The fist stop on Ariel was, honestly, by far the more important of the two. While 'Brina and I talked to each other over a Cortex link every couple days, it wasn't the same as seeing each other in person. No matter how good haptic feedback systems got, they were no substitute for the real thing. I'd missed Sabrina's touch. A lot. I'd married her, after all. Most married couples liked to touch each other. Kind of went with the whole long term relationship thing.
This stretch with 'Brina on Ariel had it's stress. I'd be lieing to deny it. But she was happy working in the Research and Development labs, and I had the luxury of not having to hide my day to day work from my wife. We saw as much of each other as we could, which, admittedly, was a good deal more than most married couples in the active Alliance military got.
Still, it wasn't really long enough. Even extending it to give AuroraBlue and Kari a chance to get ashore for a little while didn't give us enough time together. Not that I could complain. We'd learned to cram a lot of quality into very little time. Which, I suppose, was what most married couples in the Alliance military did too. Make your shore leave count.
The second stop, on Surfer's New Paradise to refresh the coffee supply, was even shorter. Uncle Sobi had pulled together half a dozen or so roasts and packed them into sealed containers so we wouldn't have to worry about them going bad. Roughly two hundred kilos in all, including a couple of my favorite blends and a kilo of Kopi Luwak for my personal stash. I wasn't going to ask exactly how Sobi's clanmates managed to keep a population of Civets on their island paradise. Though, as I understood it, the environment inland from their beach enclave wasn't unlike Indonesia as it existed on Earth that Was.
He'd also included a few mixed cases of quality liquor to stock the new bar we were fitting out on the Orbital. Hadn't managed to quite convince him to come back and run it for us, given how things had turned out at Fook Yoo's, but I'd made the offer and he was offering up some premium ethanol to the endeavour.
I know Sobi was curious about AuroraBlue, and probably Kari too, seeing how her origin was more than a little enigmatic, but he didn't intrude. Wasn't his way. But he did give Kari a bottle of locally made rum when he came aboard Wave Equation to make sure the cargo got stowed right. Also gave AuroraBlue something in a gift wrapped box, and asked her to promise not to open it until Yule. She just nodded. Sobi'd heard that she'd stopped talking and just smiled, leaning down to give her a kiss on the cheek and a quiet "Ya'll take care o' yer kinfolk, ya'hear?" before heading out to give us clearance to boost.
Fortunately, nothing major had gone down in our absence. Except a raid. But that was pretty minor. The Militia had mustered up just fine and handled the problem before the Alliance patrols could even show up.
Another win for us, and a bit more pressure on the Alliance to back out and give us our colony back. Part of their justification for Martial Law was that we weren't handling things locally, which was getting show to be a lie. We could handle things just fine.
Colonel Silvermane'd admit the Alliance had no business keeping boots on the ground, while Liaison Officer Lionhart was a but more sacrosanct about it. She didn't strike me as the sort of bureaucrat who'd stick her neck too far out which made me think she was as in the dark about the reason as the rest of us.
At least officially.
Didn't matter though. Things were what they were, and we'd make do with them. We always did.
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