Space (second look)

Please see the note on the other space post. This is a re-work. There will be more. Feel free to be very critical.

After three months of being awake the slip into open space was welcome. The darkness encompassed the small cabin. No stars no suns no planets to need her skills to keep the vessel on course.

This was her first paid solo inter-solar-system flight. So far the uneventful trip had been a pleasing vision of space gases, glowing planets and comets. Nothing too close nothing unexpected. She had none of the stimulant side effects that would necessitate waking the co-pilot.  So she was utterly alone. Plenty of time to contemplate her divorce and the turmoil that her family would fall into upon their discovery of the loss of the alliance. She had taken this run not for the money but to be able to clear her head  before she dealt with the crisis her family will create from the simple transaction of the divorce. She had like Julian but they had nothing in common and neither could maintain the marriage for the sake of the alliance between their families. She hoped that he had faired well at least on Cersis the alliance was not the paramount reason for the arranged marriage. Pandora was not like that, Pandorans wanted alliances to “strengthen family”, even without the possibility of descendants. She had never understood that. 

In a little over a week she would be entering the Oberon system. Her first scheduled company was the medical officer that she would awake in five days. He would awake the others just out side the system and they would use two days to fly through the system and the computers would give all that were interested a pretty little tour of the system.

She would finally get to sleep six hours after landing. She would be placed in stasis for two days. Once she was awake she would finally go through all the messages that her family had left for her. The enforced communication silence borne out of centuries of addiction to digital communications was welcome.

But for now the emptiness of open space made her lonely. She knew that it was often a practice of pilots to wake a passenger in open space to while away the hours. Although against company policy it was never punished and often the cryo-logs would have messages and information about the passengers that would let you know who could be woken.

Her tails twitched at the thought. Company without politics. Conversation without pretense. She stood stretching her body. The cool air of the cabin sent her fur tail around her body while the throb of the engines made her balance tail stick out. She was glad to be alone as she hated her lack of control over her own body when she stood after sitting so long.