Her morning started too early, with the ship blaring attention about the lane end approaching. There were good reasons to name your ship, especially when you were the only person you talked to for weeks at a stretch. She'd read that in the psych workup.
She rolled herself out of bed, the sheets trailing behind her, tangled. There'd been writing about that, too. A hazard, they called it, in case of the plating going out..because that was likely, the plating going out.
She heaved herself into the too high chair, built for a man quite full of body. If it weren't halfway through her sleep cycle, if the lights weren't blaring, if she had managed to change the settings to anything on her ship, she might have had another quip about regulations as she settled in. As was, she just squinted into the glare of her boards.
The thing came online at her touch, the whole bubble lighting up, stars gleamed, just barely out of reach. She was almost mesmerized, and then the blaring proximity alert brought her back. Her hands found the capacitive screen. The circuit was completed by her bum in the chair. Not that she could feel it, or even thought of the current, but it coursed through her nonetheless, another part of the ship infecting her.
The alerts weren't wrong, either. They'ed been blaring for near half an hour now, and lane end could end anytime in the next half an hour. She'd already been shot out of the last ring, hurtling toward a planet at velocities that more than weaponized everything around her. Possibility, for a few more minutes, of catastrophy.
So she sat, ready for the other pin. The bubble would fail, fizzle, and she'd hit realtime hard. She was stuck, waiting for station catcalls, and she had forgot to stock a breakfast. That would occupy her for the rest of the morning, while she was trapped at the coms, at the nav, at engineering, at ops, at course corrections and speed dumps, at everything a single man crew had to do just out of a lane to avoid collisions and finish a job. She sat there, and the hole in her stomach sucked as she dragged her arms across the screen. tap here, tap there, yes, pull that headset down over your ears...pretend there's not a hole sucking at your torso, as though it doesn't hurt like its started eating itself, as though your intestines haven't bound up and you're not trapped in a chair while vicious acids burn at your insides. That's the feeling, at least, when you haven't eaten for so long that you're cramping in your first hour of the day.
The stations wanted news, because theirs was six hours behind hers. They wanted a course correction and a declaration of IFF and every single thing to go right...even though she was tired and hungry and alone on a coffin dumping V at rates that weren't...rational. But pretend things are fine, cause they'll work you over on voice recordings and analyze everything if either the people or intelligence on the other end of the line thought there were things a little bit wrong. Weaponized, and mad? Can't have anyone sovereign of even a coffin like that.
Courses had been laid in, angles of approach calculated, and then passed back and forth. She'd brought the images up on her screens, arcs and lines demarcated in speeds and changing vector, the ship kindly adding just what sorts of forces she would encounter on the trip, and tying those into the alert system..the same one that had woke her hours earlier, before she tumbled out of bed as her ship tumbled out of a lane toward inhabited structures.
The course wasn't a long one, it was just a tight, tough system of orbits through this center of mass, carefully planned so as to avoid collisions and near misses, and within sight ranges of things for constant contact as her news dump updated. Her cargo would even be bought...which meant, autopilot knowing exactly where she had agreed it could go, that she could pull back from the chair, stretch, and make out toward something that would substitute, hours late, for breakfast.
As she made her way toward the galley, past the bulkheads that separated her tiny lavatory from the bridge and her quarter, then past the other two, empty quarters, she grumbled about that layout, setting the galley closest to the hatch, and furthest from at attention chairs. One could expect she'd be hungry, and have put it in the second position. Everything was modular.
Acceleration warnings blared, and she grabbed for a holdfast, and then aspects blurred, one edge moving faster than another, and she was hanging instead of sitting as the thing banked sharply around its course. Breakfast would have to be cooked in packages, else she'd get it in her hair. The space was too tight and too large at the same time, and she was forced to camber and stretch to open the cabinets. She'd have to get those re done as well, lower.
Food smells emanated from the crisper as a package inflated, and she stared at its slow movements, slumped against the opposite wall. Tired, not enough sleep and haunted by space, hungry for contact, hungry for people and food and information, as her eyes shuttered closed. Open, then shut, heavy lidded. She had things to do, but they would keep, and the ship would wake her. That's what it was for. A series of alaurms.