It's what they call this sort of thing. 'Collaborative' is about ensuring one party in a fixed contractual arrangement doesn't get a leg up over the other. The word is part of the grand romance of the corporate lifestyle. Sounds productive and supportive. Rather than petty.
It doesn't suit me, however you call it. On my charitable days, I like to refer to myself as a loner. Most of the time, however, I see my misanthropy for what it is. But misanthropy can be a gift, if correctly framed, like the word 'collaborative'. It turns my current commission of an eight-week journey through deep space in the confines of a minimally stocked lightspeed shuttle into something of a vacation. I don't have to sit in my cubicle in the offices of the Vienna-based Sympathica-Cantegyle Solar Industries and fake interest in the smalltalk of colleagues. I don't have to plan my route to the kitchenette to avoid the chattier members of our little 'family'. Just me, the inert droning of the ship's AI, and the endless black of Outer Sol. Bliss.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the delivery I was to be making was now a joint handover between myself as rep for Symp-Cant, and one other, a corpo from our long-term rivals at the Red Mars Group. Someone I'd never met before. And I'd be stuck with them for eight weeks in this tiny shuttle.
I didn't have much of a foundation on which to assert my ability to make the trip by myself. I still don't even know what it is we are shipping in those seven, red-steel containers, each coming up to my waist and longer than I am tall. It's something heavy, I've tried lifting one of them already, but the digital manifest labels the contents unhelpfully as 'Type-C Subtype-F Classified Resource', so it could be anything. It must be something that connects us at Symp-Cant to the Martians, hence the presence of my unrequested partner. And it can't be something that we could just ship digitally, unless the shipping itself forms part of the legitimacy of the transfer. My theory is that we're delivering old fashioned deeds of writ for real estate, real paper ones, that relate to ownership of some First Colonies land that both corporations would like to get their hands on. A lot of my colleagues turn their noses up at paper documents, but I think they ought to be more careful. A bit of ink on paper used to be able to shift mountains in the old world. And these days-...
"Peitr?"
I am brought forth from my navel gazing and back to the dim flickers of the Danube III cockpit, its tight, faux-leather chair and the vast onyx of space beyond the viewscreen. The too-close co-pilot seat is empty, and the voice of my partner echoes from behind me in the central corridor. The chair doesn't swivel like it would on a larger, newer shuttle, so I am forced to crane my head around towards the neon-lit gangway.
"Stella?" I reply.
"Have you been through a thrust coil diagnostic yet today?"
"No," I respond warily. "I was going to do it after dinner."
"Very well," comes the reply. "When you do so, I would appreciate if you could make a note of line thirty-four for me. I have adjusted the mockup regulator input and anticipate some form of, um, a response."
"Alright. No problem."
I rotate back and grab a little square of sticky paper from the stack under the control compartment. The click of the pen as I bring the nib forth from within blends seamlessly with the little clunks and thuds of the ship in motion. 'Thrust coil line 34,' I write, and slap the bright green paper onto the diagnostics screen alongside a few other notes of mine. Paper and ink, I think with a smile. You couldn't beat it.
Stella's boots thunk rhythmically on the steel grating below us as she approaches the cockpit. She doesn't make to seat herself down, as we have learned that doing so while a crewman is present in the other chair seriously harms both our prides. She would need to hold tight to the back of my seat while she stepped over the controls and slide herself slowly into the cramped leg space next to mine. She would have every chance of falling on top of me when she did so. Instead, Stella places her hands on the headrest of the co-pilot chair and remains standing, her pride intact. She says nothing, and neither do I.
This is the other reason why I did not think to push back against the assignment of a partner on what I had hoped to be a one-man job. Stella is my professional equivalent from Red Mars, a Band 17 executive administrator. A fact which I am reminded of every day thanks to the badge of her burgundy jumpsuit. My own slate grey doesn't have my name on it, but she has still been kind enough to remember it. Stella also wears her foreign-ness in the form of the pale purple tint of her skin. She is an extra-solar citizen, one of the peoples discovered when humanity left Sol some hundred years ago. Her twilight hair has an almost metallic sheen at her temple that reflects the neon of the Danube III, unlike my earthy, ruddy blonde, and her eyes are mesmerizingly dark with bright, blue irises like supernovas. But she is still humanoid, and the heavy curves of her body, her round breasts and broad hips, her full lips and soft, tinted cheeks, are unmistakably feminine. Her tinted fingers are working at her hair now, tying it up into a loose tail, and she glances my way once she is done. I look away hurriedly.
It did not surprise me greatly to learn that I was to be joined on this departure. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised. I have enough colleagues with connections across the corporation net of the Sol Territories to know that it is the way of companies like Symp-Cant and Red Mars to always add too many cooks to the broth-making process. It did surprise me, and indeed still does, that my partner on this venture should be a girl. Symp-Cant is very strict on company fraternisation. It is why the offices, corridors and indeed ships like the Danube are lined with monitoring devices as they are, cameras and mics and things that connect our activity to the judgemental eye of the infrastructure's AI. The corps would hate their 'tried and tested' Compassionate Partnership System, by which they identify who best to hook you up with using metric data from your work habits, to be ignored. Otherwise we would all be wasting valuable company time flirting with one another, instead of working. Not that I have ever looked at any of the women I work with more than once.
In the two weeks we have been aboard the Danube III, I have looked at Stella far more than once. She is quiet, even at meal times, and though I would normally value the lack of smalltalk it does mean I am at a loss for her personal details. I don't have an age for her, and I am sure I wouldn't recognise the name of her home on Mars if she did ever share it. She has a lilt of an accent in her Earth Common, but that might be her extra-solar heritage rather than her Martian upbringing. She doesn't wear a wedding or engagement ring, but maybe they just don't do that on Mars. And I readily confess that I have no way of knowing if a girl is interested in me without her outright stating so. Apparently there were ways, now long lost to time.
When I learned that Stella was to be my partner for the eight weeks of our delivery, I was at first elated. And that's putting it mildly. The electric excitement that flared in my lungs and stomach in the days leading up to launch at the thought of sharing the confines of the shuttle with this exotic, curvaceous beauty was a potency of emotion that I hadn't felt in a very long time. It kept me awake, and it distracted me from my work. A couple of my colleagues commented that they didn't remember me being so 'smiley'.
But that was two weeks ago. Stella's quietness, and my own inability to engage her in non-professional conversation, have left a great void in the state of our relationship. We work well together, and we share our understanding of ship maintenance readily and easily. But that is despite my being weighed down by the great burden of my supposition, of what we may both be leaving unsaid. What does it mean when Stella looks at me, as she just did when she was done tying her hair up? Is it different to the way she looked at me this morning when she asked me to pass her a serving spoon? Is it important that she uses my first name to call for me, rather than my rank or family name? At night, I toss and turn in the little capsule I use as a bed wondering at the distance between the zipper and top of her collar on her burgundy jumpsuit. Is the zip lower today, reaching slowly downwards towards her cleavage in what would assuredly be a coquettish, flirtatious manoeuvre? Or is that just my imagination?
And does any of this really matter? If, by some miracle, she also felt these same sparks about me, what could we even do about it? Even if the ship wasn't equipped with the means to reprimand us then and there for unprofessional behaviour, which it might well be, we could both expect severe punishment on our return to work at the end of our trip when the higher ups take a look at the ship records and see what we were getting up to. Loss of salary, reduction in benefits...
Being around Stella is tense in a way that at first I loved. It was like being lit aflame each morning when those supernova eyes met mine. Now, I am drained at the constant wondering of what she is thinking about me, if she is thinking at all. I feel like I would have burst with the suspense long ago did I not jerk myself off each night, imagining what she looked like under her clothing. Imagining clambering into her capsule one night and ascertaining for myself how far she would be willing to take a chance on me.
