Snippet #2825336

/write
Delfye was the last of the freighter Yamaya’s crew to disembark. Well, maybe Conrad was still aboard; from the way she talked, he guessed the ship’s owner rarely left her vessel.

The sammaran had said his goodbyes and declined the crew’s offers for drinks and the other distractions Blue Heaven offered. He had not eschewed friendly relations with the others during the weeks in transit, but everyone knew he was a temp, onboarded to fulfill mutual needs. The Yamaya’s--of an engineering assistant--and his--of transit to the colonies.

Smells, always the smells. Delfye had been on Terra a long time. Long enough to convince himself he had forgotten his life among the stars. He might meditate away the familiar thrum of a well-worn fusion drive, avert his eyes from the sprawling starfields out the viewports, or work and sweat away the stomach-churning shifts between poorly-tuned gravitational dampers. The smells though--recycled air, irradiated plasteel, and vaporized synthetic lubricants--those always brought back a flood of memories of before. Memories that unbalanced the sammaran more than the familiar weight of his cybernetic limb. Memories of--

Focus, old man. You’re not here for that.

Delfye took in the familiar terminus of Blue Heaven. Much had changed in a decade, even if it had the same stink. More non-humans. Maybe Sol’s economy was on the upswing again. Hopefully--that would make it more likely for Genecorp to keep her in-system. If Aishe was shipped off via a NLS popsicle hopper, that would complicate things for him, especially if he took a warp ship, and arrived four thousand years before she did.

Haha. Not likely you’d even end up in the same sector if you made that mistake. He thought with a grimace.

So let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, by finding the right person to ask the right questions. He counseled himself. The sammaran crossed from the Yamaya’s gangway airlock to the nearest of the glitchy monitors, then parsed through the information screens until he found a map of Blue Heaven.