Since it has been just about a year since Space Station X came out, and I think I maybe have broken triple-digits in book sales, here is a snippet of something I wrote as an exercise in getting to know my other character, as opposed to just living in Jax’s head rent-free.
Jillian Saunders finished eating dinner and immediately cleaned her dishes. On this tin can of a space station, there were no Commanding Officers or nightly inspections to warrant such a need to diligently clean, sort and organize, but some habits were ingrained as natural as breathing, and if she didn’t take care of it right away, then they would never get taken care of.
The electric hum of the LED tube lights provided bland background noise as she loaded the dishes into the sanitizer, and wished she had brought her music player with her for the background noise. It was too much work hauling it from its nook back at her quarters, so she would have to just wait until she retired back to her bunk. She wasn’t ready to make that trek yet, however, as she knew once she left the galley there would be nothing left in the day cycle but to turn in, and that always made her loneliness a little more intense.
Saunders liked people, and always had. It was what had motivated her to pursue medical training when she was younger, and then it was what had pushed her into the service. She had adored the bonding and team mechanics of her squad, not to mention it fit in pretty well with her competitive nature. She had made some truly excellent friends and connections in the service, and she had certainly intended to continue with that career, but history changes things. It still confused her late at night why she would have accepted a job on a space station so remote that even the transports that supplied it regularly forgot it was there.
But the people who passed through the station were fascinating. They all had their own reasons for being this deep in space, and they all came from such varied and interesting backgrounds that Saunders enjoyed the opportunity to greet them, and learn from them. She knew they were transient, and therefore most likely people she would never see again. She knew they were not future life-long friends, but strangers passing in the night. But she still enjoyed the opportunity to get to know them. This late in a day cycle though, all residents were quartered to the Berthing level, and Saunders, in her post as Security Officer, was confined to her quarters on Docking level. There would be no further human interaction for the evening.
Well, confined wasn’t quite the right word for it. As Security Officer, Saunders could wander any part of the station she needed to, up to and including the secured Level 5 where Station Power and Life Support operations were controlled from. And she wasn’t the only person who would be around. That elusive Station Mechanical Engineer Jax would be hibernating up there. But Saunders knew she didn’t have a reason to venture up to Level 5, and she particularly knew that Jax would not appreciate the interruption.
The galley clean, Saunders returned to the table and pulled out her tablet. This far from any signal relay point meant that communications trickled in slowly. She didn’t have any reports to file for the day, and there were no updates from the station management hub. In fact, Saunders half suspected they forgot to even include them on the data dump these days. She could always browse the news, but after leaving the service she felt she just didn’t care about the news any more. It never changed. The names, places, and times were maybe different, but the story was the same. Pointless conflict, stupid politics, dumb actions by powerful people.
Instead, Saunders read the sports section. Of all the things she could miss from a solid planet to rest her feet on it was athletics. She hadn’t been able to compete in anything since her contract on that asteroid. She had earned top honors in marksmanship amongst her squad mates after all. She missed it dearly, the thrill of competition, the agony of defeat, the glory of victory. The most she could get up to on this station was core and strength training, though she regularly joked with herself about what exactly she felt she was training for. Probably an avoidance of osteoporosis when she made it back to normal gravity.
Saunders scrolled through match scores, and tournament results. Video clips took days to download out here, so nothing seemed worth the wait to watch, but the recaps of games played kept her entertained. The lights hummed more in her ear.
This station really was lonely. The work contracts out here were short on purpose. Most people would go mad being isolated out here for longer than a contract or two. Most people. An outlier in that data would be Jax. Saunders recalled the contract manager telling her that she would be working with someone who had been on station for nearly a decade. That was unheard of. Who could keep sane out here that long? Well, Saunders knew the answer to that. The Station Mechanical Engineer was insufferable, but she also liked it out here, clearly. She spent all her time hiding up on the 5th Level, only to emerge when the station dearly needed her. And by “station” Saunders really meant “The Station.” Jax seemed particularly chagrined to ever have to deal with another person, but oh did she clearly love this station. There was not a day that called up some need for repairs that the Station Mechanical Engineer couldn’t be found dutifully caring and repairing for their home with flawless expertise. Saunders had even caught the mechanic talking to the machinery on occasion, which she knew, if she were caught listening, might be an unforgivable offense.
Saunders had discovered that Jax was something of a sideshow attraction for the residents. They clearly were fascinated by the concept of some denizen of space that refused to ever emerge to see the cold light of corridor LED tubes. Saunders had even found herself engaging on the topic with them, as they prodded her for details even she herself didn’t have. Jax was an enigma, and the only fact Saunders really knew was that Jax liked being an enigma.
But Saunders was the type to enjoy a puzzle, especially out here where there was fuck-all to do. And as the months dragged out around her she found herself taking a particularly strong interest in her only coworker. Jax made a good show of avoiding the populace, and a valiant attempt at avoiding Saunders in particular, and thus the game was afoot. Jax was a challenge, and Saunders thrived on challenge. So, to pass the time, Saunders made it her unofficial mission to run as much “recon” and learn as much “intel” as she could about the elusive mechanic. At the very least it passed the time.
Someone might think that being stuck on a crappy space station with the universe’s most anti-social reject would be agonizing. And it would be true, oh, but Saunders liked Jax. Even from the first moment she saw the mechanic when arriving on station, her interest was piqued. It probably had something to do with this lanky, mysterious, grump of a person striding up, ignoring her entirely, saying all of four words to the station management representative and then effectively evaporating to some other part of the station, setting off the small blinking light at the back of Saunders’s brain reading “hard to get.” And again, Saunders liked the thrill of the hunt.
It was not that her intentions for Jax were romantically inclined right away. She mostly just enjoyed the small twinge in her gut whenever she caught a glimpse of the other woman working her deft magic to keep the station running. It was the same thrill that came from a chance brush of contact with a crush, and was enough to drag her through the next day with a slight feeling of elation.
At first Saunders figured it was entertaining at best, and chose not to read too far into it. It had been years since she had ever considered anyone romantically, and she, herself, was not sure that she was ready for something like that again. Saunders felt content to marvel this reclusive, reserved creature from a distance, reveling in the thrill of the brief interactions they ever did seem to have. She even gave herself the freedom to feel herself grow more and more invested every time the Station Mechanical Engineer would swagger up to a problem ailing their life boat of a station, utter three unfriendly words, and solve all their predicaments as if she were born within the heart of this aging space monstrosity with the sole purpose of keeping it alive for eternity. There was, undoubtedly, something deeply… sexy… about someone who begrudgingly kept them all alive without even talking about it.
Saunders would have been perfectly content to let this little game of her own be the extent of her entertainment out here, supplemented by match scores, and stats. But, to put it fittingly and elegantly, there seemed to be a wrench in the machine that was Saunders’s minor, distanced, attraction to Jax: the mechanic liked Saunders back. Saunders was sure that Jax assumed she was doing a grand job of hiding this fact, veiled in added layers of snark and vitriol whenever they interacted, but Saunders was sharp, and she could tell that it was all a ruse to cover that fact that Jax seemingly carried a comparable level of interest in her as well.
Saunders wasn’t quite sure when she pin-pointed this as the case, but it had certainly been revelatory, and early enough in her term on Station to change the whole momentum of the game. It started with picking up on the signs. Maybe it was the fact that Saunders knew Jax would work tirelessly to fix the Level 1 electrical routing every time Saunders’s music system blew a fuse. Maybe it was subtler than that. Jax hated eye contact with her, but when she did manage to snag the dark eyes of the station’s mechanic, Saunders was aptly aware of the accompanying flush that crept up to Jax’s ears. She caught the stutter in the mechanic’s sharp wit, and knew that she, Saunders, had an edge. She could throw Jax off her game, and that was a pretty powerful feeling.
This launched the next evolution of the contest. Instead of Saunders just enjoying the tingle of passing the mechanic in the cycle of daily life, Saunders changed tactics. Now it was a game of: how many times could she cross Jax’s path before the mechanic would snap? How far could she drop hints and change the tone of the conversation before she got a rise out of the engineer? And her personal favorite was: how much could she get the reserved, aggressive, and self-guarded resolve of the station’s keeper to crack with a flushed face, red ears, and dilating pupils.
The game took on a new dimension. The rules were clear. Saunders couldn’t go seeking Jax on Level 5. That was the safe zone. There needed to be a reason. Saunders couldn’t lay traps or plant sabotage to draw the Mechanical Engineer out of her hiding. Saunders couldn’t be too obvious, she needed to maintain the guise of both of them still being able to do their jobs. But after that, the bets were off. Saunders could use whatever station features were available to track and trail the elusive mechanic. She would comb CC footage, use the comms panels embedded in the walls, and peruse the maintenance panels for faults where she could assume Jax might emerge. Saunders started making mental maps of the various hiding places and secret routes that Jax used to avoid human interaction. She doubled down on ensuring she could pop up just as suddenly as Jax could, and secretly kept score of how many times she found herself successful.
And so things advanced. At this evolution Saunders figured it would just be an enjoyable cat and mouse chase, but the longer she tailed the mechanic, the worse her attraction got. Maybe it was the fact that it had been a while since Saunders let herself take interest in another human, maybe it was the fact that as much as Saunders worked to rile up Jax, the mechanic still did her best to care and keep the station functional, no matter how pissed off she seemed. Saunders felt, deep down, that given the time, Jax may even warm up to things. They had even been having longer and longer conversations, consisting of an almost predictable banter that seemingly was their own brand of communication with each other. Jax seemed to rise to meet Saunders’s challenge and as a result, Saunders found herself falling harder for the mechanic.
Now, late at night, instead of wondering what tactics she could use to mess with Jax’s head the next day, Saunders found herself, instead, mulling over ways to win over Jax’s heart. It gave the game higher stakes, as now it also came with the added fall of heartbreak for Saunders if things went foul. It was always fun to think about what things might look like in a different light, but once the shadows were thrown in contrast, sometimes you hated what you saw.
All of this left Saunders at an impasse. She itched with the thrill of the idea of winning over the object of her affection, and cowered at the idea of making things painfully awkward, and irreversibly damaged. She let herself teeter on the edge of this uncertainty as long as she could bear it before admitting to herself that she was lost, and could only accept the mission ahead of her: win Jax over. Unfortunately, all her reconnaissance had been worthless in showing her how she could do that.
Saunders sat now, in her abandoned galley, scrolling blindly through the sports page of the last data dump from maybe a week ago, stuck considering the options ahead of her, and wishing, in that moment, that there was some excuse to find herself on Level 5, pleading to the better nature of the Station Mechanical Engineer. She had been lucky today, with their brief exchange up on Level 4. She racked her brain for a reason to tie that encounter to some other excuse to seek out Jax’s company. But clogged air vents were not a reason to breach Level 5. There seemingly would be no other thrill or mystery for the night, and she was resigned to calling it a close and heading for her quarters.
Speak of the devil, Jax, the Station Mechanical Engineer, in a moment fresh out of this dimension of reality, had materialized in Saunders’s galley, through some bold entrance thinly veiling an obvious discomfort, and was now appraising Saunders’s leftover coffee from the start of the day cycle.
“What is this mess” Jax said. Saunders was, having found herself reeling in disbelief, surrounded by some dark thrill, apparently caught entirely speechless.
***
Saunders’s eyes lingered on the door to her quarters. Jax’s exit seemed to reverberate around the room in a deafening silence. A slow creep of dread swept up Saunders’s spine, accompanied by the lurch of too much alcohol still in her system. She swore under her breath, letting herself sit there in her bunk, still entirely naked, the Mechanical Engineer’s warmth still haunting her from the sheets she found herself tangled in.
Saunders silently cursed herself and she buried her head in her hands. She wished she could instead revel in some feeling of victory in her game, or at least in the memory of Jax’s hands proving skillful at more than just station upkeep. But instead, she felt heavy regret. Why had she decided that drinking would be the best tactic? She had pushed too hard, too fast. And while, in the moment, it seemed like Jax had been fine going along for the ride, Saunders had just spent an entire, glorious, night surrounded by the exact company she had been seeking, learning the mechanic’s in-depth backstory, including the extent at which Jax so deeply distrusted insincere people.
But Saunders was sincere. She had been holding out hope for a night like last night for months, half the time thinking it could not even plausibly be a reality, and the other half of the time finding intricate ways to convince herself that she may actually have a chance.
Well, she did have a chance, and she seemingly blew it by steering things at her own pace, and not the pace of the person who she so desperately wanted to come streaming back through that door. Why hadn’t she taken the time to better tell Jax how she felt? Why hadn’t she used the new knowledge that Jax had given her to find a way to better show Jax that Saunders was serious about her? Instead, she turned the whole mess into a hookup. A drunken hookup, which meant even she couldn’t remember the good parts all too well.
What was she expecting to happen when they woke in the morning? That Jax would suddenly not be the insufferable and reserved creature she had been for what was apparently most of her life? Did Saunders expect a whole new Jax in her bed? One that didn’t run from every emotionally impactful stressor? She felt lucky Jax had still been there in the first place.
The room was spinning, and the motion of the stars outside her window did not help. Saunders squeezed her eyes shut and calmed her breath. She needed to knock it off. Saunders was not one to wallow in her shortcomings, she was someone of action. Or, at the very least, she tried to be. So she had taken a rash action, and the outcome was not, at this moment at least, what she had wanted. She needed to correct course and adjust. Jax needed time. Clearly something had spooked her this morning, and there were several potential reasons for that. Saunders even hazarded that it may be unrelated to their night together. Jax’s unyielding loyalty to the station was, after all, one of the things that Saunders liked about her. She could not fault Jax for feeling she may have let down the station in a moment of distraction.
Saunders pulled her head up, the spinning having ceased. She exhaled, letting her hands drop to her lap. She looked around her room, at the throw-pillows still discarded, the chairs shoved aside for their impromptu dance floor, Jax’s sock left under the table. Saunders had made a promise to poll the residents, and sweep Level 4. Jax was tending to the needs of the station. Saunders would give her time. She would take care of her duty and find Jax later, hopefully in a chance to iron things out. Perhaps they could start over, fresh and sober, maybe over some far better coffee than Jax was used to. And Saunders could come clean about how she felt. It was a better plan, to give it a few hours and some perspective, rather than force things right away.
Having a plan made Saunders feel better. It always made her feel better. This wasn’t a setback, it was just a catalyst to set off the change they needed between each other. She would give Jax her space, and find her again when the time was better. Saunders slid out of bed, sore in ways she could certainly imagine the cause for, and head for the shower.
AZ ROZKILLIS 