Orbit

'What a fegging hole,' That familiar view, from a thousand nostalgic images.

'Language!' Dad snapped back at me, his face underlit by the instrument panel.

'What? You said it first' I responded, rapier fast.

'When did I ever raise you to speak like that?' He turned to look at me, employing full parental tone.

'That's a different question. You haven't had to raise me for years thank you very much, and you said it when we first got to Europa.' I parried with extra adult, thrusting through his open defences with the specificity I knew he rarely prepared for.

'Well. I mean, that's different.' A desperate defensive ploy.

'How?' I added the tone I perfected at thirteen, sharp and edged, under his flailing guard.

'Firstly,' He always counted his fingers when I had him cornered. 'Europa is a hole.' Agreement designed to wrongfoot me.

'A fegging hole?' My blade at his throat, unwavering.

'Yes, it's a fegging hole. And secondly,' counting again, 'that,' Pointing out of the thick view glass with his two fingers together like an old fashioned hand pistol, 'Is not a fegging hole, it's home, and it's where your mother asked us to bring her. So a little fegging respect please.'

I was disarmed in a blink. We both sniggered. He could still do that and it still drove me nuts.

I stared at the space between my reflection in the thick glass and the lights of the planetary system's outer reaches that flew past us. I had played the same game since I was small, counting lights as they passed, tracing a route with my eyes over, then under, nimble as a void fighter. My gaze ran through the dots of brilliance as they sped by, slaloming through constellations, ships, mining rigs, waystations and moons. I spent hours drawing connections and patterns where there were none, creating new zodiacs and empires, alien beings and trade routes. It was how I passed time and vast distances while my parents navigated and argued over contracts and money, maps and routes, even occasionally flirted. It had been decades they had flirted. Or even argued.

'Can you equalise pressure in number four? Amy, are you with me?'

'Yes Dad,' I dragged my eyes away from the game, found the control. 'On three?'

'Two, one,' We punched the controls in silence, another ritual of the journey, repeated for my whole life, but now I equalised engine number four. Not my mother. I returned my gaze to the window, relaxing my eyes to see myself and in the same instance, the outer expanses of The Solar System. We still called it The Solar System, even though there were colonies and outposts in half a dozen or more. The Solar System. So fegging obsessed with The Solar System. It was pathetic.

'Can you see it?' He was trying to be chirpy. Read the room, Dad.

'What?'

'The rings. There.' He pointed up and to fifteen degrees starboard; a tiny brightness, fractionally brighter then the rest. He activated the screens on the control panels in front of us, a flickering green interface projected onto the viewglass, magnifying the sixth planet, the screen scrolling with facts that might interest a bored five year old. 'You used to love the rings when you were a kid,'

'Dad, I used to love all sorts of crap when I was a kid. I'm not a kid any more.' A bit harsh, looking back.

'I know, love, it's just. Well, it wasn't all so bad was it?' When did he go grey? I wondered then, he looked so tired, and so old. Way more then his fifty years.

I showed my teeth then, and bit. 'The only child of a rock hauler and a synth head? Growing up in a freight tug? Great.' He turned off the mag screen at that and we sat in silence. He had worked hard his whole life, for us, for me. Moving freight in space was a tough life, dangerous and low paid. He was lucky when he got contracts and even more so when they were honoured. The big Corps screwed little haulers like Dad. He drummed his fingers, tap, tap, tap, one, two, three, tap, tap, tap, one, two, three. A jig he called it. He loved all that shit old music from old Earth, wooden instruments and human musicians. Diddly doo dah, I called it. Years later I would find a cheap fiddle in a junk market, pressed pulp rather than hard wood of course, and learned to scratch out some of the melodies I remembered from my childhood memories. I wish I had paid attention to the music he loved.

After a while he tried again. He always tried again, I loved it about him 'It won't be long now.' Chirpy again. Way markers went past us, red and green; an ingress beacon guiding us onto a flight way, warnings about dust clouds and rogue objects in the lanes, the dangers of flying while tired. The lights of other traffic was invisible to the naked eye but scrolled and flashed distances and angles and speeds on the instrument board. We adjusted trim and approach vectors quietly, only speaking confirmations and figures, our hands complimenting each other, hitting switches and shutting valves in a mechanical duet. I thought about when mum had read the beacons and called out the numbers.

'Was it me?' My voice was thick with old hurt. I was twenty five, a Mineral tug driver in my own right and I could hardly get the question out. It had been nearly an hour since I had snapped at him. He glanced over at me in surprise, wondering if he had missed a turning or a malfunction light that had prompted my question out of the black silence of space.

'You?' He asked.

'That made her so unhappy. That got her onto Synth?' I had waited twenty years, our last approach towards the planes of Mars seemed like as good a place to ask as any.

'Stars, no, it was never you, it was never like that. She was sick. It was an illness she couldn't help.'

I cut in at that, hot again, 'Not at the start she wasn't. At the start she had me in the pod and you were hauling and she had a family and a life and she chose Synth, didn't she?' I was crying but I barely realised, the words fell out of me like the tears, salty and hot. 'She took it and left me in another room and turned off comms and took it, didn't she?' I had thought about it so often over so many years; how she had started. When. Why. 'Not when she was sick but when she was clean. I know she was fegged up later, lost control, I saw it for twenty years, but at the start, when she was clean and sober why did she choose it, Dad? Was it me? Was that why she was unhappy? Didn't she want me?'

I looked over. He was crying too. Silently. I recognised that look in the light of the instruments reflected on the viewglass. I had seen the green light reflected on the wetness on his face in my childhood, when mum was too sick to help, or haul, or anything, and it was just me and him in the command deck. When I was small.

'Wait, we need to turn off here, get in the other lane, the other lane!' I cried out as our beacon flew past on the wrong side of our small craft. 'Oh for fegs fegging sake! We will have to go around again.' We watched the path we should have chosen pass us as we sped back towards the darkened blackside of the fourth planet. 'You like Mars right?' We were both laughing now, wiping tears away. Something softened between us.

'She was the happiest I ever saw her when she had you.' It was a while later, the worst of the Mars traffic was now behind us. In the dead centre of the viewglass was a bright object, too far away yet to make out the famous colours and patterns, but we were on the home straight. 'We had lost a baby, your brother, two years before. Mum was only three or four months gone.' He had never spoken to me about this before. Mum had, but only once, high and raging and weeping and horrifying. 'It was awful hard. Life had been hard for your mother. She always resented her own parents, the death of her father when she was wee. Even her own childhood, moving away from Earth. She felt like she lost something, her future, maybe. Herself.' I could tell it hurt him to say this to me. I wondered if he had ever said it out loud before. To anyone.

'She always thought she should have been somewhere else. Someone else.' I didn't look at him. I couldn't. My tears were cold and sad. It was enough to hear him even try to talk about it all. The moment was too fragile to risk. He had wondered the same thing that I had, I realised. Was it him? Had it been him that had driven her to the drugs that took her and killed her? His pain was a fresh twist in my guts. I felt the anger I had held for him begin to dissipate in my balled fists.

I whispered over the thrum of the craft 'She had us, didn't she? Weren't we enough?' He took an eternity to answer, we could have returned to the outer reaches and come back again in the time it took him to whisper through wet lips, 'She had us, love. She had us.' We both reached in unison to still the flashing lights and quiet the alarm that notified us of our arrival at our destination; the vast orbit station a little out beyond Luna. We watched the scrolling welcome on the viewglass. 'Welcome to Earth, the cradle of Humanity.'

I took his hand and felt him grip my fingers tightly. It was the most contact we had had between us since I had left them both five years earlier. More even then when I had returned after I got the inevitable news. We hadn't hugged at the landing bay, he had just turned and I had just followed him to the medical rooms, to look through a glass panel at my mothers body. She was dead at last from the substances that had taken her from us twenty years previously but had only just killed her.

I squeezed his hand back. Mum had wanted to be cremated here, for some reason. She had asked for her ashes to be jettisoned into the smog clouds that enveloped old Earth. Despite all of the broken promises, the lies and the heartbreak and the shame Dad had asked me to join him to fulfil her last wishes. Of course I had come, what else could I do? For everything, she was still my mother.

'So this is Earth?' I said. He nodded as we coasted towards the huge station high above the planet we called 'home.'

And then both of us, in unison for the first time in a decade, 'What a fegging hole.'