Beneath the Floating City collection by Donna Maree Hanson

Author:Donna Maree Hanson [Hanson, Donna Maree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, science fiction
Publisher: Aust Spec Fic
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Warning Buoy

Evie felt consciousness returning while she was still deep in slime. She resisted the urge to breathe until she had surged out of the life support fluid and wiped the synthetic mucous from her nose and retched, dislodging the dregs of it from her throat. Her eyes were out of focus, but she could tell straight away that something wasn’t right, something was missing. It was Sam. He always emerged before her, programming his unit that way so that he was there to help her untether the tubes and the intravenous drips that had kept her sleeping for their jump. By the time she had pulled herself out and extracted the last tube, she saw that he wasn’t still interred in his own life support. Nothing appeared to have malfunctioned. He wasn’t dead, which had been her first fear. What was it then?

After a shower, she stood and shaved her head in preparation for their next outing while thinking back on the time before the jump. They had finished maintaining the beacons on Bright Star station and made love with the light of the system’s star before heading below to go into deep sleep. Sam had been full of joy, for no particular reason other than he loved working alone out here in space, just to the two of them. Perhaps it was his capacity for deep thinking while he stared out the viewport that had first attracted her. That and his silence.

She keyed the intercom. ‘Sam?’

A few moments of crackle and then Sam came on line. ‘You up already? Dinner is almost ready.’

‘You weren’t here.’

His breathing sounded over the intercom for a bit and then she heard him whisper. ‘I know…’ before he cut the connection.

Drawing her brows together she began to mentally catalogue plausible reasons for the ‘mood’. It was obvious he was in one. By the time she made her way up to the command deck she was over it. She smiled crookedly at him, which encouraged him to embrace her before he slapped her on the back and said, ‘Time to eat.’

‘Yeah, right…eating,’ she said anchoring herself to the small table. He refused eye contact and that made it difficult to broach the subject of the ‘mood’. Her eyebrow lifted. ‘Do you have any more of that Pinot Gris? I could do with something to wash your cooking down.’ She could do with something to wheedle the issue out of him too.

While went in search of some wine, she gazed out of the view port, dragging up details of their next maintenance stop. Out the view port she saw them—two gaseous nebulae, one more distinct than the other. The fainter one was a dying star, feeding the newer, hotter, brighter one. She tapped her finger on the table, ignored how the smell of Sam’s cooking made her stomach roil and recalled the name of the mission. ‘Tolstoy Patches,’ she said to herself, nodding. It was a newly marked corridor, with top-of-the-range transponder buoys. They guided

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