Remnants of the Earth

ooc: Oh lord this is long, but hopefully open-ended enough.

“ETA,” Captain Sea Mean shifted in her chair, her arms stretched out and over her head to the tune of a series of pops as her joints cracked. In the back of her mind, she could hear her mother nag her—don’t do that, you’ll have arthritis by thirty—and Sea had to smile.

The captain of the Skeleton Grin had had many things by age thirty—bullet wounds, scars from knife fights both won and lost, a few fractured bones, mild tinnitus in one ear and telltale stripes on either side of her abdomen—but arthritis had yet to make the list.

Year forty-eight had come and gone somewhere a few moths back, and she had celebrated her distinct lack of joint problems by abusing those same joints as much as possible. The entire night remained a blacked-out mystery, but considering her boys still complained that they would never be able to show their faces in that particular port again, she guessed it had been one hell of a party.

In response to her initial query, the ship’s flight computer gave a calculating blip, before responding, “Estimated arrival time at thirty standard minutes.”

Sea hummed, her full lips curved into a far less sardonic smile now. She had programmed the computer to speak in a very distinct twang—her eldest, Kin, called it hokey, but Zaro had inherited his mother’s love for old-world western vids, and had adored it. She had caught him in the cockpit more than once, submitting frivolous queries in an attempt to get the AI to parrot lines from his favourite films. She had tanned his hide for it, of course, but it remained one of her fondest memories of his childhood.

Speaking of her kids. Sea pressed the commlink button set into her chair’s armrest. “We’ll be docking at Cancer in under a half. Get the ‘acquirements’ stowed and ready for unloading.”

She didn’t have to wait for the chorus of affirmatives to know the task would be done, but she loved hearing it anyway. It reminded her of her own control, and she had always loved being the boss. Their resident medic—a great brick house of a Teinari—insisted that it was borderline pathological, to which Sea replied that his business was in bullet holes, not psychology.

Her console blipped a proximity warning, and she shut off the autopilot with the flip of a switch. Sea took hold of the controls, and proceeded to (rather forcefully) shove her way into the docking queue. She pointedly ignored the angry flashes of hazard lights from the other ships that she had cut off along the way. The sooner they got this over with—and got paid—the better.

By the time she powered the ship’s engines down and climbed down to the cargo bay, her crew was already hard at work unloading innocently labeled crates onto a hovering loader. She took her customary supervisory role by the cargo bay doors, her solid arms crossed over her ample chest.

“Zaro, that is fragile, if I see you handling it like it’s got herpes one more time, I’m taking the damages out of your cut, is that understood?” She didn't bother to watch to see if he followed the order, knowing that he would sooner cut off his own foot than possibly lose out on another antique duster or some other nonsense. Her attention was thoroughly grabbed by the other ships filing in, her dark eyes narrowed as she sized each one up as potential threats or targets.

A woman's work was never done, after all.