Flight of the Ariadne

Four-and-a-five-eight, four-and-a-five-nine, four-and-a-sixty.
Five minutes. Five minutes, give or take maybe twenty seconds, since the last footsteps outside the maintenance compartment. Slowly, carefully, Hari released a breath, allowed her body to unfurl, planted one arm beneath her and climbed to her feet. 
Five minutes was probably overcautious, but she didn't want to be taking any risks right now. The fortnight in slipspace had been long and tense, especially when mostly living within containers or cubbyholes, carefully doling out the rations she had brought with her supplanted with the odd theft of the crew's leftovers. Muscle and strength had atrophied, joints and reflexes had seized up; her last night on solid ground might have been spent fleeing from engines and gunfire but any feats like that would be well out of the question in her current state.
There was another one of her out there who could probably pull that off, though. A duplicate, another Hari asleep in her bunk back at Camp Curahee, belly full of nutrient-rich slop, kept in fighting shape with Kurt's daily drills. Her other self could probably snap her like a twig in the state she was in. Her mind briefly wandered to thoughts that maybe she was the faded copy, the pale imitation - and she didn't like them.
More footsteps now, but these ones were distant, down an adjacent corridor - approaching, then passing.
They were closer than she would like, but the window of the Agincourt's crew change, for her to slip off the ship, was growing shorter by the minute.
Time for her to move.
-----
The air was different here. It was full of noise, bustle, and busy people; the first people in almost half her life who lived their own lives and had their own business to attend to that didn't correspond to the tightly-wound machine of a relentless training regimen. 
You should count your blessings, she told herself. You remember how things were like this. The others might not have. And she could remember, dimly; days spent lurking around the spaceport and cargo terminals, sneaking through alleys after dark, tearing through marketplaces at a dead sprint after the others. She could certainly remember enough of it that it didn't feel wholly alien, and a candidate who had been raised out in rural farmlands or sterile habitats might not even have that.
But still, that was a lifetime ago, and watching from the sidelines or passing through was a very different world from being immersed in the living, writhing being that was the station's civilian concourse. Alcoves were lit by glowing lights in front of palettes stacked high, holoprojectors strobing above them with readouts flickering everything there was to know about a ship's cargo and its destination. The Centauri Solstice, the Outrageous Fortune, the Ariadne, the Jadestone Iris-
There, that one. In the corner, attended to by the scowling man. She didn't know why, but her gut gave her a good feeling about it. She squinted up at the display; they were going far from here, and - if she was remembering her Orion Arm geography right - far from any major UNSC hub-worlds. She couldn't quite make out what they were hauling, but she could probably talk her way into signing on-
-an interruption, a flash of confusion. A woman barged into Harriet, breaking her concentration, knocking her aside with a string of obscenities. Her arm reached out instinctively in return as she pulled away into the crowd, snagging something with one hand; she yanked hard, feeling something snap, before ducking her head down just enough to disappear below shoulder-height. And she was gone.
First she would get her strength up. She would get something to eat, and she would do so courtesy of a credit token recently 'misplaced' by that asshole.
-----
"IDs?"
"No, I - I don't have anything-" The lie came to her lips, accompanied by a practiced tremble, as easily as breathing. She was still toying with the credit token with one hand in her pocket, but he didn't have to know. "-I booked a bunk and locked my pack to it, but when I woke up everything was gone, someone must-"
He snorted, a hair away from a chuckle at her expense. "Ah, don't worry about it, that shouldn't be much trouble." Stupid kid. "Skipper doesn't really give a damn about the paperwork, especially these days, but if you're out of chit you'll need to work your way."
"Yeah, of course, I can do that." She did her best to temper her enthusiasm, her eagerness to sign on and just get away from here, lest it give away her youth - or worse still, her desparation. "Know my way around ships, and I learn new ones real quick. Grew up around the things." 
"Sure, kid." He didn't look fully convinced, but she didn't need him to be; so long as he was mostly onboard then she would be too. 
A moment later came the killing blow. "Oh, can't be telling the skipper that we just picked up 'some runt' though. You got a name?"
Shit. Her mind flickered through every bit of sensory input through the last few minutes; names of ships or stations, brands shown-off by passers-by, destinations displayed on departure holoscreens. What sounded like a name - what would be passable - what would she still know to respond to-
"Ari, I'm - I'm Arianne."
"Welcome aboard, Arianne. Might take a bit but I'll find a bunk and clear out some room for you..." 
The rest of the words went right past her; Hari was already nodding, smiling in return. This time it was a genuine smile, a wave of warmth and relief crashing over her and banishing the remaining vestiges of nervousness to the very edges of her lips. The very first of those in the long weeks of her escape.
"Thank you."
Category:The Weekly
Category:The Weekly Winners
Category:Seventh Circle