Mech Pilot happy to see the Accounts Receivable clerk fight like the dog they are.
Home is not a town with a whole lot going on, but there's a fierce gladness in seeing it rolled out under the sun right below her, in a way that has nothing to do with the dicky starboard fuel pump or the way the airframe moans in pain under stress. She wouldn't trade the clapped-out MARSHA for something pristine if she could; they're both Navy surplus, and both came out creakier than they went in.
Red River is an outpost in a sea of mixed-use ag, food and biofuel crops. Large enough for a small school and a small hospital, a town hall, a double handful of small stores. Cosmopolitan, compared to half the farming towns on this rock. Getting around between places is slow and hard enough that a decommissioned multirole short-hop airframe and a smile are enough to make you a community linchpin: mail carrier, vaccination transport, crop sprayer, firefighter in the dry season with the lake-skimming water siphon and release tank. She's gone a lot, mapping out endless Travelling Salesman solutions, while the town quietly grows and changes when her eyes aren't on it.
The planet's picturesque enough to try for tourism, and Red River's one of the towns big enough to try to catch a slice of it. Over at Catherine, they have the Galaxy's Biggest Rocking Chair; Red River has — something else. Over to one side of the airstrip, a site's been roughly landscaped with earthmovered hills and hollows, logs and concrete slabs, like some out-of-proportion extreme sports course; and around it, half a dozen beat-up ex-service mechs, groundside 118B Digiornos, are scrambling and stalking, hailing down paintballs on each other.
She settles the bird on the ground, taxis to the hangar; runs through the postflight checklist, scrawls FUEL PUMP back on the Now What's Fucked whiteboard, waves to Henry with his feet up in the ATC shack, and strolls across to squeeze through the gap in the fence behind the mech paintball front office building, a moonshine jug of high-proof backyard payment-in-kind dangling from one hand.
She rounds the corner of the building, and stops. Looks, heart creasing into soft shapes in her chest, at boots propped on the office porch railing; a cushion-stuffed rocking chair; grey-threaded hair beneath a baseball cap, once marked, long since peeled, with the symbol of the People's Fleet. The only movement is the tap of one finger of one tanned hand, where they're threaded together in the other woman's lap; the radio on the small table beside her burrs away with the inter-mech trash talk, next to the big red DCL fleet killswitch and the field first aid kit.
Somehow, arriving feels more like coming home, every time.
"Hello, stranger," she says, years-old butterflies still fluttering at the slow smile under the hat's shade. "How are they today?"
"Hen party." Her partner raises the twitching finger to prod the cap's peak higher on her head, opens her eyes. "Rowdy. Accountants."
"Oh, the worst," she says gravely, stepping up onto the porch.
"I thought that was lawyers?"
She puts the jug on the table, lets her hands settle onto and gently knead shoulders, quirks an indulgent smile down into eyes glinting with well-worn mischief. "Of course, but you can't trust lawyers with paintballs."
"Guess we can't comp your mother a session for her birthday, then."
She can't help a bark of bitter laughter. After the Armistice, her parents had anticipated her return — back to school, finally pass the bar, enter the family business. Even now, that relationship is trapped in a cycle of tentative reconciliation and abrupt, bitter relapse; there is no squaring the circle of their unrelinquished expectations and her immovably staked position. Here.
"Hey." Bea — her here — nuzzles softly into her forearm, and she lets out a breath, and the tension with it. "You wanna drag out another chair? I'll turn the radio up, this crowd's wild. They've booked all afternoon and I'm just running a tab for them on extra ammo bins — one more and I'm taking you out for a meal Saturday—"
