at the mirror at the hair that was just kind of there on top of my head. I really didn’t understand what she meant. Maybe it was stuff like this that I had never learned that was one of the reasons that back when I trimmed my own long hair, my hair never quite had the bounce and volume the girls who could pay for fancy salons did, not that this place counted as a fancy salon, but she was a trained professional.

“Ok, as long as it won’t really look shorter.” I swallowed down my apprehension.

I watched as she carefully chose where to take a single chomp with the shears, then combed out a sprinkle of short hairs. I watched carefully, feeling ridiculously nervous about it. Just a couple of months ago I’d sat in a barber chair as I had every couple of weeks for the previous four years and felt nothing as my hair was shaved down to stubble, now I was suddenly attached to every millimeter.

“There you go.” The barber said as she ruffled the short hair on top of my head, knocking out a few more loose hairs to fall on my face and shoulders.

The barber then used a hairdryer on me very briefly, since the short hair was mostly dry already, but it did clear away most of the hair clippings that were stuck to my face and neck.

With my hair dry, she picked up a smaller set of clippers, and turned them on. They gave off a higher pitched whinier hum than the regular sized clippers. She nudged my head down, and placed the bare blades against my neck and stroked downward. She used the tiny clippers to clean away any stray hairs all along my hairline, not just the neck, but also around my ears and sideburns, and even a little up along the front by my temples.

“There you go,” the barber announced as she began to dust me off with a fluffy brush, and unfasten the cape that had kept my clothing clean. “Basically the same length on the top, but with a better shape and clean edges.”

Then she held up a mirror behind me, so I could see the back. I tilted my head, right above my neck, it was back to the same length it had been when I was an EES officer, but that was really only at the bottom. The taper quickly reached long enough that my scalp didn’t glare through, then more gradually increased till it blended in with the top. Though my hair was definitely shorter than was fashionable, even for guys, it was an improvement on what I had come in with.

“It looks better,” I honestly praised it as I brushed my hand over the still shorter than I wanted hair.
—————————————
I entered the little diner at the agreed upon time and looked around. I spotted Sally sitting at a small table in a quiet corner away from the windows pretty quickly, she already had a drink in front of her. She waved at me to come over.

“Hey,” I said as I sat down. “You order yet?”

“Just my drink,”

Talking about what to order and then actually tapping the order into the screen next to the table fortunately ate up a decent amount of the awkwardness of where the hell do you start catching up with someone who you both care for deeply, but also drifted away from feeling.

“So, you said you’ve been working?” I tried to start the real conversation.

“Yeah,” Sally said like it was a confession, then it really was. “I do the oldest profession, it pays well enough, no educational requirements. And since my clients pay me under the table, they can’t take eighty percent of it to put towards mom’s depts from when she was in detention.”

“oh….” said out loud, while inside my head I was panicking and reminding myself that I didn’t have to arrest her, I didn’t have to drag her off to detention, it wasn’t my job anymore.

“How’s the family?” She asked me.

“They’re all good.” I said, trying not to sound evasive, trying not to admit that I had been feeling weird about seeing them since joining EES. “My parents still work for the same family. My sister got a job as a maid in the neighborhood too.”

“So,” she said, “why were you in detention?”

“I really wasn’t in detention.” I told her, chuckling slightly that that was her assumption, and shaking my head, and trying to act like I wasn’t hiding anything. In some ways the need to act, brought out a more emotional response than just feeling.

“Yeah right.” She challenged me. “The haircut makes it a little less obvious that your head was shaved a couple’a months ago, but I saw ya’ this morning.”

I looked to the side, too embarrassed to look her in the eye. “People get their heads shaved for other reasons than being in detention.”

“Like what?”

“I just had to for my old job,” I admitted, still looking away. Then I tried to steer it away from why I was growing my hair out from having my head shaved. “Actually, my new job requires keeping my hair short. I’m starting as a junior engineer with Stellar Path Shipping.”

“Junior engineer?” Sally wrinkled her brow at me slightly. “How’d you get to go to school for that?”

I looked to the side, and started fiddling with the salt shaker. “My old job just paid for it.”

“What kind of job pays tuition, and makes you get your head shaved?”

I kept looking away and shrugged. I couldn’t tell her, but I also couldn’t lie to her.

“Ya know how I know they shave heads in detention?” Sally asked me.

“Common knowledge,” I claimed, “And I guess you saw the cost of the haircuts on your mom’s itemized bill from when she was in detention…”

Sally started a story. “The woman who showed me the ropes when I left the home told me about it. She’d gotten arrested years earlier, and they’d shaved her head in detention. Ya know what else she told me? When they were arresting her, she put up a bit of a fight, and knocked the helmet off of the officer trying to cuff her. She said the officer’s head was shaved under the helmet.”

“Interesting,” I said as I continued to look away.

“I can’t believe you joined EES.” Sally looked at me with disgust.

“It was the only way I could get tuition,” I told her, wishing I could erase the past four years. “I quit as soon as my contract was up.”

“You sold out where you came from just so you could get a better paying job.” Her hurt and disappointment, clear in her voice.

“If I was just in it for the money, I’d have renewed the contract. Junior engineer at SPS pays less, I could have made more staying at EES. They offered me a raise and promotion.” I tried to explain, tried to excuse. “I turned it down.”

“They offered you a raise and promotion?” Sally sneered at me. “So you weren’t just an EES officer, you were a good EES officer.”

Sally got up and started walking away. I sat, feeling like shit, feeling like I deserved it.

—————————————————-

****************OFF EARTH************
————————————————-
My first ship assignment with SPS was insystem on the small Freighter Peter Cottontail. It seemed that it was pretty standard to keep new junior engineers and assistant pilots out of interstellar space for their first couple of loops. The chief engineer of the Peter Cottontail enjoyed reminding me and the other brand new junior engineer that it was so it was easy to drop us off back on Earth if we screwed up.

As much as I was looking forward to seeing interstellar space and the rest of the settled galaxy, seeing most of the Sol system first was really cool. It wasn’t like I could have afforded to get to Titan any other way. Heck, the day I showed up for my first ship assignment had been the very first time I’d taken the elevator up to the ring station.

After three loops around the solar system, I got assigned to my first interstellar route. It was a short one, with just four stops, the three closest colonies, then back to Earth/Sol. From the start, I’d been told not to get too settled in, that it wasn’t going to be a long term assignment. It wasn’t quite the same level of -we assign the newbees to this route so we can drop them off at Earth if they are screwups- as the insystem assignment had been, but a short loop was convenient when a crewman’s more permanent assignment was not open yet. So I did two short loops.

At the end of those two loops, I found myself sitting in HR at SPS HQ.

“Looks like I have an opening for a junior engineer with room for promotion on the Twister,” The guy from HR said.

“The Twister? Someone seriously named a freighter the Twister? Who names these things?”

“Fleet coordinators,” The HR guy said in a tone that just barely hinted that he didn’t think much of the names either, then he added in a tone that hid his contempt even less, “It’s under Captain Fischer.”

“What’s wrong with Captain Fischer?” I asked.

“Nothing is wrong with Captain Fischer,” HR guy claimed stiffly, though his tone gave away that his true feelings were being suppressed. “Captain Fischer just happens to be one of the youngest captains in the fleet and a college buddy of one of the fleet coordinators.”

“Ah,” I let out, suspecting what was left unsaid.

“Anyway, as I said, there’s room for promotion, you can go from being a junior engineer to a regular engineer in a couple of loops.” HR guy moved the conversation along. “Try not to get sloppy, and I’ll keep an eye out for openings on a different ship. Hopefully something will open up in a couple of loops if you want. Or I suppose if you have settled in, it can be your permanent assignment.”
————————————————-

***************MAKING FRIENDS*****************
————————————————–

At first, I just hung around with the other former EES officers on board. It seemed like there were always a few of us on crews. Joining EES wasn’t the only way to be able to pay for the education necessary to become a specialist, but it was a common enough way that generally a few of us had done it.

It was when I was up on the bridge to swap out a malfunctioning autopilot screen, that I started getting friendly with the pretty girl with the blonde bob that definitely stretched the limits of crew standard. She had bright blue eyes that sparkled and a smile so perfect orthodontics had almost certainly been involved. I noticed the smile, because she kept flashing it at me and flirting.

“Smith stop distracting the engineer,” the pilot complained as the pretty crewman chuckled. “I put you over there to keep an eye on our heading since the autopilot screen is down, not to make friends. What’s our heading?”

“Still accelerating in a straight line, through empty space.” Smith said in a mildly bored tone.

“Just because the chart says it’s empty doesn’t mean it actually is. Keep an eye on those numbers, and I expect a verbal heading update every three minutes. Just let me monitor to make sure the space in front of us is empty and don’t assume it is. Understood?”

“Yes pilot.” Smith said a little more seriously, then added softly to me, “Hey, I’ll be having dinner in the mess fifth shift, if you want to join me.”

“Sounds good,” I said and tried to concentrate on the job at hand, instead of the pretty smile.

——————————————-

***************LAKE HOUSE**************
————————————————-
“Some day, this is what I want,” the woman next to me said, “a house right on the water.”

“This place is amazing,” I said as we sat on the sandy beach outside the cabin Melissa Smith, one of the junior assistant pilots on the Twister, had rented for the thirty four hours we had off duty on the almost earth sized moon that orbited the huge gas giant that was slowly sinking below the horizon. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“I didn’t want to just come by myself,” Melissa said, “and you are very good company.”

“I’ve been enjoying your company too,” I said as I turned away from the setting planet and looked at the beautiful woman who I’d been eating most of my meals with for the last three weeks as we made our way through interstellar space. “It’s nice to have it all to myself for a change. Considering how big that ship is, you’d think it would be easier to find a little privacy.”

“Was there something you wanted to do that requires privacy?” Melissa asked coyly as she leaned in and parted her lips ever so slightly.

“This,” I said, and reached up to cup the back of her head, feeling the soft hair between my fingers, I slowly leaned in and gently kissed her pink lips.

Melissa returned the kiss, and reached up and stroked my arm.

We kissed and cuddled till the gas giant finally sunk below the horizon, leaving the sky streaked with just its rings. Then we went inside where we wouldn’t have to worry as much about sand getting in sensitive parts.

We started with the kind of long hot shower that ship life precluded. I enjoyed helping Melissa lather her back with the sweetly scented soap, using it as an excuse to run my hands from her toned shoulders down to her perfectly padded derriere. Melissa turned and explored my body with her hands.

After our shower, we dried each other off, enjoying more time to explore each other’s bodies. By the time we lay upon the bed, there was only our most private parts that we hadn’t become familiar with.

Melissa reached down, and began to gently explore the folds that hid my most sensitive parts, and I stroked and kissed her face. She slowly nudged me open, finding the inner lips I could tell were slick with anticipation.

Melissa stared deeply into my brown eyes with her icey blue ones as she stroked the wetness from my opening up to my swollen clit. She stroked me hard till I felt myself spasm with orgasm. She kept stroking me, bringing me to orgasm too many times to count. Melissa smiled like the devil, knowing what she’d done.

When I caught my breath, I turned the tables. I flipped Melissa onto her back. Melissa’s eyes sparkled as she looked up at me surrounded by a halo of blonde hair. I began by kissing her smiling face and burying my hands into the silky straight hair. Then I worked my way down slowly visiting all the landmarks along the way.

First getting to Melissa’s milky neck, I lingered long enough I knew there would be evidence of what we’d done on our little vacation. As I moved on to her toned shoulder, Melissa reached up, running her dirty fingers through my hair. Once the firm shoulders had been thoroughly kissed, I moved down to the not at all firm breasts. I lingered sucking in her small pink nipples, giving the second attention with my hand, as Melissa expressed her delight with soft moans. I kissed my way down her soft belly, pausing briefly and looking up at Melissa’s face when I reached the pale fine hair that provided the barest modesty.

Melissa looked down and smiled at me, silently giving me permission to cross that barrier to her most secret garden. I stroked down over her mons, and lightly pressed her open. I dived inside, licking and sucking and giving her pleasure. Melissa writhed and squealed with delight as I brought her to climax. I slowed, letting her come down from the climax for just a moment, then sucked hard again, returning her to the apex. I took her there over and over till she was obviously exhausted.

————————————————

*******************CHANGING PLANS*********************
———————————————-

We’d finally made it back to Earth, and I was waiting with Melissa for the elevator down to the surface, hoping we could get seats even though the station was rather crowded, when my watch pinged. I looked down at it, hoping that it was my parents telling me they could get more time off than I’d expected, and that they could come to dinner out with Melissa’s family later that evening, but it wasn’t.

**Hi, this is Mike from SPS HR. Would you like to schedule a meeting to look into transferring to another ship?**

I kind of did, but suspected it wouldn’t happen.

“Hey honey,” I said to Melissa, “I got a message from the HR guy. What do you think of getting on a new route?”

“I’m not in a rush to. There are still things I want to see on our current route. It’s not like I get enough time to thoroughly explore each system each time we stop. There’s lots of things I haven’t seen yet. Plus, isn’t it nice how chill Captain is?”

“I’m kind of used to more… structure…”

“You’ll get used to less structure,” Melissa insisted as the Elevator arrived and she led us to start lining up to board it, “and once you do, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.”

I had my doubts, but didn’t really want to argue the point, so I just decided to focus on other reasons to change routes. “I thought you wanted to see as much of the settled Galaxy as you could.”

“I know I said I want to get to do more than just one route before I’m ready to leave SPS and settle down somewhere to start a family, but I don’t want to be a total loop bunny. We were talking about switching routes as something we’d do eventually after we loop a couple of more times. Three contracts is plenty of time to do a few routes.”

I sighed, and breathed in Melissa’s scent. I wasn’t sure exactly when or why I had accepted Melissa’s three contract plan as my own, instead of just assuming I my career with SPS would last till I was forced to retire from some health condition or something. When Melissa had talked about her plans for after the three contracts though, I just found myself nodding along even though I’d never wanted to raise kids in a house on a lake before. Something about it being with Melissa suddenly made it sound really good.

“Ok honey.”

Once we were comfortably seated on the elevator and waiting for the other passengers to get settled, I opened messaging on my watch. I began to type in my response.

**Thanks, but I’m happy staying on my current route. Maybe next loop, if there’s an opening for an assistant pilot too.**

Melissa leaned into me as I put my arm around her shoulders, and rested my cheek against the top of her golden head. I breathed in smelling her clean scent. I really was just happy.
———————————————

************************LEAVING LACAILLE************************
————————————————-

“Don’t get cum in my hair,” Melissa warned me as I gently stroked the blonde hair that was definitely more than the fifteen centimeter limit of crew standard. “I don’t want to have to waste half my water credits washing it.”

“I’m using my clean hand,” I assured her. “You didn’t bother to get a haircut when we stopped at Lacaille”

There always had to be at least one crewman from either engineering or bridge staff aboard ship at all times, including while docked. It had been my turn when we got to Lacaille, so I’d been stuck on board, and couldn’t nag my always reluctant girlfriend into visiting a barber.

“Captain doesn’t care,” she dismissed my concern.

“Hmmm,” I let out with a sigh.

“I know you think he’s sloppy,” Melissa acknowledged, “but he’s the captain, and you my dear are just an engineer. Just barely an engineer, you were still a junior engineer three weeks ago.”

“Captain Fischer doesn’t have to deal with fixing the recycler because it’s got too much hair in it. I guess I don’t really have to either now that we have a new junior engineer.”

I tried to remember it wasn’t really my business if the captain didn’t care about crew not keeping strictly to crew standard. It didn’t really affect me personally, since when my hair had grown out, I’d just really liked it when it had reached about five centimeters on top, so I’d kept it that length, with a bit of a taper. Of course many on the crew were pretty happy the captain was easy going about it. It worried me though, I knew things like hull breaches were rare, and it wasn’t like Melissa was down in maintenance shafts next to gyroscopes and stuff, she was bridge crew, an assistant pilot.

“You don’t think a little extra maintenance is worth having a pretty girlfriend,” Melissa teased me.

She sat up in our bed, her pale naked body, only semi obscured by the sheet. Her simple bob with bangs hung between her jawline and shoulders. It was only a little over crew standard, I suspected that it wouldn’t really interfere with a helmet seal, since it wasn’t touching her shoulders or anything, even if it was maybe a smidge further down than the halfway point between her skull and shoulders. The bangs extended a little bit down past her eyebrows, obviously well beyond the centimeter above the eyebrows crew standard demanded, but it wasn’t actually in her eyes yet, and it was only three and a half weeks till our next stop where she could get them trimmed. The hair that hung down along the sides of her face definitely could be swept forward into her eyes, which violated crew standard, but I did think the no hair hair could even vaguely possibly get in the eyes rule was a bit over the top, really how often could that be an issue. The hair at the very top of her head was quite a bit more than fifteen centimeters, even when she had the bob freshly trimmed, it tended to be more than fifteen centimeters at the top since she rarely got it layered enough. It was long enough to get sucked into and wrapped around some of the spinning machinery, but they didn’t have that up on the bridge. Even though crew standard was as much about safety as maintenance, I was probably just being a worry-wart.

“You’d be just as pretty with a few centimeters less hair,” I assured her. “But if you feel prettier and the captain doesn’t mind, I will stop nagging.”

“I do feel prettier, and he doesn’t care.” She reiterated as she got up. “He might care if I’m late for my shift though, and pilot definitely will, so I need to get ready.”

Melissa gave me a tender kiss, and slipped out of the bed and sauntered off towards the head. I watched her slender form with her just slightly round tushy disappear through the door. As much as I was usually annoyed that Captain Fischer was a bit loose when it came to following regulations, it had been nice when he’d just kind of skipped over half the steps when Melissa and I had asked to be reassigned to the same cabin.

Maybe those years in EES had just made me a hard ass. I was years out, and still trying to drop a few of the lingering habits, like the way I still always spread my feet shoulder width apart when I stood. Maybe I just needed to remember that being written in the handbook wasn’t the same as written in stone. It was hard to not feel a little uncomfortable about Melissa taking safety regulations a bit casually though. Melissa’s safety was a very high priority for me.

—————————————————

******************JUST ANOTHER WORK SHIFT********************

—————————————————-
I smiled as Melissa walked in the hatch to engineering, where I was sitting at the workbench adjusting a gyroscope. It was a nice surprise.

“Hi’ya,” she said with a smile as she slid up next to me.

“I thought you were on duty,” I said, briefly abandoning my own responsibilities.

“I am,” she confirmed with just a hint of playfulness. “I’m here on business. Pilot says we keep going point zero three degrees off to starboard, he thinks the starboard engine might be the issue. He sent me down to as he put it, ‘make sure whoever’s down there gets off their ass and actually goes look.’ So, I need to see your keister climb up to the starboard engine.”

“Was it really Pilot, or did you just not get enough of my keister this morning?” I joked, but was also pulling up the maintenance log on the screen.

“It really was Pilot.”

“Log says Peeters, checked the starboard engine from down here first time he got a call from Pilot, checked all four engines from down here the second time, then went up there after the third call,” I said seeing the more senior engineer had been called about the same issue before my shift started. “I wish he’d mentioned it to me when I started my shift. He claimed everything was standard. Sure the issue isn’t gravitational?”

“Pilot is considering that too. He actually called down to navigation before he called Peeters, so I think he’s leaning towards it being gravitational, but it can be hard to tell. Navigation claims they have already checked the charts and there’s nothing that should be causing the issue.” Melissa told me, with a shrug. “Pilot sent Park down to navigation to make them recheck too. He told Park to tell them ‘stop looking at the fucking charts and do a scan.’ He wants to cover all the bases though.”

“I guess you get to enjoy a little on duty keister watching then,” I said as I got up and prepared to head up the maintenance shaft that led to the starboard engine. “I’ll go recheck starboard first since Pilot thinks it’s the issue. If I don’t find anything, I’ll go check the port, keel, and dorsal engines too.”

I gave Melissa a quick kiss as I put on my tool belt, before opening the hatch and beginning to climb up the shaft. I was about a meter up into it when I noticed Melissa was about to follow.

“You can’t come up here.” I told her. “You’re not authorized, I couldn’t even come up here unless there was a senior engineer with me for my first four months.”

“Pilot ordered me to watch.”

“Pilot doesn’t get to override engineering,” I told her.

“I’ll check with Captain.” She said before tapping her watch and speaking into it. “Smith here, Cap’n. Pilot ordered me to watch engineering check the starboard engine, but Reyes says I’m not authorized to enter the shaft.”

**Tell Reyes it’s fine, I authorize it.** The captain’s voice came through in a bored tone.

I sighed, a little frustrated since I really didn’t think Melissa belonged in the shaft, but it wasn’t like I could contradict the Captain.

“Be careful.” I grumbled as I continued climbing with Melissa following.

I was about three fourths of the way up the shaft, and Melissa was just about four meters below me when the low/high Gee alarm sounded. I had no way to get down to her in time as the direction of the artificial gravity suddenly shifted. Her hair getting caught up in one of the spinning gears probably would have just been a very painful injury except her head being suddenly jerked back pulled her away from the ladder rungs so her fingers couldn’t reach the handhold that might have saved her from falling when the gravity shifted.

What I saw and heard after that, would haunt me for the rest of my life.
—————————————

~~~~~~~~~~Part 3~~~~~~~~~~~~

*******************HOTEL****************
—————————————————

I was sitting in the bar of the hotel SPS had paid for me to stay at while I was on Earth.

The hotel was in the city closer to SPS HQ, since SPS HR wanted me available for the inquiry, than to where Melissa’s family lived, where the memorial had been, and where we had scattered her ashes. Though Melissa’s family weren’t rich like the people my parents worked for, they weren’t poor either, and the suburban garden where Melissa’s ashes were scattered had been beautiful. They’d offered to let me stay with them like I had whenever Melissa and I had been on Earth, but I couldn’t handle the idea of sleeping in the pink bedroom Melissa had grown up in. As we’d finished the loop after the accident, it had been hard enough returning to our little crew cabin. I might have been able to stay with my parents if their employers gave permission, but this way I didn’t have to ask.

My parents had been able to take turns visiting me in the city, which helped but still didn’t fill up as many empty hours as I needed. Seeing my parents right after seeing how devastated Melissa’s parents were did remind me there were reasons I couldn’t just take a handful of pills and join her, no matter how much that sounded like a good idea when I was alone.

It was the desire to not be alone that had me sitting in the bar. When the bartender came by and dropped off my rum and coke, I looked up. Across the bar, Sally was sitting and chatting with some guy. She was laughing, and looked like she was having a good time. Her long curly bright coral hair had been toned down to a more elegant lavender she wore in an elaborate updo, she wore a nicer newer looking dress and better jewelry.

When Sally spotted me, her laughing stopped, she met my gaze, and then her lips looked like they said “just give me a minute.” She patted the guy on his hand, and got up and started crossing the bar towards me. I was a bit surprised, she hadn’t just chosen to ignore me considering how we’d left things.

“Hey Sunshine,” Sally said, sitting in the seat next to me. “Listen, I’m sorry about how I acted last time. I should have been more understanding, we all do what we have to to get by.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking down into my drink more than at her. “I don’t blame you though, you were right.”

“No I wasn’t.” Sally insisted. “I think I may have been a little jealous since it wasn’t like I had that option. I also just felt a bit stupid and scared about having told you I was a prostitute, and it not occuring to me that I might be confessing to illegal activity to an Earth Enforcement Service officer.”

“I would never turn you in.” I assured her, though I honestly didn’t know what I would have done if I had ever just happened to have been assigned to take her in if she’d been detained.

“What’cha doin’ here on Earth?” Sally asked.

I took a deep breath, and tried to come up with a softer, gentler way to put it. There wasn’t one, so I just said, “My girlfriend died in a horrible accident. I had to take her ashes to her parents and SPS is holding inquiries.”

“Oh,”

We both sat there silent for a few moments as I sipped my rum and coke.

“Listen, this guy,” Sally gestured at the guy waiting for her to come back. “He’s cheap, he didn’t pay for the whole night, just for four hours, and he’s already wasted two telling me terrible jokes. I gotta add on fifteen minutes for coming over to talk to you, but we could meet back here in a couple of hours, after I’ve tucked him in for the night, and really talk. Ok?”

“I’d like that.” I told her, swallowing down tears.

Later that night when she was done working, she’d held me as I had finally let go and really cried. It was something I hadn’t been able to do for her when her mom died, at the time all we could do was lean together on the chain link fence and stick a couple of fingers through the openings.
—————————————————————–

**************INQUIRY*****************
———————————————————————–

The first part of the inquiry was pretty straight forward, the issue had indeed been gravitational, an uncharted rogue asteroid, which was why Pilot had to make an emergency course change. Melissa hadn’t been the only fatality, a crewman down in cargo had been crushed by cargo that was being rearranged when the high gee maneuver took place. There’d been several other injuries, most minor, but a few serious enough that the crewmen would be in hospitals regrowing limbs for months.

My part in the inquiry was fairly small, even though I was the main witness to what had happened to Melissa. The recording of the exchange between Melissa and the captain made it clear that I was following regulations and he had overridden me.

When the inquiry board asked if I thought I could have done anything differently. I said I should have questioned the captain’s orders. EES had put me in the habit of just doing what I was told no matter how much I knew it was wrong.

They’d asked Pilot the same question, and he said he should have been more clear when he sent Melissa down to engineering that watching from the bottom of the shaft would have been fine.

The inquiry found Captain Fischer at fault for both deaths. The one down in cargo was considered likely preventable if he hadn’t given permission to ignore the safety protocol that only allowed one container to be unsecured at a time during transit.

There was also a general agreement that if he’d generally run a tighter ship, the asteroid might have been discovered sooner, before pilot would have had to make the course correction quite so dramatically with so little time between sounding the alarm and starting the maneuver, and some of the other injuries could have been prevented too.

——————————————————-

I was just sitting on the edge of the fountain outside SPS HQ processing how I felt about everything, when I heard a voice. “Oh hey, Reyes.”

“Hi,” I said as I looked up and tried to remember who the guy who obviously felt like he knew me was.

It took a moment but I finally recognized him as the HR guy. The one who’d first convinced me to become an EES officer so I could go to school, and then scheduled me for a haircut, and had given me my first few ship assignments. I was pretty sure I saw him taking notes during the inquiry too.

“I was going to shoot you a message about scheduling a meeting with me tomorrow about what ship I would be assigning you to, but since you’re here might as well start if you aren’t in a rush.” He told me as he sat down next to me. “It’s a nicer place to talk than my office.”

“I have time,” I told him. “I didn’t realize I’d be reassigned.”

“I plan to get you on a different ship.” He confirmed. “That’s assuming you wouldn’t rather just finish your contract out here on Earth. We decided that we should offer you that option if you didn’t feel up for going again.”

“So I need to decide right away?” I asked.

“Do you need time?”

It was a good question. There were a bunch of reasons I should want to stay on Earth. I had family here. I could go back to EES and make a lot more money. I wouldn’t have to keep all my worldly possessions within a very tight mass limit. Heck, I could shower any time I wanted to. Most of all it was safe. There were plenty of good reasons to stay on Earth, and no good reason to want to go back out. Yet somehow, I just didn’t want to.

I shrugged, “I guess not really. I loved seeing the galaxy. I might as well continue, even if it’s going to feel a little weird without Melissa. It’s not like just existing here on Earth doesn’t also feel weird without Melissa.”

“I can arrange it so you have a little time here on Earth to grieve?”

“hmmm”

“We want to reassign and spread out the entire crew across the fleet,” he explained. “We figure that is the best way to deal with the culture of sloppy habits Captain Fischer allowed.”

“That seems like a good idea.”

“One of the side effects is that the crew will be leaving gradually as the ships they are assigned to stop by earth. So I can assign you to one that won’t arrive for a few months. It can give you a little time.”

“I kind of think I need to stay busy. I don’t want to just sit around thinking about it all the time.”

“Don’t worry, SPS doesn’t want to pay you to just sit around anymore than you want to sit around.” HR guy chuckled. “I would like to set you up with some training, pilot if you’re up for it.”

“I’m happy in engineering.”

“Having a few months of pilot training isn’t going to turn you into a pilot, it’s going to make you an engineer who is better at talking to the pilots and understanding them. You can move up in engineering without pilot training, but having pilot training can help you get into command.” He explained. “I reread my notes from your first interview, before you joined EES, you mentioned piloting too.”

“You reread your notes?” I felt my forehead wrinkle.

“You were willing to join EES to make getting into engineering happen, and happy to quit instead of taking the raise and promotion when you could. You obviously really do want more than just a ticket to a colony. Most people who SPS hires don’t want a career, they want a free ticket to a colony.” He explained. “It’s obvious you want a career. I figured keeping you is worth a little extra effort. So I went back and looked through your file to make sure the next ship I put you on is a better fit.”

“I’m worth extra effort?” That had not been something I expected to hear.

“I think so.” HR guy smiled at me. “I’ve mentioned joining EES for tuition to lots of interviewees who are fresh out of highschool and say they’re interested in a job that requires a more advanced degree. Many don’t bother and just become regular crew. Many of the ones who do join EES just turn down the offer of a position with us once they’ve put in four years with EES and realize that they can make a lot more money staying with EES, or getting another job on Earth now that they have more marketable degrees. The few who are like you, and willing to become EES officers and then don’t care about the money because they really did want to use the degree with SPS, are the ones who really want careers.”

“I guess that kind of makes sense.” I contemplated what he was saying. “Why do you suggest joining EES if it so rarely works for SPS?”

“I guess because it sort of worked out for me.”

“You were in EES?”

“Yeah, I hated it, but I got my degree.” He chuckled. “Of course then it turned out I can’t actually go into space. I’m allergic to some of the drugs for suspended animation, and you can’t go if there isn’t an option to be put in a pod in an emergency.”

“Sorry.”

“Eh, it’s fine.” He shrugged it off. “I get to see my wife and kid more than once a year this way. Talking about which, I need to head home. I’ll set up a meeting with you tomorrow, and we can see about getting you assigned to a ship that will arrive after you’ve had a chance to get a little more training in. Ok?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I kept sitting at the edge of the fountain watching the sunset, feeling a bit more settled with the decision to go back out. Melissa hadn’t been the first woman I had ever had real feelings for, but she was the only person I’d ever had strong enough feelings for to have considered wanting to settle down with. If I stayed here on Earth that would be settling down, and that just felt wrong without Melissa.

——————————————————-

*************************THE JOKER******************

——————————————————–
Being on a whole new route meant seeing new planets and stations. On the one hand, it meant that every stop wasn’t filled with memories of having been there with Melissa. On the other hand, I kept thinking how much I wanted to tell Melissa about the new exciting things I saw.

This planet was likely to be one of the ones I was going to really wish I could tell Melissa about. We were scheduled to be at the old well established mining colony for a few days, and even though the planet itself was a rocky vacuum like the moon, it had an extensive dome system, including a multi-dome zoo complex with several species that had gone extinct on earth. A couple of crewmen, Stein and Khalil, offered to show me around the planet.

Before we headed to the zoo though, we all were rather in need of haircuts. I was definitely in need of a haircut, though the back and sides were still within crew standard, my bangs were already below my eyebrows. Since I liked my hair longer on the top, and then tapered down, the bangs were pretty much always the reason I needed a haircut.

Unlike at more busy stops, there was no barbershop up on the space station that orbited the planet, ships just didn’t stop frequently enough to make opening one on the small station worth it, so even if I had decided I felt too guilty about going to the zoo without Melissa, I would have had to go down planet anyway. Then once we were down planet Stein informed me, they didn’t actually have any barbershops on planet either, which I found a bit doubtful.

“Really, they only have salons on this planet.” Stein swore. “Look around, we’re the only people with short hair.”

I had been noticing the locals were occasionally staring a bit, and there’d been a little kid who had asked their mom if we were off worlders, but I had assumed it was the ship coveralls that gave us away as they did on most planets. I looked around us, and Stein was right, absolutely none of the locals had hair shorter than a long bob, and most had it much longer. I thought for a moment I spotted an older man with short hair, but then he turned, and I could see the thin horse shoe of hair he had was just pulled back into a thin ponytail that hung a little past his shoulders. I was used to different colonies having different style trends, but this was particularly extreme.

“Yeah,” I acknowledged. “I see what’ya mean.”

“Have you ever been to a salon?” Stein asked with a hint of something that made me a little warry. She continued when I just gave her a slightly dirty look. “Don’t worry, it’s not that different. There are just a few things that are different. You need an appointment, but don’t worry I made us some from the shuttle. You kind of really have to push them to cut your hair as short as you want it, otherwise we’ll be there all day while they trim just a millimeter at a time.”

I looked back at Khalil who was walking a bit behind us to see if she was going to contradict anything Stein was telling me. She just smiled and nodded.

“Now the big difference isn’t because it’s a salon, it’s because this planet was settled really early, it was when a few places on Earth still used an old system of measurements called imperial.” Stein told me in a tone that made me slightly suspicious. “Distance is in yards, feet, inches, and fractions of inches, instead of kilometers, meters, centimeters, and millimeters.”

“Really?” I turned to Khalil.

“Yup,” Khalil confirmed, sounding completely confident and without the tone that was making me doubt Stein. “You have to do a little basic math. You can tell the stylist in centimeters, but they’ll be annoyed and drag out a calculator.”

“Ok, what’s the conversion formula?” I asked.

“There are about twenty centimeters in an inch, Not exactly of course, it’s nineteen point something, but twenty is close enough and the math is easier,” Stein explained to me, “Now the fractions of an inch they use are eighths though, instead of twentieths or tenths. That’s why they get annoyed about the math. You’re an engineer, you can do the math in your head, right?”

“Yeah sure,” I said with a bit of a snort, since it was stuff I’d learned in elementary school, and it wasn’t like I had to be perfectly exact. “I’ll estimate then just round off to eighths.”

“Great,” Stein said, then gestured towards a hatch that was strangely not surrounded by swirling red and white LEDs. “Here we are.”

I walked into the salon, at the front was a desk with a smiling receptionist. To the side was a rather comfortable waiting area. Towards the back, I could see stylists lightly trimming, coloring, or styling longhair.

“We have appointments.” Khalil said to the receptionist. “Reyes, Stein, and Khalil.”

“Yes,” The friendly receptionist confirmed, “Your stylists will just be a few minutes. I see none of you put in water credits, so I assume you don’t want color or wash’n style?”

“We all just need haircuts,” Khalil told the receptionist who gave her a kind of look that said she didn’t really agree, but was willing to just play along.

“Please make yourselves comfortable.” The receptionist suggested, with a gesture to the rather cozy looking waiting area.

While Stein and Khalil both settled into seats that gave a good view of the salon, I decided I would rather sound like an idiot to the receptionist than to the stylist. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Stein was trying to pull something, convincing me to talk to the stylist in gibberish was exactly the kind of joke she loved.

I leaned down and asked, “Do you guys use centimeters or fractions of inches?”

“We use inches and fractions of inches,” the receptionist told me.

“And there are multiple centimeters in an inch? They aren’t just different names for the same length?”

“Yeah, there are multiple centimeters in an inch. I don’t remember the exact number. I can pull up a calculator.”

“Thank you, but no need, I can do the math in my head,” I said, and went to go sit across from Stein who was giving me a told-you-so look.

“Reyes?” a guy behind me asked.

“That’s me,” I said and got up.

As I followed the stylist, who introduced himself as Paul, to the back, I found myself amused by the level of chatting. Never once had a barber bothered to tell me their name, or wanted to know my first name.

“So Maria,” Paul asked, using the name I hadn’t heard in quite a while, as he fluffed my hair with his fingers, “I assume we need to bring this back into crew standard. though you seem to only be over crew standard right here in front.”

“I like the shape better with the back and sides shorter than the top,” I told him.

“So you want me to take off just enough from the top to get the front into crew standard, but a little shorter on the sides?”

I almost responded with what I usually said, which was that I wanted it just a little shorter than crew standard, so it would last a couple of stops, but then I remembered what Stein had said about it taking forever while they trimmed millimeter by millimeter, and decided to leave out the word “little.”

“I want it shorter than crew standard,” I stated firmly. “Take it down to” I paused and did a little quick math converting five centimeters into the unfamiliar units of measure, “two eighths of an inch on top, and then tapered along the back and sides.”

“Two eighths?!” The stylist questioned with a raised eyebrow. “So you want me to take most of the length? You want it much shorter, so you won’t need a trim for several stops?”

Paul looked very unsure, making me double check my math. “Most” seemed like a rather dramatic way to put asking for what was not quite half the length off, but considering what Stein had said I had kind of expected push back. The math mathed, 5/20=¼=2/8, it didn’t even require rounding up or down beyond rounding from nineteen point something to twenty.

“Yeah,” I said with a nod.

“Ok,” he said just a little hesitantly. “How do you want your neckline?”

“Rounded.” I told Paul as he took a cape from the pile and shook it out.

“So Maria, what do you do on the ship?” Paul asked me.

Paul and I chatted in a friendly manner as he got me ready for my haircut, putting the cape on me, encouraging me to sit nice and straight. Then he got out his clippers that had been tucked away in a drawer. They weren’t the digital clippers that were more common in barbershops across the settled galaxy, but the kind that still used a guard over the blades to adjust cutting length, which was something I had only encountered on colonies best described as backwater.

Paul stood behind me, still just chatting, telling me a bit about the zoo, and combing down the hair on the back of my head. He turned on the clippers, and I felt him place the vibrating device against my neck. It seemed like he was starting with the taper, which wasn’t unusual. I started tilting my head down, the way I usually did when barbers worked on the taper, but Paul put two fingers from the hand holding the comb on my forehead, keeping me from bending too far down, which was a bit unusual, but I was kind of used to every planet having trained their barbers slightly differently. Plus Paul was a stylist, so I expected things to be different.

I didn’t think anything of it as I felt the vibrating clippers travel up the back of my head as Paul chatted. I began to feel mildly nervous, when the clippers kept going over the swirl on my crown. Then completely confused as the clipper kept going forward over my crown, especially since Paul was pushing my head up. And finally utter panic as eight centimeter long locks fell into my lap.

“What the hell?!” I said as I looked up at the mirror and saw the strip Paul had buzzed down to less than a centimeter reached my forehead. “I asked for five centimeters.”

“You asked for two eighths of an inch!” Paul looked at me with confusion.

Then we heard it, the boisterous laughter coming from the waiting area. Both Paul and I turned and glared at Stein and Khalil, who were laughing hard and leaning against each other. I’d been right to think they’d set me up, I must have asked the receptionist the wrong questions.

“They told me there were twenty centimeters in an inch,” I informed Paul as I turned back to the mirror and brushed my hand over the hair right above my forehead that was less than a centimeter.

Paul pulled out a device, and tapped its screen for a moment looking down at it.

“There are just a little over two and a half centimeters per inch,” Paul told me, giving the laughing women another dirty look. “You wanted something around two inches. Two eighths of an inch is six millimeters. What do you want me to do?”

“Just finish it,” I told him, more angry about having been made to look like a fool than about the actual haircut. “I’ve had it shorter.”

“You’ve had it shorter?!” Paul asked with an edge of disbelief.

As Paul started to cut my hair almost, but not quite as short as it had been years earlier, I told him the story.

Though I’d had clippers run over my whole head every couple of weeks when I had been an EES officer, it felt very different here at the salon. Paul was very gentle as he guided my head around, listening to my stories. He asked prompting questions, and helped me relax.

I watched in the mirror as Paul repeatedly pushed the clippers up and over my head, letting the hair tumble to my lap. He was particularly gentle as he buzzed the hair around my ears, not folding them the way barbers often did. It actually felt kind of good as the vibrating machine combed through the short hair. Something about the way there is so little muscle and fat between the surface and the bone makes the scalp particularly sensitive to vibration.

When Paul had finished buzzing all my hair to a uniform six millimeters, he switched the guard on the clippers to an only slightly shorter one, and started tapering the sides only very slightly. I appreciated that he was giving it some shape without taking away too much more of the already too short length.

He switched to scissors, but instead of snapping them quickly against the comb while holding the blades flat, like barbers usually did, he snipped with them slowly and deliberately. I watched patiently in the mirror as the little snips had a rather negligible effect on my appearance. The sideburns were maybe just a tad softer looking, and the hair at the front just a bit more textured. Finally, Paul went along with the edger and cleaned the hairline slightly.

“I am so sorry about the misunderstanding,” Paul said as he held the mirror up behind my head to show me the back.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” I assured him as I rubbed my hand over the velvety crop. “It wasn’t your fault and it doesn’t look terrible even if it is a bit more extreme than I wanted. It’s not like it’ll stand out that much aboard ship, plenty of crewmen just get their hair cut super short so they can put off getting haircuts for as many stops as possible.”

“Thank you for not blaming me.” Paul put away the mirror. “I’ll talk to the receptionist about not charging you, since this isn’t the haircut you actually wanted.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “It is technically what I asked for, I just didn’t know what I was asking for.”

Though I was willing to pay for the haircut since it wasn’t Paul’s fault, Stein and Khalil had all the exchange cards. They’d insist on not waiting for me to go get a few because they wanted to get going, saying I could just add anything I wanted to pay for onto one of their cards. So I couldn’t pay till either Stein or Khalil were ready to pay.

I went and sat back down in the waiting area. Stein and Khalil were both off getting their haircuts, so I picked up one of the tablets and started looking at the offering of unfamiliar games and media available on it. I still hadn’t figured out what I might want to do, when I heard Khalil come back with her hair trimmed just a little shorter than crew standard.

“Did you know what Stein was planning?” I asked her a little grumpily.

“I told her I wouldn’t lie to you, but I wouldn’t spoil it if she pulled it off without me.” Khalil admitted. “I figured you wouldn’t really care. She promised me she’d pay for your haircut. Besides, you look cute enough.”

“Hmmm,” I grumbled, still a little annoyed about it anyway.
—————————————————————

“Hey Reyes,” Captain Suoza said as she came into engineering.

“Hi,” I said, just a little surprised that she was stopping by and assuming it was because something was broken, though wondering why she didn’t go through the chief engineer like usual.

“That’s a rather severe haircut,” Souza pointed out as she took a seat and acted like she was planning for this to be a longer conversation, “a lot shorter than you usually keep it.”

“The stylist and I had a miscommunication,” I said, trying not to sound as grumpy about it as I felt.

“Was the miscommunication caused by someone deliberately giving you the wrong information? Did the crewmen you went down planet with set up the appointment for you?”

I sighed, I hadn’t planned to say anything and get Stein and Khalil in trouble, but I wasn’t going to lie to the captain. “It was a prank. Stein told me there were twenty centimeters in an inch and Khalil didn’t contradict her.”

“Do you want to file a complaint about being hazed?” Souza asked.

“I don’t really want to, but I know that ship’s discipline is important. I’ve seen what happens on ships that have captains that let things slide and let crewmen ignore the rules. So I will.”

“Reyes, I’m asking if you want to.” Souza emphasized. “I’m here because I want to make sure you don’t feel bullied.”

“Stein paid for my haircut plus my admission to the zoo,” I told the captain. “Khalil paid for my lunch. We had a great time down planet. Aside from the prank they were just nice. It’s not like they ditched me after the salon or anything. And it’s not like Stein singled me out, she pranks everyone.”

“Mmmmh.” Souza half grumbled, making obvious she was familiar with Stein’s pranks and not a fan.

I paused and took a deep breath as I tried to get to the part that felt harder to explain. “The prank kind of made me feel a bit more like just one of the crew for a change. Not the person with the tragic history, not the person that has to be tiptoed on eggshells around. I didn’t exactly enjoy the prank, but it kind of felt good to not have them treat me differently than they would have someone else who they thought they could pull it off on and who wouldn’t freak out. I even wonder if you would have thought you needed to come and talk to me about this if I wasn’t the crewman who watched their girlfriend ripped to shreds.”

“I wouldn’t ignore bullying or hazing of any crewman.” Souza claimed, though I wondered if she just would have been less likely to notice if it had happened to another crewman she didn’t feel she needed to keep an eye on. “So you don’t want to file a complaint?”

“As I said, I don’t really want to, but I get why you might not be comfortable just letting it slide. I’m sure there are crewmen who would have felt a lot more hurt by the prank.” I said. “I know a lot of people care more about their hair than I do.”

“Did you get the feeling they took that into account when they decided they could pull the prank on you?” Souza asked me. “Did they know you didn’t care that much about your hair?”

“Part of the reason Stein, Khalil, and I all get along and like hanging out together is that all three of us joined EES to get tuition. We understand each other.” I explained to her. “We all spent four years with shaved heads. I don’t think they would have done it if they didn’t know that about me. Or at least Khalil would have stopped Stein.”

“I don’t need you to make a formal complaint to not let things slide,” Souza assured me. “Heck, Stein and Khalil don’t even need to know you confirmed my suspicion and told me who did it. If they just believe I figured out all the details myself, it ups my reputation as the captain with eyes on the back of my head. I can just do a little unofficial making them fear what will happen if they ever pull a similar prank again on someone who isn’t as good a sport about it. I don’t have to dole out official punishments, I can just very strongly recommend that they volunteer for some of the worst jobs aboard ship. Ok?”

“Thank you.”

——————————————————–

*******************HOME**********************

———————————————————-

I was glad my hair had made it back to a halfway decent length by the time we made it back to Earth, and I had a whole week off to visit my family. The hair had even grown out enough that I’d needed a haircut to keep it in crew standard during the months it had taken to get back to Earth.

My mom had cried the first time she’d seen me with my head shaved after I’d joined EES. It hadn’t been the main reason I had avoided visiting home when I’d been in EES, I’d mostly just felt out of place and really didn’t want to talk about what I was doing day after day. The bald head was just a physical reminder of it. She wasn’t as obviously upset about the pixie cut, but I also knew she didn’t love it, so I was glad that the crewcut was grown out by the time I quietly went around to the back of the sprawling estate to the service entrance.

“Maria!” My mother smiled in delight as she looked up from the vacuum bot that lay in parts across the workbench near the service entrance.

“Hi mom,” I said as I allowed her to wrap her arms around me.

“I asked permission for you to stay with us,” mom said as she gently stroked the hair I knew she was thinking was too short on the back of my head, “they said it was fine as long as you don’t mind working one night. The family is having a big party in a couple of nights and if you work it, they don’t have to hire as many servers from the agency. Do you want to, or is SPS putting you up in a hotel?”

“No hotel this time,” I told her. “That was just because I was technically working last time I was on Earth. The inquiry and pilot training counted as work, this time I’m just on leave. If I want a hotel room, I have to pay for it. I can handle working.”

“Wonderful. It will be nice having you home.” Mom finally released me. “Go put your stuff up in the apartment, then say ‘hi’ to your dad. He’s out in the orchard with the pruning drone, so should be pretty easy to find. I need to get back to this damned bot, I swear, it would probably be faster to just vacuum things like they did in the old days than it is trying to keep these damned bots going.”

“How about after I say hi to dad, I come back and take a look at it,” I offered mom.

“Are you sure you can handle it honey, they are awfully complicated,” mom frowned down at the disassembled robot.

“I’m sure it’s much more complicated than an interstellar freighter,” I pointed out with sarcasm, “but I think I can manage.”

“Sorry honey,” mom chuckled at herself. “Sometimes I forget you’re not a little girl anymore. I’ll go deal with the laundry and if you get to the bot before I get a chance to finish fixing it, I will appreciate it.”

I headed off to the apartment above the garage as I’d been told. I walked into the main room that served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, then through my parents bedroom, and into the tiny room I had shared with my sister as a child.

As children, we’d just accepted that the tiny room was a bedroom. We hadn’t questioned that you had to walk through our parents bedroom to get to it; we hadn’t questioned its lack of a window; we hadn’t questioned why there was a shelf just a half meter or so below the ceiling with a rod that hung below it. It wasn’t till as a teen I’d started making a little money cleaning houses that didn’t have full-time live-in servants after school that I realized, the tiny bedroom that just had space for a pair of cots, was actually a walk-in closet.

I put my small bag with the small amount of clothes and a few basics up on the shelf on what had been my side of the bedroom/closet. Then I headed back out to find dad.

Mom had been right that it would be fairly easy to find dad. I just looked out above the small grove of fruit trees and spotted the pruning drone hovering before going down to remove a branch, then rising up again into the air. I simply headed towards the drone, knowing dad would be following it so he could see what branch he wanted to direct it to prune next.

“HEY DAD!” I called out above the buzzing howl of the saw blade cutting through wood once I spotted dad, waiting below the tree for the branch to fall so he could collect it.

“HEY BABY GIRL!” dad called back then returned his attention to the tree just in time to watch the branch begin to fall as the saw completed the cut. Dad sent the drone up to hover above the trees as he walked towards me and gave me a hug. “It’s so good to have you home.”

We chatted, catching up on what was going on as I helped him gather fallen branches into the wheelbarrow that was following us around. When the wheelbarrow was full, and dad sent it back to its shed, I headed back to the house where the vacuum bot was waiting.

“Thank you Maria,” mom said as she came up behind me while I tightened the last screw, she put her hand on my shoulder, bent forward, and gave me a kiss on my cheek. When she stood back up, she ruffled the hair on the top of my head slightly. “It seems shorter?”

“It’s the same,” I assured her. “Five centimeters.”

“You had such beautiful hair before you joined EES.” Mom lamented as she gently stroked my head.

“So it’s ugly now?” I challenged her.

“No sweetie,” mom assured me, and stopped petting, moving her hand to my shoulder where she just let it rest. “Mother’s just never like it when their babies change.”

“Sorry I grew up,” I chuckled.

“Andrea and Steve are coming over tonight with the baby,” Mom told me.

“I’m very excited to meet my nephew,” I assured her as I looked up to the smiling face that was slightly more wrinkled than I’d remembered from my last visit. “The robot’s done. Is there anything else I can help with?”

“You don’t work here,” Mom reminded me. “Well, except the night of the party.”

“I know, but I was thinking of it as helping you out, not them.” I said as I got up from the table. “Hey, how about I go make dinner. That’s for us, not the family. I could clean up the apartment too.”

“Ok, sweety, you can go make dinner while I finish up here.” Mom agreed. “Don’t bother cleaning though, it’s haircut night, so we’ll have to clean up after anyway.”

“Ok, mom.”

I headed back to the apartment, thinking about what I could make for dinner, and remembering family haircut nights.

Mom had always started just by trimming a bit off the bottom of dad’s shoulder length hair. He never bothered to change the style when it had gone out of fashion, I suspected mostly because the simple haircut was something mom found easy, then eventually it had come back into fashion anyway. After dad’s haircut, she would check the end’s of my sister’s long hair and mine for split ends, and either declare us good and start cleaning up, or decide we should get trims too. Then we would stand on top of a stool as she trimmed a tiny dusting off the ends. If she’d trimmed ours, she made dad trim the ends of hers too, fussing the entire time to not cut too much.

Then when I was a teen, I’d wanted layers, and mom said she didn’t know how. So I had looked up a video with instructions. The first couple of times I’d taken the scissors to the bathroom mirror after mom was done, she’d warned me to be very careful, and hovered nervously the whole time. She’d told me if I messed up, she’d have to cut my hair like dad’s to fix it, and was I really sure I wanted to risk that for layers? It had gone fine though.

After a few times of my giving myself layers going fine, Andrea had requested I give her layers too. Then a few times after that, I’d ended up taking over trimming mom’s hair instead of dad doing it.

And then….sigh….and then I’d gone off to EES and had to hack off all my hair then the barbers had shaved what little was left off. I often wondered if EES making us hack off our own hair first really was to save the barbers time, or if the real reason was to start us getting used to following crappy orders or something like that. I’d wondered if the reason they shaved our heads was to make us self conscious so we socialized less with people who weren’t in EES. I wondered if they wanted us to forget that we cared about people just like the ones we dragged off to detention.

——————————————————-

When Andrea and Steve showed up at the little apartment with the tiny infant, mom and dad called it a day, put away all their tools, and came to have a family dinner. Family dinner was a festive occasion, like it usually was.

Squeezing around the little table was a little hard. When we’d first moved into the apartment when mom and dad got hired as the grounds and house keepers, the round table was plenty for just two adults and two little kids. As Andrea and I grew up, it had been fine. When Andrea started bringing home Steve, was when the table had started to feel a bit crowded and elbow bumping had started. The night I had brought Melissa and Andrea had brought Steve, Melissa and I had simply shared a plate because there wasn’t room for six plates. Though there were six of us around the table once again, since my tiny new nephew didn’t need a plate, we managed without any sharing.

When dinner was done, and haircut time arrived, I was tasked with holding my nephew, since we were both deemed as having too little hair to cut.

Dad was up first. I watched as mom cut the hair to the same length just a bit above his shoulders she’d been cutting it too for as long as I could remember. The only change was that his hair line had been gradually receding ever so slightly as the years went by, and the blue black hair had more and more white strands scattered throughout it.

Next up was Steve, though he was decades younger than dad, the hair line of his light brown hair was already further back than dads, plus there was a bald spot beginning on his crown too. Mom gave him the same just above the shoulders trim she’d given dad. I wonder if shoulder length hair for men went out of style again, if Steve would start going to a professional, and get something that fit whatever the next fashion would be, or if he, like dad, would just let mom keep giving him the same haircut since it was free.

Then it was Andrea’s turn. Steve was getting up and dusting himself off before putting his shirt back on, as Andrea stripped down to just her bra. I was confused about why Andrea was taking off her shirt like Steve and dad had, since the ends of her hair were well below the bottom of her shirt last time I’d seen her.

“I don’t just want a trim mom,” Andrea announced as she let down the hair that was the same chocolatey brown as our mother’s had been till it had started going gray and reached past her pants waistband. “The baby is constantly tugging it, and I’m too tired between taking care of the baby and working to deal with it. I just want it short.”

“What? No Andrea, your hair’s so pretty.” Mom complained. “Babies outgrow the hair pulling stage in just a year or so.”

“I’m tired mom, and it hurts.” Adrea complained. “I can grow my hair back when he outgrows tugging on it.”

“Steve, tell her how pretty her hair is,” mom appealed to Andrea’s husband.

“As pretty as she is with long hair, I’m sure she will be just as pretty with short hair,” Steve said diplomatically. “I want her to be happy.”

“I can’t,” mom claimed. “Even if I thought it was a good idea, I don’t cut short hair, it’s more complicated.”

“You can give me a simple bob a bit shorter than Steve and dad. That should be pretty easy. It doesn’t have to be a pixie like Maria’s.” Andrea negotiated with our frowning mother.

“I can’t. I just can’t,” mom stated and started putting things away, obviously deciding that since Andrey didn’t want her usual trim, that haircut night was over.

“Maria,” Andrea turned to me. “You can do it, right? You could even layer it a bit like when we were teenagers.”

“I haven’t cut hair in years,” I pointed out as Steve came over to take his sleeping baby from me, I assume because he figured Andrea was going to get her way and I was going to need my hands free.

“If you mess up, mom can fix it.” Andrea pointed out. “If you mess up really badly, I can just wear a hat like you did when your head was shaved.”

“You sure?” I asked nervously.

“Very.” Andrea claimed, “I’d rather have it a short mess than keep it long with random bald spots from having it tugged out.”

I looked at mom, who had paused putting away the tools, and was looking at them reluctantly. I suspect trying to decide if she wanted to tell Andrea and I we couldn’t use them. She let out a sigh, put the comb she’d been about to put in the case back, down, put the case with the rest of the tools down next to it, and stepped away from the chair she’d been using.

“Be careful,” mom warned us.

Andrea sat down in the chair, and started pulling the towel up around her bare shoulders.

“Exactly how short do you want it?” I asked Andrea.

“Give me the shortest bob you can without clippers and stuff.” Andrea said. “And if you think you can manage to layer the front so it’s more out of my face, that would be nice.”

“You’re sure?” I checked again, as I contemplated the long hair that hung over the towel on my sister’s shoulders.

“Completely.”

“Ok,” I sighed.

I gathered my resolve as I gathered up Andrea’s long hair into a bundle. I didn’t bother to comb it yet, figuring it would be easier after I had cut off the bulk. I held the slightly wavy tresses in a loose ponytail just about at shoulder length, and grabbed the scissors. I opened the blades, and placed them around the bundle just above my hand.

Shhhhhhrunch-runch-runch.

I began closing the blades, sawing through the thick ponytail. I took my time as the blades though they were sharp, struggled against the locks. Shortened strands had begun to fall away from my hand though.

Sssshhhrunch-runch-runch, Shhhhrunch-runch-runch, shhhnap.

Almost all of Andrea’s hair was shoulder length, like dad’s and Steve’s, just a bit messier. I snapped at a few bits that still connected the bundle of hair in my hand to Andrea’s head.

Snap, snap, snap.

I dropped the bulk of my sister’s hair to the floor. I’d barely begun a couple of minutes ago, and my sister had the shortest haircut she’d ever gotten.

“You still want it shorter, right?” I checked, since just neatening up the ends was an option if this was what she meant.

“Yeah, take it a few centimeters shorter if you can.” Andrea requested.

I gave her hair a quick combing, and smoothed it down around her. I decided to start at the back, combing the hair down and using the comb to hold it down against the nape of her neck. I began to carefully snip along the bottom of the comb, using it both to hold the hair in place and as a straight edge.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

The line I cut left the ends of Andrea’s hair just grazing her hairline at her neck. As I pulled the comb away, the hair sprung up just slightly, revealing the M shaped hairline underneath.

“Oh that’s too short!” Mom fretted.

“It’s fine mom.” Andrea insisted.

I just ignored the exchange as I moved a little more to the side of Andrea’s head and I lined up the comb to the short hair in the back, making sure I combed a little of the short hair down with the longer hair, so that I was lining up to the length I had cut at, and not the length it had sprung up to.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

The line the hair ended at brushed just at the very bottom of Andrea’s earlobe. The earlobe actually provided a rather handy landmark for making the other side match. Lining up the comb between the cut lin in the back and the bottom of the earlobe.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

When I extended the line forward, I realised the hair in the front would be a bit shorter than I had expected. I’d thought it would be brushing Andrea’s jaw line in the front, but I guess all the bobs I’d seen where they were at about the hair line in the back and below the jaw in the front, must have been angled. I felt that trying to angle downward at this point from Andrea’s earlobe would be awkward. Beside she said she wanted the front layered, so I figured she was ok with it pretty short in front. ANd she could feel what I was doing, if she felt it was too short she could object.

I lined the comb up, extending the line forward across Andrea’s face to line up with her lips. Andrea just sat straight, looking reasonably calm, not objecting.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

Mom continued to complain that it was way too short as I made sure both sides were the same length, and Andrea told her it was fine. When I had the front all even at a length that brushed across Andrea’s cheeks, I decided I needed to clean up the back, where hair stuck out from under the line I had cut off most of the length at.

“Tilt you head forward,” I told Andrea.

I combed up the sparse hairs along Andrea’s neckline, leaving the comb in the hair resting against Andrea’s neck and began to cut right against the teeth of the comb. I figured it was the closest I could get since I didn’t have the clippers that would have made more sense to use.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

Thinking about how clippers would be better as I snipped away everything that stuck out under Andrea’s bob, reminded me of how Melissa had always cringed as the barbers ran the clippers up her neck, and even sometimes over her nape.

Andrea wasn’t complaining as I snipped the hair on her neck off to the thickness of the teeth of the comb. I wasn’t sure if that was because she was happy with that length or if it was because she didn’t realize how short I was cutting it.

Once all the hair on Andrea’s neck was reduced to just a couple of milimeters, I got her to look up, so I could make sure nothing suck out from under the length I had cut most of the hair to. There was just a tiny bit that did when I combed down, so I snipped it carefully away.

Snip, shnip, shnip, snip, snip.

It was finally time to add the layering. I combed the hair from the top of her head, and a bit from the sides up and forward, gathering it into a bit of a mini ponytail just above her forehead. Then I lifted it till a few strands began to pull out of it, falling back down the the sides of Andrea’s head. I snipped off the ends that stuck out above that point, letting the dark brown snippets fall in front of Andrea’s face.

I combed Andrea’s layered bob down.

“Go look in the mirror,” I told her, then asked. “Is that good or do you want me to layer it more?”

Andrea, stood in front of the bathroom mirror, playing with the short hair, contemplating. “It’s good, let’s not risk going overboard. It feels so light and cool. And it’s so easy to run my fingers through. What do you think, Steve?”

“It’s very cute,” Steve reassured her, and gave her a tender kiss.

When I helped mom clean up all the hair, she muttered sadly about what a waste it was to just throw away such pretty hair.

——————————————————

“I thought you and Sally would stay out later,” Mom said as she sat down next to me where I leaned against the shed watching the sunset over the orchard.

“Sally has a client scheduled tonight, so we could only hang out for a bit.” I told my mom.

“You could have stayed out.” Mom took on an encouraging tone. “Do you have friends from your ship you could have hung out with?”

“I’m changing routes,” I explained. “That’s why I’m here for a whole week. I said goodbye to my crew friends already, and they left yesterday.”

“Are you upset about being reassigned?” Mom took on a mildly concerned tone. “I know you’d made close friends, you talked about them.”

“I requested it. I can still keep in touch with those friends while going somewhere new and different and seeing new places.” I told her, trying to avoid giving her a real reason why, a reason I could feel but not quite put words to, a reason I knew would concern her even more.

“Maybe you could go out somewhere you might meet someone,” she cautiously suggested.

“I’m not ready.” I just said.

“Ok,” mom accepted, and put an arm around me, letting me lean into her comfort. “Going out and having a little fun doesn’t mean that you have to look for a serious long term relationship. You can just go out and have a little fun.”

“I’ll try to get out more when I start my next loop,” I promised my mom.

We sat like that for a while, just watching the sunset, till I remembered something else I needed o talk about. “Oh, by the way, can you get Sally on the server schedule for the party? It helps her if she can report occasional legal employment.”

Mom sighed deeply. “Sorry honey. The Petrovs will be there.”

“Do you think they’d even recognize Sally?” I asked. “She was still a little girl when Mrs Petrov accused Sally’s mom of stealing. I know Sally would just keep her mouth shut.”

“They’d recognize her,” mom said confidently with a nod. “I’ll keep my eye out for any work I think I can get Sally, that avoids the Petrovs and doesn’t require a high school diploma and background check. Not a whole lot like that comes up, she’ll be at the top of my list when it does though. Ok?”

“Thanks mom.”

The next night at the party as I handed out drinks, the Petrovs completely ignored me just as they ignored all the other servers. Watching them though, I suddenly realized how much Sally looked like the Petrov’s adult children. Sure there were differences, they certainly had that look of going to nice salons and having gotten expensive orthodontics and stuff like that, but there was a resemblance anyway. I noticed that the traits they shared were the traits they shared with their father, not the traits they shared with their mother.

I suddenly had a very adult understanding of why Mrs Petrov had disliked Sally’s mom so much she would make stuff up to get rid of her. I kept it to myself, and just continued serving drinks with a bland expression.

—————————————————

******************COMPANY********************

—————————————————–

“Hey,” I lifted up the long blue hair that covered the delicate ear and said over the loud music we were dancing to. “Remind me what your name is”

“Abby,” she said right up against my ear, and stroked down my freshly tapered hair.

“Abby,” I told her, “I have to be back at my ship in just forty hours, and I wanted to get a chance to go down planet. Do you know of somewhere comfortable I could get a little rest? Maybe a shower in the morning?”

“I live down planet. Want to come to my place?”

“That would be great.” I told her, smiling. “Maybe we could go see some of the sights together.”

“As long as one of the sights you want to see is my bedroom.” Abby obviously caught on fast.
—————————————————–

“Do you really have to go?” She asked as she stood by the door frame to her bedroom in nothing but an open sheer robe and gave me puppy eyes.

I’d had a lovely thirty eight hours with the blue haired nymph, and was just shoving everything I had taken down planet back into my overnight bag. Lovely a time as I’d had with Abby, I wasn’t ready to be in a real relationship again. I believed I never would be.

“I really have to go.” I told her. “That interstellar freighter isn’t going to wait for one engineer.”

“I suppose you did warn me.” Abby admitted.

“I had a really good time.” I assured her as I went over to enjoy a last moment of stroking her curvy body and a final kiss.

“When will you be back?” Abby asked a little hopefully as my hand traced a line from her hip to her waist..

“Abby,” I wrinkled my brow, “don’t do the whole ‘I’ll wait for you’ thing. This route takes thirteen months to loop, that’s over a year, and then I’ll only be here a day or two. And that’s assuming I don’t get reassigned to a new ship when we stop at Earth. There’s a decent chance I am never coming back to this planet. I meant it when I said this could only be a one time thing.”

“What if I apply to join your crew?” Abby asked in a tone that was only half joking.

“Even if the idea of changing your whole life for someone you met a day ago wasn’t crazy, the chances we’d just happen to be assigned to the same ship are small.” I didn’t mention that coupled crewmen frequently requested to be kept together, and it was typically accommodated, since it greatly increased crew retention.

Abby frowned at me, slightly pouty. “It’s not that crazy and I bet if I asked real nice they’d keep us together.”

“Besides, if you joined the crew, you’d have to get all this pretty hair cut off.” I told her as I lifted one of the long silky locks and wrapped it around my finger. “This hair is way too nice to give up just for a girl. It must have cost a fortune to get it to this shade of sapphire.”

“What makes you think my hair isn’t just naturally sapphire?” Abby joked.

“Sorry I doubted you.” I played along then took that last kiss I wanted. “Now I really do have to go.”

I pulled away and headed for the door, settled with knowing I would never see Abby again even though I really did like her. I had my hand on the door knob when she asked one final question.

“Is it because of Melissa you don’t want to see me again?”

“How’d you know about Melissa?” I looked back over my shoulder at Abby.

“You muttered ‘I love you Melissa’ when you held me as you were falling asleep last night. Who is she? Are you cheating on her”

“I’m not cheating on her…” I said what felt like a lie even though I knew it was the truth. “She was a crewman who died in an accident a few years ago. Interstellar space is dangerous. Find someone to have a real relationship with who doesn’t want to live in it.”

I slipped out the door, and started jogging. The chief engineer and captain were going to be pissed if I missed the next public shuttle up and they had to try to arrange a private one.

————————————————————-

******************SLEEPING ON THE COUCH*********************

————————————————————
“Hey dad,” I said as I got to the service entrance where dad was sitting on the bench just outside it changing the blade of the pruning drone.

“Hey baby girl.” He put down the drone and wiped his hands on a rag, before he put his arms around me in a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too.”

“How was your last loop?”

“Good,” I started, then began to tell Dad about the planets I’d seen, focusing on things other than the girls I was hooking up with, the natural wonders or local cuisine, as he led me inside to where mom was unloading the dishwasher.

“Maria,” Mom said with delight as she briefly abandoned her task, and embraced me in a hug.

“Hi Mom,” I returned the hug feeling safe in her arms as I always had.

“Your hair looks nice,” Mom stated as I felt her hands petting over the grown out sides. “You’ve let it grow out a bit.”

It hadn’t been deliberate, I just hadn’t had a chance to get in cut for a few systems. At the last system we’d stopped at before Earth/Sol, I’d been stuck watching the ship. I should be getting it cut, but of course Earth was the most expensive place in the galaxy to get a haircut. I was hoping to just get away with it till the next system, since my hair was only over crew standard in the front where the bangs extended below my eyebrows. For the moment though, I would just let Mom enjoy that my hair was a bit longer than it should be.

“I let it grow out just a little. I’m glad you like it.” I told her. “I’m just here for one night. Can I stay here, so that we can do stuff tomorrow before I have to get back to the ship?”

Mom sighed heavily, reminding me where I had picked up the habit. “Sorry honey. The family said that having you stay so often was making this place seem like hotel. I talked to Andrea and Steve, they say you can stay with them if you don’t mind the couch. We’re going there for dinner anyway.”

“The couch is fine.” I assured mom, as she went back to unloading the dishes.

———————————————————————————-

I helped mom and dad get through their to-do list, so we could head over to Andrea and Steve’s place early. We actually made it there before Andrea made it home from work. Steve was a bit later, since he had to stop and get my nephew, who everyone still called “the baby” even though he was clearly a toddler, from daycare.

At dinner we squeezed around the table that felt just as crowded as the one at the apartment above the garage where mom and dad lived, after I read a couple of bedtime stories to my nephew till he fell asleep in the little room being called a bedroom, that was clearly a walk-in closet. Our parents stayed for just a little bit after the baby fell asleep before they declared they were tired and had a busy day tomorrow and went back to the estate they worked on.

A few moments after mom and dad went, Steve announced that he had picked up an extra shift at the loading dock at the base of the freight elevator up to the ring station my ship as well as a few dozen others were docked at. He promised he’d be quiet when he got back and try not to wake me.

“Maria,” Andrea said to me once things were quiet and it was just me and her. “We need to talk about mom and dad.”

“Ok?”

“I think the family they work for feel they are too old to keep working.” She told me with a worried look as she pushed her shoulder length hair back. “I’ve been hearing rumors that they are looking for a new younger couple to work as grounds and house keeper and saying their current ones will be retiring soon.”

“Do mom and dad know?”

“They have vaguely mentioned that the family has been dropping hints they might want to retire soon, but of course mom and dad don’t really have any retirement savings.” Andrea sighed. “And it’s not like they can easily get other jobs at their age. Retiring doesn’t just mean they lose their income, it means they lose the place they are living. We’ll manage if we have to, I can get a fold out couch for Steve and I so mom and dad can have the real bed, but this place isn’t really big enough for all five of us nevermind…”

“Nevermind?”

“It’s going to be six of us in a few months,” Andrea sighed, the same way mom and I did. “If I’d known about the situation, Steve and I would have put it off, but I didn’t find out about it till after Steve and I had started trying.”

I vaguely glanced around the little apartment, it was the same basic layout as the apartment above the garage, One room that served as living space with a kitchen in the corner, one real bedroom, the walk-in closet that was serving as my nephews bedroom and a bathroom. There were a few minor differences, like the apartment was in a building on the edge of the neighborhood, instead of above a garage, and the door to the bedroom was to the right when you came in instead of to the left, but it otherwise was very similar. It definitely would be difficult with four adults and two children.

“Well, obviously, I can’t take them in,” I sighed too. “If you had mom and dad take over childcare, would that help save enough for a larger apartment? Two or Three bedrooms instead of just one.”

“It would help,” Andrea said, “but not enough to make up the whole difference in rent between a one bedroom and a two nevermind a three bedroom.”

“How much more would you need?” I asked her. “I got a bit of a raise when I signed my new contract, and I have pretty low living expenses.”

I didn’t need the raise to continue living the way I did, I’d been comfortable enough without it. Heck, if I was frugal, I could probably send them more than just the raise I’d gotten. I could cut back a little, not go down planet at every stop, never get hotels when I did, get a few less drinks when I hit bars which would probably be healthier anyway. I could even go a little longer between haircuts, and not put aside quite as much for the tablet I was saving up for. I would be able to send the whole raise plus some to mom and dad.

“I’m not sure,” Andrea shrugged, and pushed the hair back again. “We can look at a few apartment listings. Any chance you could give me a haircut while we do? Mom never cuts it as short as I want.”

“Yeah sure,” I said, “As long as you have the tools.”

“I’ve got everything,” Andrea told me, with a hint of a smile. “Steve even found a set of clippers at the thriftshop a bit ago and bought them since he decided to just embrace the fact that he was going bald.”

“I kinda noticed,” I admitted with a chuckle, Steve’s shoulder length thin hair had been replaced by a simple buzzcut just slightly longer than the one I’d had in EES. “I didn’t say anything in case he’d just been in detention.”

“He says that down at the loading dock, looking like you’ve just gotten out of detention just makes people less likely to mess with you.” Andrea chuckled. “So you can get rid of some of this for me, while we price apartments big enough for a family of six?”

“Yeah,” I said as I got up.

I moved the dining chair from the mismatched set that looked best for cutting hair over to the center of the room. Andrea went off and gathered the scissors, a comb, and the set of clippers before she slipped off her shirt, revealing the slight bulge the loose fabric had hidden, and draped a towel over her shoulders.

“So same as last time?” I asked as Andrea sat down.

“Do you think you can do a little shorter, since mom isn’t here fussing and you’ve got clippers?” She asked. “And do you think you could do bangs instead of layering the front? The layers are a little dated looking, and bangs would keep it out of my face even better.”

“I could look up how to do bangs,” I tentatively said, “if you are willing to risk me learning how to do them on you.”

“Eh,” she shrugged, “since we’ve got the clippers, if it goes really badly, we can just shave my head and claim I was sent to detention by accident and then immediately released.”

“Seriously?”

“No, but go for it.” Andrea chuckled. “A bad haircut’s not fatal no matter how dramatic mom acts about it.”

“Ok,” I said and tapped my watch till a tutorial on doing bangs came up on the tiny screen.

When I was done watching the tutorial, I decided I should cut the bob first, then add the bangs. As I combed down the shoulder length hair and smoothed it before beginning to cut it, Andrea began to pull up apartment listings on her own watch.

I combed through the shoulder length hair, and stopped the comb right about at the level of Andrea’s earlobes. I very carefully began to snip away the five or six centimeters of hair that hung below the teeth of the comb. The locks tumbled down to Andrea’s shoulders and the floor, revealing the wispy hairs that grew from her neckline below the line I had cut the bulk of her hair to. I ignored the little wispy hair, I would get them later with the clippers.

I combed down again through the hair, making sure I captured some of the hair I had cut already, and lined the comb up from what I had already cut to Andrea’s earlobe, the teeth of the comb resting exactly where the hole for her little faux pearl earrings were. I once again snipped carefully along and the below the comb, watching the locks drop to Andrea’s shoulder. The hair left hanging down over her ear sprung up very slightly as I pulled the comb down, leaving her earlobe and the earring in it on display. I knew the pearls were fake, but they looked pretty cute anyway.

I repeated the snipping on the other side, and then I went in front of Andrea. This time, I lined the comb up between her fake pearl earring and her upper lip before snipping away all the hair that hung below to land on her lap and cover the apartment listing she had been looking at on her watch.

Andrea sighed slightly as she shook the cut hair off her watch and pushed it off her lap. It was the first clue that maybe Andrea wasn’t quite as blasé about her hair as she’d been trying to act, that maybe even though she wanted it shorter because it made her life easier, giving it up was a little bit of a sacrifice. It made me wonder if I hadn’t had to cut my hair for EES, and then had to keep it short for SPS, if I would have just kept it long.

I combed down the hair on the other side of her face, and lined it up the same way. I snipped it off, reburying her watch and lap in the cut off locks. I thought about skipping making sure both sides met in the middle, since I was going to be doing bangs and figured most of that hair would get cut again, but decided it was best to just do it anyway since some of the hair might not get included with the bangs, so I combed Andrea’s hair forward over her face and ignored her complaining she couldn’t look at apartment listings as I snipped it carefully making sure it all matched up.

I then combed the hair back, and began sectioning out the triangle at the front the way the instructions had said to. I combed the hair from the triangle down over Andrea’s eyes, and stepped back to make sure it looked like a reasonable thickness. I stepped back, gathered the hair, gave it a little twist, and trapped it between my fingers. I held it so the bottom of my fingers lined up to the bridge of her nose and began to snip. The instructions had assured that the bridge of the nose would leave the bangs just slightly long so I could then trim them so they brushed her eyebrows.

As I snipped, Andrea abandoned looking at apartments, her eyes focused on the scissors right in front of them. The dark strands fell lightly to Andrea’s lap, as I snipped her new bangs in. Once every strand was cut, I released the short hair from my fingers to fall over Andrea’s eyebrows. Just a little longer than I had planned the finished length.

“Close your eyes so hair doesn’t get in them, and I will take them up to eyebrow level.” I told her as I combed the hair down to lay against her forehead.

The instructions had been very clear to let the hair sit naturally as I did the final trim, so I didn’t have the comb to use as a straight edge as I took the little snips and tiny hairs rained down like pepper landing on Andrea’s cheeks and in her eyelashes. I just had to follow the shape of her eyebrows as I cut, except in the very middle where there was a gap between them. Fortunately it was a small gap and I managed to bridge it in a reasonably straight line.

“Don’t open your eyes yet.” I warned Andrea as I took the corner of the towel over her shoulders and brushed the snippets off her face.

When I was done, Andrea blinked carefully a couple of times, just in case there were a few snippets still in her eyelashes, and seemed relieved that no hair ended up in her eyes. Then she asked, “Is that it?”

“I still have to clean up the back with the clippers.” I reminded her. “Remember you wanted it shorter and having clippers made it easier.”

“Right,” Andrea said with a touch of trepidation as she raised her hand to feel the hair that stuck out below the bulk of her hair.

I put down the scissors, and unpacked Steve’s clippers. I was a little more nervous about using them than I was about having cut Andrea’s hair with scissors, since I hadn’t actually used them before, but I had had them used on me enough that I figured I probably wouldn’t mess up.

They weren’t the digital kind, which I figured made them simpler for untrained people like me and Steve to use. There were guards, but since I wasn’t giving Andrea a buzz cut, I ignored them. I simply turned them on, and they started humming. I was used to the feel of the vibrations against my scalp, where it almost felt like a massage, it was different in my hand, I tightened my grip.

I used the comb to push most of Andrea’s hair up higher on the back of her head, and placed the clippers on her neck. She startled very slightly, but didn’t pull away. I pushed the clippers up, into the wispy neck hair, shaving them away, then kept pushing them up and into the thicker hair on her nape, till I had cleaned away everything that hung below the line I had cut most of her hair to.

I ran the clippers up through the hair just to the side of the strip I had already reduced to just a fine stubble.

“Now I’m done,” I told her as I turned off the clippers. “What do you think?”

Andrea ran her hand over her short hair, allowing it to especially linger at the stubble on her neck. “It feels good.”

“Do you want to go look?” I asked, wondering if I should start cleaning up.

“Later,” Andrea said with a slight sigh. “Let’s finish up looking at what various apartments would cost first, and then you can tell me if you think you can help us enough to make it doable.”

Andrea and I took turns pulling up various bills and our pay stubs, making guesses and estimates of mom and dad’s living expenses beyond a place to live that they would no longer have income to cover, and looking at the cost of apartments reasonably close enough to Andrea and Steve’s work. We swept up Andrea’s hair as we talked. I assured Andrea that I was willing to put a bit more in so they could get a three bedroom instead of a two bedroom with a walk-in closet big enough to use for the kids.

“You know I don’t have nearly enough clothes to fill a walk-in closet if it isn’t being used as a bedroom.” Andrea joked.

“Well I don’t think I can afford to buy you a whole closet full of clothes,” I teased back, “so I guess you’ll just have to take the smaller bedroom and let mom and dad have the room with the walk in closet.”

“Like mom has that much clothing,” Andrea laughed, but then more seriously added. “I was planning to anyway. I guess the walk-in closet also would make sense for your room when you come to visit.”

“It would be nice to have a closet to call home.” I chuckled, as I spread the sheet on top of the couch I would be spending the night on.

“So it’s settled?” Andrea asked.

“Yeah,” I assured her.

“What if the rumors I heard about mom and dad being forced to retire are wrong?”

“I doubt it”

“But it’s not fair for me to take your money for a bigger apartment if mom and dad don’t move in.” Andrea said cautiously, “How hard would it be to change the arrangements if I find out it was just a rumor when your light years from here?”

I sigh, it would be hard. If we didn’t set it up before I left, it would be a pain in the ass, possible but annoying. I just wanted it settled while I was on Earth.

“Maybe it’s time for them to retire anyway.” I shrugged. “It will be nice for my nephew and future nephew to not grow up in a closet being dropped off at daycare, when they could have a real bedroom with a window to share and loving grandparents to take care of them. Besides, I really like the idea of having a closet to stay in that mom and dad don’t have to beg permission for.”

“Thanks.”
——————————————————
I was only kind of half asleep when I heard Steve quietly come back from his late shift. He silently tiptoed by the couch assuming I was fully asleep. I was close enough to sleep that I let him just pass by without saying anything and waking myself up more.

“Hey honey,” I heard Andrea’s slightly groggy voice say after Steve entered their bedroom.

“Sorry,” Steve’s deep voice answered in a soft tone. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s ok. I’m glad we get a little time to talk.” Andrea responded in just enough above a whisper for me to hear. “What would you think about moving to a larger place and inviting my parents to come live with us? Maria can help us out.”

“Your parents coming is fine, we talked about it, getting a better couch for us,” Steve responded, “but I feel weird about taking Maria’s money to get a bigger place.”

“There’d be enough space for the walk-in to be her bedroom, she wants a homebase on Earth when she visits.”

“Where will the kids sleep?”

“They’d get their own room.”

“That sounds really expensive.”

“We can make it work. Maria and I ran the numbers.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok then.” Steve agreed, sounding a bit nervous about it. “Maria gave you a haircut?”

“Yeah,” Andrea shifted to the one sounding nervous. “I asked her to cut it shorter, do you hate it?”

“Hate it, why would I hate it?” Steve chuckled softly. “It’s really cute.”

“Thanks.” Then with a sigh, Andrea added, “mom’s going to hate it.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste.” Steve reasoned. “Let’s get some sleep before we have to get up for work.”
————————————————————–

**************FAMILIAR PLACES**************

—————————————————————

Most colonies, though not all colonies, had at least one place where sapphic ladies went to meet up. Very very few had two or more. So on the second loop of my current route, I was hitting the same places again. At first, it hadn’t seemed like a bad thing. I knew how to get to them, and knew some of the local slang and stuff.

I was sitting in one of those place, one where the safe place to meet was a noisy bar with dancing up station. I felt a gentle hand on my back and turned to look up, a vaguely familiar looking woman with long sapphire blue hair looked down at me.

“Maria?” She asked me, “right?”

Though I’d been with a half dozen other women since, I recognized her. I remembered the love making, I remembered the goodbye where she’d looked forlorn, I remembered the jog and only making it to the shuttle in the nick of time to get on, they’d actually started closing the door when I had shouted out and gone from a jog to a full hard run, squeezing through the door panting. Searching my
memory, I was blanking on a name. Maybe something that started with an A.

“Aaaaa…?”

“Abby,” she reminded me, as I felt her lean against me. “It’s good to see you again. Want to come back down to my place?”

I sighed, remembering how she’d had a hard time saying goodbye. I thought about making up an excuse, it was a slightly shorter stop this time, and I’d cut it too close last time. I could just say I didn’t have enough time for that, but I decided I should probably just be honest, it would be clearer.

“As fun as it might be to hook up again,” I said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. It was hard enough saying good bye last time, a second time would be even harder.”

“How about at the end of it we say ‘till next time,’ instead of goodbye.” Abby suggested. “I know my joking about joining SPS was a bit silly, but maybe you could settle down here once your contract is up. This is a nice colony, pleasant climate, We only work thirty-two hours per week.”

“I just renewed my contract with SPS,” I told her. “I wasn’t just working for a ticket to a colony.”

I spent a few more minutes chatting with Abby, before I decided to just head back to the ship. Knowing where to go was nice, running into people I’d had a hard time making a clean break with wasn’t as nice.

I needed a new route. A new route would also get me away from the pretty new crewman down in navigation who was flirting a bit. It wasn’t as obvious as on the last ship when Khalil had claimed she’d confirmed that one of the entry level general crewmen definitely had sapphic leanings and had noticed me, but switching routes before it got to that point was a good idea.

————————————————-

~~~~~~~~~~Part 4~~~~~~~~~~~~

***********************ONCE EES, ALWAYS EES*****************

———————————————
I was looking forward to seeing a planet I had never seen before, and hopefully meeting someone who would enjoy having a seventeen hour fling with someone they would never have to see again after it. I’d saved up water credits to be freshly showered, and had on my newest least beaten up ship’s coveralls. Some crewmen liked to change into regular clothes off ship, but between many women being into a gal in uniform, and it just making it really clear that I would be gone the next day, I just liked to wear fresh coveralls.

Plus, I’d heard rumors about the waffles on this planet.

Knock, knock

“Yeah?”

“Hey Reyes,” Captain Berzina said as he leaned in through the door into my cabin, “you were an Earth Enforcement Service officer, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Listen sorry about this, but I’m going to need you this stop. You and Freeman are the only crewmen who were EES.”

“Are you telling me my leave is cancelled?”

“Sorry. That passenger I confined to her quarters till we could put her in a pod is being uncooperative about getting prepared for the pod.”

The passenger in question, Grace, in no way matched her name. She was returning to her home planet after having supposedly studied at a university on Earth. She’d smuggled intoxicants aboard and rarely showed up for her work shifts, which had had the captain pretty pissed, but not quite ready to confine her to her cabin then toss her in a pod. Assaulting a crewman had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“You need muscle?”

“Yup.”

I sighed. “Can I have fifteen minutes to change into a set of coveralls that I care less about maybe getting ripped?”

“No problem. Meet me and Freeman at Grace’s cabin.”

———————————————

“Ready?” Captain Berzina asked as I arrived. Knock, knock. “GRACE, IT’S TIME TO EITHER GET READY FOR THE POD OR DISEMBARK. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO COME OUT COOPERATIVELY.”

“NO! GO AWAY!.” The woman just yelled through the door. “I’LL PAY WHATEVER FINES I HAVE TO, BUT I’M NOT ALLOWING YOU TO SHAVE MY HEAD OR MAKE ME GET IN A POD! AND I’M NOT GETTING OFF THIS SHIP! MY PARENTS PAID FOR THIS TRIP, I’M FINISHING IT! YOU HAVE TO TAKE TO ELPEE!!”

Berzina rolled his eyes, and simply typed his override code into the door, and opened it. “If you want to go back to Earth to pay for a private judge and then pay the fine, you still have to do it in a pod for my crew’s safety. Money may make consequences go away on Earth, but out here that doesn’t work. Now we’re going.”

Since old habits die hard, Freeman and I had simply flanked Grace, who was seated on the chair, without saying a word. I noticed she had let her long unnaturally fuchsia and orange hair down. I suspected she’d done it before we had docked.

“NO!!”

Freeman and I both slipped a hand under Grace’s arms, and used our other hands to grab her wrists and twist them back. Grace put up a rather ineffective fight as Freeman and I escorted her to the hatch and off of the ship. Where Captain Berzina paused, and we put Grace down.

“Now, if you want to stay here on Nouvelle Belgique,” Berzina informed Grace, “I will arrange to have your luggage unloaded. This is actually a rather nice system, but I have to warn you, they don’t believe in monetary fines if you break the law here, it’s all rehabilitation facilities and community service. Do not try to reboard the ship, I am going to have a guard posted at the hatch.

“If you want to continue to Elpee,” Beriza carried on, “these crewmen will escort you to the barbershop to get cleaned up for the pod, while I arrange with the ship’s medical officer to get a pod ready for you. After the barber has shaved your head, the crewmen will escort you directly to pod preparation. What’s it going to be?”

Freemen and I stood, just waiting as Grace tried begging, negotiating, and bribing Captain Beriza, till finally he said, “If you don’t make the decision yourself soon, it will be made for you, because there won’t be enough time to get you prepared for a pod. Now I’m going to start arranging to have your cabin packed up and any luggage you have in cargo offloaded, if you don’t tell me you are willing to start preparing for a pod.”

At the end of his little speech, Captain Beriza simply began walking back towards the hatch into the ship.

“I’ll go into a pod,” Grace finally reluctantly agreed.

“Freeman, you know the way to the barbershop, and have an exchange card from petty cash?”

“Yup cap’n” Freeman confirmed patting a pocket.

“Fine, you and Reyes escort Grace to the barbershop. Her head should be shaved down to oh-point-five millimeter. Then straight to pod prep’n storage. I’ll go make arrangements with Nurse Ford.”

—————————————————————

The barbershop was actually a more interesting place to visit than I had expected. Instead of simple red and white stripes, or swirling LEDs like at most stations, the hatch into the barbershop was surrounded by a red and white mural of abstract shapes. It was just as interesting as a lot of stuff I’d seen in art museums. The whole station seemed to be decorated with murals.

Freeman and I slipped into single file with Grace, him going ahead since he was on her right, and I falling behind since I was on her left, as we walked through the hatch. It was weird how even though we’d both been out of EES for years, we still just followed the training.

Inside, I wasn’t sure if we should try to act casual, or keep playing EES. Obviously, we had zero authority now that we were off the ship. If Grace changed her mind, all we could do was to deny her reentry onto the ship. Habits are habits though, so when Grace sat down in a waiting chair, I stood with my feet spread out shoulder width next to her at the ready.

“Ya ever been to Nu-Bell before?” Freeman asked me.

“Nu-Bell?”

“Nouvelle Belgique.”

“Oh… Yeah, no.” I told him. “I’m pretty disappointed that this is probably all I’m going to see of it. I heard rumors about the waffles, and one of the others told me about a club down planet.”

“I’ve only been here once before,” He said. “I got the waffles last time, kinda got the feelin’ they mostly make’em for visiting SPS crew.”

“Can I get some waffles before we go back to the ship, since this is the only planet I get to see?” Grace asked.

“Only if you want Nurse giving you an emetic.” Freeman snorted. “No eating for six hours before going into a pod. That’s why we didn’t bring you breakfast.”

“Figures,” Grace complained.

“Next,” a barber called out, Grace just sat. “NEXT, NEXT!”

“If you want to be let back on the ship,” Freeman told Grace, “you need to get your ass in that barber chair.”

Grace got up muttering obscenities under her breath, and went over and sat with her arms crossed angrily in front of her. I looked over at Freeman, who seemed to have decided he was done playing EES, and was getting comfortable in one of the waiting chairs. I figured I might as well get comfortable too, so plopped down in the one next to him.

“What’s it going to be?” The barber asked as he shook out a silky zebra print cape.

“We need her prepped for a pod,” Freeman told the barber as Grace sat silently pouting. “Zero point five millimeter.”

“Ok,” was all the barber said as he fastened the cape.

While Freeman and I chatted about planets we’d been to, and the local specialties on them, the barber got to work on Grace. He grabbed a pair of long gold toned scissors from the bronze console table in front of him, and a comb that looked like it was made out of clear lucite with gold designs embedded in it.

He combed up a sizable lock from the top of Grace’s head, and trapped it between his fingers that didn’t quite touch her scalp. He then snipped the sticking up lock off swiftly.

Snip, shnip, snip, snip, snip.

The fuschia lock fell to her lap. Left on the top of Grace’s head, were short mousy brown strands that stood up out of the fuschia and orange long locks that surrounded them. The barber combed up another lock next to the patch of cropped mousy brown hair, and trapped it in his fingers.

Sshnip, shnip, snip, snip, snip.

This time, the lock fell to the side, where it draped over Grace’s shoulder as she glared angrily at her reflection. The barber kept combing Grace’s hair up and cropping it short. The brightly colored hair fell all around, pooling up in Grace’s lap, draping on her shoulders, and littering the floor.

Ssssnip, snip, ssshhnap.

When the barber started snipping the final long locks from the nape of Grace’s neck, it was obvious she was not making it any easier for him by tilting her head down, but instead keeping her head up stiffly as she glared at her reflection. The long colorful locks had been replaced with just a couple of centimeters that lay tightly against her head like a cap. Most of the cropped hair was dirty blonde, with just a few of the tips here and there still fuschia or orange.

Shnip, sssnip, snip-snip.

The barber didn’t bother to say anything to his obviously unhappy reluctant client as he returned the scissors to the counter, and picked up the clipper. He tapped the screen, and turned them on, as he walked back behind Grace.

Since clippers were a mostly one handed deal, the barber used his free hand to force Grace’s head down, instead of trying to work with her head up. He placed the blades of the clippers against Grace’s neck, and pushed them up through the cropped hair. The short hair simply rained down from Grace’s head as the barber shaved her to nothing but stubble.

As he folded down her kind of small and squarish ears to shave off any stray hairs, the barber asked just loudly enough for us to hear over the humming clippers, “What about the hairline?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Freeman answered firmly. “Just skip it.”

“Don’t I get to decide that?” Grace complained, as the barber shoved her head to the side and ran the clippers up through what little was left of her sideburn.

“If you wanted a say in the matter, you should have just gotten off the ship and come here by yourself, and paid for this.” Freeman told her. “I don’t want to waste any more time on this than I have to.”

The barber moved his hand to Grace’s forehead, and forced her to tilt her head back, as he placed the humming clippers on her temple, pulling them back just above where he’d shaved the side of her head. When he reached the point where the new strip of stubble joined the stubble from having shaved up the back of her head, he brought the clippers back to her forehead and pulled them back again over the top of her rather square looking head. He worked his way across, shaving strip after strip, just overlapping them slightly.

When Grace was pretty much bald, the barber began to go back over everything from a slightly different angle, to clean things up and perfect them, but Freeman got up and stopped him.

“That’s good enough man,” Freeman said. “She’s just going straight into a pod after this. It just needs to be safe, not look good. No reason to waste any more of your time.”

Grace glared at Freeman even more angrily as the barber removed the cape, spilling her long hair to the floor where a sweeper bot had just begun to collect the colorful locks.

I was used to seeing mostly bald women. There were often a few aboard ship, since lot’s of women who worked for a single contract with SPS, just wanted to save up as much as they could before they started new lives on colonies. Plus, I’d spent 4 years living in the EES barracks. Hell, I had spent four years looking at my own bald head in the mirror. I didn’t find bald women shocking like some did. Most of them looked fine, some even looked good. Grace, not so much.

Without the long layered hair, nothing hid those ears that were too small for her rectangular face. The layers had obviously also been skillfully cut to camouflage how squared off the top of Grace’s head was, which the squared ears and rectangular face made even more harsh looking. Without hair to soften anything, Grace looked rather masculine.

That it was a somewhat unfinished haircut did not help her look better. There were lighter areas where the clippers had overlapped, and darker patches here and there. When I’d been in EES and the barbers had always gone over everything twice, it had always felt like they were trying to drag out the humiliation, I now appreciated that there actually had been a reason.

I had gotten up and was standing on the other side of Grace.

“Let’s go.” Freeman said to Grace.

“It’s patchy looking,” Grace complained.

“So?”

Grace got up, pouting even more.

——————————————–

“I think Nurse Ford and I can handle it from here,” Captain Berzina told me and Freeman once Grace’s breathing was slowing from the sedatives.

“Gotcha Cap’n,” Freeman said as he started getting up to leave.

“Hey, listen,” Berzina added as Freeman and I started heading towards the hatch out of pod storage and prep. “I’m sorry there isn’t enough time to go down planet. I’m going to take you off the roster to babysit the ship for the next loop.”

“Thanks,” Freeman and I said in unison.

“Also, there should be enough on that card I gave you from petty cash, to go get a quick meal at the crepe place before we depart.”

“Crepe place?” I asked slightly confused. “Did you mean waffles?”

“Nah, crepes,” Berzina confirmed. “The waffles are just for ship crews, the crepes are what are actually good. Trust me.”
————————————–

*********************SAVINGS*****************

———————————————————–
It was the second or third time I’d been to the rather boring planet, though it was the first time on this ship, even with switching routes there was usually some overlap, when I opened the message from mom. I wasn’t planning to head down to the surface anyway, which was fortunate since it suddenly was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

“I need to send money to Earth,” I said as I walked back into the station’s SPS office.

“Sure,” the receptionist said. “how much do you want to allocate from your next paycheck and who do you want to name as the recipient?”

“No, I need to send it from my savings account,” I explained.

“Ok,” the receptionist sighed, “that’s a little more complicated.”

As she helped me through the complicated process of transferring the money from the account where I’d been saving up for a tablet onto the certificates that could be sent back to Earth, I wanted to tell her all about the message I’d gotten. I wanted to have someone to complain to about how this was going to mean I couldn’t get the tablet I was so close to affording after saving up for years. I wanted to talk about my fears about what my best friend was going through, and how I wasn’t sure sending her every penny I had would even be enough. I wanted to rant about the system that had put us into this position. I didn’t though, I just kept it to myself.

The finances all settled, the receptionist asked what message I wanted to send along with the money. I sighed very deeply as she waited, looking at me like she’d figured out it was some kind of emergency. My head spun as I tried to gather my thoughts.

I recalled the message from my mother:

Hi Maria,
Your friend Sally was arrested a couple of days ago. I have been trying to raise enough money to pay for her to have a private trial sooner than her turn on the waiting list will come up. The current estimate is that her turn for a public trial will come up in about four and a half years.

I have called all of her friends that Andrea kept in contact with, some have passed along the message to other friends of her. Many pitched in, but we are still short. Please send what you can.

I hope this message catches up to you soon, each day she is in detention her room and boarding dept grows.

Sorry this is just bad news, I wish I had time to just catch up.

Love,
Mom

She’d also sent me numbers, on a separate note, but with the caveat that she was hoping to still get more from other friends of Sally’s. The amount she was short by was almost double what I’d saved up. I took the tablet from the receptionist, and began to write:

Hi Mom,

I wish this was the whole amount you needed, I will try to get more to send at my next stop in about four weeks. Thank you for coordinating this, I wish I could be there helping.

If (delete, delete) When you get Sally out, tell her Sunshine sends her love and give her a big hug from me.

Love,
Maria

I hit the seal-the-message button, making it private, and handed the tablet back to the receptionist. With a thank you.

I walked out of the office, contemplating if there was anything I wanted to do on the station that didn’t cost money since I now had zero. My plan to have a nice lunch at the cafe that overlooked the planet was not going to happen. I guessed I could just wander around and window shop, but I wasn’t really in the mood.

Of course I’d been planning to get a haircut, but that wasn’t free. I ran my hands up through my hair. I’d really been pushing it, between having a third of every paycheck automatically sent to my parents, and the amount I’d been putting aside for the tablet, I’d been going a stop or two longer between each haircut. I was well over crew standard. There really wasn’t a good way to deal with the issue though. I couldn’t afford a haircut. I couldn’t just cut it myself since even if I had scissor, or money left to buy some, I had nowhere to do it myself. I was stuck.

I started just heading back to the ship, figuring that I would just have to hope no one would notice how long my hair had gotten. That hope was soon dashed.

“Hey Reyes,” Chief Engineer Baker said as I walked passed him. “Forget something on the ship?”

“Nah,” I said, trying to sound casual, “Just heading back early. I don’t really have anything to do. Figured I would just relax.”

“You seem to have forgotten that you need to visit the barbershop.” Baker pointed out.

I sighed deeply, “I didn’t forget, it just didn’t work out.”

“What do you mean it didn’t work out?” Baker wrinkled his brow. “Is the shop closed or something?”

“No, I just can’t go.” I said elusively.

“Did you run into an ex or something?”

“Nah, nothing like that.”

“Reyes, you need to get a haircut. Your hair is way over crew standard in the front.”

“It’s just the front, does it really matter.” I tried negotiating. “I don’t think it’s long enough to get sucked into anything.”

“Yes Reyes, it matters.” Baker said with a combination of frustration and confusion. “What’s the problem?”

“I just can’t afford it.” I admitted suddenly feeling a bit like I did when I was a kid and had to admit I didn’t have enough money for something at school.

“I’ve been to the barbershop here, it doesn’t cost more than usual.”

“Yeah, well there was a family emergency back on Earth and I had to send all my money to my mom.” I grumbled and looked away as a tear started to roll down my cheek. “I promised I would send her everything I could at our next stop too, so it’s going to be a bit before I can take care of it.”

“I’m sorry Reyes,” Baker said in a gentler tone.

“It’s ok.” I mumbled, trying to get my tears under control and not really succeeding, the combination of embarrassment and worry about Sally just were overwhelming. “Can I go now?”

“You need to get a haircut Reyes.” Baker reiterated. “I will have write you up if you show up like this for your next shift, it will affect how soon you can get your next promotion.”

“I can’t afford one, so I guess you’ll just have to write me up.”

“I don’t want to write you up.” Baker muttered, then with just a bit of reluctance in his voice offered, “I’ll pay for the haircut. Don’t mention it to anyone else, I don’t want everyone coming to me for money. Just make sure the haircut lasts till you can afford another one.”

I watched Baker take out an exchange card and start putting credits on it. I just stood there as I lost what little control I’d had over the tears. Then Baker handed over the card to me, which looked like it had a little bit more on it than I would need to get a haircut and leave a halfway decent tip.

“Thank you,” I said as I took the card.

“We aren’t leaving for sixteen hours,” Baker reminded me softly. “You don’t have to rush to the barbershop, you can go splash a little cold water on your face and maybe even lie down for a bit. Just make sure you get it taken care of before we leave.”

I nodded, as I tried to brush away the tears I still hadn’t gotten control over. I said, “Thanks again,” and headed into the ship to finish having the good cry I obviously needed in private.

———————————-

I took a deep breath and walked over to the recently vacated barber chair. I wanted to say to the barber to give me my usual five centimeter, but Baker had said to make sure it would last till I could afford to pay for my own haircuts again, that was going to be a while, a long while.

“One millimeter,” I said, “round neckline.”

“Gotcha” was all the barber said as he picked up the clippers and started tapping the screen.

The barber casually combed the overgrown hair that had been falling in my eyes up and back. He placed the humming clippers on the center of my forehead, and began to slowly pull them back into my black hair.

I watched in the mirror as the shaggy locks began to slide down away from my head. Left behind was the familiar strip of nothing but faint stubble. It looked pretty much the same as it had when I’d been in EES.

There was one really important difference though. I had chosen this, I had asked for this. Sure I had made the choice reluctantly, and for reasons I couldn’t control. It wasn’t like simply being ordered into the barber chair as I had been in EES, it wasn’t like the time Stein had tricked me into getting the crewcut. I’d decided to do this for practical reasons.

As I felt the barber gently return the clippers back to my forehead for the next strip of hair to be cut off, I was reminded of another difference, the gentleness of a barber who saw the people he worked on as customers. Though I wasn’t sure exactly how the barbers at EES saw us, numbers, herds, inventory, they didn’t treat us as customers even if we were paying for their services.

Of course the barber who’d undoubtedly shaved Sally’s head when she arrived at detention had certainly didn’t see her as a customer even though she’d be billed for the haircut. I was sure they’d seen her as even less and treated her even more roughly than the barbers at EES had treated me. Plus, even if the haircut hadn’t really been my choice at EES, joining EES had been my choice. Sally had no choice about going to detention.

I looked up at the mirror, I was at some ridiculous halfway point in the haircut, the dome of my head bare, but surrounded still by a horseshoe of dark slightly shaggy locks. I thought about how Sally hadn’t even have a mirror to look at as her head was being shaved, I’d only seen it done a few times while in EES, but it had been brutal.

Thinking about how Sally’s hair she’d been growing back since she could leave the group home being brutally shaved off brought back the tears I’d only just managed to get under control after the long cry in my cabin were suddenly back. The warm salty water rolled down my cheek as the shaggy black hair fell away from my head.

“Hey,” the barber said kindly, “don’t worry you’re still really pretty without hair. And you’ll have enough to hide your scalp by the next stop.”

I didn’t bother to explain that I was crying about a lot more than just the hair he continued to strip off my head. Instead, I just nodded at the kindness accepting it even though I felt weird about not being able to pass it along to Sally, who needed it so much more than I did.

“I know this short isn’t really the style on earth right now,” he continued as he steered the clippers around behind my ears, “but lots of crewmen on the ships get this cut. The money you’ll save not having to get a haircut again for three or four stops will help you out a ton at the end of your contract when you get to a colony. What colony are you thinking of settling down on after your contract?”

I sighed, guessing I had to explain as I felt the barber begin to stroke up over my nape with the humming clippers. “I’m planning to just start another contract. I’m watching money because I had to send a bunch back to Earth for a family emergency.”

“I’ve heard Earth is expensive,” The barber sympathized as he ran the clippers over the stubble that covered my head a second time.

Then for some reason I started telling him the whole long story, only leaving out names. He took his time finishing up the second pass, and using the trimmer to give me a clean neckling and shaping my sideburns. He even went slowly over my stubble covered scalp with the clippers a third time, I’m pretty sure just to give me time to get the story and tears all out, since no more hair fell.

“That should last you till you get back to Earth,” the barber said as he took off the cape and showed me the back.

“Thanks” I halfheartedly smiled, feeling only a little better for having gotten things off my chest, as I rubbed my hand over the familiar sand paper feel of my very bare scalp and wished I had my old fuzzy red cap to cover it even though the station was a comfortable temperature. “The neckline looks a lot nicer than it did last time I had a one millimeter.”

I handed over the exchange card Baker had given me as the barber said, “If you are ever back here when you don’t just need something that’ll last as long as possible, I’ll give you something a bit more fashionable.”

——————————————————————

*****************WHAT ONE CAN*******************

—————————————————————-

“Hey Maria,” Mom, who was washing dishes, said as I walked back into the apartment three generations of my family lived in. “How’s Sally?”

“Not too bad for someone who only got out of detention a few weeks ago,” I told mom. “I thought she’d be upset over how it more than doubled the debt she had to pay off, but she said it didn’t really matter since she’d already owed more than she could pay off in a single lifetime anyway. She seems more upset over her hair and the tooth that got broken while she was there. She can’t really work till her hair grows out enough that men aren’t embarrassed to be seen around her. At least the tooth is towards the back so it just feels weird to her and isn’t visible.”

“I wish I could have gotten her out sooner,” Mom lamented with a sigh. “Before her tooth got broken.”

“If you hadn’t contacted so many people, she’d still be in there on the waiting list.” I told Mom, “You did great.”

“I did what I could.”

“Mom…” I cautiously asked, “when they took Sally and her mom when I was a kid, why didn’t you try to get Sally or her mom out then?”

“I did Maria,” Mom abandoned the dishes and sat at the table that was too small for a family of seven, though at the moment mom and I had it to ourselves. “I tried, but I just couldn’t make it happen. I didn’t tell you at the time, because I didn’t want to get your hopes up when I knew it was unlikely to work. I tried to raise enough money for her mom to get a trial, but I couldn’t before the accident. After the accident, I tried to see if they’d let us adopt Sally, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t even let me contact her. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok Mom,” I told her as I rubbed the shoulders I’d never seen slumped in defeat before. “Like you always told me, ‘One can only do what one can.’”

Mom nodded sadly, then looked at me. “I couldn’t have done it this time, without you. None of Sally’s other friends were able to put in anything close to what you did.”

I nodded slowly back. The only reason I’d been able to contribute what I did was because of the years I’d put in at EES. A lot of my savings had been from then, and of course the education that got me the better paying job at SPS wouldn’t have happened without EES. I’d have been a much lower paid general crewman. The only reason I could help Sally was because I’d done to scores of other people what had happened to Sally. Helping Sally was not enough to fully atone for what I’d done to others, full atonement was about as realistically achievable as Sally paying off her debt on top of the debt she’d inherited from her mom.

“I need to get up early tomorrow,” I changed topics, “I need to catch the six A.M. elevator to be back at my ship on time.”

“Ok honey,” Mom started to get up.

“Before you get back to dishes, can you give me a haircut?” I asked cautiously, since I knew how mom felt about my hair, though she hadn’t said anything, I think she understood the grown out buzz instead of my usual pixie had been about money. “Nothing fancy, just all one length like Steve’s.”

“Sure,” Mom just said without fussing.
——————————————————————

*******************PLANETARY BRIEFINGS*****************

———————————————————————–

“Hi, Nurse Osei?” I said as I walked into the sick bay of the ship I had just transferred to.

The woman sitting at the desk said, “that’s me. Do you have something going on? Reyes, right?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I suddenly have this weird, really itchy rash.”

Nurse Osei glanced at the arm I held out, showing off one of the patches of red bumpy skin. She rolled her eyes slightly.

“You went down planet on Atlantis without watching the planetary briefing video didn’t you?”

“Only first slippers watch the briefings.”

“Usually only first slippers haven’t been to any of the planets along their route before.” Osei pointed out. “It’s always you loop bunnies who get in trouble down planet because you don’t want to seem like first slippers, but you don’t actually know the planets you’re visiting.”

“Can you just make the itching stop?” I sighed, annoyed both with being called a loop bunny and lectured.

“The rash is from poison ivy.” Okei explained as she was getting a shot ready to give me. “Most colonies don’t have it since nobody would import it deliberately, and on most planets, if it was imported accidently, they went to the trouble of eliminating it, since around ninety percent of humans are allergic to it. Probably just by coincidence it seems most of the original colonists that settled Atlantis were part of the ten percent who are immune to it, and they’ve been passing the genes down, so practically no one on Atlantis is allergic to poison ivy. So, they didn’t bother to eliminate it when it was accidentally imported. You went hiking didn’t you?”

I’d heard of poison ivy back on earth, but never actually seen it. Dad said he found a patch on the estate, one time, and warned Andrea and I to stay away from the area till after the weeding drone took care of it.

“Does exactly what I was doing in the woods affect my treatment?” I asked, wondering if I was going to have to show her the more private areas also covered in red bumps. Denise had brought a blanket for us, but we’d been rather enthusiastic and it had gotten bunched up and covered in random leaves.

“The treatment is systemic,” Okei rolled her eyes again. “It doesn’t matter where the rash is, we just need to get your immune system to stop overreacting, I tossed in an analgesic too. Hold out your arm.”

Okei jabbed the needle into my arm, reasonably gently, and squeezed the drugs into me. The itching finally subsided as a slightly cool feeling spread over my skin.

“Since you happen to be here, and distracting me from more important tasks,” Okei informed me as she disposed of the hypodermic she’d used, “you can be my volunteer. I need help prepping a patient for a pod.”

“A patient?” I asked a little nervously. “From the accident down in cargo? I am a little… squeamish.”

“It’s not grissly any more,” Okei assured me. “The wound is all cleaned up and will be covered to keep it clean and safe till the last minute. She’s not in any pain or anything, I’ve got her so drugged up that she probably barely knows she’s on a ship.”

I sighed, I didn’t really want to, but I got the feeling Okei wouldn’t take no for an answer without a fuss, and I was feeling a million times better since she’d given me the shot, so I did kind of feel I owed her something.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Mostly help lifting her up.” Okei told me as she led me over to the bed where the sleeping young woman lay. I sort of vaguely glanced down toward the leg the rumors had told me she’d lost should be under the sheet, the sheet lay completely flat. Then Okei started talking slowly and loudly enunciating every word to the sleeping woman. “Crewman Zelinske, it’s Nurse Okei, I’m going to start the next step to getting you ready for a pod.”

“I du whan ga” the very stoned woman muttered unintelligibly.

“Remember, I explained you have to go into a pod so the wound doesn’t heal before we can get you to a planet with a hospital where they can regrow the leg.”

“mah reg?”

“Yes, it’s easier to regrow with a fresher wound.” Okei kept talking to the woman I suspect wasn’t really understanding, as she gestured for me to help lift the woman into a sitting position. “So you are going into a pod.”

“pahb?”

“Yes, into a pod.” Okei said as she unfolded some kind of pad that she placed on the bed behind Zelinske, then to me she explain in a quieter tone. “It’s a sticky pad to catch the hair.”

“Duh wan gah.”

“I know, but it’s better. You agreed to it before I gave you the sedative.” Okei opened another pad and placed it on the woman’s lap. “I have to cut off your hair now.”

“nah ober cwoo stahddah” Zelinske complained.

Zelinske’s hair looked to me like it was definitely pushing the boundaries of crew standard, the shaggy light brown hair was over her eyebrows in the front. It looked like she tended to get it cut just to crew standard when she was ordered to, and not a centimeter shorter, so it was grown out to over crew standard in practically no time. but of course since hair had to be way shorter than crew standard for pods, it was kind of irrelevant how close her hair was to crew standard.

“I have to cut your hair shorter for the pod,” Okei patiently told her. “It will grow back while you are at the hospital regrowing your leg.”

“wah abbened tah mah reg?”

“Is there really a point to talking to her when she’s this drugged up and unaware?” I asked as Okei cut a third pad into a sort of poncho shape to put around Zelinske as a make do barber cape.

“According to my psychology professor, yes.” Okei told me with a lot less patience than she was showing to Zelinske, went over to a cabinet she took some clippers out of, and then came back to the woman I was holding up. “I have to cut your hair now. Ok?”

“moe. i bon’t wah airguh”

“I’m sorry, but it’s necessary.” Okei said as she turned on the clippers, then to me. “Try to hold her as straight as possible.”

Okei firmly gripped Zelinske under her chin, and tilted her head back slightly. Okei then placed the humming blades of the clippers on Zelinske’s cheek. Slowly, Okei pushed the blades upward, into the shaggy hair in front of Zelinske’s ear.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzoot

A clump of Zelinske’s light brown hair tumbled to the pad covering her shoulders, where some of it stuck, more fell off though, behind her to the other sticky pad. Okei mostly ignored the tumbling hair, and placed the clippers on Zelinske’s temple and pushed the clippers back into the shaggy hair.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzoot

Another clump of hair came off, this time falling forward, to the pad on Zelinske’s lap. Okei tried to brush Zelinske’s bangs up and off her patient’s forehead with the back of her hand, but the hair just fell forward again, obviously in Okei’s way. So instead, Okie simply tilted Zelinske’s head more forward. She pushed the blades of the clippers down through the hair towards Zelinske’s scalp, and then pulled the clippers down and forward.

Bzzzzzzt

Zelinske’s bangs slid off the woman’s head and into her lap, as the blades emerged on Zelinske’s forehead revealing the hairline. The look was ridiculous, the gap in the bangs reduced to stubble extending about a centimeter back from the hairline where there was the sharp but not exactly straight line where Okei had pressed the clippers into the hair. I thought it was a good thing the woman was heavily drugged and not looking in a mirror to see what her hair looked like, since she’d sounded like she had cared.

Okei repeated the process, creating a second gap in Zelinske’s bangs. Then created a third and forth gap in the bangs. Once Zelinske’s bangs were all cut off, Okei tilted her head back again. Without the shaggy bangs in the way, Okei was able to just pull the clippers back over Zelinske’s scalp the hair fell back behind Zelinske to the sticky pad behind her. There was a distinct line of hair truly shaved to the skin left where Okei had pressed the blades of the clippers straight down.

Okei pulled the clippers back over the crown of Zelinske’s head over and over, reducing it all to stubble. The hair simple rained down as she did. The sticky pad that covered Zelinske’s shoulders was quickly covered in a layer of hair, that kept anymore hair from sticking to it, so the hair mostly just tumbled down, to the pad that rested on the bed behind Zelinske.

When Okei had finished buzzing all the hair from the top of Zelinske’s head, she tilted Zelinske’s head forward, and began to buzz away the hair that had hidden behind Zelinske’s ears. Okei finally finished up by stroking the clippers down the back of Zelinske’s head, pushing the hair away down towards the pad covering Zelinske’s shoulders, where it tumbled to the pad below.

Okei turned off the buzzing clippers, and looked at me. “I need you to hold her up, while I clean up.”

I held Zelinske’s torso up, even though her shorn head flopped forward as Okei carefully folded up the three sticky pads, trying to keep all the hair stuck to them trapped between the layers. Careful as she was being, it was obvious, some of the hair had escaped. I could see a few stray strands on the sheet that covered the lower half of Zelinske’s body. I could even feel the prickles of some of the hair on my hands and arms, I suspected that if it weren’t for the analgesic Okei had given me for my rash, the hair on me would be making me itch.

“Oh, by the way. The record of you visit here is going to say I needed to shave you to get a better look at your rash.” Okei told me.

“You have to shave me too?” I asked in both confusion and worry, as my heart suddenly pounded, since I didn’t particularly want to be bald again, it had put a bit of a crimp in ability to meet women last time I’d been bald, though maybe not being able to buy them drinks that time had been a contributing factor. I doubted I needed further treatment, the shot she’d given me seemed to have done the trick. She’d said that the treatment was systematic and she didn’t need to see the rash on more private parts. “Is my hair going to fall out from the poison ivy or the shot you gave me?”

“I’m not going to shave you,” Okei rolled her eyes at me again. “If I did that I’d have to use even more pads. I just am going to be putting it in your chart so that it helps balance my inventory. I’m only supposed to use one pad per shaving, but frankly three is barely enough.”

“I can see that.” I said, thinking about the amount of extra hair that was going to be in the filters and drains. “Why don’t you just tell them you need more than one per patient?”

“Ship’s nurses have been complaining about it since before I was born,” Okei shrugged, “but SPS is cheap. So according to your chart I shaved you. And I will find an excuse to claim I shaved someone else. And then, my inventory won’t be off.”

I watched Okei shove the pads into one of the purple bags that meant don’t put through on ship recycling. Then she came back over, and helped me gently lay Zelinske back down to the bed.

“There, your haircut is over, and you can rest till it’s time for the next step.” Okei told Zelinske.

“ah donnn meed airgu… mah air isn ober cwoo sanda et.” Zelinske muttered, seeming to be unaware she was now nearly bald.

————————————————-

***********LOBBY*************

—————————————————–

“You should have used your voucher and gone to one of the barbers who take them.” The person at the desk where the new crew members check in told a new crewman standing at the desk.

I looked over and smirked at the curls that hung to halfway down the crewman’s neck. They didn’t quite look natural either, I suspected the crewman had been talked into getting it permed to make them appear shorter than they were, so they would look like crew standard while keeping some length. It wasn’t that I was really interested, it was just that the conversation was being held loudly, and I needed to cross the SPS lobby if I wanted to get to the bathroom before I went to the elevator up to my next ship.

Melissa had carefully avoided the check in desk the couple of times we’d been leaving Earth, like other crewmen who habitually stretched the limits of crew standard. The clerks at the desk didn’t scrutinize crewmen who weren’t checking in for their first assignment, but if they noticed, they’d say something. So there were crewmen who gave the desk a wide berth.

Of course, my hair was well within crew standard, so cutting straight across the lobby towards the bathroom was fine. There were more of us who just causally walked by the desk than those who avoided it.

“My stylist followed all the guidelines exactly,” the crewman argued. “This is exactly crew standard maximum allowed length.”

“I can clearly see it’s not if the curls are pulled straight.” The desk person stated, and then as they always did, opened the drawer many new crewmen discovered was the even worse alternative to going to the barber appointment SPS HR had scheduled for them. “Take this. Go to the bathroom, there is a cape and broom in the closet there. Try to not make too much mess and clean up after yourself. You have thirty-four minutes to get back here if you don’t want a write up for being late on top of the one for showing up not prepared to board.”

“What’s this?”

“Hair clippers.” The person at the desk just said, and pointed in the direction I happened to be heading.

I’d seen a few crewmen just walk right up to the desk and ask to borrow the clippers since haircuts on Earth were expensive, though most of those who were frugal enough to just want to buzz their own hair off with borrowed clipper, also were too frugal to take the elevator down, so it wasn’t common. Of course sometimes SPS paid for a crewman to come down for a training, a transfer, or a meeting. Most of the time though, the clippers were for new crew who showed up with too much hair.

“I don’t know how….”

I entered the bathroom, and headed over to a stall, leaving the conversation behind. When I emerged from the stall, and began washing my hands, I was thrust into a whole new conversation.

“Mommy,” the new crewman said into her watch while beginning to cry, “they said my hair isn’t short enough. I already got it cut so short and they said I have to cut it even shorter.”

As I lathered my hands under the running water, the girl listened to the response from her mother.

“They say permed to stay up off my face doesn’t count, if I can pull the hair down so it stretches past crew standard maximum length, it’s too long……. They want me to just cut it more myself…… Really, they handed me hair clippers and sent me to the bathroom……. I told them I didn’t know how to use them, and they said it was easy, just put them against my forehead and pull back…… It does sound pretty easy, mom, but I’m pretty sure it means I will be buzzing all my hair off, not that the clippers will cut my hair to the maximum crew standard length!….. I don’t know what to do……I guess I could ask the crewman who’s washing her hands, her hair is really short.”

I had a sinking feeling that I was the crewman washing her hands as I flipped them over from the palms which I had just finished holding under the sanitizer to the back.

“Do you know how clippers work?”

“Yeah,” I admitted reluctantly.

“If I place them on my forehead and pull back what length will they cut my hair?”

“Is there a screen you can adjust the length on?” I had a feeling there wasn’t, since every time I had seen anyone sent to the bathroom with the clippers, they’d come back out either pretty much bald or with their hair somewhat uneven, I suspect from trying to use the clippers against the comb unskillfully.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Did they give you any little attachments you can put on the clippers?”

“No. Just a comb.” She held up said comb, that was a basic twenty centimeter barber comb

“It’ll probably cut to a millimeter or less then.”

“MOMMY!?” the new crewman squealed into her watch. “Can you get me a lawyer to get out of the contract?!”

I sighed. I could step in and help, but the girl was an adult, and still calling her mom to get her out of consequences, did she really deserve my help? I supposed though that whether or not she deserved it, I should offer. Besides, a couple of loops where she couldn’t just call her mommy would help her start learning to cope with life like an adult, something she should have learned years earlier, but there was no changing the past.

“Here, I cut my sister’s hair whenever I’m on Earth, I’ll give you a hand.”

“You can cut it to crew standard?”

“I’m not a barber, I can’t do anything fancy. It’s going to be shorter than crew standard,” I told her, “but your other option is bald, so….”

“Mommy?” The crewman asked, then listened to the response as I started losing my patience. “She said she can’t get me a lawyer at this short notice and I should just let you do it.”

Once the new crewman was covered in the cape, and staring unhappily at the mirror, I began. Fortunately she was quite a bit shorter than me, since there was nowhere for her to sit.

I knew the girl didn’t have a ton of time, so I didn’t try to get fancy. I simply used my fingers as a spacer between her scalp and the clipper blades, figuring that would leave the girl a fair amount more hair than just running the bare blades directly against her scalp.

Bzzzzzzzzzzoot

The curls that had been sticking up from between my fingers fell away, leaving behind mostly uniform bristles. I pulled my fingers free. Left behind was hair shorter than what I had on the top of my head, but longer than on the sides. The curls helped hide that it probably wasn’t perfectly even. It wasn’t going to be the best haircut anyone had ever given, but she wouldn’t be bald.

I combed my fingers into the curls again and once again ran the clippers over my fingers cutting off every strand that stuck up above them.

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt

More of the perfectly uniform round curls fell to the floor. I wondered how much had been paid for the perm that had been supposed to trick SPS into thinking her hair was shorter than it really was. Watching the round locks fall I couldn’t help but think of what a waste of money it had been. I buried my fingers into another clump of the bouncy curls.

Buzzzzzzwooot

I kept cutting as the bouncy curls piled up around the girl. I thought about trying to make the sides a little shorter than I’d made the top, but how to do it super quickly without things like a set of guards for the clippers wasn’t obvious, so I just kept cropping the hair to the thickness of my fingers.

Buzzzzoooot, buzzzzzzzzzwooot, bzzzzzzzzzzzzt

I went over a few spots that looked a little extra uneven, and turned the clippers off. The girl turned her head, frowning deeply at the mirror. and raised her hand to the simple crop.

“Want me to clean up your neck?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“I can use the clippers directly against your neck to give it a cleaner look.” I explained, as I tried to brush away all the strands of hair clinging to my sleeves. “I’m not really sure we have time though. You still need to sweep up. Actually I kinda need to get going myself, I want to get a seat on the elevator. So unless you really want me to, I’d like to get going.”

“It’s fine,” the girl said a little grudgingly, as she took off the cape. “go catch the elevator and I’ll clean up.”

“Good luck kid,” I said as I turned towards the door, feeling the girl should have thanked me for helping, but knowing that she was just wasn’t in the mindset that would lead to that.

—————————————————-

**************TIME************

——————————————————-

“How do you keep looking so young?” Sally smiled at me, the corners of her eyes crinkling slightly, as I sat down in the booth at the diner where we usually met every time I made it back to Earth. “I swear you don’t have a single wrinkle or gray hair.”

I sighed knowing it was true. Most of the time I didn’t really mind that I was considerably younger looking and feeling than the age I legally was based on my birth date. This time though, the cost of aging at a different rate than the friends and family I left on Earth and only saw every couple of years was weighing on me extra heavily.

“Time dilation when travelling at high speeds.” I told her.

“I knew that was a thing,” Sally shrugged, “Somehow I thought it was just a week or two here and there.”

“Well, all those weeks add up over time.”

“How are your dad and sister doing?” Sally sort of changed topics, I guess not really thinking about how I was feeling about how my family was aging what felt like too quickly to me.

“They seem good.” I said, thinking how they just were way farther ahead in the grieving process than I was. “They took me to where they had sprinkled mom’s ashes, it was a nice place. They said you were at the memorial.”

“Yeah,” Sally confirmed with a slight nod. “They asked me if I thought they should delay it till you could be here, but eight months is a long time. I thought it was probably what you would have told them to do if you could have been part of the conversation.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledge a bit sadly, “It wouldn’t have been fair to delay just for one person.”

“I’m sorry if I was wrong,” Sally told me.

I looked over at her, and remembered how the only memorial her mom had gotten was us leaning against each other’s backs through a chain link fence and barely talking about it on a playground.

“You weren’t wrong.” I assured her.

———————————————————-

**************HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE*************

————————————————-

Wolf-Cee was one of the places in the settled galaxy that was hard to avoid. Of the dozen or so routes I had been assigned to, all but a few had stopped at Wolf-Cee. So I had a fairly well established routine when we arrived at the station that orbited the planet.

First, I would head to the SPS office, and get any mail. Then I would choose a place to sit and eat while I watch the videos sent to me, mostly from my family and Sally. Next I would get a haircut, since Earth system was almost always the previous stop or the next stop, and the barbers on Wolf-Cee were much much cheaper. Also getting the haircut after watching the video messages gave me time to mull over the messages and think about how I wanted to respond. Finally I would find a quiet spot to record any messages I wanted to send back, then drop them off at the SPS office. Occasionally if there was a ship with some old friends docked, we’d hang out and catch up, but that was only occasionally. Since it was such a regular stop, I’d avoided hooking up with anyone who lived here. Often, I’d head back to the ship early.

It’s not like Wolf-Cee wasn’t a nice place, it was fine, but I’d been here so often it wasn’t exactly novel, and it wasn’t that exciting. Wolf-Cee was a particularly hard planet to terraform, the first century of the colony’s had been spent building the station and capturing comets to get enough water to the dry rocky planet to create oceans that could be seeded with algae, so it was still just part way through the process even though it was a long established colony, so neither interestingly alien nor charmingly earthlike. Its biodomes were pretty much the same as the biodomes on any other planet where there wasn’t a breathable atmosphere yet. I was sure the biodomes and station were ok places to live, but not unique. It wasn’t like there were forests to go hiking in, so there just wasn’t a lot of reason to pay to go down planet.

I was just walking towards the SPS office when I spotted Janet and Frank, the couple who were passengers on my current ship, The Rose Garden, which was a ridiculous name for a freighter that didn’t have a single living plant on it, trying to figure out the station map on one of the screens that dotted the corridors. It was obvious that the wife was quite frustrated when she looked up, then she made eye contact with me, and an expression of relief spread across her face.

“REYES!” Janet called out and waved at me. “Can you help us?”

I knew I had the right to say no, I was off duty, they weren’t my responsibility, but it wasn’t like I was in some major rush, so I figured I might as well be nice. Besides, they were a nice enough couple, even if half the crew complained they were boring. He was a historian, and had a tendency to talk like he was giving a lecture at meals, or really anytime someone was around. He also had a tendency to make the same tired joke over and over about how those that fail to learn their history are doomed to repeat it, and then talk about how certain patterns repeated in Earth history. She was an archivist, and would explain at length how librarians and archivists were different at the least prompting. I’d mostly found it mildly entertaining to vaguely listen to the monologs when either of them had been assigned to assist me by handing me tools as I crawled around under panels or climbed into shafts.

They were definitely more pleasant than many passengers, who were wealthy and resented being expected to work while travelling. Having a passenger who was not in suspended animation in a pod meant that they were occupying space and consuming resources that a crew member normally would, so they needed to make up for it. Wealthy passengers found it absurd that they had to pay to work and not be waited on the way they were accustomed to. Frank and Janet though were not paying their own fares, and probably couldn’t even come close to affording to. They weren’t broke, they probably could have afforded sleeper fares even if it would have been a bit of a strain, but the university on Trappist had been slowly expanding for a while, and hiring professors from Earth, and prefered if they arrived awake. I was very happy to take mildly socially awkward over pompous, arrogant, and resentful.

“Having trouble finding something?” I asked as I joined them at the screen Frank was staring at.

“A hair salon,” Janet said as she waved at the screen. “I thought the instructor back on Earth was exaggerating when she said long hair was extremely uncomfortable while travelling and that I should probably get it cut, but she was right.” Janet frowned and gave the large mousy brown bun on the back of her head a pat, then continued. “We see a barber shop, so Frank can get his hair trimmed, but we don’t see a salon.”

“There’s no salon up station,” I informed her. “You either need to go to the barbershop or take a shuttle down planet.”

“I don’t really want to waste our limited time down on the planet getting a haircut,” Janet lamented. “Since it’s a couple of hours till the shuttle leaves for the planet, we just figured we could get it done while waiting.”

“If you want to get it done up here, the barbershop’s the only option.”

Janet sighed and looked at Frank, “What do you think?”

“Does it really matter?” Frank shrugged. “You have to get it cut fairly short if you don’t want to have to keep putting it up anyway.”

“I want to keep it as long as I can get away with,” Janet insisted.

“The barbers here are fine with things like bobs,” I told her. “I’ve seen people get all kinds of haircuts at them.”

“I guess it doesn’t really matter,” Janet sighed. “Thank you for helping us Reyes. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time on your day off.”

“No problem,” I said as I began to walk off.

Janet and Frank turned back to the screen and started discussing privately while pointing. “I think this is that corridor over there?” “Are you sure?” “No, but look how it branches on the map?”

I hadn’t gotten very far, so I turned back. I was pretty sure if I left Frank and Janet wandering the station by themselves, they were going to get lost and probably miss the shuttle down planet. It wasn’t like rearranging my usual routine was a big deal, I could visit the barbershop first.

“I’m going that way anyhow, since I also need a haircut.” I announced. “You can just follow me, and I can take you to the shuttle dock after.”

“Oh, thank you so much.”

———————————————————-

I led Frank and Janet through the complicated maze of corridors till we finally came to the one that led to the barbershop. Thanks to the swirling red and white LEDs that surrounded the hatch, it was visible from all the way at the intersection. We walked down the corridor and through the hatch into the barbershop.

As far as I could tell, Wolf-Cee station had one of the busiest barbershop in the settled galaxy. It was almost exclusively visited by SPS freighter crews, so when there were multiple ships docked, the place was hopping. Today it was just mildly busy, since there were only two ships in. Janet, Frank, and I settled down for the short wait.

Since I had been leading the way, and sat down first, my turn came first, when one of the barbers released a not exactly thrilled looking fellow crewman. She was from cargo and I just barely knew her. Last time I’d seen her at lunch yesterday, she’d had shaggy brown hair enough over crew standard she couldn’t get away with putting off a haircut any longer. Getting out of the barber chair her hair was buzzed down to a velvety stubble. It was something the crewmen who just wanted to save up enough to settle on a colony often did to save money, only get haircuts when absolutely necessary, and make sure they would last as long as possible when they did get haircuts. It was one of the things that tended to set career SPS apart from the one contract wonders. It wasn’t universal, some single contract crewmen just cared too much about their appearance to get the severe buzz, and some couldn’t stand the feeling of the shaggy hair so didn’t put off haircuts. On the other side there were some career SPS who were just very frugal and didn’t really care how they looked, so they did the grow and buzz. I went over and took the seat the buzzed crewman had just gotten out of.

‘What’ll it be?” My barber asked as she swung the cape over me.

“Five centimeters on top, tapered on the sides, and a round hairline in the back.” I recited the same thing I said almost every time I sat down for a haircut.

“Got’cha,” The barber replied, then she simply began with no fuss.

I sat as the barber combed up the hair from the top of my head and trimmed away a couple of centimeters. As I sat watching the black hair falling to my shoulders, Janet got called up to the chair next to me.

“I want to keep as much length as possible, while making it so I don’t have to sleep with my hair in a bun.” Janet nervously told the barber, from the edge of the seat as she began to take bobby pins from the large bun, that I was sure was rather uncomfortable to sleep in. “So just enough above my shoulders that it won’t get caught in a helmet seal.”

“Is this Earth grown virgin hair?” The barber asked her a little excitedly as he looked at the smooth straight mousy brown hair that fell all the way down Janice’s back till it brushed the seat.

“Huh?”

“You were living on Earth while you grew your hair, and you never permed or dyed it?”

“Oh… yeah, I guess.” Janet looked baffled.

“Wonderful!” The barber said, “this haircut is on the house then. I’ll need to go get a special cape to collect the hair in before we begin.”

“Uhhhh… ok,” Janet’s anxiety sounded like it was a bit higher.

“Now, you were saying you wanted a just above the shoulders haircut,” Janet’s barber said, “but you have to consider not just that it needs to be clear of a helmet seal when you leave Wolf-Cee tomorrow, but also for the entire trip to your next stop, which I am assuming will be a few weeks. And at your next stop, they will not be offering free haircuts for passengers from Earth. I would recommend you go shorter. You’ll need at least a bob, but shorter would be better. The shorter you go the easier it will be to manage on your travels. I can show you some pictures of shorter styles. You have a great face shape for a pixie.”

“Maybe I should go to a salon down on the surface…” Janet looked over at Frank, clearly uncomfortable with the barber who was pressuring her to go shorter.

“I can offer you a pup a gram, for the hair,” The barber insisted.

“What?!”

“How about a pup fifty?”

“What are pups?” Frank interjected himself into the one sided negotiation.

“It’s the local currency.” I decided to get involved.

“You want to buy my wife’s hair?” Frank clarified.

“I know it probably seems a little strange to you coming from Earth where hair is just garbage, but here recycling the hair provides important organic matter for terraforming. Earth grown hair is particularly high in certain elements that are much more common there than here, so we take extra care recycling it. And we can offer to pay you for it. Two pups per gram?”

“It doesn’t really seem that strange.” Frank stated in a tone that I knew meant he was about to slip into lecture mode. “Historically, selling hair has been practiced on Earth for millenia. The ancient…”

“Frank shut up.” Janet interrupted him before he could really get going. “I don’t need to sell my hair, we may not be rich, but we aren’t destitute.”

“I’m sorry if it came across like I was suggesting you were ma’am,” the barber switched tactics. “You could just look at it as a little gift from us for contributing necessary elements to our terraforming efforts. You’ll be leaving a little bit of yourself here on Wolf-Cee that will help sustain life for millenia to come. And by leaving the extra mass from the hair here, you will be able to take some more mass with you when you leave. You can get yourself a nice souvenir. Gold is not one of the elements this system lacks, and Wolf-Cee has the finest jewelers in the settled galaxy.”

“I still think I might be more comfortable at a salon on the surface,” Janet stated and began to twist the long hair back up into a bun.

“I assure you,” the barber stated, “I will cut your hair however you want it. If you really do just want it cut to above your shoulder I can do that. But, I was suggesting short not just because it allows me to collect more grams of hair, it really will be more comfortable. And shoulder length is definitely not short enough to keep it free of a helmet seal. Getting more compensation the shorter you want to go is just a bonus.”

“Reyes,” Janet turned to me as my own barber snipped an arch over my ear, “is shoulder length really not short enough?”

“It’s not my call” I told her, “but probably not. Captain Baldwin gets to decide, and he might not think so and insist you either continue to put it up or get it cut again. You’ll definitely have to get it cut every stop along the way. A short bob will get it clear of the helmet, You’ll need to get it cut when we stop, but not at every stop. It’s true that shorter than a bob is easier, like shorter would keep it out of your face during low to high gee maneuvers. I keep my hair shorter than crew standard in part because it’s more comfortable and convenient.”

“Just get it cut short enough here,” Frank volunteered his opinion. “I don’t want to spend half our time at every stop looking for salons. This is a once in a lifetime trip, do you really want to spend half of it getting haircuts instead of visiting places we will never have the opportunity to see again? You could get it the same length as Reyes’ hair, she doesn’t look terrible. And selling your hair is a rather interesting historic experience. And the shorter you go the more we get for it.”

“What we?” Janet complained. “It’s my hair, I’m the one that has to live with it. If you think it’s worth the money sell your own hair.”

“I don’t have enough hair to sell,” Frank made a rather bold statement about his mildly shaggy brown classic businessman’s haircut.

“Oh no,” the barber contradicted. “If your hair is Earth grown virgin, we’ll buy it too. The same two pups per gram, though obviously we can’t get nearly as many grams from you.”

“Oh… well… umm…” Frank stammered.

“If you want me to get my hair cut like Reyes’ for a few extra credits, you can give them all your hair. Let them buzz you to the scalp.” Janet threatened.

“EXCELLENT!” The barber decided it was his moment to settle negotiations. “A five centimeter pixie cut for the lady and a nice comfortable buzz cut for the gentleman. Now just wait here while I go get that special cape.”

“Huh!” Janet turned slightly to the barber who obviously was hoping everyone would just go along with it at this point as he began to walk away.

“You know this is going to be shorter when it’s done?” I warned Janet in a slightly muffled tone, since my chin was pressed to my chest, as her barber went off to get a cape, and my barber turned on the clippers and began pushing them up the back of my head.

———————————————-

Janet had fussed a little as the barber had put the cape on her while my barber completed my haircut. She still seemed rather unsure about getting the five centimeter pixie, but the barber kept assuring her it was a really good decision, and that her husband obviously would like it.

By the time the barber had Janet all set up to be sure to capture every gram of her hair in a large bowl that rested in her lap, my haircut was finished, so I just went over to the waiting chair next to Frank. I considered just leaving, but I kinda felt committed to getting Frank and Janet to the shuttle on time, and I wasn’t in a rush.

It was a complicated set up, the barber had Janet in. The cape had a rim around the edges to keep any hair from sliding off to the sides and to the floor, though the barber had put a drop cloth on the floor just in case. Then the cape had a bit of structure to it, giving it a very slight funnel shape. The surface was very slick looking. In the center of it was Janet with her long hair twisted up on top of her head, and the most unsure expression on her face I had ever seen.

The barber finally seemed ready to actually begin cutting Janice’s hair as he chose a pair of long sheers and a comb from his counter and began approaching Janet.

“Aren’t you going to wash my hair?” Janet nervously asked. “Or at least wet it?”

“Why would I waste water credits making your hair wet?” The barber seemed a little confused. “Wouldn’t that make the hair clump together?”

“It’s common in systems where clean water is fairly plentiful.” I explained. “They seem to think it makes it easier.”

“Hmmmm,” The barber took a moment thinking about it. “I’ll give it a try sometime, but not right now. I don’t want to experiment on…a client.”

I suspected the hesitation was that he didn’t want to experiment on hair that was so valuable, but was trying to not make Janet feel even more like he was focused on gathering as much of it as possible and not on giving her a hairstyle she could live with.

“Now, sit nice and still, and be careful not to spill the hair,” the barber told Janet as he gathered the huge bundle of hair behind her back.

Janet looked intently at the mirror as the barber held the hair up several centimeters away from her head. Held the hair tightly, so none would slip from his hand as he raised the shears up. He opened the blades and inserted the bottom blade into the long strands up at the top of the bundle , obviously not planning to try to cut all the thick hair in a single step. The blades were closer to Janet’s scalp than the barber’s hand, just seven or eight centimeters. He began to cut.

Shhrunch, sshhrrrrunch, shhhhnap

Short hair lay against the crown of Janet’s head as the severed end of the long stands hung loosely over the barber’s hand. He inserted the scissors again right up by the place where Janet’s skull curved out the furthest, and closed the scissor, this time closer to just five or six centimeters from her scalp.

Shhhhhrunch, ssccrrrrunch, snap

As more severed ends covered the barber’s hand, and the cut ends swung forward covering Janet’s ears, he lowered the bundle slightly and began to insert the scissors into the hair at Janet’s nape.

“Ooooh,” Janet startled slightly as the silver blades brushed her neck. “That’s cold! It feels awfully short!”

The barbers, unfazed by Janet’s concern, closed the scissors about three or four centimeters below her hairline.

Shhnip. Sssshnap.

“It’s just a little shorter right at the bottom.” The barber told Janet without slowing or pausing as he snipped along. below her hairline. “I’ll be tapering the back to give it that flattering pixie shape.”

The barber twisted the bundle of hair back and forth slightly, hunting for any strands that hadn’t been cut yet, and cut them as he found them.

Shhnip, ssshnap, snip, snip, ssssnip, ssnap, snap.

The barber slowly pulled the handful of Janet’s hair away, and snapped off the few stray still long strands that he found as he did. Then he very carefully brought the very long ponytail in front of Janet. Her eyes went mildly wide as she watched him lift the bulk of her hair up high so that the original ends cleared the rim of the bowl in her lap. He carefully lowered the long strands down into the bowl, arranging them into a coil that took up most of the space.

Janet looked down at the bowl a little forlornly, then up at her reflection. Her expression was rather regretful as she looked at what looked like a bob from the front. I figured she would probably be even more unhappy if she could see the back, which looked like messy shingles.

The the barber didn’t leave her to contemplate the bob for long. He combed up the hair that hung along the side of Janet’s face and trapped it between his fingers in the typical barber fashion, but instead of cutting the hair that stuck out against the tops of his fingers, he snipped along the otherside in the gap between his fingers and Janet’s scalp.

Sssssssnip, sssssssssss-click, sssssshnip.

The barber carefully kept his fingers closed, as he moved his hand to just centimeters above Janet’s lap, where he finally opened his fingers dropping the tufts of hair into the bowl with the coil. Janet looked at her reflection with concern.

I looked over at Frank, who was beginning to look a bit worried himself. Though he may not have had strong feelings about Janet’s hair, I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to be happy if she ended up angry at him for the next five months it was going to take us to get to Trappist for having talked her into this.

The barber simply ignored Janet’s look of regret, and focused on carefully collecting the hair from her head. He combed the hair from the top of her head straight up, and cut it below his fingers just slightly longer than the agreed upon finished length.

Shhhnip, sssshhhhhhhhhhnip.

He repeated collecting the hair over and over, till Janet’s hair was a just a slightly long and somewhat choppy version of the pixie she’d been talked into. The barber combed through what hair was left on Janet’s head a couple of times, and went to the counter to switch scissors.

When the barber returned behind Janet, who had a very concerned expression on her face, he began to lightly trim what was left of her hair into its final shape. He combed the hair down onto her forehead, and trimmed her bangs using a slicing motion, just very slightly above her eye brows. The way he sliced down through the hair, left the bangs soft and a little wispy. When he combed through the soft bangs, they almost automatically began to sweep to the side.

With the bangs established, the barber began working his way back, cutting the hair on the top of Janet’s head into long points instead of straight across. When he reached the back, the result was that the choppiness from him simply harvesting the hair had been transformed into softness. As Janet watched in the mirror, her expression relaxed very slightly.

Though technically he was giving Janet a five centimeter pixie just like I had, he was cutting the fine smooth straight hair very differently than my thick slightly wavy hair was cut. He also was pausing every few snips to sweep the valuable snippets toward the bowl in Janet’s lap.

Janet’s nervousness seemed to return briefly as the barber switched to using clippers. The barber pushed them fairly high up the back of Janet’s head, and pulled them away rather suddenly, leaving a distinct line between the sides and the top. The hair from the top, hung over the line slightly, and the barber didn’t blend the top and bottom, as barbers tended to for me. It was a style I saw on lot’s of crewmen, and even sometimes on others, Though I didn’t think it would suit me, I could see why Janet’s barber had decided to do her hair that way. It just worked for the smooth straight hair.

Finished with the clippers, the barber picked up the scissor again, and began shaping the short pelt slightly more, cutting scissors over comb up the back of Janet’s head, then around her ears. He used the thinning shears a lot more sparingly on her than they usually did on me. Then he gave Janet’s hair cut the final finishing touch of shaving in a clean hairline, carving the bottom into a rather flattering V, that left Janet’s neck looking longer.

Janet sat looking rather impatient as the barber carefully brushed any tiny bits of hair forward into the bowl. When he’d finished and had finally taken the bowl full of hair over to a scale, the barber simply handed Janice the hand mirror and left her to examine the back of her head on her own.

Janet, tilted her head about, looking more curious than unhappy as her hand brushed up through the short hair.

“It looks really good on you.” I assured her. “Fresh and young. Right Frank?”

“Yes, not terrible at all.” Frank agreed. “And I’m sure you will be much more comfortable.”

“Thanks Reyes,” Janet said rather genuinely, then added not quite as genuinely, “and Frank…” Then Janet sighed, got up, and added, “Well, I guess it’s your turn Frank. Time to find out how much that fuzz on your head is worth.”

“Yes…well…uhm, I’m not sure there’s time for that.“ Frank hesitated. “We only have a little over half an hour before the shuttle leaves for the planet’s surface.”

“It’s just a five minute walk from here.” I told him.

“That doesn’t leave a lot of time for a haircut.” Frank argued.

“Don’t worry,” The barber told him as he handed Janet an exchange card for her hair, “buzzcuts are very quick, and I already have the collection cape ready to go.”

“Yes…uhm…”

“Stop trying to come up with an excuse Frank,” Janet told him in a warning tone. “I got the haircut you suggested, now it’s your turn. And hurry up, we don’t have a ton of time.”

“yes dear,” Frank said, as he reluctantly walked over to the barber’s chair.

As the barber fastened the cape around Frank’s neck, Janet examined the exchange card she’d been given.

“Now keep your head down,” the barber ordered Frank as he started up the clippers.

As the barber ran the clippers up and over the top of Franks head, pushing all the hair in front of them into Frank’s lap, Janet showed me the sum on the exchange card. I nodded and smiled at the not completely insignificant sum.

“NO! Keep your head down!” The barber ordered Frank again when he tried to look up. “I’m trying to get the hair to fall forward directly into the bowl.”

The barber was pushing Frank’s head down and forward much more than I had ever seen a barber do. Frank’s head was pretty much directly over the bowl as the barber sheared him like a sheep.

When the barber finally let Frank sit up, he was basically bald. He had the exact same haircut I had during my four years in EES. The barber did take a moment to shave a sharp clean hairline into the stubble, which the EES barbers had never done.

Honestly as shell shocked as Frank looked about the experience, the buzzed head was kind of a better look on him, more rugged than the shaggy business man’s cut had been.

“Well you don’t look completely terrible, and I’m sure it’s very comfortable,” Janet told Frank just slightly sarcastically, though I suspected the dig went over Frank’s suddenly bald head. “Now come on before we miss that shuttle.”

As Janet and I got up, the barber handed Frank his exchange card. He looked down at the card and frowned. When he joined Janet and I at the hatch into the barbershop, he looked over her shoulder at the sum on her card, then back down at the sum on his and frowned even more deeply.

———————————————————–

I led the freshly cropped couple through the corridors to the shuttle port. We managed to get there with about ten minutes to spare.

“Well, here you are,” I announced. “Have a good time down planet. I’ll see you back on the ship.”

“Aren’t you coming down to the surface?” Janet asked.

“I’ve been down a couple of times,” I told her, “and the shuttle tickets are pretty expensive.”

“Expensive?” Frank asked as he peered at the sign that listed the prices for adults, children, pets, and extra luggage in both pups and stellar units. His slight expression of confusion made it clear that he didn’t really understand why I thought of the cost as high. I guess compared to similar things on Earth, it wasn’t really.

“Would you like to go down?” Janet asked. “We’d be happy to make it our treat.”

“Thanks, but I couldn’t accept such a generous gift.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s nothing compared to the time you gave up waiting around while Frank and I got haircuts just to make sure we made it here on time. And I’m sure we wouldn’t have if you hadn’t.” Janet assured me. “If you want to come down, it’s our treat.”

I was about say I had plans up here even though going down planet was more fun than hanging out on the station, but having been reminded that they never would have made it to the shuttle on time, I suddenly realized that sending the couple down to the planet alone was risking them getting lost and not making it back to the ship on time. I decided going down planet with them and playing tour guide was a good idea.

“Ok,” I said.

Seeing the planet with the couple turned out to be more fun than I expected. It was amusing seeing how things that I had become so used to I no longer even really noticed them were new and novel to the couple. They put things I hadn’t really understood into interesting historical perspectives. They bought me a couple of meals, and took me to the science museum. We had a great time, and I made sure they didn’t get lost and were back on the shuttle up to the station on time.

I ended up playing tour guide for the couple at every stop. When they finally got off on Trappist, they left me with a rather interesting present, a thumb drive with a longer more detailed history book, that covered lots of stuff that had been left out of the version of Earth history in the ship’s library that was skewed to paint the industries that wanted to uphold the status quo in as favorable a light as possible. They kept saying they wished it could be a more tangible gift, but that they knew I had strict limits on how much weight I was allowed. I assured them the gift was amazing, even though I was nervous to use it on anything but the tiny screen on my personal watch.
———————————————

*****************SHRINK**************

——————————————————–
“So you want another new route?” HR guy looked at me like I was making his day hard, which I guess I was. “Is there a problem with Captain Clark?”

“Nah nothing like that.” I shrugged. “I just want to see somewhere new.”

“Level with me.” HR guy said.

“It’s getting hard to avoid running into women I’ve had one night stands with along the route.” I admitted. “You’d think it would be easy, considering it’s a whole planet, but most of them are fairly sparsely populated planets, and there aren’t that many lesbians who are into the casual thing. I’m not looking for relationships, but it starts to feel like that when you sleep with the same girl a couple of times. I just don’t want to start something serious, then have someone trying to convince me to settle down on a planet or moon or something.”

“You know most crewmen don’t ask for a new route every time they visit Earth. Should I set you up with an appointment with the shrink, while you’re here?”

“Do you want me getting into a serious relationship and not renewing because I’m settling down with some girl?”

“Good point.” HR guy smirked and started tapping his screen. “I’ve got an opening for a senior engineer on a nice long route, the Galileo. You won’t be hitting the same systems for well over a year, so maybe you will be happy on it for more than a loop or two. Or at least the two loops will last longer so you won’t be back here asking me for a new route quite so soon. It goes all the way out to Toi.”

—————————————————————–

We were over a year from when we would be returning to Earth, when the message from my sister caught up to me.

Radio waves and light pulses were limited to the speed of light, so were pretty useless for communicating out of system, so mail was the only option. Mail drones traveled between systems pretty much the same way freighters did, getting far enough away from high gravity that they could generate wormholes to slip through. They could travel a lot faster than a freighter though. Because they were so much smaller, they did not have to get nearly as far out into the empty to generate a wormhole to slip through, and were less likely to need to make multiple slips. And because they were unmanned drones, they could accelerate at levels that would kill a human pilot, and even kill sleepers in pods.

Drones were much more likely to get lost than manned ships, so anything sent digitally was sent out twice on a redundant backup drone. Physical items could be sent, but they had to be extremely small and light, cost even more than it cost to send things on a freighter, which was already not cheap, and were never guaranteed to actually arrive.

Crewmen’s mail was forwarded to an SPS office in the system where the ship was scheduled to arrive. Mail often waited weeks for us to catch up to it. So messages from my family on Earth were usually from a month or two earlier by the time I got them.

When I had downloaded the message from my sister to my watch, I just expected the usual video of my nephews saying “hi,” and a quick life update from dad and my sister. So since I was on a nice planet that was fully terraformed, and lucky enough to be there on a day with great weather, I decided I would watch the message on the personal tablet I had manage to save up for at an open air cafe. I was comfortably settled with a tea and a local pastry specialty, when I began the message.

**Hi Maria,** the image of my sister greeted me as she came onto the screen with no sign of my nephews or father being nearby. She looked older and more tired than usual. **There’s no good way to say this. Dad had a heart attack two nights ago. It turned out that after mom passed away, he had taken the DNR discount on his insurance. He passed away.**

My sister began talking about memorial arrangements and apologizing about not feeling like she could delay them till I was back to Earth. I stared off into the distance wondering if I had added the money I’d set aside for my new tablet to the percentage of my salary I had been having SPS send to my dad, if he would have not felt like he needed to take the DNR discount. Or was it just because he felt like I did after I lost Melissa, and maybe if I had been there to keep him company, he wouldn’t have taken the DNR discount. What if I’d stayed with EES so money wouldn’t have been tight at all, and I would have been on Earth to help convince him life really was still worth living. What if…I sighed.

———————————————————

~~~~~~~~~~Part 5~~~~~~~~~~~~

***************HARD WORKING PASSENGERS**************
———————————————————–

I knew the Galileo was picking up two working passengers on Earth, Sarah and Jason Papadopolous, since I needed to go talk to them about shift assignments, it was the duty of the chief engineer for some reason, but I wasn’t at all prepared for who I would find when I knocked on their cabin door.

“Sunshine!” Sally said with delight after she opened the door. “Surprise! I thought I would have to go looking for you.”

“Sally!” I said with delighted surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Mr Papadopolous is moving to Toi, and didn’t want to get lonely on the trip, so he hired me to accompany him.” Sally shrugged. “He’s one of my regular clients.”

She was dressed more casually than I was used to seeing her, though a little more chic than most passengers. She wore the usual knit pants, a tanktop, and sweater, but they just fit her a little differently and were decorated with rhinestones. Her long braided hair was now a deep royal purple, the dozens of braids came together at the back of her head where they were wrapped into a bun, which was required since having hair loose could pose safety issues even for passengers who would never go anywhere near engine shafts. They still needed to be able to get into a suit and get a helmet seal in an emergency.

“Please, just call me ‘Papa’” a baritone voice behind Sally said.

“I thought that was just for when we have privacy?” Sally turned and asked the older man.

“Everyone calls me Papa.” He smiled indulgently at Sally. “It’s been my nick-name for decades, it’s not a substitute for ‘daddy’ or anything, just shorter than Papadopolis.”

“Ok Papa.”

“I guess this explains why you messaged that we couldn’t meet down planet,” I interrupted Sally and Papa’s exchange. “Can I talk to you in the hall for a minute Sally?”

“Yeah sure,” she agreed, then told her client, “I’ll be back in a minute Papa.”

“Sally, SPS seriously frowns on travel companions that take their client’s work shifts.” I told her in a hushed voice. “They can fine Papa and you, and force you into pods. Now I’m sure Papa can afford the fine no problem, but I know you can’t. Plus I’m pretty sure they’d have blocked you from leaving Earth because of your debts if you were travelling under your own name instead of his, and that might land you back in detention.”

“Don’t worry, that’s not what he hired me for.” Sally assured me. “He’s fine working his own shifts, he just wants a little entertainment and comfort in the down time. Ok?”

“I guess,” I said a little nervously, I wasn’t really sure if there was any policy against that. It didn’t seem like it violated the policy that working passengers must work. “Are you sure he won’t change his mind once we leave dock?”

“Relax, it will be fine.” Sally assured me. “If he asks me to work one of his shifts, I’ll just threaten to spank him.”

“Maybe just keep this between you and me.” I told her, “He’s got you listed on the manifest as his wife.”

“Don’t worry,” Sally said, “I know how to play the game.”

—————————————————

“STOP!” Sally yelled at the blinking mopper robot she was chasing down the corridor. “You don’t have any fluid!”

I laughed as I blocked the escaping device with my feet, then bent down and picked it up, holding it so Sally could catch up to it. When she got to the spot in the corridor I stood holding the whirring robot, she was mildly out of breath and looking a bit disheveled, a couple of her skinny braids had escaped the bun.

“I take it this one escaped?” I teased Sally as I handed the robot over to her.

“I forgot to deactivate it when I picked it up and took out its dirty reservoir,” Sally began her explanation as she walked with the robot back to where the fluid waited, “I just put it down for a second while I got out the new fluid, and off it went.”

“That happened to me once,” I confessed.

“The chief engineer changes the cleaning fluid of mopping robots?”

“I started as a junior engineer.” I reminded her. “Generally changing the mop-bots is something that entry level crew or working passengers do, but when junior engineers first start, they have us learn all the basic maintenance tasks so that if there is an issue, we know how things should be operating. If a mop-bot isn’t operating normally, someone’s got to fix it.”

“So is escaping halfway through a fluid change considered operating normally.”

“Personally I’d call it a design flaw,” I chuckled, “But the makers didn’t ask me. Here, I’ll hold it still while you add the new fluid.”

“Thanks,” Sally smiled at me. “It’s nice to get a little time to hang out. I wish we were getting to spend some time doing fun activities together. I wished you could have come to the beach with me back on Ross.”

“I completely understand why you need to spend time with Papa, when we are docked at nice planets,” I assured her, even though I was also disappointed that we couldn’t go down planet together. “He hired you because he wants someone to go with him. Is he really boring when you’re down there?”

“Nah, we actually have a pretty good time.” Sally told me as she squirted the bottle of fresh cleaning fluid into the reservoir of the mop-bot I held. “Papa is far from the worst client I’ve ever had, he’s reasonably nice and actually kinda fun to be with. He wants to go to interesting places and stuff. I just wish I could do some of those things with you.”

“If he’s so fun to be with,” I asked as I released the filled mop-bot to get back to cleaning the corridor, “why does he need to hire a companion?”

“I don’t think he really needs to, I think he just prefers it.” Sally shrugged as we both started walking down the corridor to where she would find the next mop-bot that needed attention. “I think it’s easier for him to feel a little less like he’s actually dating. He spends a lot of time telling me about his late girlfriend. I think really dating someone would feel like cheating on her to him, but by hiring me, he can tell himself he’s just getting his physical needs met. I suppose a real girlfriend might also be jealous of his feelings about the late girlfriend, or at least he would be worried they might be, but since he is paying me, he doesn’t have to think about that and can just talk about her freely.”

“hmmm” I let out, before we fell into a thoughtful silence. I thought about how I could kind of relate to how Papa felt. I’d had trouble really dating since losing Melissa. I had avoided finding anyone on the crew to date, instead having one night stands when in systems. Though I wasn’t hiring hookers, I was always very up front that I was not looking for long term relationships. Of course the lifestyle of a career SPS employee meant I had a quick explanation when I warned the women I was flirting with that I was just looking for a couple of days’ companionship before they took me home to their beds.

I was thinking about how I felt each time I left a girl behind on a planet, knowing that even if I wanted a long term relationship there were practical obstacles, and Sally was bending down to pick up the next mop-bot with its red empty light blinking, when I felt the slight vibrations of the impacts before the warning klaxon sounded.

“DECOMPRESSION!” I warned Sally who was still holding the mop-bot as she looked around with a bit of panic.

I could tell Sally was still trying to remember what she was supposed to do as she followed me to the nearest suit locker, still carrying the bot. I opened the locker and grabbed a suit I was planning to toss at Sally, who was still holding the damned bot.

“DROP THE MOP-BOT!” I told her, then tossed the suit into her hands as soon as she did.

Fortunately she was climbing into it reasonably quickly, letting me focus on getting myself into a suit, then I made sure we were both tethered to the anchor point so we couldn’t be sucked out. I was already clicking my helmet into place while Sally was trying to adjust her sleeves so she could use her hands to get her helmet on.

I could tell from the way things were beginning to flutter, we were losing air fast, so instead of waiting for Sally to get her sleeves adjusted, I simply slammed the helmet down onto her. The helmet didn’t click the way it should. Why was fairly quickly obvious as I saw a couple of the skinny braids were fluttering in the wind created by the escaping air. Sally reached up to readjust the helmet, but I reached over and stopped her. It was too late, I knew the air pressure in the corridor had already dropped below safe levels and would reach full vacuum in seconds. Instead I grabbed the patch kit from the locker, and slapped the sticky membrane over the neck seam of the helmet.

Once the shaking of the air rushing out was over, and I could no longer hear the klaxon I knew was still going, I knew we were in vacuum. Then I noticed we must have stopped accelerating, because the artificial gravity was gone.

I tapped my watch trying to get a signal to contact the engineer on duty and the captain. I looked at it, and saw I had no signal. I tried again, but it was clear that it wasn’t happening.

I took a cautious deep breath, trying to calm myself and looked over at Sally who looked very shocked and was talking rapidly. I reached out, held her helmet still, and pressed my helmet against hers, the sound finally coming through, but I couldn’t follow what she’d been saying since she was halfway through and talking fast.

“The sound doesn’t travel over vacuum,” I reminded her. “You have to talk helmet to helmet or through watches. Start over.”

“What happened?” Sally asked the simple question, obviously not thinking whatever she’d said earlier was really important.

“Probably just got hit by a rock. Usually they won’t cause serious damage, but if it’s at the right angle, in the right spot it can happen.” I tried to shrug, the suit and weightlessness made it awkward though. “I need to get to engineering, I’m going to tether you to me. Use the hand rail since we are at zero gee. Ok?”

“I need to go check on Papa.” She told me, “I can’t get a signal to contact him by watch.”

“I need you to stay with me,” I told her. I understood and admired her feeling responsible for her client, but realistically there wasn’t a hell of a lot she could do to help him, either he’d gotten into a suit in time, was in a sealed off section and was fine, or it was already too late; and I didn’t want her wandering around alone in the dangerous situation. “There are crew who are responsible for that, just stay with me. Tap my shoulder if you want to talk again.”

“Ok.”

I released her helmet, and we started to slowly make our way through the corridor tethered together.
——————————————————–

**********************Wrench**********************

——————————————————–

I felt urgent tapping on my shoulder as I took a deep breath that finally didn’t have the stuffy stale feeling of the inside of my helmet. I looked over at Sally who was still stuck in her helmet even though we were through the airlock into engineering.

“I’M GOING TO HAVE TO CUT YOU OUT OF IT.” I told her hopefully loudly enough that she could hear inside her helmet.

I unzipped my suit so I could get to my pocket and pull out the multi-tool I always carried. Sally’s eyes went wide as I raised the knife blade to the patch covering the seam between the helmet and suit.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “it’s only to cut the patch.”

“Watch out for my hair!” Sally cautioned me as I ran the blade through the rubbery membrane.

“I had to put the patch over your hair, Sally.” I told her apologetically. “Even if I don’t cut it as I cut the seam open, I am going to have to cut some for you to get out of the suit. There’s no way to get the braids out from between the patch and suit, the adhesive is way too strong.”

“Really?” Sally frowned as I lifted the helmet off of her and she reached back to feel the braids that were still stuck

“I’m sorry.” I said. “I had to.”

“I suppose being alive is worth losing a few braids,” Sally accepted with resignation, feeling the braids that bridged the space between the disheveled bun they’d escaped from and the patch. “And I can talk Papa into taking me to a nice salon to get it fixed once we get to our next stop.”

“Watch your fingers,” I warned Sally as I inserted the sharp blade and began to saw through the braids.

When I sawed through the last braid, Sally finally started getting out of her suit, the severed ends of the braids floating around her neck.

I looked around, confused about why engineering appeared to be empty.

“NADAR,” I called out.

“REYES?” I heard the familiar voice of Nadar, who was the engineer on duty, from one of the shafts.

“YEAH,” I yelled up, “ARE YOU OK?”

“I’M NOT INJURED.” he yelled back, “BUT I’M STUCK. WELL SORT OF STUCK.”

“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”

“YOU EVER HEAR THAT STORY ABOUT THE DUTCH BOY WHO STUCK HIS FINGER IN A HOLE IN A DIKE?”

“YEAH,” I said having a bad feeling about where this was going.

“WELL I’M HOLDING THE VALVE FOR THE EMERGENCY BACK UP AIR SUPPLY CLOSED WITH A WRENCH THAT I CAN’T LET GO OF,”

“Shit,” I let out under my breath. “Sally, I need to go up there and help Nadar jerry-rig something to keep that valve closed. Get into my suit in case it goes really badly.”

“Won’t you need the suit?”

“I can maneuver through the shaft more easily without it.” I told her. “The chance that engineering will lose pressure is small. It’s better if I can just move quickly.”

“If the chance is small, why do I need the suit?”

“Because worrying about you will distract me.” I told her. “I can’t handle losing another person I love, please just give me that piece of mind. Ok?”

“Ok Sunshine.” Sally said, put her hand against my cheek for the briefest moment, then began putting on my discarded suit. “If it makes you feel better.”

“Thank you,” I told her as I donned my tool belt and began pulling myself up the shaft towards Nadar.

———————————————————-

“How much of the back up air reserve did we lose?” Captain Lee asked.

“About ninety-three percent.” I told her as I put down my helmet and unzipped my suit.

“About?” Ollson the pilot asked.

“Ninety-two point something I would have to check my notes to tell you.” I specified a bit impatiently, “It’s not like piloting where being off course by zero point zero zero something will crash you into a planet. Air is compressible and exactly how much a person breathes varies minute to minute.”

“Sorry,” Olsson apologized. “My nerves are just a bit frayed.”

“Sorry about snapping,” I said sighing, and then over-thought about how much air sighing may have wasted. “I’m a bit on edge too.”

“And what’s left is not enough to replace the ninety seven percent of the air we lost from the breaches?” Captain Lee tried to get us back on topic.

“Not even close.”

“So there’s no chance of pressurizing the corridors?” Captain Lee asked with frustration. “How about just keeping us all alive?”

“Sorry to be morbid, but it depends on how many of us survived the initial depressurization. Assuming seventy five percent, we can make it about sixty hours.” I told her. “The filters and oxygenators just can’t work as efficiently with the low pressure and poor air circulation of only having air in a few select compartments. And several oxygenators were just damaged in the accident.”

“It’s going to take more than sixty hours for the SOS drones just to make it to systems.” The captain gave me a rather gloomy look. “The nearest ship is at least 3 weeks away, probably longer. How long can you keep three crewmen alive?”

“Three people, two weeks probably, maybe the three weeks, but it would be close, not within the margin of error.” I answered nervously.

I knew three was the minimum crew to keep a drifting ship safe. A pilot to keep us from getting captured by gravity and pulled into an asteroid. An engineer to keep the ship from falling apart. A medical officer, usually a nurse, to keep an eye on everyone who would be going into suspended animation to conserve the resources necessary to keep the three awake crew alive.

Of course it was those three departments that were represented by this meeting. Nurse Patterson, Pilot Ollson, and I had all just known to make our way to Captain Lee’s office as soon as we had dealt with any immediate tasks, like jerry-rigging something to hold a valve closed so a crewman didn’t have to manually hold it closed till he was too exhausted to continue.

“What about two people?” Captain Lee asked.

“Two?” I wrinkled my brow, I supposed the people in suspended animation usually were ok without monitoring, but of course there was nobody to safely put the nurse into suspended animation after everyone but a pilot and engineer. “I guess pretty much indefinitely. But three is the minimum, pilot, engineer, and nurse.”

“You did pilot training when you had that long layover on Earth several years ago didn’t you?” Lee asked me. “What if you doubled as pilot and engineer.”

“A few months of pilot training doesn’t qualify me to fly this thing,” I pointed out.

“You don’t need to steer us through a wormhole, you just need to make sure we continue drifting on a safe course, and adjust if we are suddenly headed towards a rogue asteroid. You can do that right?”

I didn’t like the option, I didn’t want to take on that level of responsibility.

“I guess,” I said, then I reminded Lee. “You have both pilot experience and some engineering training too.”

“I’m sure I am a better pilot than you, since I was the pilot before becoming captain, but I just did enough engineer training to qualify for command. If piloting was the more challenging part of keeping this ship functional enough to keep everyone from dying, I would say I was the better choice to do double duty, but keeping the ship from falling apart at the seams is the bigger issue. Reyes, I need you to do this.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. I knew she was right even if I didn’t like it. We were just drifting. Basically I needed to check to make sure the heading wasn’t changing several times a day, and go down to navigation and run scans for asteroids. I would only change headings in an emergency, since the distress message included the speed and direction we were drifting in so they would know where to look for us.

“I can do it.”

Lee turned to Patterson. “How quickly can you get all survivors, except you and Reyes, into pods.”

“Do you know how many survivors there are?” Patterson asked.

“No. Just assume seventy five percent. Can you do it in under sixty hours?”

“I’m going to have to push it a little, but I think so.” Patterson agreed. “I can get help monitoring the first people who are going in from crew who will get put in later. And I figure everyone can shave themselves.”

“Everyone can NOT shave themselves.” I interrupted. “The filters can’t handle tons of hair floating around in the air.”

“It’s not safe to put people in pods without shaving them.” Patterson pointed out.

“If the filters get clogged up, then you and I can’t breathe,” I told him. “If you and I can’t breathe, we can’t keep the ship safe and monitor the pods. Heck, with the filters clogged, we won’t have sixty hours to get everyone into pods, the filters will be clog up in minutes and air will stop being reoxygenated. Plus people will be choking on inhaled hair.”

“Didn’t SPS provide a way for shaving people in emergencies?” Ollson asked, looking confused. “ I mean they knew people might go into pods in emergencies…”

“The plan assumed we would have artificial gravity while getting ready,” Patterson explained. “Emergency shaving is supposed to be done over a sticky pad that the hair is supposed to fall on. The glue is supposed to hold the hair like fly paper. It should have occured to me sooner that it won’t work without gravity making the hair fall. I’m not really sure that even if the gravity situation wasn’t a problem, I would have enough pads for seventy five percent of the crew anyway.”

“So SPS has yet another poorly thought out design flaw,” Ollson grumbled.

“Yeah.” Patterson and I said in unison.

“How not safe is it to go into pods with hair?” Lee asked Patterson.

“The statistics are a bit sketchy since it only happens in emergencies, I guess like this.” Patterson explained. “The most common issue is skin infection because hair disrupts the usual cleaning process, it happens to almost everyone. It used to be generally common when trips were so long hair grew out a few centimeters in pods. It’s not really a big deal though, easily treated with an antifungal. The next most common issue is losing fingers, that’s about thirty percent for people with more than eight centimeters of hair in pods for more than two weeks. The biggest danger is if the cleaner gets caught up in the hair and just keeps restarting in the same spot. It can do a lot of damage. Risk increases with length of hair and amount of time in pod.”

“Reyes, how sure are you that the filters can’t handle it?” Lee asked me.

“Cutting hair aboard ship with artificial gravity and full air is enough of an issue that there are rules against it. With no gravity, hair is just going to be floating everywhere, and the air system is already at it’s limit.” I pointed out. “Pretty much 100%.”

“Ok so it’s not safe,” Lee said, “but it sounds like it’s safer than not breathing. I guess we’re going into pods without shaving. ”

“I’m suddenly wishing I kept my hair shorter than crew standard,” Ollson commented, “It’s a hell of a lot easier to grow back hair than fingers.”

“Hmmm,” Lee agreed with a little nod. “Can’t predict everything.”

Ollson ran his fingers through his sandy blond hair that was almost exactly crew standard. Lee’s glossy black hair was shorter than crew standard in the back to make it more of a layered micro bob shape, but that still left a fair amount of it around the fifteen centimeter maximum.

“Now we need to figure out a way to coordinate getting everyone into pods with communications down.” Lee got back to business. “Reyes, head back to engineering and do whatever you can to get communication back up ASAP. Patterson, find a crewman or two that can help you, and start preparing pods. Ollson, you and I will start putting together a team to go around and gather people verbally. Any questions or comments?”

“Nadar is already working on getting communications back up. I’d like him to be one of the last people to go into pods, since having his help for a few more hours would be good.” Then I broached a different topic. “Um, the passenger Sally Papadopolous. I was chatting with her when the accident happened, so I took her back to engineering with me. She has very long hair, but it’s fully braided. I think cutting off the braids shouldn’t be the same issue since the hair is contained. Is it ok if I get her to cut them off before she goes into the pod? I assume it would make the pod a little safer for her.”

“It would be better,” Patterson confirmed. “I think those braids are long enough to wrap all the way around her wrist, possibly even her neck.”

“I trust your judgment about it.” Lee told me. “Anything else?”

—————————————————

“Nadar,” I said when I got through the airlock into engineering. “How’s it going with communications?”

“I found the problem. I’m planning on bypassing the fried circuit board with this cable,” he said as he uncoiled the wire, “I was trying to explain to Sally about grabbing this end of the wire when it comes out over there, but not pulling too hard because it’s not really secure on this end while I climb under and snake this up. Since you’re back you can do it. Plus you know what needs to be done with it when it comes out, so you can do that while I make sure this end doesn’t get pulled out”

“Got’cha,” I said as I headed over to where I knew the cable would be coming out.

Since I was just holding onto a seat so I wouldn’t accidently float off away from where the cable would come out, I turned to Sally, who was sitting in one of the chairs, her thighs gripping the back rest to keep her in place, I wondered if she’d just instinctively known to sit that way because of the shape of the notches in the backrest, or if Nadar had shown her.

“Sally, I need you to cut off your braids as close to your scalp as possible.”

“What?”

“You’re going to be put in a pod, and the shorter your hair is the safer it will be.” I told her. “I’ll explain the details later. Take my knife and cut off your braids as close to your scalp as you can without hurting yourself, then stick them in a pocket so they aren’t floating around.”

“I’m being put in a pod?” Sally asked with confused concern.

“There isn’t enough air to keep everyone awake. Please just cut the braids, several are already short anyway because of the way they got caught in the patch.”

“It’s really necessary?” Sally asked me unhappily.

“Yeah,” I told her.

“I’M GOING TO HAVE TO START OVER,” Nadar yelled from under the panel, “THIS IS HARDER WITHOUT GRAVITY.”

“DO YOU WANT TO TRADE PLACES?” I asked him.

“I’LL TRY AGAIN, ONE MORE TIME SINCE I’M DOWN HERE, AND IF IT DOESN’T WORK WE CAN SWITCH.”

“OK” I yelled back to Nadar, then switched back to talking to Sally. “Come get my knife.”

I reached into my pocket and took out the multitool. Sally frowned, but carefully started making her way towards me. I wasn’t sure how much of the slow approach was due to her reluctance to cut off her braids, and how much was her inexperience at moving in zero gee. When she reached me, I handed over the tool.

“Be careful not to cut your fingers,” I told my oldest friend.

Sally took it, looking down at it in her hand unhappily before making her way back to the seat. She sat down, clamping her thighs against the backrest tightly. She reached behind her head and undid the bun, her dozens of thin braids just stuck out behind her head, since there was no gravity to pull them down. She opened the knife revealing the sharp silver blade. I saw her throat convulse with a nervous swallow,

Sally reached back, grabbed one of the long purple braids right up near where it flowed off her scalp, and placed the blade of the knife under it. She folded the braid over the blade, put tension on it and began to saw the blade back and forth. After three strokes, the blade sprung up, and Sally was left holding a severed braid. She brought the purple braid forward, looked at it for just a moment, then stuck it in a pocket like I’d told her to.

Sally gave me an unhappy look, but lifted up another braid and began to cut again. She wasn’t getting them as close to her scalp as she probably could have with scissors, because she had to leave enough length on the scalp side to be able to hold the braid taut as she folded it over the knife blade. She shoved the severed braid into her pocket just as she had with the previous one.

I stood there watching Sally cut off her long royal purple braids as I waited for the cable to emerge. Sally had sliced through about half of them when the cable finally emerged.

As Nadar and I worked on bypassing the faulty circuit that was the reason communication was down, Sally kept cutting off her braids. We were nearly done with the bypass, when Sally shoved her last long braid into her very stuffed pocket.

“You said to just cut the braids, but shouldn’t I try to cut it all shorter?” Sally asked me. “I heard you had to get all your hair cut off for pod travel.”

“Unfortunately because of the air filter situation,” I told her, “we can’t have loose hair just floating around, we only got away with the braids because the hair was bundled together. So we aren’t shaving everyone for the pods.”

“I’m glad I’m not going to be bald, but the way you said that makes it sound bad.” Sally observed as she ran her hand over the hair that was still tightly braided down to her scalp.

“It’s just mildly riskier.” I tried to sound reassuring. “It’s probably going to be ok with your hair shorter.”

“Should I leave it braided or undo them?” She asked me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted with a shrug. “Ask Nurse Patterson.”

“I HAVE EVERYTHING CONNECTED,” Nadar called out from under the panel. “TRY IT BEFORE I CRAWL OUT.”

I found it mildly amusing that it didn’t occur to Nadar that trying his watch to talk to me instead of shouting to be heard from under the panel would have been a good way to check, but just went ahead and tried contacting the captain.

I tapped my watch and spoke into it, “Captain, can you hear me?”

**Yes,** Captain Lee’s mildly relieved voice said. **You seem to have gotten communication up.**

“Mostly thanks to Nadar.” I told her. “I’d like to keep him with me as long as possible, so I’d rather not send him to get in a pod till the last minute. If he had pilot training, I’d recommend keeping him awake instead of me.”

**I feel better knowing it will be you.** Lee asserted. **Do you still have Mrs Papadopolous down there?**

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

**I’m going to send a crewman down to escort her to pod storage.**

“I don’t mind escorting her down.”

**I need you to keep working on getting as much of the ship as possible stable.** Lee insisted. **I’m sending a crewman.**

I frowned at Sally, the idea of letting someone else escort her through the airless corridors with zero gee and failing systems all over the place terrified me, but I knew Lee was right, I needed to keep working to make sure Patterson had those sixty hours I had promised him to get everyone but me and him into pods. Keeping the ship from falling apart was important to keep not only Sally, but everyone safe.

I sighed. “Got’cha Cap’n.”
——————————————

*********************SURVIVING******************

————————————————

If a relief ship didn’t arrive soon, I would have this damned tin-can fully patched before they did. Sure, even if everything was repaired, we still didn’t have enough air to repressurise everywhere, but that wasn’t that big a deal.

I’d actually deliberately depressurized a couple of compartments that hadn’t depressurized initially, using the air from them to get the pressure in the areas Patterson and I needed a bit higher, so the filters and oxygenators could work more efficiently. During the first few weeks, I had thought maybe I’d been a little pessimistic and maybe we should have kept a real pilot awake, but at week five when we still hadn’t received any message from a relief ship, and I was had to replace the burnt out motor on the fan of the air filter in the Captain’s office again, where Patterson and I had been camping out when not in engineering, pod storage, or on the bridge, it was clear that three people would have overwhelmed the system completely.

The ship wasn’t going to really be fully back to specks without time in the shipyard, but I was making a fair amount of progress just patching up holes and getting the engines basically functional. I guess if I really did get it repaired enough to slip through a wormhole without an escort from a relief ship, we could wake up the captain and pilot and just head to the nearest inhabited system. Hopefully before Patterson and my muscles atrophied completely from lack of gravity, though he’d been giving us shots and exercises to try to prevent it.

**Reyes?** Patterson’s way too familiar voice came from my watch, as I welded another patch into place.

“You were expecting someone else?” I joked.

**I need you here in pod storage ASAP.** Patterson said with zero humor.

“Got’cha,” I said, dropping the humor myself.

If Patterson didn’t have time for a few jokes to relieve some of the tension, whatever was wrong was damned serious. I secured the welder, and started pulling myself through the empty corridors as quickly as I could. Waiting for the pressure in the airlock to equalize to the pressure in pod storage felt like it took much longer than usual, even though I knew it took the exact same amount of time as it always did.

“What’s wrong?” I asked a worried looking Patterson as soon as I had my helmet off.

“Lee has a cleaner stuck in her hair,” he informed me. “It’s already caused a lot of damage to her ear and scalp. If I don’t get it off, it’s going to drill into her skull. I need help getting her pod down for starters; operate the arm, while I guide it onto the table.”

I looked up at the window of Lee’s pod. She lay there looking peaceful, blissfully unaware of the huge gaping wound where her ear should have been, in her drug induced deep slumber. As I watched, the tiny device cycled off then on again, went through its start up routine, then its spinning wheels and brushes sent a spray of blood to splatter against the window, where there was already a lot of dried blood accumulated. I swallowed down the rising sick feeling in my throat, and went over to the robotic arm controls.

As I operated the arm, Patterson asked me, “How squeamish are you?”

“Somewhat.” I admitted wrinkling my nose.

“I need help, but if you are going to faint or puke, I can probably find another way to manage.”

“Help? Other than getting the pod down, how could I help?”

“When I cut the cleaner off her, and then cauterize the wounds, I have to open the pod. Opening the pod automatically stops the sedatives being pumped into her, and of course the sedatives in the gas around her have to be stopped. I could try to get a second IV started with anesthetic, but her veins are going to be extra hard to find because of the suspended animation, she would almost certainly wake up in excruciating pain while I was trying to do that. I think it’s better for me to just try to get what I have to do over as quickly as possible and hope I can before she starts to become really conscious. There is a chance that she will wake up though, if she does, I need you to hold her down. Also, if you are just here to hand me things and tilt her head if I need it, will make it go faster, reducing the chances of her waking up halfway through.”

I swallowed down more bile, because fuck that sounded horrifying, I held my breath for a moment as Melissa’s pained final scream replayed in my head. I looked over at Patterson. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t up for it, that I would faint or puke, or maybe both, I desperately wanted to leave the room immediately and get away before he opened the pod and the room would fill with the metallic smell of blood and then burning flesh when he cauterized the wound. Patterson looked back at me with a somber expression.

“I won’t faint or puke,” I promised Patterson as he secured the pod down to the table.

————————————————————-

“Are you ok?” Patterson asked me with concern once Lee’s pod was secured back in place now decorated with a few bloody hand prints by the latches.

I grabbed the nearest bag, pressed it over my mouth and puked my guts out, trying to forget the thing’s I had smelled, seen, and heard. I knew the smell especially was going to be sticking with me, rather literally, since a long hot shower wasn’t an option without artificial gravity. I looked up and watched Patterson trying to wipe the blood off of his hands with a wetwipe.

————————————————–

***************DOCTORS*************

————————————————–

Sally sat on the edge of the exam table looking deep in thought as the doctor talked with her. She’d fared pretty well in the pod as far as I could tell, so I was a little confused why she looked so serious as the doctor talked. The conversation was taking much longer than I expected, how long could it take to just ask her if she wanted to go through the pain and hassle associated with the treatment involved in regrowing the tip of her left pinky, or if she was just as happy to get on with life and not bother, since it was just the tip of a left pinky.

When Sally nodded and got up, she still looked rather shocked as she walked to the door where I waited for her.

The relief ship had taken us back to Trappist, since we could get to it with only a single wormhole slip and it had excellent medical facilities. Many crewmen had gone into pods already badly injured from the original accident, but then there were the injuries like Lee’s that had been caused by having hair in the pods.

Captain Lee was going to be here for months having her ear and part of her scalp regrown. Several other crewmen were going to be here for months too. Others had been lucky and walked away completely fine or with just very minor issues. Among the crewmen who had a centimeter or less of hair, there’d been no fingers lost or major pod injuries, just a couple of fungal infections since the cleaners hadn’t been able to do their job as well. Even though Patterson had been rushed and had his attention split over so many patients, he hadn’t over taxed anyone’s liver, so nobody had to undergo growing a new liver at least.

I’d already visited several fellow crewmen, and since Sally was being discharged, she asked me to meet her at the exit so I could take her to lunch and talk.

“So are you going to regrow the pinky, or just ignore it?” I asked Sally when we got to the exit from the emergency room, and we started walking out into the gardens that surrounded the hospital.

“I’m pregnant,” she told me in a tone of disbelief.

“What? How?” I asked, wrinkling my brow and looking back at the hospital we had just left as though I would find the doctor following us ready to explain.

“The doctor said that the suspended animation simultaneously interfered with my hormonal birth control and then the pregnancy basically gets paused after implantation.” She told me, still not sounding like she believed it. “Supposedly before going into suspended animation they usually warn you about the possibility and tell you not to rely on hormonal birth control, but of course, since I went in in an emergency…”

We kept walking in silence as Sally continued to process the very unexpected development. When we passed a bench, Sally just silently sat down, and stared off into the distance. I sat down next to her.

“How do you feel about it?” I asked softly in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

“Obviously shocked and confused.” She stated, but then dug deeper. “I’m kind of sad about it, because I really can’t even though I would love to… I always did want kids. And Papa was a nice guy. I mean, I wasn’t deeply in love with him, he was a client, but it’s not like he was a jerk I couldn’t imagine using as a sperm donor. He talked about how it was something his girlfriend and him were considering before she died and how he regretted not having any kids. It would be kind of nice… I can’t though. I can’t afford a baby, especially once I get back to Earth where everything is so expensive. Even if I sell the gold necklace Papa bought me on Wolf Cee, and the engagement and wedding rings he gave me so no one would question that I was his wife, that’s not enough to provide a stable home. Maybe if Papa and I had made it to Toi, and I’d been paid the rest of my fee, but since we didn’t… On earth, they’ll just take it straight to a group home because I won’t be able to show legal employment. It will inherit all the depts I’d hoped I could escape by going to Toi, my debt from detension, mom’s debt. I only got away with leaving Earth even though I had the debts because Papa arranged for me to travel under his name. I don’t know why I even told the doctor I needed to think about it. At least I found out here, instead of back on Earth. I should have just gotten it over with before I started to get attached to the idea.”

“Sally, you can continue to Toi, you don’t have to return to Earth.” I told her, as it suddenly occurred to me that no one had explained to Sally that she was still a passenger with a fully paid fare and more. “SPS just is assuming you will be continuing to Toi with Papa’s ashes and all of the stuff Papa was having shipped there. As far as anyone other than me is concerned you were Papa’s legal spouse. He had you on the manifest as a spouse and his next of kin, which as far as SPS goes makes you his common law wife, even if you weren’t married on earth before you left. And he had no other family, you are his sole heir.”

“I’m Papa’s sole heir?!” Sally looked at me, like I’d just told her up was down.

“Yeah.” I told her. “You’ve inherited all of Papa’s wealth, which I’m assuming was a lot since he was able to hire you to keep him company. Plus, you will be getting some pretty decent compensation from SPS for your pain and lose.”

“So I’m just suddenly rich because a guy died?”

“That’s kind of how most people get rich.” I pointed out. “That’s most of why the kids of rich people grow up to be rich. I mean sure there’s a little more to it, like kids of rich people go to fancier schools so they can get fancier jobs, but because their rich grandparents croaked and left them money is most of it.”

“I don’t know,” Sally said, shaking her head. “It just doesn’t feel right. It feels like stealing Papa’s money. I mean sure he owed me a little because he only paid half my fee before leaving, but more than that… He worked hard to make his money. He started a company then sold it to start up a new business on Toi.”

“I guess he worked for it, but did he work that much harder than anyone else?” I asked her. “I’m guessing that even if he built his wealth up, that he started with a foot up. Did he get to just continue through school as far as he wanted? Did his family provide a safety net that let him take risks people like you and I can’t?”

“Yeah, I guess. He had a doctoral degree, even though he prefered that people not call him ‘doctor.’ He talked about growing up on a rather nice sounding estate.” Sally shrugged. “It still feels like if I take his money I’m stealing it though.”

“Legally it’s yours. It’s not like he needs it anymore, and you are the person he left it to.” I pointed out. “It’s not like you haven’t always worked just like Papa worked. It’s not like it was right that you were forced to drop out of school to pay off the bills from the group home and your mom’s time in detention. This is more right than that was.”

“I guess.” Sally said really slowly like she was still thinking about it. “So I can go to Toi, and I can afford this baby when I get there?”

“If that’s what you want,” I confirmed with a shrug.

“I’m pregnant,” Sally repeated how we’d started the conversation in a much lighter tone as she put her hand to her still flat belly.

“Congratulations,” I told her, since it now seemed like the right thing to say.

“It kind of feels less weird taking Papa’s money if it means I can raise his baby,” Sally’s tone had taken on a certain contentment.

“I’m sure you’re going to be an amazing mom,” I told her as she leaned over towards me and I put an arm around her.
—————————————————————————

******************GIRLS DAY OUT****************

—————————————————————————-

“So why exactly are we going to a salon halfway across the planet?” I asked Sally as I waited in the desk chair of her hotel room while she was in the bathroom putting on her makeup.

“Because they specialize in natural curls,” Sally told me. “Do you really not want to come? I know you usually go to barbershops, but I figured you’d enjoy seeing another part of the planet anyway.”

“Nah, I don’t mind.” I confirmed. “I was just curious. Do you know what’s down there? Anything interesting?”

“I think there’s a museum that’s all about terraforming.” Sally said as she came out of the bathroom and sat on the end of her bed to start putting on her shoes, a pair of gold sandals, that matched the gold threads woven into the colorful plaid scarf she wore over her rather uneven hair. “We can also just wander around the city down there, do a little window shopping.”

“You know you can actually afford to do some real shopping.” I reminded her.

“I still feel weird about it.” Sally shrugged. “I don’t really need anything anyway.”

“I’m pretty sure you are going to need some new clothing.” I told her with a chuckle. “You’re leaving for Toi in just two days, and it’s a five and a half month trip to get there. You’re going to need maternity clothing by that point.”

“Oh…” Sally looked down at her still flat belly. “I just figured I would wait till I had to get them.”

“Most stations don’t have a lot of shops with maternity clothing. SPS is only letting you travel while pregnant because of the unusual circumstances.” I pointed out. “I guess you could go down planet at some point, but it’s easier to just make sure you leave here with enough to get by till Toi.”

“You’ve got a point,” Sally agreed. “And I guess having you along for picking out some maternity cloting will be fun.”

“That does sound fun.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a real girly day out like this,” Sally said as she grabbed her handbag and headed towards the door. “What are you going to do with your hair, Sunshine?”

“My hair?” I snorted.

“Yeah your hair. It’s actually longer than mine now.” Sally pointed out. “While I was stuck in suspended animation with my hacked off hair not growing, yours got pretty long. It’s almost like back when we were kids and they just cut my hair because it was convenient, but your parents were happy to take care of your hair.”

“I was just planning to ignore it till I have to get it cut back into crew standard.” I told Sally as I raised my hand to my head, and felt the grown out shaggy hair that brushed my shoulders. “The ship isn’t going to be ready to go anywhere for at least a couple of months, so I don’t have to get it cut right away.”

“So you can enjoy it for a little while,” Sally insisted. “Get it done so it will look nice while you’re stuck here on Trappist.”

“Get it done…” I contemplated the idea. “So it looks nice.”

I’d been limited in what I could do with my hair for so long, I had almost forgotten that I had ever wanted it to look pretty the way I had when I was a teen, and of course back then, there was never enough money for me to go to a nice salon on Earth. Heck, if we were on Earth, I would still be balking at the idea of paying for a salon, but things were cheaper on Trappist, much cheaper. Getting my hair done felt kind of wasteful since I would have to just cut most of it off in a couple of months, but even if I couldn’t keep a fancy longish hairstyle for very long, the bonding experience of participating in some girls day out activities felt worth it.

“It will be fun.” Sally told me as we arrived at the elevator. “How about it’s my treat, since I need to start getting used to not being poor.”

“Ok,” I agreed as I pressed the down button. “I’m going to need some suggestions about what to do with it though, because it’s been a long time since I was allowed to have enough to really do much with it.”

—————————————————————————–

I sat in a waiting chair of the cosy salon listening to Sally tell the story about having had to slice off the long purple braids with my knife as she untied the scarf that contained the purple curls. I was just a little odd feeling in the loose smock I’d been given to change into, so my blouse wouldn’t get dirty. I’d felt a little more odd in the blouse, I was used to just wearing ship coveralls most of the time, having had to buy clothing to wear when I got Trappist had left me feeling a little self conscious. It wasn’t like I knew what was in style. Heck Sally even was a little unsure about it, since she was up on Earth styles, not Trappists styles. Sally had decided that since she was only going to be here for a few weeks, she would not really worry about what was in style on Trappist when she decided what to do with her hair, but just do something that she thought looked nice.

“I see what you mean about it being uneven,” Leslie, the stylist, said as she ran her fingers through the tight curls, “even with the curls I can tell the right is shorter than the left. Do you want to keep it purple? I can see your roots coming in.”

Leslie gently parted the curls showing off the black roots that I was surprised to see had a few gray hairs. I felt like Sally and I were way too young to be getting grays, but of course I’d been aging more slowly, because of spending so much of my life traveling at speeds that dilated time. Sally had gotten a little bit of it on this trip, but it had been my life for years and years.

“I’m still enjoying the purple,” Sally told her. “But anything you use has to be safe during pregnancy.”

“We use exclusively nontoxic products on this planet,” Leslie assured Sally. “Did you want me to try to keep it as long as possible while evening it out?”

“I am continuing my travels and heading to Toi, so I need it short enough to not interfere with a helmet seal, if it isn’t long enough to put up easily.”

Leslie started playing with Sally’s hair, obviously trying to estimate how easily she could pull back the shorter hair on the right side, and see what was left to work with.

“I don’t think it will be easy to put up if I keep it the length it is on the right.” Leslie concluded after a few minutes. “A jaw length bob is great for travel, but with your curls, it’s going to get that poofy triangle look. We could do a high undercut to take out bulk and then cut the top to jaw length. A pixie would work too and look good. I think an all over one length crop might not be the best for your face shape. Do you want to see some pictures?”

“Yeah,” Sally said, “that would be nice.”

Sally and Leslie had just started looking through the options on a tablet when another stylist came up to me and asked, “Sunshine?”

“That’s me,” I admitted with amusement that Sally had made my appointment using the nickname that I hadn’t heard from anyone else since middle school.

As she led me to a chair, she chatted with me, introducing herself as Delilah, the way they always did in salons when I found myself in need of a haircut when stopped at one of the systems without barbershops. I found being called Sunshine instead of Maria amusing though.

When I was seated in the chair, Delilah did something I had never experienced before, she pushed the longish hair forward over my shoulders, and fluffed it into place and then smoothed the hair in front of me.

“So Sunshine, what are we doing?” She asked me.

“I work for SPS, so usually keep it pretty short, but I can keep the longer length for a little while,” I told her, “so if you could just trim it a little to get it into more of a shape. Then Sally suggested highlights.”

“If you don’t mind giving up about five centimeters from the bottom, I can get a nice shape,” Delilah suggested, using her hands to sculpt the hair to demonstrate what she meant. “It will be just about shoulder length. If you really want to keep all but a couple of centimeters of the length, it’s going to be very heavily layered.”

“I don’t mind losing five centimeters.” I assured her.

“Ok, so how about I bring it up to here.” Delilah placed her hands at my shoulders. “Now, let’s look at some color swatches for the the highlights,”

Delilah held little pony tail after little pony tail up to my hair, and talked about tone and brightness. She referred to bright blondes as fun and warm browns as more natural. And very soon my head was spinning with all the options. I looked over at Sally who was sitting patiently as the chemicals that weren’t purple, but somehow were part of making Sally’s hair purple were applied to her black and gray roots. She was two seats away, but fortunately, no one was in the seat between us.

“Sally what do you think?” I asked.

“You wanted to have fun,” Sally reminded me, “don’t worry about it looking natural. The third golden blonde…” Delilah pointed to the swatch she thought Sally meant, then to the next one when Sally shook her head and pointed to the right, “That one for the highlights. It will be like a ray of sunshine, perfect for Reyes of Sunshine. Then that second caramel color can be some midtones for more dimension and to help the jump from black to blonde be a little less jarring.”

Delilah and Sally talked placement and blending, and I simply smiled and nodded, since I had no clue. Somehow in the conversation, Sally and Delilah decided that my hair should be be styled with something called a semi-perm so it would just fall into place without me thinking about it.

Then Delilah began painting the chemicals that would turn the black hair various shades of gold and caramel onto very carefully selected locks from around my head. It was a strange new experience, but not an unpleasant one.

I’d heard about hair coloring chemicals smelling, but these didn’t, any scent was barely noticeable. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the color I was going or because they used different chemicals here on Trappist than on Earth. The way Leslie had assured Sally touching up her roots was fine during pregnancy and the way Sally needed the assurance, made me suspect they used different chemicals on Earth. Of course what really made it fun was just getting to hang out with Sally feeling pampered.

And then it was time to have all the chemicals washed out. I’d never had my hair washed before. I mean I washed my hair, but this was nothing like standing in a shower doing the work myself. I lay back in the soft cushioned chair, comfortably wrapped in warm towels with my eyes closed as Delilah massaged the lather against my scalp. The idea of paying for a wash and style always seemed silly when I was just getting my short hair trimmed to make sure it fit regulations, but now I was contemplating doing this again. It wasn’t something that would often be an option, there were stops where water was just a way too expensive resource to waste any of it on nonsense like this, but maybe if I happened to be on a planet like this with plenty of water when I needed a haircut, and I had plenty of time, and it wasn’t a very expensive planet, I would indulge again at some point.

I was a little disappointed that I had to get up when the final conditioning treatment was rinsed out, but it did mean I would get to see my new highlights. I sat in the stylist’s chair, watching Delilah squeeze out the excess water as she told me it would look even lighter when it was dry. Then she began to gently comb out the tangles and revisit details about the cut she’d be doing, and styling after, as she parted my hair into little sections she twisted then pinned to my head.

“Don’t worry,” Delilah told me, “the semi-perm isn’t like the permanents back on Earth. It won’t dissolve the hairbonds and then reform them, it just coats the hair shaft lightly. It washes out after about six to eight weeks and is completely nontoxic.”

“That’s fine,” I said, thinking that even if Earth salons weren’t super expensive, I might never want to go to one, because they were beginning to sound scary. Six to eight weeks would last almost as long as I was going to get to keep the long hair. I kind of wished Sally was back to put in her two cents, but she was getting some deep conditioning treatment for curly hair.

All combed out, and with most of my hair pinned up, Delilah picked up a long pair of silver scissors. She ran the comb through the long hair that hung down over my shoulders and to my back, smoothing it out. She pressed the hair down to my neck with one hand, and then she began to slice the hair straight across just below where my neck and back met. She recombed the hair, took a few extra snips.

Once she was happy with how she’d cut my loose hair, she unpinned the section of hair on the back of my head, and combed down a little bit of it. She smoothed the new hair over the hair she’d already cut, and began to slice it to the same length.

It was a simple process, she repeated over and over till all the hair from the back of my head was the same length. Then she started to comb the hair from the side of my head down. At first she simply extended the line from the back forward, though since my ear and shoulder were in the way, Delilah held the hair between her fingers before slicing it to the length that just brushed my shoulders. As she got towards the front though, she curved the corners up ever so slightly.

When Delilah was finished cutting all my hair to shoulder length, she began to layer it. She combed it straight out from my head and sliced down into it, sending just a few extra centimeters raining down. Delilah didn’t spend long at the layering, since she’d said she would do “light layers,” and soon was done and putting the shears down.

“Hold on just a minute while I go get a cart” Delilah told me before she went off to the back.

While she was gone, I looked at the shoulder length hair that had been lightened. I hadn’t had hair that was long enough to move in so long before it had grown out while Patterson and I waited for the relief ship to come. Of course, as it grew out up on the ship waiting, it had just been dirty since we could just barely keep ourselves vaguely clean with wipes, I hadn’t even been able to use dry shampoo like I usually did between showers, since the powder was designed to work with the artificial gravity and be vacuumed out. I had just tied the greasy hair back. Obviously taking a very long shower was one of the first things I’d done when I finally got a chance to, but even with the hair clean, I had simply been pulling it back into a ponytail.

Delilah was back, with the cart, so I just continued to sit there while she wrapped the hair around big rollers. Then she applied the liquid that was supposed to lightly coat the hair, keeping it in the shape it was drying in. With the curlers all in, and the hair properly saturated, Delilah put me under a heater that blew warmed air gently at my hair and told me to just relax while I “cooked” for a little bit.

When it was fully dry and set, I watched as Delilah took out the rollers, and my vague waves were instead big voluminous curls. Delilah trimed the dry hair just a little more as I sat chatting with Sally as Leslie snipped away at Sally’s much tighter natural curls.

When we were finished I sat looking at myself in the mirror. I looked pretty and fashionable in a way I had strived to be so hard as a teenager. It was soft and feminine, and it had been so long since I had been or felt like either of those things. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

Sally next to me had a much softer, more feminine pixie than I usually got. Not constrained by crew standard, in the front her tight purple curls extended down over her eyebrows. In the back, the taper was steeper, leaving her hair longer over the crown of her head, and then bringing it in tight right along the edges, where instead of a carved in curve like I had always gotten, was a soft natural hairline that formed a subtle “M” shape.

Then we’d gone shopping. Though Sally could afford to go to any of the shops on Trappist, she insisted she was used to shopping at the second hand stores. I did wonder if she just didn’t want to exclude me, knowing I didn’t exactly have a giant budget. Amusingly though, instead of calling the second hand shops “thrift stores” like we’d been used to on Earth, they were called “Eco-fashion Centres” on Trappist.

I did end up buying a few rather femme blouses, they just felt like they went better with my new look, and they were cheap enough that abandoning them here on Trappist, when it was time to go back to wearing ship’s coveralls and keeping my possessions in a tight mass limit, didn’t bother me.

—————————————————-

**********************NAME TAG************

—————————————————-

I sat in the quiet bar up on the station, it wasn’t like having said goodbye to Sally, a half hour earlier when she’d boarded the ship headed to Toi, had left me friendless and knowing no one on Trappist, a few crewmates had left on various ships they’d been reassigned to, and some were sedated in the hospital, but there were still a dozen crewmen I could have messaged to ask if they wanted to hang out. Plus I knew a few people who lived on Trappist. I felt like just wallowing in a little unnecessary loneliness though.

I also kind of needed a little time to process how felt when Sally had made sure she’d paid back what she’d still owed me from the cost of her private trial. She’d been giving my family back on Earth a small payment every month for a decade, not always the same amount, more in good months less in bad months, but always something. I did really feel like I personally needed the money, but then again having something in my savings account for emergencies wasn’t a bad thing.

Though I’d been to Trappist many times, and had spent a decent amount of time on Trappist’s main station, I had never bothered to stop into this particular bar before. I generally had gone to the more lively bar that offered the opportunity to dance if I was sticking to the station, but I was much more likely to go down planet to one of the places known for being a good place for women to meet women. With Sally having gone though, a quiet little bar to sit and think in just suited my mood.

A rather pretty young server, whose name tag read “Zoe,” came over and asked me, “What’s your poison?”

“Rum and coke,” I told her, then asked with curiosity. “Why don’t you have tablets to place orders? It would be faster and more efficient.”

“Did you come to a bar to get a drink as quickly as possible, or did you come to a bar to relax for a little while?”

“I guess I just came to relax and kill a little time,” I admitted. “I’m just used to placing orders on tablet.”

“Well, we aim for the human touch here.” Zoe told me.

I suppressed the raunchy joke that popped into my head, and instead said, “It’s a nice change.”

When Zoe came back with my rum and coke, she lingered as we made small talk. Everything about her was quite delightful. The carefree way she laughed. The way she tucked her long copper waves of hair behind her ear. How eager she was when she showed me pictures of her black and white cat, Bond.

She would go off and serve other customers, but she seemed to linger with me just a little longer. I told myself she just thought I looked like a good tipper, or maybe she just thought I looked lonely as I slowly milked my second drink, not really wanting to order a third, I wasn’t aiming to drown my sorrows in alcohol, but found myself wanting to linger.

At a certain point, hanging out in the bar watching the friendly server started becoming impractical. I didn’t want more to drink, and if I missed the next shuttle down planet, I’d be stuck waiting three more hours for the next one. The real kicker though was that I could see Zoe was talking to a server who had just arrived and was putting on an apron rather similar to the one Zoe was taking off.

“Hey,” I called out to Zoe, “can I settle up. I need to get going.”

“Sure thing,” Zoe called back as she finished hanging her apron up on a hook.

When she came over, she held out her watch towards me obviously expecting I would just transfer the payment directly to her. Instead I pulled out an exchange card from my pocket.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you didn’t live here,” Zoe said with surprise as I handed over the card to her.

“I’m an engineer with SPS,” I told her.

For the barest moment I was surprised she hadn’t just guessed, people usually knew I was on a freight crew just in a single glance, but it quickly occured to me that most of the usual clues were obscured. Though I had an Earth accent, that wasn’t uncommon on Trappist. I wasn’t wearing crew coveralls for a change. My hair wasn’t even vaguely in crew standard length.

“Oh well,” Zoe sounded just a tad disappointed. “I guess I can’t expect you back soon.”

As I watched Zoe walk away, the slightly curled under ends of her long copper hair bouncing just above her waist band, I assumed I would never see her again.

———————————————-

I was just sitting on the shuttle waiting for it to finish loading and take off, casually eavesdropping on the conversation of the couple seated behind who were talking about how it was going to be different if the planetary planning board decided it was worth the cost to build an elevator like Earth had.

Then I saw Zoe tap her watch at the entrance to the shuttle. She glanced around the cabin, considering what seats were available, the way people getting onto public transport usually do. When her eyes met mine, she paused, then she smiled. To my surprise, even though there were plenty of seats in unoccupied rows, and considering how close we were to taking off, it was unlikely they wouldn’t stay that way, she started walking towards the empty seat next to me.

“Is this seat available?” Zoe asked even though it was pretty obvious it was.

“Completely.” I smiled, as Zoe took the seat.

“When you said you had to go,” Zoe said, “I thought you meant back to your ship.”

“Unfortunately, my ship, including my quarters, is decompressed at the moment. So, I am staying at a hotel down planet.”

“Oh, were you on the Galileo?” When I confirmed with a nod, Zoe went on. “I heard about it on the news.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it’s not the kind of thing that happens everyday.”

“No, not really. This is the first time I know of a damaged ship coming into Trappist.” Zoe chuckled. “I guess maybe damaged ships arrive at other systems that have better facilities to repair them more often.”

“Really it’s just the Earth-Sol system with a real shipyard.” I explained, “The Galileo will head there for the really extensive repairs, but we can’t take her back there till she’s a bit more patched up here.”

“So, how long are you going to be staying here?” Zoe asked a little hopefully.

“Two months.”

“If you want, I could show you around a bit,” Zoe offered, leaning in a little closer than strangers who just met normally would. “Do you like beaches? I know a really great one, pretty quiet, and close enough to the equator that it’s warm all year long.”

I looked at Zoe, she smiled back. Getting involved was dangerous, this wasn’t an opportunity for a one night stand, two months was enough time for her to get attached, and she was young looking she may never have done this before even though she worked on a busy station.

I suppose maybe her interest was purely platonic, maybe she just enjoyed meeting people or had an interest in interstellar travel or engineering, it wasn’t like every friendship had to be about sex, I had never had sex with Sally. Patterson and I had gotten quite close since it had just been the two of us keeping the sleeping crew and passengers alive for months till help had arrived, but we hadn’t done anything sexual. Maybe Zoe just wanted to show a stranger around.

“I’d love to see a beach.”

—————————————————————–

Zoe sat on the side of her bed naked. Her cat had been locked out of the bedroom to give us privacy. Her legs were spread wide inviting me in.

I’d warned her, she knew that it was possible that when I left in a couple of months that I would never ever set foot on Trappist again. She swore she was ok with it and wanted for us to do this anyway.

I knelt down, and ran my hands along the inside of her soft thighs. My hands found their way to the fleshy outer lips just slightly obscured by the trimmed copper curls that matched the long hair that hung to her waist. I gently pushed them apart, opening Zoe’s private treasure chest. I breathed in her delicate scent, and leaned in. I took her exposed clit into my mouth, sucking it as her hands clutched my hair. I pushed my tongue past her inner lips and inside her. My chin rested on her taint.

I pleasured her, basking in her vocal praise, till she fell back in an orgasm.

———————————————————————

*******************VISITING HOURS*************************

—————————————————————————-
“Hey Cap’n,” I said as I entered the quiet hospital room.

“Hi Reyes,” Captain Lee returned my greeting in slightly slurred speech, since they were keeping half her face paralyzed so movement wouldn’t disturb the placement of her head in the device that was necessary for her to grow a whole new ear. “Pull up a chair.”

I was already grabbing one and pulling it over so I could place it where Lee could see me, since she couldn’t turn her head.

“So,” I started as I pushed the chair into place, “how’s it been going?”

“The doctor says the ear is growing well, not that I can tell what’s actually happening, since I can neither see nor feel it. Otherwise, I’m mostly bored…” Lee told me then paused when I settled down in front of her. “Good lord Reyes, what happened to your hair? Did you grow all that?”

I flush mildly, feeling self conscious. The last couple of times Lee had seen me, she was pretty distracted and heavily drugged, plus the long hair I’d grown had been pulled back and mostly out of sight. Now I wore it loose in all its poofed up and highlighted glory.

“It grew out while we waited for a relief ship, and since I’m stuck here I figured I could enjoy it for a little while.” I explained. “Does it look ridiculous?”

“Sorry if it came out like that.” Lee said. “It looks nice, just not what I was expecting. I knew from the reports how long you and Patterson had to wait, but seeing all that hair is a bit of a shock anyway. Kind of puts physical evidence to what had just been a number in the reports. Plus I did not expect you to get it colored, I didn’t think you were into looking quite so… femme.”

“I actually got it both cut and colored, so I grew even more than this.” I told her. “The highlights were Mrs Papadopolis’ idea. I mentioned we went to school together and were friends…”

“I remember. You grew up in a wealthy neighborhood because your parents worked on an estate.”

“Well she needed to get her hair done before she continued to Toi,” I continued without correcting the assumption that Lee seemed to be making, that Sally was from one of the wealthy families, “so I went with her to keep her company and go sightseeing and shopping. Anyway since we were at the salon, I got my hair done too. I felt a little silly, but it was nice just hanging out with an old friend.”

“Sounds like more fun than how I’ve been getting my hair done,” Lee muttered. “Every day the nurses come, remove this contraption, and shave that side of my head as part of keeping everything clean and correctly positioned.”

“That sounds annoying.”

“A little. I am grateful for modern medicine though.” Lee said. “The doctor says that the new scalp will grow hair eventually, not be hairless scar tissue like it would have been in the past.”

“That’s good.”

“Anyway, aside from getting your hair done in a fancy style, how have you been filling your time?”

“Ehh, the usual.” I shrugged. “Did some sightseeing and shopping with Mrs Papadopolis till she left. I visited a couple who I met years ago when they were passengers, they’re professors at the University. I’ve been hooking up with a woman I met after I made sure Mrs Papadopolis made it safely onto her ship.”

“You’re tone suggests, you’re more than just hooking up.” Lee observed.

“It’s just hooking up,” I claimed. “It’s fun to be here a little longer than I usually get to spend, but she knows that I am leaving as soon as the Galileo is solid enough to make it back to Earth for serious repairs.”

———————————————-

*******************JUST HOOKING UP****************************

————————————————

I lay in bed next to Zoe. I was awake watching her, reluctant to move and disturb the sleeping young woman. Her long red hair formed a slightly tangled halo around her head, her sleek black and white cat, Bond, was by her feet. She looked content and peaceful. I hoped she was going to look just as happy and content once I was gone.

We’d both known from the very start that this was a limited thing, but when I had reminded her a few days ago that we only had a week left, she had tried to hide it, but I could tell she was upset. I reached over and tenderly stroked her smooth cheek. Her gray eyes opened, and she blinked at me sleepily.

“Good morning,” I said to her as I stroked her face again. “I can’t sleep in, I need to start getting ready to leave the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Zoe said, waking more quickly than she usually did and with a frown. “Do you have a lot to do?”

“Not tons, but some of it has to get done during business hours.” I told her as I got out of the bed and walked over to the chair I had my small stack of clothing on and looked down at it.

“Anything I can help with?” She asked, and sat up. “I’m off work today.”

“Ehh… I don’t know.” I started sorting through the stack of blouses, looking for the plainest one. “You can get rid of all these clothes. I can’t take them with me. You can keep anything you like, give away anything you don’t.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“I wear ship’s coveralls aboard ship.”

“But what about when you stop at planets?”

“Mostly, I still wear ship’s coveralls,” I chuckled. “I have a jacket and hat for cold weather, and a couple of blouses and a pair of slacks for special occasions, and my sister has a few things for me on Earth. It was nice getting to have fun clothing while I’ve been here, but it weighs too much for me to take with me.”

I frowned mildly looking at the colorful florals and novelty printed fabrics that were such a stark contrast to what I was going back to. I pulled out a solid colored sky blue blouse that I figured would help me ease back into the mind set that had me happy wearing ship’s coveralls every day. I then grabbed slacks and under garments to go with it.

“If you want, I can hang on to them till next time you’re on Trappist.” Zoe offered.

“We talked about how this was just a short term thing,” I reminded the young waitress. “You should date other people when I leave. I am going to be hooking up with other women when I stop on other systems.”

“Yeah, I know.” Zoe assured me. “but I can keep them just as a friend, not necessarily as your girlfriend. Like your sister does.”

“You know I might get reassigned, and not ever come back.” I warned her.

“Trappist is a pretty busy planet, lots of ships stop here.” Zoe pointed out. “If you get reassigned, there’s still a good chance you will be stopping here. And if you know it’s going to be years and years before you come here again, just send me a message and I can get rid of them then.”

I sighed, and said, “You know what, I’m just going to give it all to you, and you can do whatever you want with it. Just think of them as yours, and if I happen to be back, maybe I’ll borrow something from you. OK?”

I figured it wasn’t worth arguing about. I hoped Zoe would realize that it wasn’t worth keeping for me. I worried that she was insisting on keeping the clothing for me because she wasn’t really prepared for me leaving.

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll wear some of it. That way it won’t just be collecting dust.”

“I’m sure you will look adorable in it,” I told her as I went back over and sat in the bed next to her, putting down the outfit I had picked out, and taking a moment to once again stroke her face. “Now, I need to take a shower, so I can go get a haircut.”

“So you can be pretty for the girls on the next planet you stop at?” Zoe teased slightly as she reached up and twirled a golden highlight.

“No,” I snorted. “Crewmen can’t have long hair, it’s a safety hazard.”

“Aww,” Zoe let out as she played some more with the golden lock she held. “Couldn’t you just put it up. It’s pretty.”

I tried not to let it show as the memory of watching Melissa’s hair getting caught and her falling flashed through my head. I swallowed, and quickly just bent forward and gave Zoe a quick kiss to cover the reaction.

“Nah. Regulations are clear. All this stuff has got to go.” I told her as I got up and walked off to her bathroom.

————————————————————–

The barber shop was spacious and comfortable, the way down planet colony shops usually were. It unfortunately seemed to be a busy day, as there were several people waiting As I walked in, I got a few odd looks in a way I never had before, I assumed because the voluminous gold hair that hung about my shoulders, just didn’t really look like something one usually got trimmed at a barbershop. I ignored the curious stares, and tapped my watch against the pad that put me on the waiting list.

As I sat waiting for my turn, I caught my reflection in the wall of mirrors across the shop from me. Though the golden highlights had grown out some, I had a vague feeling that with my usual five centimeter pixie cut, I would get to keep just a little of them right at the tips. I tried to imagine it, and wondered if it would look good or dumb. Which led me back to thinking about the way Zoe had said they were pretty earlier.

Maybe, I could keep the hair a little longer, I just needed to get it cut to crew standard, fifteen centimeters, I didn’t have to go back to the five centimeter pixie. But then, I started questioning if preserving something Zoe thought of as pretty was a good idea. Maybe if I just got my usual cut, Zoe would see it as part of the clean break we needed.

I sat thinking of how it had felt as she’d played with the hair and suggested I could just wear it up. Which of course reminded me about the flash back I’d had. Yeah, I didn’t want my hair anywhere close to crew standard, even if Zoe would think it was pretty. Heck, five centimeters was even enough for a cleaner to get caught in it, if I was in a pod. And that thought suddenly had me flashing back to watching Patterson cut the cleaner free, from Captain Lee’s hair before he cauterized the gaping wounds, and questioning if I wanted to have hair at all.

I knew getting my head shaved like I was back in EES on the vague off chance I would ever have to go into a pod was crazy, but somehow the idea of just having less hair was suddenly appealing to me. The highlights Zoe thought were pretty would be gone. I’d feel a little safer. Heck, it could even just kind of be a turning over of a new leaf.

“REYES,” one of the barbers called out, interrupting my thoughts.

“That’s me,” I said and walked over to the chair.

“So,” The barber said in a curious tone, “what are we doing with all this?”

“Getting rid of it.” I informed him.

“Well I guess you did come to the right place then.” He chuckled as he gathered the long hair and twisted it to the top of my head and stuck a clip in it to hold it up as he fastened a cape around my neck. “You want to be more specific.”

“I was thinking maybe a crewcut.”

“You ever had a crewcut?” The barber sounded doubtful.

“Yeah,” I snorted. “I normally keep it shorter, I’m a crewman with SPS, I just have all this ‘cause it grew out while The Galileo was broken down.”

“Oh. I thought hair didn’t really grow in pods?”

“I was part of the skeleton crew that didn’t go in a pod.”

“Ah,” the barber seemed to sense that I didn’t really want to talk about it, and moved on. “So, what length crewcut?”

“Eh, I guess around a centimeter…” I said, thinking that was around the length that was pretty safe in a pod, just leaving one mildly more vulnerable to skin infection, but not injury. “Last time I had a crewcut, it was about six millimeters and a bit severe looking. Maybe the six millimeters on the sides. The last crewcut was kind of a mistake, I was on a planet where they used an old unit of measure and I got the conversion rate wrong.”

“Inches?” The barber asked as he let my hair out of the clip, so it tumbled down around my shoulders.

“That sounds kinda familiar, it was fractions we talked in… Eighths? How do you know about inches?”

“Barbers across the galaxy actually often use eighths of inches, many without even realizing it.” The barber told me as he began to comb through my long hair. “The standard guard lengths are in eighths of inches. When I set the clipper to a number 3, it’s close to a centimeter, but it’s actually three eighths of an inch. The reason the next guard down is a number 2, is because it’s two eighths of an inch, which is why you go down to around six millimeters, instead of exactly five like would make sense if the system was created in metric.”

“Really? Fascinating.”

“You can ask for your crewcuts with guard numbers,” The barber informed me as he tapped the screen of his clipper, and then turned to show me the 3 on the little screen, “That way you’ll get the same cut each time, and not have to worry about your barber rounding off in a different direction from your last barber.”

“Thanks. I will going forward.” Though I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to ask for a crew cut again, I had complicated motives for this one.

“Neckline?”

“Rounded.” I said to him, just before he turned on the clippers and any further conversation would have involved trying to talk over the constant hum.

The barber seemed to want to get rid of the bulk of the hair that surrounded my shoulders before really getting into the crewcut. He lifted a good sized lock full of fancy golden highlights up in the comb, and ran the clippers across the teeth of the comb. The long bouncy lock that Sally had paid to make pretty fell to my shoulder. The tuft that was just a few centimeters long fell back to my head.

I looked at my reflection with mixed feelings as the barber lifted another lock and just as swiftly cut it off, this time letting it slide to my lap. The barber kept going, lifting the long locks up to meet the clipper blades. The hair simply fell, onto my shoulders, behind me, and into my lap. It would pile up on my shoulders sometimes before reaching some critical mass, then sliding to the floor.

The golden and caramel highlights slowly were removed, leaving nothing behind but a short crop of black hair. Even just removing the bulk, it was already shorter than my usual five centimeter pixie. I was starting to wonder if this was a mistake, and maybe I should have just gotten my regular haircut. It was too late for my usual five centimeters, but maybe I could still go for two or three centimeters, instead of all the way down to one.

I kept my mouth closed. As I watched the barber take a bit more off the few locks still long enough to want to flop over.

I then felt the barber press the clippers directly against my scalp, no comb adding space, and he began to drag the clippers back. A sprinkling of black hair rained down, and a patch of upright bristles emerged from behind the clippers. I sat watching as the barber worked his way up, strip by strip to the top of my head. Then he went to the other temple and made the bristles on the other side match. He went back over my bristly dome, back to front the second time, catching any strands that had escaped when he had cut front to back.

He left me like that, staring at the mirror, with a dome of standing bristle you could see scalp through, surrounded by slightly longer hair on the sides of my head, as he tapped the screen of the clippers, adjusting the blades. Then he began again, this time starting at the neckline, and pulling the clippers up through the cropped hair.

For a while, he worked on the back of my head, which I couldn’t see. It was all just sensation as he did, and fairly familiar feeling, though my five millimeter pixie was always cut with scissors on the top, more often than not, whoever was cutting my hair would cut at least some of the back with clippers. Nevermind how many haircuts I’d had that had been shorter than the pixie. So the feeling of him folding my ear forward, was nothing new.

Eventually though, he made his way to the front, and I could see what it looked like as he joined the shorter bristle from the side to the centimeter he’d left me on top. They stood off my head at a ninety degree angle, and the scalp glared through even more, making the sides look a little lighter than the top.

The barber spent a little time, making sure he hadn’t missed any strays on the sides, especially going around my ears again. Then he began to blend the sides to the top, taking the length that was closer to six millimeters up higher as he did. The barber adjusted the clippers again, and spent just a little time tapering the bottom a bit, running the clippers over the comb.

The barber put down the clippers, and picked up a spray bottle, and gently misted the very short hair. I was used to barbers on planets with plenty of water misting my hair during a haircut, but usually, I would only really feel it hitting my neck and ears. With my hair buzzed so short that scalp showed through, some of the water droplets were directly hitting my scalp.

With my hair generally damp, the barber began to comb up through it, snapping the blades of the scissors right up against the comb, barely taking off any hair, but blending out any lines, and catching any strands that had escaped the clipper blades with a little extra length by bending. When he was finished, he dried the hair, the warm air blowing away any little snippets. Then he carved in the clean rounded neckline I’d requested. He bent my ears forward as he shaved away any stray hairs behind them. Finally, he shaped my sideburns. I watched as instead of trimming them into points like I was used to, he gave them a bit of a fade.

With the haircut completed, I sat as the barber showed me the back. Somehow, in just about fifteen minutes I had gone from the most feminine I had ever looked to the least feminine. Obviously, it wasn’t the shortest haircut I’d ever had, but something about the extreme simplicity of the one millimeter all over I’d had in EES had been more gender neutral. It had simply been a lacking of hair, no lines of deliberate style to it. And the time Stein and Khalil had tricked me into getting my hair buzzed down to six millimeters, the stylist had done his very best to soften it and make it less crewcut like. This barber had taken me at my word that I had not only wanted it crewcut length, but fully crewcut in style, and that style was masculine. Even more so than masculine though, the haircut looked clean and professional, almost stern really.

“Thanks,” I said to the barber, hiding my mixed feelings about the reflection I was looking at. “That’s a lot more appropriate for interstellar space.”
——————————————————————–

***********************LOOP BUNNY*************************

——————————————————————–

I decided to head over to the hospital and see Captain Lee, before heading back to Zoe’s apartment. Lee had messaged that we had stuff she wanted to go over casually, before we did it officially with the fleet coordinator. From the doorway I could see Captain Lee was in the bed where she was finally propped up in a sitting position. Though her new ear wasn’t completely healed, it was far enough along that she didn’t have to keep her head inside a device for most of the day, now she just had a protective frame cast of clear plastic over the brand new ear. There was a man sitting next to her, with his back to me, whom I didn’t immediately recognize.

“Hey Cap’n,” I said as I entered the room.

“Ah, perfect timing Reyes,” Lee said. “You can meet Captain Simpson, before the official meeting with the fleet coordinator in the morning. He’s going to be taking over The Galileo, and you’ll be his second in command.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to hide some of my surprise as he stood and offered me a hand to shake. “Nice to meet you.”

We spent a few minutes talking old routes, mutual friends, and him complimenting me on keeping the drifting ship going in the heading that the rescue ship expected to find us on even though I wasn’t a pilot. Then Simpson made excuses about needing to get several more things done before we would be departing, so he left me to visit with Lee in private.

“I thought you were being released from the hospital in the morning and the ear could finish healing aboard ship,” I said to Lee once we were alone. “Did something go wrong with it?”

I looked at the slightly pink looking ear inside its little cage, surrounded by stubble and a small patch of pink scalp with only peach fuzz.

“The ear is fine.” Lee began to explain, sounding a little unhappy. “You know I mentioned about the dreams, well, they’ve been getting worse, and yesterday when I was talking with my doctor about follow up care aboard ship, I just started having a panic attack. They offered me a psychologist to talk to, and I realized I’m done with interstellar travel. Trappist is a nice planet, not the cheapest place in the galaxy to settle down to retire, but not like Earth. I can work at the SPS office at least till my contract is up, and then maybe start a second career.”

“Are they forcing you into this? If you want, maybe you could get a second opinion from a different psychologist.”

“No, it’s not being forced at all. Talking to the psychologist just helped me feel comfortable making the decision I wanted to. The only reason I didn’t decide this sooner was because I felt bad about leaving the crew. Plus I felt like I had to prove I was ok… The psychologist just helped me see that I don’t owe that to anyone. I don’t have to prove I am able to do this just for the sake of proving it. And I’m not abandoning the crew, I’m just turning them over to a different perfectly capable captain. I can do what is right for me.”

“If this is really what you think is best for you, of course I want that for you.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Lee gave me a half smile, “and I’m sorry I sprung it on you last minute.”

“Sometimes you can’t make a decision till the last minute,” I pointed out.

“Was the hair a last minute decision?” Lee changed topics as she glanced up at my head. “I expected you to just go back to your usual haircut.”

“Yeah, kinda just came to me that maybe I should get a crew cut while waiting in the barbershop,” I admitted as I ran my hand over the little bristles again. “When I got up this morning and mentioned that I had to get a haircut, that girl I’ve been hooking up with was sad because she thought my long hair was pretty. I figured, maybe really getting rid of it might help her get over me a little quicker.”

“I wouldn’t count on it working,” Lee told me, “you don’t look terrible.”

“You’re more used to seeing me with short hair than Zoe is.” I pointed out. “Even if this is shorter than usual, it’s not as drastic a change.”

“I suppose,” Lee conceded. Then in a more serious tone she asked, “Did watching Patterson have to cut off the cleaner and cauterize my wound maybe influence wanting to have shorter hair before going back into space?”

Instead of answering, I just shrugged and looked away from her.

“We were all traumatized by what happened, you don’t have to pretend for my sake.” Lee assured me. “Actually, that brings up the other subject I wanted to warn you about before tomorrow’s meeting. Patterson is transferring to a different ship, The Jasmine. The psychologist SPS consulted on the subject felt that since the very last thing so many crewmen saw right before they woke up in pain was Patterson, that they might be avoidant of seeking medical treatment if they associate it with going to Patterson. I know you became close friends since you only had each other to talk to for months.”

I sighed, and just said “Thanks for warning me,” as I continued looking at the wall instead of at Lee. “I probably will request a new route in a loop or two anyway.”

“I’ve seen your history,” Lee said, “I know you are a bit of a loop bunny. Can you please stay with Simpson for a little bit though.”

I sighed, and looked at Lee. “I’ve already stayed on this route longer than I usually do. Mostly because you talked me into it.”

“I appreciate that,” Lee said, “but the crew’s been through a lot, and a little continuity might ease some of that. They aren’t getting it from any of the other officers: Olsson deciding it was the right time to get some engineer training so he can move up to command in a few years; nurse Patterson is leaving; Cheney the cargo chief died in the accident. I’m sorry I’m adding captain to that list. It leaves you as the only one continuing.”

“I guess a few more loops won’t kill me.” I sighed. “And I guess I am going to have to go to Toi to keep visiting Sally now that she’s not on Earth, and not nearly as many routes stop at Toi as Earth.”

“Thanks Reyes.”

Knock, knock.

Lee and I looked up at a man who was standing at her door, carrying a case. I think we both raised a questioning eyebrow in unison.

“Hi,” he said. “Sharon Lee? I’m Greg, the hospital barber.”

“Oh, I forgot about that.” Lee said, with regret, as she reached up and stroked the hair on the side of her head that nurses hadn’t been shaving daily till just a few days ago. “My doctor said I can’t go to barbershops where they might bend the ear or go over the new scalp with a comb for six months, because it’s still fragile and healing. When I said I had to get my hair cut before returning to duty, he said he’d arrange to have it done by someone here who is specially trained and will take extra care. I guess no one thought to cancel since I don’t have to get it cut if I’m not returning to duty.”

Greg nodded, but then said. “I’m here. Would you like me to even it out anyway, so that both sides match?”

Lee wrinkled her brow in indecision. I knew Lee had hated having to keep her hair at crew standard, she put up with it because she loved being in space even more than she wanted longer hair, but I knew just letting her hair grow was part of her retirement plan. I assumed the indecision was because, as much as she’d wanted to let her hair grow out from the microbob she’d kept it in while working aboard a ship, right now she didn’t have that micro bob. She was nearly bald on one side and grown out and shaggy on the other side.

“I suppose it’s probably the sensible thing to do, to just get it over with.” Lee said, looking at me like she wanted reassurance. “It will be easier to grow out from having the whole head shaved than just half of it?”

“Just a couple of months after I quit EES I had enough hair that it fully covered my scalp,” I told her. “If you keep the long side, it’s going to grow out unevenly, and you’ll have to live with it for six months if you don’t make special arrangements.”

“I guess I will take the opportunity to get it evened out.” Lee reluctantly agreed. “A fully shaved head is a little better than a half shaved one.”

“I’ll get going and give you some privacy.” I said and started to get up.

“Please stay,” Lee said, reaching out. Then added an excuse, “I’m not sure we went over everything.”

“Sure thing Cap’n” I sat back down, took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

I stayed with her, holding her hand as the barber buzzed the hair on the uninjured side of her head to match the stubble on the side the nurse had only stopped shaving clean a few days earlier. When she looked in the mirror with wet eyes, I assured her it had been a good decision and that it would grow out fast. After the barber left, I just listened to her talk some more about how she felt about not returning to space as she shed a few tears.

When she finally said she was tired and needed a nap, I gave her a cautious hug, and left her to rest. Hopefully her last night in the hospital she would get a better night’s sleep than she’d been having. Hopefully without the fear of having to go back out looming, she wouldn’t be woken by the dreams.

——————————————–

I waved my watch at the door to Zoe’s apartment, I’d felt a little funny about her progamming me into the lock about two weeks after we met, but it was much more convenient for both of us.

“I’M BACK,” I announced as the door slid shut behind me.

“Maria? Want me to make lunch?” Zoe’s approaching voice asked as she came out of the kitchen. “Or do you want to go….”

Zoe didn’t complete her thought as she came around the corner and visibly startled. She stood there, suddenly frozen with wide eyes. Her mouth half open from pausing mid sentence. She obviously was having a little trouble processing what she was looking at.

“You don’t like the haircut?” I asked, torn between feeling that that had kind of been the plan and hurt.

“I…I didn’t recognize you,” Zoe said very cautiously, her expression still a little confused. “I thought there was a strange guy in my living room.”

“Ah,” I sighed.

“Sorry,” Zoe said, obviously aware she’d just put her foot in her mouth as she continued to stare at me a little apprehensively, like she still wasn’t completely sure I was the same person she had voluntarily given access to her apartment to.

Even when I’d been bald in EES, I’d never been mistaken for a guy out of the uniform that had been designed to disguise identity, including any gender markers. I guess if Zoe thought I looked like a man the plan to help her get over me had basically worked, she had confided having zero attraction to guys. I assumed looking like some strange guy made my upcoming departure feel like a good thing to her.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ll just grab the couple of things I want to keep, then head back to my ship, so you don’t have to worry about feeding me again. It was much nicer staying here than at that hotel this last month. Thank you.”

“You said you didn’t have to go till tomorrow?” Zoe’s caution was suddenly replaced by a rather hurt tone.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to keep imposing on you.”

“I had plans for our last night together.” Zoe said, the hurt barely in check. “I wanted to make it special.”

“You still want to even though I look like a guy?” I said a little sarcastically and then immediately wished I could take it back when I saw the pain on Zoe’s face.

“I’m sorry,” she said again as a tear rolled down her cheek. “You don’t look like a guy, I just… You look good. It was just a shock.”

“I’m sorry too,” I said as I wrapped my arms around the softly crying woman I really did want to spend one more night with. “I overreacted. I know it is a huge change, I know I look really different. I guess I’m a little self conscious about it. I usually have short hair, because I have to for safety, but I don’t usually have it this short and this masculine. I… I just… was kind of scared of going back out there, so I asked for a crewcut…. I just felt like I might feel a little safer if I was extra strict about some of the safety rules.”

Zoe kind of nodded against my shoulder accepting the apology and explanation. Holding her, I realized it was true that I was scared. I also realized I had wanted her to reject me, not because it would make it easier for her once I was gone, but because it would make it easier for me to leave.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, and swallowed down the -I love you- I almost added just because I felt it.

———————————————–

***************BUSINESS*******************************
———————————

The Galileo docked at Toi station seventeen months later than it had been scheduled to. I usually didn’t pay any attention to the unloading of the cargo, but this time I was more interested than usual, so I headed over to the cargo section of the station.

“Hey Sunshine,” Sally said to me with a big smile as she paused signing receipts, then looked down at the baby held in a sling on her hip. “Jason, say ‘hi’ to your Aunty Sunshine.”

Instead of saying anything, Jason continued to suck his thumb as he looked at me with big eyes that looked like they were turning from the gray blue babies were so often born with to green like Mr Papadopoulos’ eyes had been. His wispy baby hair was a dark brown that curled, not quite as tightly as Sally’s did, but with baby hair, it’s always hard to say if it was going to be more curly or less curly once the baby hair grows out.

“Oh Sally,” I said as I gave her a careful half hug, making sure not to squish the baby. “He’s perfect.”

“Thanks,” Sally said, returning the hug, then looking down and beaming a smile at the tiny very young person she had grown. “I’m pretty amazed by him.”

We spent a few minutes discussing how amazing and beautiful Jason was, and generally just catching up the way we used to when Sally lived on Earth.

“So, what is all this?” I asked as Sally and I watched through one of the station’s observation windows as the cargo she had signed for being unloaded into a huge unpressurized storage hanger.

“Equipment that would have been hard to build from scratch here on Toi.” Sally said, her mixed feelings about it clear in her tone. “Papa had been planning to build a shipyard. A real full shipyard that could compete with Earth’s shipyards. I’ve been reading his diaries since I inherited those too. They are quite detailed, some are personal, some are business plans. Ledgers and stuff too.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.” Sally said with a bit of a shrug. “I guess I just need to sell it. It’s not like I have a PhD and the knowledge to build interstellar freighters. It’s pretty darn valuable if I read the invoices correctly. Of course I have no idea who I could sell it to, and it’s not like I need the money, Jason and I are set for life. Funny thing, none of it seems to have gotten damaged in the accident.”

“That’s pretty typical.” I explained to Sally. “The way SPS has the freighters built, the cargo areas are more solid and protected.”

“The cargo is better protected than the crew and passengers?” Sally asked, sounding horrified.

I sighed, I knew she was right, but also I had long ago just accepted it. “Crew are cheaper and easier to replace than cargo, and we don’t often have passengers.”

“It always comes down to money, doesn’t it.” Sally complained. “I gotta tell you though, passengers don’t even seem to be as valuable as cargo if what Papa had shipped here is at all normal. The compensation I got as Papa’s widow, was less than what he’d invested in all that equipment, and that isn’t all the cargo on that ship.”

“I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.” I said, even though it did.

“What am I going to do with it?” Sally returned to her original concern.

“I dun’know,” I sighed. “Start building ships?”

“Yeah right. I’m a high school drop out.” Sally snorted a laugh. “I can’t compete with SPS like Papa planned to. I don’t even think Papa could have pulled it off. Papa’s business plan to compete with SPS looked pretty optimistic and risky.”

“You understood them?”

“I got a lot of it, not the technical stuff,” Sally shrugged. “You’d probably get that stuff. I understood most of the business stuff though, I looked up and researched bits I didn’t. He was taking a big gamble, he sunk most of his money into all this, and was planning to sink pretty much every penny he had left when he got here trying to build the first giant ship.”

“What would you do differently?” I asked her, curious.

“I’d start with smaller, less expensive to build ships. Not try to start with frieghters.” Sally said. “I’d make the ships that the shipyards in the Earth/Sol system don’t.”

“What ships don’t they make?” I asked, wrinkling my brow. “They make freighters, shuttles, yachts, they make colony ships, what else is there?”

“Well, for starters,” Sally began, “all the yachts are intrasystem, not interstellar. I remember Papa complaining that he wished he could just hire a pilot and take a yacht. And they don’t make interstellar passenger ships, ones that take more than two awake passengers, and takes them comfortably.”

“Considering how dangerous interstellar travel is, how many people would be interested?” I asked.

“With how many people sign up to be SPS crew just to get to travel, I’m sure it’s a decently large amount.” Sally claimed. “Plus, what if the ships weren’t built to protect the cargo better than the crew and passengers. Put people ahead of money, and build them so they are safe even if they are a wee bit less profitable. And make them so families with kids can travel. If I ever want to leave Toi, I can’t take Jason till he’s stopped growing, since kids grow unevenly in pods.”

“Can you afford to do it with a lower profit margin than Papa had planned for?”

“If I was careful it would be no problem at all. I could set aside enough to keep Jason and I comfortable for life, and still have plenty to start building small ships to start with.”

“You’re going to do it aren’t you?” I asked Sally.

“I’m not an engineer or anything, I don’t know what makes ships move or how wormholes get opened.”

“So hire engineers.”

“You asking for a job?”

“No. You can pick my brain while I’m here, but I don’t want to settle down.” I chuckled. “I know an engineer who’s been complaining about wanting to see his wife more than one week every sixteen months though, and his contract is going to be up very soon. If you’d be willing to pay what it cost to get his wife here from Earth, I suspect he’d be interested.”

Sally looked at me and smiled.

———————————————–

~~~~~~~~~~~~PART 6~~~~~~~~~~~

********************SEEING THE CAT*******************
———————————————
I’m not sure whether I wanted her to be there when I entered the cozy little bar on Trappist station, the one that offered the human touch instead of tablets to order on. I went alone though, and sat in the same spot I had the first time and waited. Then there she was.

“Hey there, stranger.” Zoe smiled at me, her long red hair was in a pair of pigtails that hung over her shoulders, she wore her usual work apron, and the name tag was still there. “Rum and coke?”

“Yeah.” I confirmed. “I see you still haven’t made that degree in poetry payoff.”

“Oh nah,” she played along, “it’s been making me a fortune. I just keep working here as a favor. I’ve sold three dozen copies of my book so far, and not only to family, two people I don’t know bought copies. It only took two years of work, and I’ve already made nearly as much as I do working a six hour shift here.”

“Great to hear,” I chuckled as I watched Zoe fill my glass. “How’s Bond doing?”

“He’s good.” She said, as she placed the glass in front of me. “If you are going to be here long enough to come down planet, I’m sure he’d love to see you again.”

“It’s a long stop over, we’re here for a full one hundred and sixty three hours. We have cargo that we need to transfer to another ship that won’t arrive here till a few days from now. So I have some time to visit Bond,” I told her. “If you’ve got a girlfriend though, I wouldn’t want her getting the wrong impression by my visiting Bond.”

“I’ve been too busy selling poetry books to date much,” Zoe claimed looking a little anxious. “I suppose visiting a girl at every port is a little easier to squeeze into the work schedule, since you get shore leave.”

I poked at an ice cube with my drink stirrer, as I tried to figure out how to respond. I had told Zoe how I hooked up, I had wanted to be honest and not hide it. I’d told her I would be going back to that. I’d had every intention of continuing my habit of hooking up with someone new at every system. I hadn’t really wanted to when I said good bye to Zoe before boarding the ship, but I had figure that by the time we made it to the next system, I would be over that feeling. I’d even gone to a bar, but sitting there, all I thought about was Zoe.

I looked up at Zoe, and into her nervous gray eyes. “I’ve really been looking forward to seeing Bond again.”

———————————————

“Sorry to waste your time with this,” I said as I set up my tablet on Zoe’s coffee table, then sat on the floor in front of it leaning back against the couch, “but sometimes I really want to send off a response right away, and I can’t respond once I’m out of system for weeks.”

“It’s fine,” Zoe assured me as she climbed up onto the couch behind me, her crossed legs giving a little extra support to my back. “Are you sure you don’t want privacy?”

“There really isn’t ever anything super personal in these.” I said as I transferred the files I’d picked up at the SPS office, then tapped the screen till the message from Sally began to play. I certainly was enjoying the way Zoe was rubbing my shoulders as she sat behind me way too much to care if Sally or my sister said anything embarrassing to me.

**Hey Sunshine,** the message started with Sally holding Jason in her lap. **Say ‘hi’ to Aunty Sunshine.**

**Hi Andy Suh-shy** Jason, who had grown from a baby into a toddler, waved enthusiastically with his little fist. His big eyes were clearly the same shade of green Mr Papadopolis’ had been, and his dark brown hair was in just slightly bigger looser curls than Sally’s purple hair which motherhood seemed to have motivated her to keep short.

“Sunshine?” Zoe asked me as Sally asked Jason if he wanted to stay or if he would rather go play with Nanny.

“When Sally and I met as little kids, she decided to call me sunshine because ‘Reyes’ sounds like ‘rays’, so ‘rays of sunshine’ sounds like ‘Reyes of Sunshine.’” I blushed a little as I explained the pun that led to my childhood nickname, while Jason said **bye** to the camera with more enthusiastic waving.

“It’s cute,” Zoe told me as we watched Sally handing Jason over to the nanny.

As I watched Sally telling me about how things were going, Bond climbed into my lap. I began to absentmindedly stroke his soft fur as he rumbled in my lap. I sat there comfortably as I listened to Sally talk about an idea she had gotten from reading an old story about an anthropomorphic tug boat to Jason of making interstellar tug boats. She said she’d be able to deliver fully assembled intrasystem shuttles this way to the smaller colonies that SPS didn’t stop at regularly since they didn’t have stations the big freighters could dock at.

Zoe, seeming to have grown tired of sitting up and kneading my shoulder muscles, had stretched out on the couch, and switched to lightly stroking her fingertips over the upright bristles of the crewcut I had just kept up in almost the same absentminded manner that I stroked bonds fur. Just as I occasionally switched to scratching behind Bond’s velvety ears, or rubbed his check behind his stiff whiskers, Zoe would sometimes switch to scratching her nails through the pelt along my scalp, or feeling the stubble on my neck.

Bond decided he’d had enough of being petted a few minutes into a message from one of my teenage nephews, and wandered off to go eat some kibble, so I just reached up and took the hand Zoe wasn’t stroking my hair with, and lightly held it. When my sister said bye at the end of her message, and the screen went blank, Zoe started to more actively enjoy our proximity. She bent forward and began to nibble my exposed ear.

Though I’d had mixed feelings about the haircut when I had first gotten it, once I’d gotten used to it, I’d started to appreciate the crewcut. It certainly was more comfortable. It was cooler and the dry shampoo didn’t build up in it between washes the way it sometimes did when my hair had been in a pixie. Keeping it sharp had meant stopping by barbershops a little more frequently, but I’d long ago decided I didn’t mind paying for fairly frequent haircuts I actually liked, since I was career SPS, and short hair was just my life, not something to be endured for a few years till I could settle on a colony where I could have the hair I wanted. That was more akin to the way I had endured being bald for four years in EES. Plus, though the haircuts were more frequent, they were quicker and more predictable, a five centimeter pixie was open to interpretation in a way a crewcut wasn’t. What had really motivated me to maintain the crewcut though was the feeling that I just looked more authoritative, and more serious. Somehow looking more professional had started to feel more important to me than looking nice for the girls I could theoretically be hooking up with at every stop. It just felt like it matched my place in life as chief engineer and second in command better.

Though I had chosen it in part to make breaking up with Zoe easier, feeling her lips against my ear, made it obvious that it wasn’t something Zoe disliked.

——————————————–

****************JUST A FEW******************
——————————————-

“They finally found The Night Owl,” Khalil told me as we sat in the bar on Wolf-Cee station, the way we always did when our ships both happened to dock there at the same time. “Or really the wreckage.”

“Any survivors?” I asked, with complicated feelings.

I’d mourned our friend Stein already in some ways, but missing was always weirder to mourn than simply dead. There’d been hope at first, ships got found. Heck, I knew what it was like to be alive and sort of well on a ship that would be found, though that hadn’t been till The Night Owl had already been missing for a few years. Of course part of the torture of those months waiting for a rescue ship to come was hoping my sister wasn’t too worried that our ship wouldn’t be found.

“Just a few of the pod passengers. A lot of the pods failed because no one was monitoring them, but a few seem to have kept going with passengers.” She said, absentmindedly stirring the bubbles out of her gin’n tonic. “They say it looked like the entire crew was killed nearly instantaneously. It wasn’t a slow breach like what happened to your ship, there wasn’t time to get into suits or seal hatches between sections. No chance for them to survive to then go into pods.”

I sighed and nodded before taking a sip from my rum and coke. “You know, when I first heard the rumor about The Night Owl being two weeks late showing up at Akhet, I thought that the crewman who told me had been talked into pranking me by Stein.”

Stein wasn’t the only crewman I’d known and counted as a friend on The Night Owl, she just was the one that Khalil and I had in common, and the only one who would have thought a prank like that was funny.

“I did too,” Khalil said, sipping her own drink. “It didn’t help that SPS was trying to keep the whole thing hushed.”

“The idea that you could keep the disappearance of an entire freighter under wraps,” I shook my head remembering how long the official story from SPS was just that delays could happen for a variety of reasons, like unexpected course changes. A few days, sure. The months that it took before SPS admitted The Night Owl was really missing though was pretty ridiculous.

“How much do you want to bet they are going to try to reclaim any lost cargo and death settlements they made.”

“Probably pretty high,” I said. “Can you imagine waking up after you got into a pod expecting to arrive somewhere in a few months, and then you find out you’ve been missing for a decade, and everyone assumed you were dead, and maybe you had a job lined up and everything, but obviously none of that is still there. The passengers from the Galileo were pretty shocked over arriving just one year late.”

“At least they arrived.”

I nodded. It was true they eventually arrived. Melissa, almost a third of the crew from the Galileo, the entire crew of The Night Owl, would never be arriving.

“To Stein,” I raised my glass in a toast.

“To Stein,” Khalil returned the salute, and we both downed what was left of our drinks.
————————————————

*********************TIME*****************

———————————————

“Who’s this?” I asked with surprise as I stood just inside the door into Zoe’s apartment looking down at the lanky not quite full sized orange cat that was just a bit old looking to count as a kitten, more of an adolescent cat.

He was meowing, and rubbing his body against both Zoe’s and my legs, as we tried to take off our shoes and jackets. He was cute, and obviously quite friendly. As I contemplated the surprise of the presence of the young orange cat, I realized something I had expected was missing.

“Where’s Bond?” I asked Zoe before she could answer my first question.

“This is Tigger,” Zoe lifted the orange creature up to meet me, then frowned. “Bond passed away about a month after you left. Old age, he was twenty-two. I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you up station when you arrived.”

“It’s ok,” I assured her as I reached out to stroke the you cat’s head, Tigger didn’t sit still for me to stroke him though, instead he started batting at the slightly dinghy sting bracelets that I wore. “He’s very playful isn’t he?”

——————————————–

~~~~~~~~~~~Part 6~~~~~~~~~~~

***************CAREER*********************

————————————————–

“Congratulations Captain Reyes,” the HR guy informed me of my promotion with zero pomp or circumstance. “You have reached the pinnacle of employment with SPS.”

It wasn’t completely unexpected. I had been working towards it for years, I’d done all the right things, made the right sacrifices, played the game well. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still felt a bit surreal, somewhere inside me I was still the the little girl who had stood in front of the teacher with my long black hair and hand-me-down clothing and had to tell her that I had no tablet as she rolled her eyes at me. It was hard to believe I’d stepped up that particular wrung on the ladder to success, sure I didn’t look like that little girl anymore, when not in crewmen’s coveralls, I kept a nice pair of trousers and two blouses, and I easily could have afforded to buy more if there wasn’t the issue of weight allotments and locker space. My hair was not only quite short, but I’d also begun to find a few gray hairs. Different as I looked from that little girl, somewhere deep inside I still carried the weight of the expectation that kids like me never amounted to much.

I’d made captain because I’d worked hard. I thought it was funny he called it the pinnacle of employment though, I wasn’t that old, I had time for another promotion or two. If I kept working hard, I was sure I could climb up a bit higher on that ladder.

Shoving the voice of imposter syndrome down, I joked, “Hey, don’t count on captain being as far as I get, I might just make fleet coordinator before I retire.”

“What? You planning to marry into the family?” HR guy gave me funny look.

“The family?” I asked.

“Yeah, the family. The descendants of the founder of SPS. All the positions above captain are filled by family.”

“They are?” I admitted to confusion. “But they don’t all have the same name or anything?”

“Yeah. Marriage and whatnot, has changed the names through the generations, but they’re all like fourth cousins and stuff to each other. The great-great-great-whatever grandkids of good’ol Chuck.” HR guy told me. “It’s not exactly a deep secret, though they also don’t make it widely known. I’ve never seen anyone who didn’t inherit stock in SPS get promoted above captain.”

“Oh,” I tried not to sound disappointed, just a few moments ago I’d been so happy, making captain was amazing, even if it was the pinnacle. It wasn’t like getting to be captain till I was ready to retire was bad.

“Now,” HR guy said in a cheerful tone that I knew was meant to distract me away from the disappointment. “Let’s find you a ship. I have several ships that have soon to retire captains that I can get you on. Are there any particular routes you want to be on?”

“I like my current route,” I told him, “though I assume it’s not on the available list, since Captain Simpson has not said he’s retiring any time soon. Though maybe he’s ready for a change? I guess seeing new things will be nice. Mostly though, I want a route that stops at Earth so I can visit my sister and nephews, Trappist so I can see the woman I’ve been dating, and Toi so I can visit an old childhood friend and her son.”

“That’s a tall order. I don’t have anything available that hits all three.” HR guy told me after tapping his screen.

“I can live without stopping at Earth,” I conceded, it would hurt saying goodbye to my sister, nephews, and grand nieces for a much longer time, but it wasn’t like I figured it wouldn’t be forever.

“Earth is no problem.” HR guy said. “Lots of ships stop by Earth, so between Earth and Trappist I have several. Trappist is kind of a hub for that corner of the galaxy. Toi has a lot fewer options though. Aside from your current route, which isn’t available. I only have one that stops at both Earth and Toi. Nothing that goes to all three though. You’re going to have to choose between Trappist and Toi.”

“Suppose I could turn down the promotion and stay on my current route,” I joked.

HR guy gave me a look.

Toi was the right choice, it was the choice I should find easy. I told Zoe that the relationship was temporary. She knew this might happen, I’d warned her that I might get assigned to a new route every time I had left. I’d only know Zoe for a few years, a few stops, Sally had been my friend since we were little kids. I loved her, I loved her kid. I cared about what she was doing. Sally had been part of my life for decades. The idea of her not being a regular part of my life going forward was heartbreaking. Toi should have been the easy choice.

Then I imagined never feeling Zoe’s warm body in my arms again.

“Give me one of the routes that stops at Trappist.” I said.

“Ok,” HR guy nodded and pulled up options on his screen as though I hadn’t just made a heart breaking decision. “I have a few options, one’s a pretty quick loop, you aren’t going to get to go anywhere new, so I figure that’s not what you want.”

“How quick is the loop?” I asked.

HR guy looked at me and chuckled. “She must be quite a lady.”

—————————————————–

“I don’t want you to go,” Zoe said as I said goodbye to her at the hatch to The Jasmine.

“I know,” I whispered in her ear as we embraced. “I’m not going to be gone for as long this time. The Jasmine is on a much shorter loop than one the Galileo was on. And we can message as we always do.”

I felt her head nod against my shoulder. Zoe was always a little reluctant to let me go, but this time it was a little extra. This had been a longer visit than we’d had since the stop when I’d met her. The Galileo and The Jasmine’s schedules made it so that the best way for me to transfer had been for The Galileo to drop me off when we got to Trappist, and for me to wait three weeks for The Jasmine to arrive. The current captain of The Jasmine would be staying on for just another half a loop till we dropped him off on Wolf-Cee where he was planning to retire from SPS and settle down with his two husbands. So, we’d just gotten to have a lot of time being rather casually domestic while I waited for The Jasmine to arrive.

I think, it might also be that I had made a certain mental shift in the relationship, and Zoe had sensed it. I’d tried not to make too much of a fuss and tell her specifically that I had chosen this route so that I could see her more often, but it was kind of obvious that this marked a change.

Usually when we embraced at the end of a visit, I would remind her that if she met someone else while I was gone it was ok, and I would remind her I might get a new route and this might be a final goodbye. I breathed in deep, holding her familiar scent in my lungs, near my heart.

“I love you,” slipped out as I breathed out, I hadn’t planned it, but also…it was ok, maybe?

Zoe hugged me tighter. “I love you too.”
———————————————–

*****************AGRICULTURAL*****************

—————————————————
“Excuse me,” a colonist who had that look of being on the cusp between being a teenager and an adult approached me as I stepped through the hatch to the public part of the station we were docked at. “Are you this ship’s captain?”

“Yes, Captain Reyes,” I confirmed. “I’m the captain of The Jasmine. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been hoping to apply for a crew position with Stellar Path Shipping.” The young lady told me in a tone that was an imitation of confident, even though her body language betrayed how nervous she really was as it was clear she couldn’t decide what to do with her hands. “I heard captains can hire extra crew if they have any openings.”

I didn’t blame her for being nervous, on top of the typical reasons people are always a bit anxious over asking for a job, this was possibly the kids only chance for anything other than being a farmer. The agricultural planet was that combination of mostly self-sufficient but also not so abundant that it had lots to export that meant ships rarely docked at it. The Jasmine only stopped at it every third loop. If I didn’t have an opening, it would be a long time till the next opportunity for her to leave the system came, one she might not be in a position to wait for.

“How old are you?” I asked as I looked her up and down. She was dressed in a reasonably practical looking basic outfit, and had a small backpack slung over her shoulder. Her brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, with a couple of barrets holding back some shorter bits that were probably grown out bangs.

“Eighteen,” she claimed.

“That’s age of majority on this planet?” I asked, since twenty-one wasn’t uncommon, especially on some of the smaller agrarian colonies like this one, where kids were seen as free farm labor, and nobody wanted to give them up till they had to. If memory was serving me correctly though, this was a planet that used its own seasonal calendar and this planet’s year was longer than an Earth year, so eighteen year olds here were closer in development to 20 year olds on Earth.

“Yes,” she said.

I would be double checking that she really was eighteen and that was this planet’s age of majority before I actually took the girl if I decided to hire her. I did have an opening, I had thought it was likely to stay that way till we got to one of the systems with an SPS office where the fleet coordinator would fill it, but if I could fill it right away, it would take a bit of the strain off the crew. A pretty fast crew turnover was pretty unavoidable, since so many from Earth just took jobs with SPS to get a free ticket to a colony.

“We’re leaving in just a few hours,” I warned her. “Do you have everything you want to take and your records with you? There isn’t really time to go down planet and pack or look anything up.”

“Yes,” she confirmed, her tone taking on a cautious excitement.

“Ok,” I told her. “Let’s go sit at the station cafe, and you can show me all your records and transcripts, then we can talk.”

——————————————————–

“And these are my results from a highschool equivalency test I bought. The seller said it covered all the same subjects that are covered in an Earth high school,” Kathleen Murphy said as she stuck a thumb drive into the port of the tablet the owner of the cafe had graciously loaned us when we’d discovered that my tablet and her records were incompatible technology.

“You bought?” I asked as I vaguely scanned over the results of the test that definitely left some gaps, but not necessarily significant ones. “Your parents didn’t buy it?”

“My parents want me to stay and make more grandkids for them to expand the farm.” Murphy explained.

“How did you pay for it?” I asked as I looked up from the test results she’d done perfectly fine on.

“I’ve been working a part time job.” Murphy told me. “Nothing much, just after all my chores are done on my parents farm, I am an assembler at the tractor factory. The tests cost most of what I had saved up, but I figured if it helped show I could do Earth level academic work, it was worth it. And I had enough left to get a shuttle up here to the station.”

“Between the farm and the factory,” I asked, “How many hours do you work each week?”

“Gad, I don’t know.” The girl looked upward, searching her memory and doing some mental math. “I work twenty-two a week at the factory, that I know ‘cause they pay me by the hour. The farm’s different though, I guess maybe a bit more on the farm though.”

“Ok,” I said, convinced that Murphy had shown enough for the guy at SPS HR to approve my waving the highschool diploma requirement, since this planet just simply didn’t have any accredited high schools. “Why do you want to work for SPS.”

“Stellar Path Shipping has a marvelous reputation as…” Murphy began what sounded like a memorized monologue.

“Cut the bullshit,” I interrupted, since I still had a couple of errands to do before I needed to make sure everyone was back aboard ship on time. “Just level with me.”

“I heard you can go to one of the universities on Earth after you work for SPS. I can’t afford a ticket to Earth, and I heard working for SPS I could get off on Earth.”

“If you can afford it, SPS does help you get into a university and you can do some of the course work aboard ship, but you have to pay tuition when you get there.” I told her. “It takes most people two contracts, ten years to save up enough for tuition at an Earth University, and you have to be frugal.”

“Oh,” Murphy let out in a deflated tone. “It takes that long to save enough money to go to a University?”

“An Earth university, yes. But, if you don’t care about the prestige of it being an earth school, the University on Trappist, is much cheaper. When I was in school, SPS didn’t accept degrees from Trappist for specialists, but they started to a couple of years ago. It’s got a well established STEM curriculum, and has been expanding its humanities program.”

“Oh,” Murphy brightened up. “I didn’t even know there was a university anywhere other than Earth.”

“There are a few, Trappist is the only one SPS accepts degrees from, but if you want a degree for another reason, one of the others might work for you.” I told her. “Listen, we don’t really have time to go over all the details about that. I just want to make sure you understand what you are signing up for. Space is dangerous, interstellar space is extra dangerous. Though I am hiring you here on this route, it doesn’t mean you will spend all five years of your contract on this route, the fleet coordinator or SPS HR may want to reassign you to another route. If you screw up, I can stick you in a pod and then dump you back here. Working for SPS is a one way trip to wherever you choose to get off. If you don’t sign up for another five years after you get your degree, you would have to pay full fare to return to this system. Understand?”

“Yes,” Murphy nodded a little nervously.

“Ok, welcome to Stellar Path Shipping.” I reached out my hand, Murphy took it and smiled broadly as we shook hands. “Issuing you ship’s coveralls and most of the training videos can wait till we are underway. Before you board though, I need you to sign the contract, watch a couple of the most important safety videos, and check that you plus everything you are taking are within your mass allowance.”

“Ok.” Murphy agreed, sounding mildly overwhelmed.

“You also need a haircut, so it makes sense to check if you’re under mass allowance after that.” I mentioned. “I’ll get you a voucher for the haircut.”

“I have to get a haircut?!” Murphy’s eyes went wide as she stared at my not so fresh crew cut.

I had gotten it trimmed on our last stop a few weeks ago, but of course crew cuts grew out fast. Getting my crew cut trimmed had been on my to-do list, but I wasn’t sure it was happening in the time I had left. I felt like my hair was too long, but to most people, it always looked severe. Looking at how pale Murphy had gone, it was obvious that she definitely thought my hair was very very severe.

“You don’t have to get a crewcut like I do.” I assured the girl who looked close to panic. “There’s a whole video about acceptable length, and how long hair is a safety hazard and clogs stuff, but it’s long and stupid. You just have to get it cut so it’s not in your face or going to get caught in a helmet seal and stuff. The station barbers usually know what is and isn’t over crew standard.”

Murphy pulled her ponytail forward over her shoulder and looked down at it, petting it slightly with a very unhappy expression. “I’ve always had long hair.”

“Do you not want to sign that contract?” I asked her, I thought giving up the opportunities SPS would open for her over hair was stupid, especially considering she was ok with all the other downsides to working for SPS, but it was her choice.

“I guess it’s not that big a deal,” Murphy said not too convincingly. “How short?”

“As I said, not as short as mine. If you look around at the crewmen from the Jasmine, you can see many have hair longer than mine.”

Murphy looked around the station cafe, where several crewmen were enjoying snacks, then out past the tables into the wide corridors where other crewmen were window shopping, people watching, or just hanging out. There were almost always some crew who decided to skip going down planet when we stopped, since this was a particularly short stop, almost nobody was going down planet and crewmen seems to outnumber locals.

“So, I can keep my hair as long as that guy’s?” Murphy pointed to someone behind me.

I twisted to look and see who she was pointing at. I sighed deeply, it was Jackson, who I hadn’t seen in a while, I now suspected he’d been hiding from me. It wasn’t that Jackson had any particular attachment to the hair he always let grow past crew standard, he was just cheap as shit. He was one of the few career SPS crewmen who did the grow and buzz. He just pushed the grow stage a bit further than most.

“JACKSON, you’re planning to visit the barber this stop, right?” I shouted over to him.

“Of course I was planning to cap’n.” Jackson claimed, then said to the other crewmen he was hanging out with, “Sorry, I guess I need to go.”

I turned back around and told Murphy, “Not quite that long.”

—————————————————-

“I’m sorry about the whole not having a watch for you to put the voucher on thing.” Murphy said to me when we arrived at the hatch to the station barber shop. “Or knowing how much you’d need to put on an exchange card, and not having enough so you could just reimburse me.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” I assured the girl again. “I’ll issue you a ship watch when we get on board. If you want to be frugal, you can just use it for the duration of your contract. You might want to save up for a personal one though, they’re more comfortable, and you can keep it when you start at a university.”

“I know you’re very busy though.”

“It’s fine.” I assured her. “I needed to stay with you anyway so you can finish watching those safety videos before you get on board.”

“If I had a watch I wouldn’t need your tablet.” Murphy pointed out apologetically.

“Hey cap’n,” Jackson said as he passed us on our way to the waiting area.

“Is that the same crewman who had too long hair a half hour ago?” Murphy asked me as she stared at the back of Jackson’s nearly bald head as he exited the station barbershop. “Why would he…?”

“Yeah, that’s Jackson. He puts off haircuts as long as possible, then makes sure it’s short enough that’i’ll last a while to save money.”

“Why would it save money if we get vouchers?” Murphy asked.

“You get A voucher. One voucher when you take employment with SPS, since they figure some newly hired crewmen are broke, and barbers who take the vouchers know crew standard.” I explained to the kid. “After this haircut, we know you’ll be getting a paycheck, so the expectation is that you maintain it.”

“Can I just trim it myself?”

“Not aboard ship, the filtration and recycling systems aboard can’t handle it. Most stations have similar rules, the station barber shops are built to handle it.”

“So I have to pay for my next haircut?” Murphy asked. “How often do I have to get haircuts? What do they cost?”

“Yes, you’ve got to pay for the next one,” I confirmed. “How often’ll depend on how short you go. If you keep it near the limits of crew standard, you have to get a haircut every stop. If you get it shorter, it can last for half a loop. How much they cost varies from system to system, about twenty stellar credits on average; a lot more on Earth, less on Wolf-Cee.”

“TWENTY CREDITS!?” Murphy whisper-shouted at me. “Every stop?!”

“That’s why some crewmen just get it all cut off when they get haircuts.” I said. “You only have to get a haircut every stop if you only get it cut to crew standard maximum, if you get it cut shorter, it will last longer.”

“I don’t think I can handle being bald.”

“Understandable.”

“How short do you get yours cut?”

“A number three on top.” Then it occured to me that was probably pretty meaningless to the long haired kid. “About a centimeter. It’s a little grown out from that right now though, so closer to two.”

“And the max is fifteen?”

“Overall, but your bangs have to be a centimeter above your eyebrows. Not in your eyes at all. And it can’t be more than halfway down your neck in the back.” I explained. “The fifteen centimeters opens up some style options though.”

“So, not really fifteen anyway…”

“Not really.”

“I guess I should just get it cut as short as I can stomach.” Murphy decided.

“That’s the sensible choice. Aboard ship, you’ll fit in, it’s not like anyone has long hair. And you’ll look good with short hair.” I assured her.

“Is short hair the fashion on Earth?”

I sighed, I could just tell her I was too old to keep up with fashion, or I could tell her that I didn’t spend enough time visiting Earth to care, but instead I thought about the way my grandnieces talked about keeping up with the latest trends when they couldn’t just buy anything they wanted or pay for salon visits as they sat braiding beads and feathers into their long brown locks.

“No, not really.” I admitted. “Just aboard ship.”

————————————————–

“Ok, your turn, kid.” The barber said to Murphy as he took the exchange card from his previous client and a sweeper bot pushed the hair away from the base of the barber chair.

Murphy got up a little reluctantly, and walked over to the chair. She sat down with a stoic expression, and began to take out the elastic that held the long hair in a ponytail, revealing the slightly wavy locks that reached her waist. The barber waited with the cape at the ready, as Murphy took out the barrettes that held back her grown out bangs. The barber swung the white cotton cape over Murphy’s stiffly straight body, then twisted the long chocolate brown hair and used a clip to hold it up out of his way.

“What’s it gonna be?” The barber asked as he wrapped a strip of paper around her neck, and fastened the collar over it.

“What would three centimeters look like?”

The barber pinched a lock from the grown out bangs up. “About like this. It’s a good length for a simple crop. I can give it a nice soft texture.”

“I guess I can live with it.” Murphy agreed reluctantly.

The barber smiled at Murphy and told her, “It’ll look good, and be nice and easy to manage in space.”

The barber took out the clip, and let Murphy’s long hair tumble down one last time. He walked over to his counter, and chose his clippers instead of shears, before returning to stand behind Murphy. Then without bothering to comb through the hair he was going to be cutting most of off anyway, he gathered it into a simple bundle. He turned the clippers on, and began to press the blades into the bundle just above his hand.

hummmmm-buzzzzt-hummmmm-buzzzzzzzzoot-hmmmmmm-buzzzzzt-buzz-hummmmmmmmm

Murphy’s hair fell forward framing her face, mostly in a bob length, a little shorter in the back, but longer towards the front where it hung a couple of centimeters below her jawline. The barber dropped the bundle of chocolate brown hair to the floor.

The barber swapped his clippers for a comb and spray bottle, and began to wet Murphy’s hair. Once it had begun to drip slightly, he picked up a pair of shears. He parted Murphy’s damp hair at her left temple, and combed all the hair above it off to the right side. He combed down through the hair, a couple of centimeters back from her hairline, creating a sliver of hair that he then combed out and up into his fingers. Holding the sliver of hair taut, he raised the silver shears to the strands that hung from his fingers.

Snip, shnip, sssnip, snip

He cut the lock off with the very tips of his shears into tiny points that stuck out above his fingers. The barber combed the hair back down and gave it a little ruffle, contemplating how it moved, then combed it back up, and cut back down into it, making the ends even more jagged, but not really taking off more length.

I had a feeling this haircut was going to take a while, so I pulled up some work on my tablet. As I worked, I kept glancing at my watch and the progress on Murphy’s haircut. We still had a few things to do before the ship’s scheduled departure. Most critically, Murphy needed to know how to get herself secure for the zero to high gee maneuvers that would happen when we undocked from the station.

The barber combed out another slim section of hair from the side of Murphy’s head just behind the one he’d already cut. He once again, snipped at it with just the tips of his scissors into it, creating tiny points, then he combed it down again. He repeated the process again, going back slightly.

As the locks draped over Murphy’s shoulder built up, I was rather amused that the barber was very deliberately cutting Murphy’s hair in a manner that gave it a soft texture that reminded me of the way a shaved head grew out. He talked about it being a flattering and more feminine look than a sharper cut. I guess on a planet where growing out a shaved head didn’t usually mean you’d just gotten out of either EES or detention, it didn’t have the same associations. Of course aboard ship, a grown out shaved head was mostly associated with being frugal.

The barber slowly worked his way back, lightly snipping at sliver after sliver of the long hair, reducing the hair on the side of Murphy’s head to the soft three centimeter crop. When he reached the back, he left it long, and returned to the front. He combed the hair from the top over toward the other side, and starting at Murphy’s temple, combed out a sliver of hair just like the first one he’d cut. Then he snipped it short just the same ways he had started the hair cut in the front.

The barber paused though, not simply continuing to work back like he had with the first side. The barber instead started pinching the hair from both sides of Murphy’s head, looking at it intently as he did. I understood the barber was just trying to do a good job, and make sure the hair on both sides of Murphy’s head was the same length, but we had a schedule.

Ships had to leave on time or it was a big deal. Pilot calculated departure time based on the movements of numerous gravitational bodies. If you didn’t leave when you were scheduled to, it could mean waiting days for the next good opportunity to leave.

I sighed deeply.

The barber looked over and did seem to sense my impatience. He stopped comparing the visually identical hair lines on the sides of Murphy’s head and got on with cutting the rest of the hair from the side of her head working just a little more swiftly, as he snipped it into little points. Not that he was fast exactly, as he picked up the sprayer to redampen Murphy’s hair every third section or so.

On the back of Murphy’s head, he went back and forth a few times, till the hair met in the middle. As he did, the long locks fell behind Murphy steadily tumbling down the cape before dropping to the floor.

With all of Murphy’s hair short, the barber finally started snipping in a soft perimeter with the tips of his scissors. I nearly jumped up when the barber finally ran the trimmer down Murphy’s neck, cleaning away the wispy hairs that were below the line he’d trimmed.

“That’s really cute on you Murphy,” I assured the girl, who was looking doubtfully at her drastically changed appearance in the mirror while petting the cropped hair, as I quickly paid the barber so that we could get to the ship with enough time to go over how to get secured for the low to high gee maneuvers we would be making in just a very short time, so hopefully she’d survive her first day as a crewman with SPS. “You’ll fit right in with the crew.”

—————————————————

***************HOME****************
——————————————-
“Hey Zoe, I’m home.” I called out as I started slipping off my shoes and jacket.

I wasn’t sure exactly when Zoe’s apartment started to feel more like home than my closet at my sister’s apartement, but it had. Walking in the door with Murphy, who I’d invited to sleep on the couch.

Tigger came over and greeted us with a mildly horse meow. He was beginning to look his years, his orange fur not as smooth, his midsection getting kind of saggy. Murphy clutched her bag tightly as she looked at the cat with cautious curiosity.

“Hey Tigger,” I greeted the orange creature. Then turned to Murphy who stood behind me nervously with her bag. “You can put that down if you don’t mind the cat rubbing against it, and take off your shoes and jacket.”

“Ok. You’re sure your girlfriend doesn’t mind me coming along?” Murphy asked.

“She said it was fine, when I messaged her,” I assured Murphy.

“I’ve never seen a cat before,” Murphy admitted. “I hear they bite.”

“This is Tigger,” I told her as I picked up the middle aged cat. “He won’t bite you as long as you don’t startle him or piss him off.”

It had surprised me at first how many colonies had never imported cats. But as I traveled, it became obvious that many systems had been purely focused on just getting the animals that served to terraform planets and moons, and not much beyond that. Shrimp and ants were necessary to break down plant matter into nutrients, cats not so much. Murphy had started to nervously stroke Tigger’s back, staying away from the mouth full of pointy teeth, when Zoe came to meets us by the door.

“Maria,” Zoe said as she wrapped an arm around me. “Is this your crewman who has an interview at the university tomorrow?”

“Yes, this is Murphy,” I said, then remembered that Zoe liked knowing my crewmen’s given names when she met them, “Kathleen Murphy.”

“You can just call me Kath,” Murphy said.

I sat on the couch with Tigger and watched as Zoe played host to the crewman who’d grown into a usually confident woman. Her obvious nervousness as she Zoe told her to feel free to use the kitchen though reminded me of the young colonist who’d approach me years ago for a position on my crew.

I didn’t blame her for being nervous, not only was she staying at a stranger’s home, how her interview went would be determining her future. If it went well, she’d be leaving my crew and becoming a pre-med student in one more loop. If it went badly, she’d need to decide if she wanted to sign on for another contract with SPS when we reached Earth or find some other option. As much as I would be happy to have the girl stay on the crew, I hoped with all my heart that the studying she’d done as she’d saved up with plans to pay for her education would pay off and she’d be accepted.

“It’s been a long time since I had a towel big enough to wrap myself in,” Murphy told Zoe as Zoe handed her one for the linen closet.

“Why?” Zoe asked as she looked between me and Murphy.

“Mass limits,” I reminded her. “Same reason I can’t take any of the clothing I keep here with me.”

“Ah” Zoe let out and then went back to trying to make Murphy comfortable.

————————————————
“Thanks for putting up with Murphy sleeping on the couch,” I whispered into Zoe’s ear, which I’d tucked the long copper hair behind as we cuddled in our bed. ”She was really nervous about how likely she was going to be late taking the shuttle down in the morning, but can’t really afford a hotel. I know it puts a bit of a damper on our usual activities.”

“It’s fine honey,” Zoe assured me again, “I don’t need us to have ruckus sex every visit. I enjoy ruckus sex every visit, but I don’t need it.”

I stroked my hand over her cheek that I knew was freckled even though I couldn’t see them in the dim light and looked into her gray eyes and smiled, realizing that though I too enjoyed the sex, what I really need was just to be near Zoe, to just see Zoe and know she was ok.

“I love you,” I told her.

“I love you too,” Zoe assured me, as she snuggled up against me and a little closer and closed her eyes.

—————————————-

*****************THE SISTERS*********************

————————————–
“Cap’n” Chief engineer Taylor called out as she jogged up behind me, as I was walking towards the bridge to get ready for departure.

“Yeah?” I paused briefly to let her catch up to me.

“Those passengers, the sisters,” Taylor began to explain. “I don’t think they are sisters.”

“Give me the details.”

“They say they have different surnames because they have different mothers but the same father.” Taylor started the list. “Which sure, I have met half sibling with different names before. They don’t really look much like each other, so that’s mildly suspicious. The big thing that really makes me suspicious though is that one looks a lot richer than the other, if ya’know what I mean. One’s got perfect straight teeth, highlighted hair, a fresh manicure, designer travel clothing, everything. The other girl, her teeth are a little crooked, her hands are rough, her hair isn’t done really. And her clothing seems to just be second hand street clothing, nothing purchased to be comfortable on a ship.”

“Sounds like it might be an issue.” I sighed deeply with frustration. “One is probably a hired travel companion. Even if they are actually half sisters, it is likely that one is viewed as the illegitimate child, and is being treated like a servant.”

My thoughts went back to how much Sally had resembled the children of the family her mom had worked for. If Sally hadn’t ended up in a group home, I could imagine them using her as a travel companion servant during a trip. Of course, what I’d said to Sally when she had been a paid travel companion for Papa, held true; the person who hired her could just pay the fine and get on with their day, the travel companion who was the real victim couldn’t. Of course in Sally’s case, her being a travel companion also happened to have zero effect on the operation of the ship. Papa had been perfectly happy to work his assigned shifts, he really did just want her to provide entertainment when they didn’t have shifts. It had meant Sally was working in her free time, but not to the point that she seemed to be completely exhausted. Most of the time though, it was different.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Taylor asked

“It’s dumb that you should be responsible for this.” I told her. “I don’t know why they make scheduling passenger work shifts the responsibility of the chief engineer, you’ve got enough on your plate without worrying about passengers. Which of your junior engineers is more assertive?”

“Between Rashid and Thompson… Rashid I think. She’s also been aboard one loop longer.”

“Have Rasheed keep an eye on them, tell her to report directly to me if anything seems off.”

—————————————

Knock, knock

“Come,” I called through the door to my office.

“Sorry to bother you again Cap’n” Rashid said as she entered.

I sighed deeply, feeling really unhappy to see the young crewman, and being very aware how deeply unfair that was, since it was one hundred percent not the kid’s fault that every time she came to me it was because there was a problem I would have to go deal with. “It’s not your fault, Chief Taylor and I assigned you to keep an eye on Veronica, I want you to come to me if she is creating problems.”

“I kind of think I might be being a bit petty this time, since it’s more of a personal issue than a ship problem.”

“I’m sorry you have to share a cabin with her, but it was the only way to get her to stop using Susan’s water rations. I really don’t want Susan smelly and dehydrated.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure she managed to get a hold of my water card and used some of my water rations.” Rashid explained. “I’ve been keeping pretty close tabs on my total, since I’ve been saving up to tie-dye my coveralls, it takes a lot of water…”

“Did you say dye your coveralls?” I interrupted. “Tie-dye your official SPS issued ship coveralls?”

“I checked the employee handbook, it doesn’t say we can’t.” Rashid said a little defensively.

“Not saying you can’t isn’t the same as saying you can.” I pointed out, trying to figure out if I actually cared. It might start a trend, and I might end up with a crew that looked like a box of crayons, which would be weird but harmless. I didn’t really want dye in our water reclamation system though. “Don’t do it aboard ship, find a place to do it in system, preferably down planet. I don’t want to hear from a station master that my crew made a mess in a station bathroom. If it ruins the coveralls, you are responsible for paying to replace them. And I will consider leaking dye in the wash as ruined. Got me?”

“Yes Captain,” Rashid said, sounding mildly disappointed that I’d made her plan to make her coveralls colorful more difficult.

Rashid looked like she was about to leave, so I reminded her we hadn’t finished our original topic. “You think Veronica is using your water rations?”

“Yeah, though I guess if I’m not going to be dyeing my coveralls aboard ship, I can spare a bit.”

“I’m not going to put up with her taking advantage of you like she did with Susan. I don’t want you smelly and dehydrated, anymore than I wanted Susan smelly and dehydrated. Even if she isn’t using enough that you will end up smelling and dehydrated, you didn’t sign up to be taken advantage of, unlike Susan.” I told Rashid. “I will go talk to her, and give her one last warning before I toss her in a pod.”

“You know if you put her in a pod she’ll take it out on Susan after we leave them on Nu’tucky, and pretty much what the family wants is law on Nu’tucky. Workers rights are even more of a joke on Nu’tucky than on Earth.”

I sighed, knowing she was right, but also not really feeling like I could do much about it. There were just limits on how much I could let Veronica get away with. It wasn’t just that her wasting other people’s water was unfair, it also meant she was throwing off the rather finicky water reclamation system that was designed to deal with a typical gray water to black water ratio.

“Susan chose this,” was all I said before dismissing Rashid.

————————————————–

“I’ll sue you,” Veronica threatened as I continued marching her along towards pod preparation where Nurse Patterson was waiting.

“You’re welcome to try to arrange transport back to Earth so you can file that lawsuit,” I told her, “but it’ll cost you more than what you can recover from me in damages.”

“I hate you.”

That I just ignored since Veronica was free to feel however she felt.

“PLEASE DON’T,” I heard Susan’s voice as she ran up behind me. “If you put us back together, I’ll make sure she doesn’t cause anymore trouble.”

“Stay out of it Susan,” I warned the girl. “You can’t control her.”

“Was what she did really that bad,” Susan pleaded.

“You don’t know do you?” I paused and looked at Susan, who just shook her head. “She tried to bypass the water ration controls so she could shower without putting in a card.”

“oh” Susan let out, and suddenly looked defeated, she seemed to just get how that kind of thing was on a whole different level than any of Veronica’s previous infractions that she’d convinced me not to toss Veronica into a pod over. It wasn’t the kind of thing that just pissed me off, it could potentially damage the water system leaving the crew with nothing but emergency water rations for weeks in interstellar space. “I’ll come and stay with her till she’s safely asleep.”

I sighed, turned and kept walking.

“It’ll be ok,” Susan tried to assure Veronica in a gentle soothing voice that I felt was definitely wasted on Veronica. “I know it’s scary, but most people don’t get liver damage.”

“My hair won’t have grown out enough to get extensions bonded on if I’m in a pod.” Veronica complained to Susan as I dragged her along. I’d insisted she have her hair cut short enough that putting her in a pod was safe when we stopped at Wolf-cee, since I’d had a feeling we were going to get to this point.

“It will just take a month or two.” Susan tried to sooth her. “It won’t take that much time.”

“I have to meet his family like this,” Veronica moaned. “You have to get her to change her mind Susan.”

“I don’t think I can this time Veronica,” Susan told her instead of trying. “I’ll stay with you though.”

“God you are completely useless,” Veronica stopped bothering to try to get Susan to help since it was obvious Susan wasn’t going to try anymore. “I should have picked the other girl.”

Veronica hurled insults at Susan and I the entire way to pod preparation and storage. Once at pob preparation and storage, Nurse Patterson was added to the rotation of vitriol. Susan though just stayed calm, saying soothing things to Veronica, assuring her it would be ok. Telling her that if her fiance really loved her a little hair wouldn’t matter. She held Veronica’s hand, even after the spoiled girl was sedated, finally letting go when it was time to close the pod.

—————————————

****************QUALIFICATIONS********************
—————————————-

Knock, knock.

I looked up from the bridge duty roster, and called through my office door, “COME.”

“Hey Cap’n,” Rashid said as she came through the door. “Can I talk to you about Susan?”

“Of course,” I said, feeling mildly confused and gesturing to the spare chair for her to take a seat. “I wasn’t expecting any more issues since we put Veronica in a pod. Is Susan not showing up for her shifts or something?”

“Oh no, nothing like that, she’s been showing up like she always did.” Rashid assured me. “It’s just that we are almost at Nu’tucky, and Susan was asking about what kinds of jobs she can get on Nu’tucky. Her options are really limited if Veronica doesn’t forgive her, and I don’t think Veronica is the forgiving type. She has a very general basic education from Earth, not like how they train them for factories or mining from early childhood on Nu’tucky.”

“Yeah,” I agreed with Rashid, “I mentioned to her that Nu’tucky sucked, when I suggested she might want to get off the ship early on Wolf-Cee, but she didn’t want to abandon Veronica.”

“We can’t just leave her on Nu’tucky.” Rashid insisted.

“It’s where her ticket is for. She’s only paid to go as far as Nu’tucky.” I told Rashid. “If she’d been willing to get off early, that would have been fine, but I can’t just add extra onto her journey.”

“What if you hire her as crew?”

“She’s not qualified.” I pointed out. “She doesn’t have a high school diploma.”

“Murphy didn’t have a high school diploma either. And Franklin didn’t either.”

“Murphy came from a planet that didn’t have accredited high schools, and had equivalent work experience. She even had high scores on that test she bought, even if it was a little basic. Same with Franklin.”

“Susan’s been working since she was a teenager.”

“But she’s from Earth. Equivalent work experience doesn’t count on Earth.” I sighed, it wasn’t like I wanted to leave Susan on Nu’tucky, but I also couldn’t just completely ignore SPS’s regulations. “I know it’s not her fault that she didn’t get to finish high school, but it was there on Earth, and they expect people to finish it.”

“Yeah, but we’ll be on Nu’tucky when you hire her.” Rashid pointed out. “There aren’t any accredited high schools on Nu’tucky.”

“Even if I was hiring a person from Nu’tucky on Nu’tucky, I am expected to submit evidence of equivalent experience with the signed contract.” I argued with exasperation, wondering why I hadn’t just ended the conversation already by just reminding Rashid I was the captain and I had already made my decision. “She doesn’t have anything that I can show SPS HR to demonstrate that she has what they would count as equivalent experience.”

“What about the fact that she’s already working on this ship.”

“We don’t need someone full time to change fluid on mop bots and hand tools to engineers. Those things are useful, but I need more to justify hiring a full time crewman.”

“She’s not changing fluid on the mop bot or holding tools.” Rashid informed me.

“She’s not?” My brow wrinkled.

“Patterson started requesting her about a week after you put Veronica in a pod.” Rashid explained. “I think she’s doing something for him that an entry level crewman usually does. If she can do a regular crewman’s job…”

I sighed, realizing why I hadn’t ended the conversation and sent Rashid on her way earlier, I was hoping Rashid would say something to me give me the loop hole I desperately wanted. I didn’t want to drop Susan off on Nu’tucky anymore than anyone else did.

“I’ll go talk to Patterson, find out what she’s been doing.” I said. “No promises though.”

———————————————

“Hey Patterson,” I said to the only crewman who I felt zero need to project a certain authority with as I walked into sick bay.

“Hey Reyes,” Patterson returned my greeting, then asked, “What’s up?”

“Rashid says you’ve been requesting Susan.” I explained. “I’m kind of wondering why, and what you’ve been having her do?”

“I’ve been having her run routine checks on the pod passengers.” Patterson explained. “The why is mostly because someone has to. Susan was stopping by to check on Veronica everyday anyway, and I wasn’t exactly impressed with the crewman who had been assigned to help with checking them, so I figured I might as well try having Susan do it.”

“And she’s competent at it?” I asked. “Her lack of education isn’t an issue?”

“She’s great.” Patterson claimed. “Best I’ve had since Murphy left to start pre-med on Trappist. Obviously Murphy was a bit more interested in learning medical stuff than Susan is, but the crewman I’ve had checking pods since Murphy left didn’t care at all. Even though Susan isn’t as curious about the medical aspect, she cares about the pod passengers. Susan is just a lot more careful and attentive. I’d say the only thing that most entry level crewmen know that she didn’t was how to use the charts that are similar to the ones from high school biology class, but she caught on when I explained it. Murphy didn’t either, since the education she got wasn’t really up to Earth standards.”

“So Susan is doing a job a regular full time crewman normally would, and doing it well.”

“Yeah,” Patterson shrugged.

“Hmmm.”

“Why did you want to know?” Patterson asked.

“I’m trying to justify hiring her as a crewman so I don’t have to just abandon her on Nu’tucky. She isn’t qualified on Earth where she should have started, but the lack of accredited high schools on colonies creates a loophole for hiring from colonies, but I’d be stretching it.”

Patterson nodded, “I think she’d be fine, but I don’t know how much that will mean to SPS HR.”

“Hmmm” I nodded and sighed.

I was about to ask another question when I heard someone enter behind me. I turned and saw Susan.

“Mr Patel is sucking his thumb again,” Susan told Patterson. “Hi Captain Reyes.”

“Hi Susan.” I responded to the girl. “How’s it been going?”

“Pretty well except for Mr Patel. Veronica has been fine.”

“That’s good.”

“Susan and I need to go take care of Mr Patel,” Patterson said as he got up. “If you want to finish that discussion later, I’ll be free later this evening.”

“You know what,” I said, “why don’t I come observe.”

As we walked through the corridors towards pod storage and prep, I chatted with Susan. “So, this isn’t the first time Mr Patel has been sucking his thumb?”

“He seems to start pretty much every time his pod cycles him through more regular sleep.” She told me. “Nurse Patterson says the people in pods need to cycle to regular sleep for cell regeneration, and that they can unconsciously move a bit when it happens, and they often shift to more comfortable positions. For Mr Patel that seems to be with his thumb in his mouth.”

We continued chatting as we walked, Susan talking about the sleeping passengers like people, not cargo the way most crewmen did. When we got to pod storage and prep, I watched Susan operate the arm, lowering Mr Patel’s pod, and anticipating what Patterson would need. Then they put Mr Patel back in his place.

It was obvious Susan really was a perfectly competent crewman, now I just had to hope I could talk the guy in HR into agreeing with me.

——————————————————

********************CONFERENCE ROOM 12*******************

——————————————————
“Seriously Reyes,” He growled at me.

It was the first time I’d ever seen HR guy not calm.

“I wasn’t going to leave her on Nu’tucky,” I told him. “Hiring her was the only way to keep her aboard. And it’s not like she’s a bad crewman. She works hard.”

“She doesn’t have a highschool diploma!”

“That’s only a requirement for employment on Earth, out in the colonies equivalent experience can be substituted for diplomas.”

“That is meant to allow for hiring employees who made it all the way through school but just not from an Earth accredited school, not for people who dropped out of highschool on Earth, then traveled to the colonies.” HR guy, looked at his screen and sighed. “You know she applied to work for SPS here on Earth and was rejected, how the hell am I supposed to deal with that.”

“I know it was a bit of a stretch of the loop hole, but I really had to.” I admitted. “I’m sure you can do something.”

“I could fire both her and you,” HR guy threatened but didn’t sound serious. “And I’m betting I could have her fined for traveling fraudulently.”

“I never found any clear evidence that she was commiting fraud.” I told him since even though it was true, it was hard to prove.

“I’m going to assume that is mostly because you didn’t look very hard.” HR guy grumbled.

“You know as well as I do that the people who are the real problem just pay the fine without it meaning anything to them, and that the people who are just caught up in the system can’t afford those fines and end up spending years in detention. You were EES too.”

HR guy gave me a dirty look.

“I couldn’t leave her on Nu’tucky without a job. I’m the reason the woman she was traveling with and going to work for arrived on Nu’tucky in a pod.” I levelled with him. “And it’s not her fault she dropped out of highschool.”

“How is it not her fault she dropped out of highschool? Highschool is free.”

“Highschool is free if you have a license to attend the local school. Susan grew up in a group home, they make them drop out as soon as they reach the legal age, sixteen, then they have to start working to pay back the debt for the care they received as children in the group home. They have to work paying it back till they are twenty-one.” I waited as HR guy glared at me, then added. “She’s working her way through courses in the ship’s library.”

“Fine,” HR guy sighed and turned back to his screen. “I will approve the contract, it’s not like I’m going to be around for anyone to ask me about it, but if she wants to renew after that, she has to deal with my replacement.”

“Your replacement?” I felt my eyebrows draw together.

“Yeah, I’m retiring. Talking about which, since you happen to be on Earth, please come to my retirement party this afternoon in conference room 12. It’s at the end of the day.”

When I got to the party, I was amused the cake said “Good Luck Mike” instead of “Good Luck HR Guy.” Then again, it seemed like almost half the people at the party worked in HR, so that might have been a tad confusing.

——————————————————-

~~~~~~~~~~Part 7~~~~~~~~~~~~

————————————————-

*************************HOURS*******************
————————————————–

It was taking me longer to get off the ship than I was happy about. Most stops I didn’t care that much if getting everything squared away and settled took an hour or two after we docked, instead of the more typical half hour, but on Trappist every minute I had was precious, and this stop, we only had fifty-seven hours. It taking longer than usual had me on edge. Negotiating with the station crew to make sure a particular passenger pod got priority and that Susan could accompany the pod to the surface so she could be with the passenger when she woke up was much more of a hassle than I felt it should have been. I’d finally settled everything and was heading from the bridge to my office, so I could officially log off and grab a couple of things.

Approaching my office though, I spotted Nyugen and Horowitz obviously waiting for me by the door to my office. I took a deep sigh. They could have come to me before we arrived at Trappist.

“Please tell me this is fast,” I said impatiently.

“Sorry Captain,” Nyugen said. “Is it possible to put in a request to get off in ten stop or so even if we haven’t decided where we want to get off yet?”

I sighed again as I walked into my office with them following.

“We just were hoping to get the request in before we leave Trappist so that we keep our options open. We kind of just realized that if we don’t do it now, we might have to commit to a full extra loop after this one.” Horowitz continued as I shoved both my SPS tablet for official business and my personal tablet into my briefcase. “Some of the places we are considering are just a couple of stops into the next loop. We thought that as we finish up this loop and start the next, we can look into housing and job options as we go to help us decide where we want to get off.”

“Can you talk while we walk?” I asked them. “I don’t want to miss the next shuttle down.”

“Will it change that we are officially requesting to get off in ten or so stops?”

“I have my tablet, so I can put in the request from down planet.” I assured them as I led the way out of my office and towards the main hatch. “Why do you want to get off? I thought you guys were career.”

“Well, you know when my contract came up, I requested to just extend my current one instead of starting another, and Horowitz’es contract is up in two months.” Nyugen explained. “I’d love to keep piloting and Horowitz would be happy to stay on as an engineer, but there’s just something we want more. We want to start a family, but SPS doesn’t make it possible really. I mean sure I could take a brief pregnancy leave, but.. I don’t only want to see my kids for a day or two once every eight months. Horowitz either. So we thought we’d look for a colony to settle on. Being a shuttle pilot isn’t as exciting, but I get to go home at the end of the day.”

“I understand,” I told them, as I felt the urgency to get to the shuttle dock where I had asked Zoe to meet me. “I have to put in a destination. I can make that ten stops from now, and you can cancel it before the next stop, and I can put in a new request. I can’t do that at every stop though I can’t just leave it open ended for a whole’nother loop.”

We paused the conversation briefly as we each waved our watches at the sensor as we stepped through the hatch out into the station corridor.

“We’re having a little trouble deciding where we want to go.” Horowitz explained, “Most of the places just kind of seem like a waste of our skills. We kind of love what we do, but it’s not like any of the colonies are that exciting compared to interstellar space, so it’s hard to settle.”

I sighed again, because that was also something I understood. There’d been lots of times I had felt torn when it was time to leave Zoe. I’d almost not renewed my last contract, but as much as I loved Zoe, I just had a feeling I would become a bored and bitter person stuck on Trappist. Maybe I should retire though, Zoe aging faster than me at first had just meant she’d caught up to me, but soon it was going to mean I was going to watch her decline while I stayed relatively young.

“Job wise Earth would make sense,” Nyugen added. “With the ship yards there, I could test pilot and Horowitz could try to get into design, but I don’t want to raise kids on Earth. The only worse place I can think of to raise kids is N’tucky.”

“Mars isn’t great either, it’s only a little less industrial than Earth, and I’d rather not raise our kids on a low-gee planet.”

I paused, and looked at them for a second as a thought struck me. “Would you consider Toi?” I asked. Then I remembered I was in a rush and I kept walking.

“I’ve never been there.” Nyugen stated, then looked at Horowitz, who shrugged and shook his head.

“I have.” I explained, as I turned down the corridor towards the shuttle dock. “I have a friend raising a kid there; well really mostly raised at this point, he’s almost an adult. She’s been happy there. More to the point, there’s a shipyard there, only one outside the Earth/Sol system, if you don’t count the places where they reassemble shuttles shipped in pieces from earth. So far, they’ve only been making small ships, and contracting to do repairs on SPS ships, but they are hoping to start making larger interstellar passenger ships within the next few years. They started with interstellar yachts and tugships that can take shuttle through wormholes without disassembling them.”

“And they’re hiring?” Horowitz asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “If you guys put together resumes, I will send them to the owner of the shipyard, with my personal recommendation.”

“We’ll need to research it.” Nyugen stated.

“Of course.”

“And see if we can afford to pay passenger fare there.” Horowitz added.

“I wouldn’t recommend you guys if I didn’t think you were smart enough to check stuff like that first.” I said as the shuttle dock came into view, and I started scanning the crowd around it. “I think you’ll find it doable though. Just be a bit more frugal for the next loop, and you can get tickets to Toi from here on Trappist, not Earth. Trappist is a stop on the way from Earth to Toi, and since many passengers get off here on Trappist, there’s almost always room. The tickets shouldn’t be too expensive.”

“Ok, we’ll consider it.” Nyugen said with a tone of relief, just as I spotted a woman with a long red ponytail hanging down her back.

“If you can let me know before we leave Trappist, it would be good.” I said as I started walking towards the redhead I hoped was Zoe. “Sorry to rush you, but we’ll be back here in just twelve stops, since this is such a short loop. Plus, I will be sending a message from here to Toi anyway, so it would be nice to include your resumes. I’ll put in the request before we leave either way, but I would rather not have to change it once it’s in.”

“We’ll get right on it Cap’n,” Horowitz assured me, close enough to the redhead that she heard and turned to face us. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” I said as Nyugen and Horowitz stopped following.

I walked just a few steps further, and I opened my arms to embrace Zoe who was grinning ear to ear. She felt so good as she leaned in and returned the embrace, warm and soft and just so alive.

“Hey babe,” I said softly into her ear, using a completely different voice than the one I had while talking to my crewmen.

“I was worried you would miss the shuttle and we’d be stuck up here for an extra two hours.” Zoe said as she pulled out of the embrace, took my hand, and started leading me to the hatch into the shuttle. “I can’t wait till they complete the elevator next year. The elevator cars will leave every half hour plus be faster.”

“That should make your commute easier.” I said as I waved my watch at the pad Zoe had just waved her watch at.

—————————————————–

I didn’t usually bother to get a haircut on Trappist, since my time with Zoe was so limited and valuable, but Zoe was just on too different a schedule from me this time for us to be able to sleep at the same time. She was exhausted from a long shift at the bar, and I was restless and unable to sleep. I spent some time just sitting and watching her lay peacefully with the tiny new kitten she’d gotten since Tigger, the old orange tom she’d had when I had last left Trappist had passed away, but as sweet looking as my girlfriend and the tiny ball of multicolored fluff were, I needed to do something.

I left a note for Zoe, saying that if she woke up before I got back, she should message me, and headed out. As I wandered the familiar streets around Zoe’s apartment, I passed a barbershop and figured I could do with a trim.

“Oh hey Cap’n.” Nyugen unexpectedly greeted me as I walked in and looked around to see if it was busy.

“Hi Nyugen, Horowitz,” I said to the couple. “Have you gotten much research done?”

“Yeah,” Horowitz said, “and we’ve come to a decision. We read up on Toi, and it seems like a good option. Toi sounds kind of amazing, supposedly it was terrible twenty years ago, mostly exporting silk, but things have changed since the shipyard opened. They’ve been building all kinds of schools and stuff. Plus if you work in the shipyard, you can earn shares in the company, not just wages. We went to the SPS office and priced tickets. The money will be a little tighter than if we settled somewhere along this route, but we can swing it, especially if we’re frugal on this last loop. We were going to message you after we were done here.”

“Excellent.” I smiled at the couple as we waited our turns. “I’ll put in the departure request as soon as I get back to Zoe’s apartment, and I will include your information when I message my friend with the shipyard. Just try to send those resumes and cover letters to me before I need to take the shuttle back up to the station.”

“We can do that as soon as we finish here.” Nyugen said.

“Yes, as soon as we’re done here,” Horowitz agreed with a slightly grumpy tone.

I was at a lose as to why Horwitz sounded grumpy about being at the barbershop. Horowitz and Nyugen stopped at barbershops in every system as far as I could tell. I think they even sometimes got trims on Earth. Horowitz kept his hair right at crew standard maximum allowed length, so was always over it by the next stop. Nyugen kept her electric blue hair much shorter in a low fade, but her bangs were on the longside, slightly over crew standard really. On the rare occasions they hung straight down because she had a sweaty forehead or was fresh from the shower, they reached slightly below her eyebrows. I let it slide, because she kept them brushed to the side, and like that they stayed more than a centimeter above her eye brows. It didn’t really seem like a safety issue, because they weren’t in her eyes, and I knew she’d be getting the bangs trimmed again soon.

“After we looked over our budgets, I talked Horowitz into agreeing that having to get a haircut every stop was an expense we should give up.” Nyugen confided. “He’s not looking forward to giving up his lovely long locks.”

“hmm” Horowitz grumbled at the gentle ribbing, then claimed. “I just like my ears and neck warm. Keeping your hair blue all these years has cost more than getting mine trimmed.”

“And I have agreed to just let it grow out black after this.” Nyugen pointed out. “We both agreed to get one millimeter buzzes and then just let our hair grow out till it reaches maximum and then buzz again. We figure that way we can get it done once here then one more time on Wolf-Cee, and save eight or nine haircuts each. Honestly, the idea of the growout bothers me more than losing this blue, I hate the feeling of having hair touch my ears, I’m just constantly wondering what just touched my ears and thinking it’s a bug or something like that. Drove my mother nuts when I was little, because she always wanted me to grow it out so she could give me pretty braids and tie ribbons in it, but as soon as I could manage to get my hands on a pair of scissors unsupervised…”

Nyugen mimed snipping away the imaginary hair around her ears.

“Just remember you can’t do that aboard ship without clogging the air filters and recycler,” I chuckled.

“Yeah, I know. SPS is cheap.” Nyugen complained. “Why would they spend the money to upgrade them to station quality filters and recyclers, just to make crews safer and more comfortable.”

I just nodded, knowing it was true, but feeling a little weird about agreeing that SPS sucked sometimes since I was the captain.

“HOROWITZ?” the barber called out.

“That’s me,” Horowitz admitted a little hesitantly and made his way over the the barber chair.

“What’ll it be?” The barber swung the cape over Horowitz.

“One millimeter all over,” Horiwitz requested through gritted teeth, as he bent his head forward to make it easier for the barber to fasten the cape around his neck.

“Okie-dokie,” the barber agreed, and picked the clippers up from the charging pad.

The barber wasted no time, and simply inserted the comb below Horowitz’s bangs, and used the comb to scoop up the hair that had been covering Horowitz’s forehead, he lifted the hair revealing the hairline and widow’s peak that had been hiding.

The barber turned on the clippers, and placed them on Horowitz’s forehead just in front of the widow’s peak, and pulled back slowly. As the barber pulled the comb backwards, the suddenly loose hair in the teeth of the comb went with it. As the clippers followed the comb back over the top of Horowitz’s head, it left a nearly bare strip, revealing Horowitz’s pale scalp. When the comb and clippers reached the back of Horowitz’s head, the barber pulled them away, leaving Horowitz looking like he had an extra wide part as the barber shook the hair from the teeth of the comb to the floor.

Horowitz just stared at his reflection stone faced while the barber brought the comb and clippers back to his forehead, to repeat the process. The barber repeatedly pulled the clippers back over the top of Horowitz’s head, catching the hair in his comb, before shaking it out down to the floor.

Once the entire dome of Horowitz’s head was bared, the barber asked, “neckline preference?”

“I’ve never had a neckline before.” Horowitz admitted, wrinkling the forehead I’d never seen before. “Honey, what neckline should I get?”

“Uhhhhh….Ooooh! Can you do the skyline of New Toronto?” Nyugen suggested as she vaguely gestured at the window to the city that surrounded us.

“What?!” Horowitz turned and looked at his wife with annoyance.

“Design work would cost extra,” The barber just calmly stated.

“Eh, just square it off.”

While the barber started shaving the clean line around the edges of Horrowitz’s scalp, the other barber called out “NYUGEN?”

“My turn,” Nyugen said as she got up much less reluctantly than Horowitz had, walked over to the free chair, and sat down. “All off. One millimeter and fade the bottom. I usually get a low fade, but since I’m going shorter, let’s make it a high fade.”

“Sounds good,” the second barber said as she swung a cape over Nguyen, and fastened it.

Nguyen’s barber used pretty much the same technique starting her haircut, she combed the blue hair up off Nguyen’s forehead, then placed the humming clippers right in front of Nguyen’s hairline. As Nguyen watched the first strip of her blue hair being shaved off, instead of looking unhappy like her husband had, she mostly looked curious.

Horowitz looked a bit light headed when he came back to the waiting area and took the seat next to me, to wait for his wife. As the barber who had cut Horwitz’ hair dusted clipping from his chair down to the floor for the sweeper-bots to deal with, Nyugen’s barber started using the trimmer typically just for shaving a clean hair line to shave the back and sides of Nyugen’s head up and over her ears.

“Reyes?” Horowitz’ barber called me over to his clean barber chair.

I went over, climbed into the familiar seat, and said, “Number three on top, two on the sides, round neckline,” just as I had every few stops for years.

As my barber began to put a cape on me, Nyugen’s barber switched from using the trimmer to using a foil shaver to take the back of her head from her neck to about three centimeters above her ears all the way down to smooth skin.

I sat patiently, as my barber began the familiar task of running vibrating clippers over my scalp.

“I think it’s going to take a little getting used to.” Nyugen said to Horowitz as she got up and started rubbing her extremely bare head, her hand feeling the border between bare scalp and stubble, while looking at his not quite so bare head.

“Uhhu,” Horowitz agreed, still looking a bit shocked. “You have such a pretty face you don’t really need hair.”

“Thanks,” Nyugen smiled.

“My ears are really cold,” Horowitz said.

“You’ll get used to it,” Nyugen promised her husband as she looped her arm through his.

———————————————-
When I got back to Zoe’s apartment, I found the tiny kitten was in the main room. I’d picked up a brand new katnip mouse while on my walk, when I presented it to the kitten she immediately started playing with it enthusiastically.

I watched the kitten for a few minutes, then headed to the bedroom to check on Zoe. She was still asleep. I sat and watched, thinking a bit about how Horowitz and Nyugen were rearranging their lives to have kids. I hadn’t really thought about having kids in years, so I’d never thought to ask Zoe if she wanted them. I’d never thought to ask her if she wanted to be a mom.

Being a parent meant either never getting to leave the system you were in, or having to leave your kids behind. SPS wouldn’t take growing children as passengers. The requirements for pods was not chronological, but that all growth plates must be fused, so some older teenagers were eligible to go, other couldn’t till they were in their twenties. For crew and working passengers, eighteen was a hard cut off, on top of the fused growth plate requirement.

It was one of the reasons they’d made an exception for Sally to travel while pregnant, nervous as SPS was about that, they knew that it wasn’t like Sally could just have the baby first on Trappist then continue to Toi, if she had the baby on trappist, she was stuck on Trappist for decades if she didn’t want to give him up. They feared that would involve not only refunds, but most likely significant compensation.

As career SPS I had just put the possibility out of my mind. Like Horowitz and Nyugen, I didn’t want to have kids I barely ever saw. And even worse, watching as they grew up at what felt like an accelerated pace, my sister was only 2 years older than me, but she looked more like 20 years older, my nephews and grand nieces had grown up at breakneck speed. Watching Sally and Jason had felt too fast too. It wasn’t like I hadn’t aged at all, my hair had gone from a warm black to heavily speckled with white, but I was obviously aging more slowly.

And of course when Melissa had died, for ages I just didn’t think I would ever find a person I really wanted to spend my life with anyway. I sat down on the bed next to Zoe and gently stroked her hair, and realized the months I spent away from her felt like I was just killing time till I could get back to her.

Zoe stirred and blinked up at me with sleepy eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay awake. I know you only have a couple of days here.”

“It’s fine babe,” I assured her as I continued stroking her soft hair. “I’m sorry I couldn’t just sleep with you, but I did get a few errands done and took a walk.”

“That’s nice,” Zoe offhandedly remarked as she sat up and yawned.

“Have you ever thought about being a mom?” I sprang on Zoe.

“Huh?”

“Sorry, nevermind.” I got up to walk away, embarrassed that I had chosen such an awkward time to bring it up.

“It’s ok,” Zoe took my hand and held me there. “I just didn’t expect the question, but it’s a reasonable thing to discuss.”

“Sorry, I should have let you wake up more first.” I sat back down. “It is just kind of on my mind.”

“Why is it on your mind?”

“A couple of my crewmen are leaving to go settle down and start a family.” I sighed. “I guess I just worry that I have prevented you from starting one.”

“You don’t remind me every single time you leave that you will understand if I settle down with someone else, but you’ve made it very clear you don’t want to hold me back.” Zoe reminded me. “If I had ever gotten to the point where I just really want to be a mom, I know you would have been ok with me being a single mom. You haven’t held me back.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.” Zoe wrapped her arms around me.
————————————-

*********************DESK*******************

———————————————–

“So you’re the new HR guy?” I said as I sat down at the same desk I had been going to for my entire career at SPS.

In many ways it was the exact same desk, go to the fifth floor, turn right, cross two corridors, turn right at the third, then it was the seventh cubicle on the left. It had the same type of tablet on it, and the same gray dividers surrounding it. There were even some rather familiar charts printed out and hung behind the desk. In other ways it was quite different. Gone were the pictures of Mike the HR Guy’s family and pets, gone was the Jade plant that had started in a tiny ten centimeter pot when I had interviewed as a recent high school grad, that had been in a pot more like fifty centimeters the last time I saw it. Of course the biggest change though was the kid sitting behind the desk glaring at me.

“You don’t have to rub it in,” the kid scowled at me.

“Rub what in?” I asked with confusion as I pulled out my tablet.

“Being stuck here in HR.” The kid grumbled. “Are you Captain Reyes?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed as I pulled up the ship’s roster so we could start going over options to fill open positions on the Jasmine. “I made an appointment to discuss crew assignments.”

“So you’re here about the new senior engineer I’m assigning to your ship.” He tapped on his tablet.

“I don’t want a new senior engineer, I want a junior engineer.” I told him.

“The computer says you need a senior engineer because one of your senior engineers is getting off on Trappist when you get there.” He just repeated what I already knew.

“If the computers got final say, we wouldn’t need an HR department.” I pointed out, trying to be patient. “I want to promote Thompson to senior engineer, and Rasheed from junior engineer to engineer. So I need a junior engineer, not a senior engineer.”

“The computer has no problem with promoting Rasheed from junior engineer to engineer, but it says Thompson isn’t ready.” The kid read from the screen. “It says Thompson is supposed to have seven more months before being eligible to be a senior engineer.”

“Trappist is six months’ travel from here.” I said slowly. “Horowitz isn’t getting off till Trappist.”

“So?”

“So Thompson will be only one month short of being eligible for promotion,” I told the kid who stared at me blankly. “She’s a very capable engineer, she’s ready, the one month is just a technicality.”

“Yeah, so?”

“She’s going to be annoyed and frustrated that she will have to wait multiple loops for a senior engineering position to open up because she missed her opportunity to get promoted by one month.”

“Why do you want me to care?”

I looked at the sour kid for several seconds and sighed. “Beyond because you hopefully are a decent person who cares about other people’s feelings; when good crewmen are annoyed and frustrated by dumb shit, they don’t renew their contacts. SPS has low crew retention as it is for reasons you and I can’t control, when we can control one, we should.”

“What exactly do you expect me to do about it? The computer makes the assignments and decides when people get promoted.”

“Override the computer, give me a junior engineer, and waive the experience requirement for Thompson’s promotion.”

“The computer decides.”

“If the computer didn’t need to be overridden sometimes, SPS wouldn’t need an HR department.”

“The HR department is just a dumping ground.” The kid just complained instead of doing what I asked. “Nobody waved any requirements for me,”

I sighed again and put away my tablet. I may have been trained as an engineer, but I’d been supervising people long enough to know when a problem wasn’t about the actual problem.

“Why are you so angry?”

“I’m not angry.”

“Ok, frustrated?”

“Wouldn’t you have been frustrated if you studied math and physics for four years, signed a contract to become a pilot, and instead got stuck behind a desk?”

“You can’t go into space?”

“I’m allergic to the drugs for pods. Just like half the people who are stuck here working for SPS on Earth.” He told me. “When they find out you can’t go into space, they don’t even give you the option to leave SPS, the only option is to finish out your contract on Earth.”

“That does sound frustrating,” I nodded agreement. “It’s hard when your plans get ruined by something you can’t control.”

“What would you know about it, you get to go out there, get to see places other than this dirty rock.”

“I’ve had to change my plans a few times.” I told him. “As much as I will admit I love going out there, it hasn’t meant I’ve had a perfect life.”

“You got to leave Earth.” He pointed out.

“Yeah,” I nodded, knowing I had been lucky in a lot of ways. “What was your plan?”

I watched the muscle in his clenched jaw move as some thing cracked. “I figured I could do two or three contracts as a pilot with SPS. See some of the colonies. After a couple of contracts with SPS, I hear it’s easy to get hired as an insystem shuttle pilot on one of the colonies, so I figured by then I’d have seen enough that I would be ready to settle down on a colony, maybe start a family.”

I sighed. I’d started the conversation for the kid, but what he said reminded me of Melissa’s plans. I pushed it down though and didn’t bring it up, I didn’t want to distract the kid, and I didn’t want to rehash it anyway.

“That sounds like it would have been nice.” I said. “Since that didn’t work out, what is your new plan?”

“New plan?” The kid sounded lost.

“You’ve got options. Mike, the guy who retired a few years ago, he was here at SPS HR for the same reason. He made a career of it, but mostly he was a dad. He put effort into what he did here, and had work friends, but then he went home and spent time with his family. But that’s just one option, if that’s not what you want there are other options. What do you want?”

“I wanted to be a pilot.”

“But you can’t…”

“It’s dumb, so what if I can’t go in a pod does it really matter?” He complained. “Like really, how often do crewmen actually need to go into pods? You’ve worked for SPS for decades, have you ever had to go into a pod?”

“Not yet,” I admitted with a sigh. “It happens often enough though, just on this last loop, I had a working passenger who had to be put in a pod for medical reasons. I’ve seen plenty of passengers and crew put in pods for a wide variety of reasons. More relevant, I was on a ship, the Galileo…”

“Wait, you were on the Galileo when it was found?” The kid’s eyes grew wide. “I heard about it in school.”

I sighed, suddenly feeling a bit older, then continued. “Then you know nearly the entire crew went into pods including the pilot who normally wouldn’t have except the life support was just barely enough to keep two alive and couldn’t handle a third. Imagine how much harder the captain’s decision about who to put in a pod and who to keep awake would have been if one of the crewmen was allergic to the drugs. Would you want to put a captain into a position where they have to choose doing what is right for everyone even if it means nearly certain death for a particular crewman?”

“I guess not.” The kid deflated a bit. “I just don’t know what I want to do now though. I’ve been working towards being a pilot for years.”

“Why did you want to be a pilot?”

“I just like going fast.”

I nodded, amused at how often I’d heard that from pilots. Half of them seemed to live just for those few minutes of high gee maneuvers. I remembered that was one of the reasons Melissa wanted to settle on a planet where we could live by a lake, so she could get a boat she could go fast in. Of course, affording a house on a lake was a lot harder here on Earth where the kid was stuck.

“Do you think you can find a different way to go fast?” I asked him. “Maybe this is just your job, and you can have a hobby that lets you go fast? Or maybe just do this till your contract is up, and start looking for something you can do then? Sometimes we just do something we don’t want to for a little bit to get to where we really want to be.”

“You’re just being a Captain till you can do what you really want?” he pointed out with sarcasm.

“No,” I admitted with a chuckle. “I did spend four years as an EES officer though so I could go to school.”

“So you think that now that just because you listened to me, and we’ve got one or two things in common, everything’s all better and I know what I’m doing with my life.”

“No, of course not.” I chuckled again. “For that I’d recommend signing yourself up to see the company shrink. But maybe you’ve gotten enough off your chest that you won’t take your completely legitimate unhappiness out on my engineers who don’t have anything to do with why your unhappy.”

“Fine, I’ll override the computer and get you a junior engineer.” The kid agreed as he started tapping his screen. “While you’re here, want to sign a new contract? Looks like your current one will be up in just a couple of loops. If you sign it now, you won’t have to stop in next time you’re on Earth.”

“Uhhh,” I hesitated, I never had before, and I wasn’t sure why I was this time. Maybe it was something about the way his plans had reminded me of the plans Melissa had. When I was with Melissa, I had accepted the plans, accepted that I would just do a couple of more contracts with SPS, and then become an engineer on a colony where Melissa would be a shuttle pilot. They’d never been my plans though, so when Melissa had died, the idea I would ever leave SPS had died with her. Yet I suddenly didn’t want to just sign a new contract. “It’s a bit premature. I don’t mind stopping by next time I’m on Earth.”
———————————————–

*************************BASKET**************************

———————————————-

The message Zoe sent me once we were within communication distance of Trappist surprised me. **Don’t go to bar, just come down planet to the apartment. I’m on parental leave for the next two weeks. Just take the elevator down.**

Had the discussion we’d had last time I was on Trappist convinced Zoe she should go ahead and become a single mom? Was she ready to pretty much move on with her life without me. Should I finally transfer to a new route and stop keeping Zoe in relationship limbo. All these thoughts repeated in my head as I took the brand new elevator down to the surface of Trappist. And walked to Zoe’s apartment.

I almost said “I’m home” as was my habit but I hesitated, I was about to just call out Zoe’s name, but then it occurred to me that maybe I would wake up a baby. I just stood there unsure how to handle the situation, when Zoe, who didn’t look like she was a brand new mom came by.

“Maria!” Zoe startled. “why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought it might wake the baby.”

“Baby? Do you mean the kittens?”

“You said you were on parental leave?”

“Yeah because I figured Freya needed me.”

“So no baby?” I questioned cautiously.

“You thought I went and had a baby and didn’t discuss it ahead of time, or even tell you?” Zoe looked at me like I was insane, as I felt myself begin to flush.

“I uhm…”

“Come see the kittens,” Zoe graciously let me get away without answering and simply took my hand and began to lead me into her bedroom.

In a basket next to Zoe’s bed, four tiny kittens nursed from Freya’s belly as she lick the nearest one vigorously.

“Aren’t they amazing,” Zoe said to me. “Freya’s being such a good mother to them, honestly I think she’d be fine without me, but I didn’t want to just leave her alone incase she needed me. Besides, I only get to enjoy them for a little while. When they are old enough, they will go off to the next four people on the waiting list.”

“They are amazing,” I assured Zoe as I wrapped my arm around my proud girlfriend and looked down at the little family.

It was another contrast between the world I’d come from and the one Zoe had. The idea that there’d be a waiting list for kittens was absurd on Earth. Earth was covered in stray cats. Many considered them pests.

——————————————————–

******************Message********************
——————————————————-

Zoe and I sat together on the couch , her head on my lap, her eyes closed. Having finished watching the usual message from my sister, which Zoe had dozed off about halfway through, I pulled up the latest message from Sally.

**Hey Sunshine** Sally began as she always did. **Jason come say “hi” to Aunt Sunshine.**

Jason briefly walked into frame, said **Hi Aunt Sunshine** with a vague wave then excused himself **Sorry to run, but I have a tennis match at school.** Then he bent down to give his mother a quick kiss on her cheek.

**Can you believe how much he’s grown?** Sally asked as she watched him walk away, then shook her head with a chuckle, knowing she wouldn’t get a responce from me for weeks.

Then Sally started talking. She told me all bout how Jason was doing in school, and how she was torn about whether she wanted to encourage him to enroll in the university on Trappist or just teach him about running the business herself. She told me about how the shipyard was doing. Updated me on how Horowitz and Nyugen were doing.

**The passenger ship designs are really coming along. Take a look,** Sally said as she popped up the schematic on the screen. **As I mentioned last time, the hull and technical spaces are well into construction, but really that’s not my expertise. I’ve been concentrating on the interior and business side of things, I do know a bit about the hospitality business, afterall, I ran my own little hospitality business before I left for Toi.

**I really want these ships to offer journeys people actually look forward to taking. I did some research and looked back at a period on Earth when people used to travel by big boats called ocean liners because it took weeks to cross the ocean, and took inspiration from those.** Sally pulled up a few ancient photos and illustrations, then switched back to her plans. **As you can see, as well as the basic necessities, like cabins and a dining hall, I’m including areas for leisure. Here’s a bar, a lounge, a gym for exercise, a children’s play area.

**There will be pods for passengers who either need or just prefer to be sedated for the trip, but it’s going to have a focus on privacy, I remember going into the pod after the accident and everyone just being exposed.

“A fairly high percent of the cabins will be set up to be comfortable for families. Both for crew and passengers….**

I listened as Sally shared details and held Zoe. The idea of not having to choose between family and interstellar space… Then we got to the end of the message.

**Remember, if you ever want to pursue a slightly different career path just let me know. Give the family my love. Bye.**

——————————————————

Somehow the basket full of kittens made it even harder to say goodbye when it was time to take the Jasmine to her next stop. Zoe might be waiting patiently when I would return to Trappist, but the kittens would be gone.

It didn’t help that since Zoe didn’t want to leave Freya and the kittens, that I just sat alone on the elevator, already missing Zoe even though I’d only just left the surface. I looked out the window watching New Toronto shrink away below me, fading into the surrounding countryside, then disappearing under the cloud cover as we climbed up then out of the atmosphere.

I still had time to message Sally, I could send it from up on the station before we left. I’d just make it a simple written one, not get involved in recording video.

~~Will there be an opening on the new passenger ship for an experienced bartender?~~

——————————————————-

******************Closet*********************

————————————–
“Are you sure you can handle things without what I usually send you for a while?” I asked Andrea again as I looked around the stripped bare space that had served as my home on Earth for decades.

Most of the stuff in the tiny room, that was really a walk-in closet with a cot and bureau, I had simply given to Andrea or my nephews and grand-neices. I’d packed just a few very small sentimental items to take with me.

“We’ll be fine,” Andrea assured me. “You can do what’s right for you and Zoe, heck maybe this way I can actually meet her someday in ten or fifteen years.”

I took a deep breath, and opened my arms to hug my sister. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss seeing you too,” she returned the embrace, “but we can still keep in touch. Don’t forget to send pictures.”
—————————————

****************CONTRACTS*********************

—————————————————–

I heard the gentle knock on the door to my office.

“COME,” I called out assuming it was Susan.

“You wanted to see me cap’n,” the girl asked as she stepped in.

“Yes Susan,” I said, gesturing for her to take a seat. “Your contract with SPS is up in just a few weeks. Have you got any plans for after? Something you always dreamed of doing that this gives you the opportunity to do?”

“Not really.” Susan shrugged. “I kind of have just been figuring I would sign another contract if they will have me. Why do you ask? Am I not going to be offered another contract?”

“SPS would be making a terrible mistake if they didn’t try to keep you,” I told the girl, even though I wasn’t completely sure they would considering the flack I’d gotten from the HR guy for how I had used a loophole to hire the girl. “But I ask because I have something else I would like to offer you. My own contract is up, and I have decided not to renew. I’m getting off when we reach Trappist.

“An old friend of mine built a shipyard at the far end of the settled galaxy out in the Toi system.” I continued telling Susan. “She has offered me a ship. It’s going to be the first time SPS has had any competition.

“The ship is smaller, and lighter. It doesn’t have to get as far out of a system before it can generate and slip through a wormhole. This should make interstellar travel faster and safer. These smaller ships can’t compete with SPS for cargo carrying capacity, but it makes it vastly more practical for moving passengers.”

“So you’re going to become the captain of a passenger ship?” Susan asked.

“That’s the plan. You’re good with people Susan.” I pointed out. “Passengers are people. Would you like to come? I can’t offer you the stability and guarantees SPS can, they’ve been in business for a few hundred years, but if you want to take a risk, it might just pay off.”

————————————————————-

I have to admit, that as I stood at the airlock of Trappist station, holding my small bag of personal possessions, ready to perform my very last act as captain of the Jasmine, I had a moment of doubt. I could go to the Trappist SPS office and sign a new contract, I could stay on for another few decades. I looked over at Susan, and thought about the possibilty of a better future.

I swallowed down any doubt and trepidation.

“Take good care of her,” I said as I shook the hand of the Jasmine’s new captain. “She’s got a good crew. Sorry I’m taking one of her best with me.”

Then I handed over the old fashioned thumbdrive full of codes. It was a purely symbolic act, the thumbdrive didn’t make the ship go or anything, but it had stuck as a tradition because human nature demanded a moment of delineation. I was no longer the Captain.

I stepped through the hatch with Susan following close behind.

———————————————

****************RING******************
———————————————

I had tried to not completely blindside Zoe. I had mentioned my contract was ending, and that I was interested in moving to Tio in messages. I told her I wanted her to always be in my life. The nature of how we had to send messages back and forth taking weeks to respond to each other though, had meant that we hadn’t really been able to discuss it before I pulled out the gold ring that I’d nervously chosen on Wolf-Cee.

“I don’t want to only see you when I happen to be on Trappist anymore.” I told her. “And it’s going to be a lot longer before I’m going to be able to come to Trappist again. The passenger ships Sally is building are going to be interstellar, but the plan is to start slow, take them for a cruise around the Tio system first, then just back and forth to a couple of the nearest systems. I don’t expect us to be ready to take her from Toi to Trappist for at least five years, more if she needs to spend time in the yard. I don’t want to be gone for years, I want to see you everyday. I want you to come with me to Tio. You can work on the ship with me, it’s safer, not like an SPS freighter.”

“If I go, I won’t see my family and friends here for at least five years?” Zoe’s voice quivered as she spoke the question. “But if I don’t go, I won’t see you again for at least five years?”

“I know it’s a hard choice. You can take a few days to think about it. We can talk about more of the details before we make any decisions…”

“I don’t need time.” Zoe told me. “Leaving will be hard, waiting would be impossible.”

The retirement party the Jasmine’s crew threw for me and Susan before the ship departed, became a combination retirement and engagement party. It took us a couple of weeks to arrange the wedding though, so Zoe’s friends and family greatly out numbered mine. On my side, it was just Murphy, who was in her final year of medical school, Captain Lee with her new husband, Robert, Janet and Frank, and Susan who brought a literature professor she’d befriended a few years earlier and was staying with till it was time to leave for Toi as her plus one.

——————————————-
I watched as Zoe looked sadly at possessions she was sorting into various boxes. One was labeled “junk,” that one we would send off for recycling. There were several labeled with names of people in her family. Most of her clothing was going to her sister. One box was marked “worth selling.” The smallest box sat on a scale I had rented.

The amount of mass allowed with our sleeper tickets was very limited. It wasn’t enough that Zoe could just casually bring anything that she felt like, even with the extra allowance that she had since Susan, and I had less stuff than our mass allowances and had both just given Zoe our extra.

I watched Zoe arrange three rather scruffy catnip mice on the floor in front of the boxes. I knew they were Freya’s three favorite mice.

“I can’t decide which one to take and which two to just put in junk,” Zoe said very sadly as she looked down at the filthy toys.

“Shouldn’t they just stay with Freya?” I asked as the fluffy calico walked over, sniffed the tree toys, and began to play with one.

“What do you mean stay with?” Zoe looked up at me, a little confused and very worried.

“Here on Trappist,” I clarified. “Not in the apartment. I know she can’t make rent without you. The mice will help her feel at home with whomever you are giving her to.”

“I’m not giving her to anyone.” Zoe insisted. “She’s coming with us. I held her when I weighed myself to see how much mass I could bring.”

“Cat’s aren’t luggage.” I said. “We can’t just take her with us.”

“Aren’t there cat pods?” Zoe asked. “That’s why I held her, because I’m going in a pod. Me and her are mass that go inside pods, and the pods are already on the ship.”

“Freya would need her own separate pod.”

“Yeah,” Zoe agreed. “So?”

“Zoe SPS does not put cats in pods like they do with human passengers.” I explained, “we can’t just show up with a cat. Shipping animals is a whole separate thing.”

“Ok,” Zoe said. “So we’ll do that.”

“Zoe, do you have any idea how expensive shipping animals is?”

“I can’t just leave her,” a tear streamed down Zoe’s cheek.

Freya seemed to sense Zoe’s distress, because she abandoned tossing the fake rodent in the air and went over and started rubbing up against Zoe, Zoe gathered the rumbling creature into her arms and Zoe and Freya rubbed their cheeks together,

“Fine, I’ll go to the SPS office, and see about making arrangements.” Then muttered under my breath, “hopefully there’s enough in the worth selling box to cover it.”
————————————————-

*************PREPARATIONS************

————————————————–
Zoe looked at me, her gray eyes just a little wide with the dread I knew she was bravely suppressing. I was impressed by how well she hid her reluctance as I held the door open. Her doing this was a pure act of love.

“I promise you will still be gorgeous,” I told my new wife. “Maybe really short hair will be in style on Toi, I never thought to ask Sally.”

Zoe just nodded weakly, as I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her just a little bit of a nudge into the barbershop. Zoe looked around the simple austere establishment that was very different from the nice salon she usually went to.

I’d deliberately chosen a quiet time to take Zoe to the barbershop. There were two barbers working, one was busy trimming a centimeter or so off a guy’s hair that was the slightly longer than crew standard length that was the fashion among professional men on Trappist. It was a simple cut, brushing the eyebrows in the front, covering the tops of the ears on the side, and just resting on the collar in the back. The other barber was relaxed, sitting in his chair reading something on his tablet.

“Hi there.” The not busy barber said as he set down his tablet on the counter and got out of his chair. “How can I help you ladies?”

“My wife and I are traveling,” I told him, “interstellar.”

“Working passengers? So your wife just needs something more manageable?” He asked as he looked at Zoe’s long loose strawberry waves. “Or do you both need to be prepared for pods?”

“We’re going in pods. You’re on the list of places that take the vouchers we got from SPS.” I told him, then turned to Zoe. “I’ll go first, honey. Ok?”

Zoe just nodded again. I worried the reason she wasn’t talking was because it was the only way for her to keep from crying. I gave her a soft kiss on her forehead and took my arm from around her shoulders. She seemed reluctant to let me go, but did walk over and sit down stiffly in a waiting chair. I turned and went to go sit in the barber chair.

“It’s going to be point five millimeter,” the barber warned me.

“Yeah, I know.”

It was technically going to be the shortest haircut I’d ever had, but only by a fraction of a millimeter, it wasn’t like I really cared about losing the centimeter of graying hair I had, it was Zoe’s beautiful hair that I was thinking about as my eyes focused on the reflection of her sitting behind me trying to not look scared.

The barber was making light conversation with me as he fastened the cape around my neck, then readied his clippers, taking them off the charging pad and tapping the screen. Though I sort of kept up my end of the conversation, I was really focusing on Zoe.

Zoe’s eyes were still dry as she watched me being prepared for the ordeal she’d be going through much more dramatically soon. Zoe cringed ever so slightly when the barber pressed the button that started the clippers humming and placed them on my forehead.

Zoe’s eyes followed the movement carefully as the barber pulled the clippers back slowly through the short bristles of hair. I felt the bristles begin to rain down, and my bare scalp was revealed. I could see Zoe’s jaw tighten as she gritted her teeth.

Though the barber was very friendly, keeping up the steady conversation, and perfectly gentle, he followed the exact same pattern the barbers back on Earth Enforcement Service had when they’d cut my hair to nearly the same length over thirty years earlier. Lots of memories were coming up as I felt the blades just gliding over my head, instead of being pushed in the shorter more deliberate strokes I associated with having my hair tapered and shaped. I remembered the shock the first time I’d had my head shaved at EES, the time Stein had tricked me into getting my pixie buzzed off, how I’d had it shaved again to save money after I’d sent every fraction of a credit I had to help get Sally out of detention.

As the barber shaved the hair around my ear away, I shifted my focus from Zoe’s reflection in the big mirror to my own. I didn’t look the same as I had decades ago when I joined EES. The black stubble was heavily speckled with white hair, and there were wrinkles and creases on my face. More so though, I just looked calm, not shocked.

The barber pushed my head down as he began to shave down what little hair I had on my nape. I got to stare at the hair in my lap, it was a just a small dusting, even though this was the shortest my hair had ever been, it wasn’t like it was really a dramatic change. Then I felt the clippers pulled away, the barber released the pressure holding my head down, and I heard the clippers turn off.

“There you go.” The barber said as he began to use a fluffy brush to sweep the clippings from my neck towards the floor. “I know it’s a bit of an extreme look, but it’ll keep you safe and healthy in the pod.”

“Yeah,” I agreed with a nod, not bothering to tell him how well I knew about that.

The barber took the cape off me, scrunched it up, and placed it in the recycler. I raised my hand to the top of my head, and rubbed. The familiar feel of sand paper stubble wasn’t unpleasant, even if it was tied to some rather unpleasant memories.

I turned and saw Zoe watching me rubbing my bare scalp with sadness. I sighed, my hair would be back to my normal length within a month or so after we arrived at Toi, it was going to take years for my new wife to grow her beautiful hair back. I wondered if that time would be robbing her of getting to enjoy the last few years as a redhead before the hair faded fully to white.

“You ok?” I asked her. “Are you ready?”

Once again, Zoe just nodded, still not up to talking. As she slowly started walking towards the barber chair, she reached out towards me, I gave her my hand, and let her take me with her to the chair. Her eyes watched the barber unfolding a fresh cape for her as she walked. She briefly released my hand as she got into the seat, but then clutched at me when I started to turn toward the waiting area.

“Do you want me to stay?” I asked.

Again she just nodded, at this point her lips were pressed tightly together in her effort not to cry. The barber had begun pulling her long hair back and lightly twisting it. I wondered if I should give her permission to cry as the barber used a clip to hold the lovely waves up and out of his way. He swung the tissue cape over her and fastened it behind her neck.

When the barber took out the clip, Zoe’s long pale red waves tumbled over the white paper, and settled on Zoe’s shoulders. It was obvious that as Zoe looked at her reflection, she was losing the battle to not cry.

The barber inserted the teeth of his comb into the hair that formed a curtain around Zoe’s usually beautiful face that was twisted with pain, and lifted the lock up with it to just a couple of centimeters above Zoe’s head. In his other hand, was a long pair of silver scissors. The barber opened the gleaming blades and placed them against the teeth of the comb.

As the blades began to close, Zoe squeezed my hand till it hurt.

Sssshhhrunch.

Zoe’s tears fell from her gray eyes at the same moment the lovely lock fell to her lap. Having lost the battle to not cry, Zoe began to sob softly. I squatted down to be closer to Zoe and held her hand more tightly,

The barber simply ignored the tears and used his comb to lift another lock. He seemed to know that delaying things and dragging out this moment wasn’t going to ease Zoe’s pain, so he simply kept working.

Sssssssssiiii-runch.

“It’s going to be ok,” I promised Zoe softly as she sobbed and the barber kept cutting. “It will start growing back a soon as we get to Toi.”

Ssssscrunch

“And they have some amazing textiles there, I’ll get you some lovely scarves to wear while you grow it out. You’re going to be pretty anyway.”

Shhhhhhhhhhhhheeiirunch

“Ok?”

Sssssssssssshhhnip

“I promise it will be worth it.”

Sssshhhrunch

“We’re going to make a great life together once we get to Toi.”

The barber, continuing his job, combed out the hair from Zoe’s sideburn and temple and sliced it off, the long soft lock slid down the cape to where Zoe’s arm stuck out to hold my hand. A could see Zoe silently shudder. With the hand that wasn’t holding Zoe’s, I reached up and lifted the soft lock away. The feel of the long lock in my hand, reminded me of how I had run my fingers through the wavy tresses so many times when Zoe and I were sharing a bed.

I dropped the lock of hair to the floor and dropped trying to sooth Zoe. Zoe was just sad, not just about her hair, but about leaving the only home she’d ever known, and everything that involved. I placed a soft kiss on Zoe’s knuckles and just held her hand, and allowed her to just feel her feelings.

The barber began to comb up the hair from the back of Zoe’s head, causing her to have to look down, I watched as the tears fell from her eyes to the mess of long locks in her lap, as the barber dropped the last of Zoe’s long hair to the floor behind her.

Zoe raised her head up and looked at her reflection, when the barber stepped over to put down the shears and pick up the clippers. I watched Zoe’s red rimmed eyes taking in her cropped head.

“I’m going to use the clippers now,” the barber warned Zoe. “Ok?”

“Umph,” Zoe barely voiced her reluctant consent.

The barber lightly placed his hand on top of Zoe’s head, and turned on the clippers. He tilted Zoe’s head down to the side, and placed the clippers on her cheek just below her side burn, and began to slowly pull them upward, the fine blades gliding against her scalp.

Zoe’s hair began to rain down over the buzzing clipper to the tissue cape she wore. The path the clippers left behind looked simply bald. Zoe’s faded red hair was simply too close to the color of her skin for the fine stubble to stand out against it. The barber circled around the top of Zoe’s ear, then pushed the clippers down the other side, so the hair poured down behind her.

The barber brought the clippers back to Zoe’s hairline at her temple, just above the strip he’d already shaved from her sideburn up and over her ear. He pulled the clippers back through the cropped hair.

Zoe closed her wet eyes, sending more tears rolling down her cheeks. I wished so badly I didn’t have to put her through this, I just couldn’t afford to buy her a full price working passenger ticket, even if there had been open cabins. If there’d been an open cabin, maybe I could have asked Sally to cover the cost, but since there wasn’t, there’d been no point in asking and hoping the message got to her in time for her to make the arrangements.

The barber continued to run the noshing blades over Zoe’s head, removing all but a fine stubble. He tilted her head back and forth, and bent her ears as he made sure he didn’t leave any hair behind them.

Finally he announced “There you go, all over,” as he dusted her off then removed the cape.

Zoe opened her eyes, and just barely glanced at the mirror. I thought she still looked amazing, but I knew she wouldn’t agree with me, so I didn’t force her to dwell on it by trying to convince her. I just helped her get up on to her shaky legs.

“My scarf,” Zoe whispered to me, as she turned her back to the mirror.

I pulled the lightweight square of fabric out of a pocket. I’d taken her to a shop to pick one out after I’d asked her if there was anything that would make her feel better about having to have her head shaved, and she’d said she just wanted to be able to hide it. The scarf wasn’t real silk, no one had bothered to bring silkworms and mulberry trees to Trappist, but the rayon was the best imitation Trappist offered, and it was printed with an abstract floral design in shades of pink, orange, and yellow that weren’t completely dissimilar to the hair she’d had to give up.

“I’ll tie it,” I offered, sparing her from having to look in the mirror to do it herself .

Zoe just nodded, then bowed her bald head for me to cover. I folded the scarf into a triangle first, and centered it on her forehead, I twisted the corners, crossed them over in the back, then I brought them back to the front, tied a simple knot and tucked the ends in.

“Do you want to check how I did?” I asked her when I thought it looked good.

Zoe glanced back at her reflection, checking out how I had tied it. She looked just slightly longer at the new reflection than she had at her bald head. She didn’t smile though, just looked sad before turning away again..

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Zoe leaned against me as I settled up with the barber, and pulled out a wooly hat to cover my own bare scalp. I’d told myself it was just because I knew my head would be cold when I had decided to bring it, but as I pulled it on while looking in the mirror, I knew I also felt less self conscious not being quite so visibly bald.

————————————————————–

Zoe had shed a few silent tears while packing. She’d gently weeped while her hair had been cut off. She’d sobbed softly as she’d handed over the carrier with the frightened meowing fluffy cat to the vet with shaking hands. When the vet handed the cat back to her with all her multi-colored soft fur, and even her stiff whiskers, shaved off and sedated in the miniature pod, Zoe had openly wailed.

When we took the elevator up to the station, Zoe had returned to gently sobbing. As we stood waiting to board the ship where we would both be sedated in our pods, along with a few other nervous looking shaved passengers. Zoe clutched the miniature pod that held Freya.

Zoe was giving up so much to be with me. The only home she’d ever known, most of her possessions. Being able to see her friends and family regularly. Her beautiful hair. Plus she was putting herself and Freya through the risk of being put in a pod. I wished I’d given up being career SPS for her years sooner.

“Hey Cap’n,” Susan came out, wearing her ship’s coveralls, her Jasmine patch had been swapped out for a Galileo one.

“I’m not the captain anymore,” I reminded Susan. “I’m just a passenger.”

“Well, I’m here to escort all the passengers to pod prep’n storage, so I guess that includes you, even though that seems silly,” Susan said to me. “The layout of the Galileo is almost identical to the Jasmine, so I’m sure you could find your way without me.”

“I’ve been on the Galileo before,” I told Susan, not bothering to get into the reason the ship which had been identical to the Jasmine when built, was only different now because changing the layout slightly had made repairing her faster and cheaper. “I was assigned to many ships before I worked my way up to captain.”

“I’d love to hear about that,” Susan told me, which most people would just say to be polite, but knowing Susan, she probably genuinely meant it. “Unfortunately right now, I need to start the orientation for all the passengers.”

“We’ll have time when we get to Tio.” I promised her.

I stood patiently, listening as Susan recited the standard orientation speech. I’d heard the speech recited in a bored monotone many times, but Susan delivered it in a warm tone, pausing to answer questions, and looking around to make sure everyone understood. Then she began to lead the way into the hatch.

“Here, let me help you with that, Zoe.” Susan reached out for the pod with the hairless cat, whose rough pink tongue just hung out from between pointy teeth. “What’s her name?”

“Freya,” Zoe managed to say in a hoarse voice between tears, as she handed over the awkward pod.

I was a little surprised, since Zoe had been refusing my help, clutching the pod the whole trip, but Susan really was good with people. I suppose some of it too, was just that I had simply been offering to relieve Zoe of the physical burden of carrying the pod, Susan would be responsible for the precious animal inside the pod while Zoe and I were asleep in our own pods.

“I’ll make sure her pod get’s checked daily, just like the human pods do.” Susan reassured her as we walked to pod storage.

Susan managed to strike a good balance between treating me like one of the regular passengers and someone who already knew what would happen. Instead of taking over, she brought me things to try to make Zoe more comfortable, as the nurse slowly put Zoe to sleep, taking extra time because she was dehydrated from days of crying.

“Here you go,” Susan said as she handed me a damp cloth to wipe Zoe’s salty face one last time, and stood next to me as I did. “She’s asleep now. It’s time to get you into your pod.”

I nodded, bent down, and gave my finally peaceful looking wife a kiss. I went with Susan, and let her help me into my pod. She sealed Zoe and my wedding rings into a pouch along with Zoe’s earrings and my faded string bracelets. Then she took away the paper gown I’d worn to be recycled while the nurse inserted my IV and talked about having been on a ship with me decades ago when I’d been a senior engineer, and she’d been a general crewman saving up to go to university.

When Susan came back, and asked how I was doing, I was already feeling the effects of the sedatives, my mind was unfocused and my guard was down.

“I don’t want to wake up if Zoe doesn’t,” I whispered to her.

“Don’t worry,” Susan assured me. “Everything will be ok.”
———————————————————————-

*****************ICE CHIPS****************************
———————————————————————–

I hoped it was five months later when I heard Susan’s voice again, even though it felt like no time had passed.

“Some people just take longer to wake up than others, the nurse says her heart rate and body temperature are returning to normal. I did try to make sure they woke you and her up at the same time, but the nurse started you a few minutes earlier,” she said to someone I prayed was Zoe, “because there’s only one nurse, she really couldn’t start you both at the exact same time.”

“sthowee” I made a rather unintelligible attempt to say my wife’s name.

“There see, nothing to worry about.” Susan told hopefully Zoe. “Now take it slow with the ice chips, while I go give some to Reyes too.”

“Thank you.” Zoe’s voice sounded even more hoarse than it had from all the crying before we’d gone into the pods. “Freya?”

“Her pod is next to you, and everything is fine. We’ll have to take her to the vet, after Reyes is fully awake,” Susan told Zoe as she came towards me, before I felt the cold wet spoon pressed against my lips. Then Susan reminded me, “just let the ice melt in your mouth, don’t try to chew it yet.”

————————————————————–

************************WINDOW******************
————————————————————-

I stood at the big window of the space station that orbited above Toi, looking out at the shipyard. Jason had a hand on his mother’s shoulder as she sat in her chair. Zoe rested her shorn head, wrapped in a hand-painted silk scarf that Sally had gifted to her, against my shoulder as I had an arm wrapped around her waist, on my other side Susan almost bubbled over with anticipation. Nyugen and Horowitz’s twins Teddy and Silvia, ran around behind us, not patient enough to just wait at the window.

When the small nose of the vessel came into view, Horowitz gathered the toddlers back to the window, and said “Wave to mommy.”

It was smaller than the freighters I was used to, but bigger than a surface to station shuttle. Though it wasn’t designed to go into atmosphere, like shuttles, the clean white nose was rounded, not square. It had obviously been built with aesthetics not being considered completely unimportant.

We watched as the brand new ship came into full view. On its side was painted in small letters “Papadopoulos Interstellar Line” and just below in much bigger letters was the ship’s name “Rays of Sunshine.”