Routine operations

Sabrina's work on the platform still has her leaving in the middle of the night, a kiss good morning, some loving cuddles, then back to sleep for a couple hours before I get up for my own morning routine. It's not an ideal situation, perhaps, but it leaves us each to our work and gives us time together as a couple.

It's those early, early, mornings, after Sabrina's left for the platform that my dreams usually wander. I rarely remember them though. A lifetime of training's left me with a situational awareness that extends into sleep. Even if Wave Equation's sensors didn't alert on an unrecognized presence, I would. The only difference between an intruder and someone I recognized as safe at a subconscious level, was whether I'd register it as safe and go on sleeping or shift gears into a combat mode that'd probably leave the intruder dead.

There were only a handful of people who could intrude into my space while I slept and not be treated as hostile. Sabrina, obviously. She was my wife. It made sense. There were a few others though. People I'd trusted with my life and they, in turn, had trusted me with theirs. x0x0, perhaps oddly, was subconsciously accepted. It only made our relationship that much stranger. And, of course, my girls.

There were times, even before I'd married Sabrina, that Lily would sneak into Wave Equation and watch me sleep. The boat's self defense system saw Lily as "authorized: all access" so let her in without question. It logged the entry, not that I'd ever needed it. Even without the logs, I knew when she'd been there. The part of me that never really slept identifying the presence of my little sister and letting me go on with what passed for sleep.

There were times AuroraBlue had done the same. At least before she changed. After? Even then she'd never been perceived as Threat. She was in many respects, but not directly to me. Dragons don't hurt their own. Except when they did. I may never know the real reason. Love? Respect? Fear? Had she thought that even with all the build up to be the greatest warrior ever, the woman who'd taught Operatives to fight might have been her match? Or was there a soft spot for the woman who'd been the closest thing she'd had to being the mother she'd needed?

I would never know. I wasn't even sure I wanted to know.

She was gone. That was what I knew.

But there were a couple times, in the days since her span had ended, that I could almost feel her there. Sitting on the edge of the bed watching me sleep.

Illusion.

Of course, Lily's return and Aurora's loss wasn't the only thing happening on our little slice of heaven. With the platform coming on-line we'd been getting more boats coming in to get repairs and maintenance. Even Reese had settled in to have some fairly major work done on his Firefly. While it might not have been especially exciting, it was the kind of thing the colony needed to survive. Townsfolk were here to live. Not to have an adventure.

Of course, they got a bit of adventure too, whether they wanted it or not. While having a well armed militia, and more corporate presence, had probably reduced the number of raider and pirate incursions in our space, we still got our fair share of unwelcome guests. Not to mention the occasional Reaver.

The Reavers were actually the most disturbing, not that the Militia couldn't make short work of anything less than a major raid. Ones and twos the townsfolk would usually just shoot on sight and tell the Sheriff about later. The fact that we were seeing them again was what I found disturbing. There'd been some ties to Lily and Aurora and Mindo's experiments, but after cracking the nest in Beetle's Baily, and Krenshar relocating to Caliban, right in the heart of what was left of Reaver space, the attacks had more or less stopped.

They hadn't started up again until after Krenshar'd been forced to abandon the facility on Caliban and x0x0'd offered him, the Order, and the other refugees, space here on Blue Sun's land. A young Mathematician I'd known would tell me this was quite likely a coincidence. An old Spook who'd trained me would say there is no such thing as coincidence in the context of enemy action.

It was something to keep an eye on, of course. But mostly, non-coincidental enemy action aside, I was more concerned with making sure the folk who called Hale's Moon home were being taken care of. That, and trying to be everything the 'Verse needed me to be. Wife. Mother. Mayor. Officer. Spook. Sister. Friend.

Not always in that order.