Crescent by Phil Rossi

apartment smoking a cigarette—no messages on the comm.
    Benedict said, “To that end, I’ve decided to take you off of hangar detail for a while. To give you some opportunity to mull over where you screwed the pooch.”
    Marisa chewed on her bottom lip for an instant, keeping back a rebuttal.
    “Welcome to your new job. You’ll work the monitor station here in this office for the time being,” Benedict said, and sounded satisfied.
    “Great.” Marisa turned her attention to the monitors.
    “I knew you’d be pleased.” He tossed her a wink. “Now, get to work.”

     
    (•••)
     
    “We have arrived, Captain,” Bean’s voice drifted from the comm.
    “I see that, Bean.”
    The asteroid field drifted over the frozen surface of Anrar’s most distant planetary body. This field was nowhere near as dense as the site of Gerald’s first haul for Kendall, and for that Gerald was thankful. All the same, he felt out of his comfort zone. Gerald was used to flying alone. There was something about having a passenger aboard, as mouse- ish in her silence as Ina was, that made him nervous.
    “Shall I take us to the coordinates, or would you rather show off for the lady?” said the ship’s computer.
    “Take us in, Bean.”
    The hauler banked and the thrusters fired. Bean brought them into the heart of the asteroid field on a slow approach. Dark, rolling boulders drifted past the viewport, breathtakingly close. Gerald glanced at Ina, who for once was not looking at her feet, but instead gazed out the viewport in wide-eyed wonder. A stray lock of hair had fallen across one high cheekbone. He felt the irrational urge to brush it away. Her eyes were like bits of blue-gray glass; they moved from the viewport to meet his.
    They both looked away.
    “I haven’t spent all that much time in space,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
    “I can tell.” Gerald smiled. “I see crap…   rather, things like this every day. I’ve gotten used to it.”
    “I don’t know how you could ever get used to it.”
    He looked at her again and she was watching him with keen interest. He shrugged and glanced over to the radar array.
    “Now, who the hell is that?” Gerald said.
    “What’s wrong?” Ina asked.
    There was a red blip eight thousand meters out.
    “It’s a ship,” Bean replied, “but not the ship.”
    “Has it spotted us?” Gerald leaned forward.
    “It would not appear so; however, it is difficult to say. There is a lot of magnetic disturbance out here,” Bean said.
    “Kill all non-critical systems. Let us drift.”
    “Captain, you might be interested to know the transponder code is registered to Crescent.”
    “Very interested, Bean. Can you activate the cameras? Or would that put off too much of an energy signature?” Gerald asked.
    “Shuttles have a weak sensory array. Our cameras will not alert them to our presence.”
    The visual camera display shimmered to life in front of the control couch. It showed not one, but two specks against the milky body of Anrar VI. The camera zoomed in, each frame increasing with a jerk. Two ships were tethered together.
    “Son of a bitch,” Gerald said. “ There’s two?”
    A space-suited figure crawled out of an unmarked cargo carrier’s top hatch. He was followed by another individual. The pair pumped their legs, leapt from the cargo ship, and floated a short distance to a Crescent cargo vessel’s open rear hatch.
    “Are we safe out here?” Ina asked. Faint rose petals blossomed on her cheeks. She looked from the viewport to Gerald, her eyes reflecting the same sense of unease that he was feeling. Something glittered in her liquid blue gaze. She asked with such anticipation in her voice it seemed to Gerald that she wanted the answer to be no.
    “Well.” Gerald brought up the radar overlay with a wave of the hand and zoomed out several clicks with a twirl of his fingers. “So long as we don’t see any more colored dots in this view, yeah, we should be okay.