Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write about something that involves large quantities of chocolate. Today’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit mystery series Corgi Capers.
Valentine’s Day on Earth 7
By Val Muller
It was more of a whoosh than a boom, our crash landing. A whoosh and an echo and then silence.
“Well that does it,” Jeffreys uttered, taking off his flight gloves and tossing them onto the dashboard.
A soft beeping confirmed that the emergency SOS had been sent, not that it was needed. Earth 3 already knew we were in trouble. They were already sending help. The problem was, help would take three months to arrive.
Jeffreys looked at me expectantly. He wanted me to look at his gloves and ask, “That does what?” We’d been together too long on this voyage, I could practically read his mind. I didn’t want his antics. The drama of throwing his gloves on the dash was just the start. He would talk about how the folks on Earth 7 wouldn’t get their Valentine’s Day delivery and then he would miss his own Valentine’s Day on Old Earth. His fiancée was waiting, and he had been planning to surprise her with an elopement. I knew he was frustrated. I knew he needed to vent, but I just didn’t need to hear it.
It's tough being young and unencumbered. Tough when you’re with older folks, I mean. They’ve always got to one-up you with their problems. Fiancée waiting. Children needing to be fed. Houses needing to be cleaned.
And here I was, my first job out of school, just wanting to see the galaxy, just a feather floating on the wind before I would have to settle down and pop out some kids of my own. What was three months? I had no complaints.
Except being stuck with Jeffrys.
He looked at me again, waiting for me to take the bait.
Not gonna happen.
“Alright, then. I guess I’ll check the engine room,” he told me.
We both knew there was no need for him to check the engine room. The whole thing was run by AI, from the distress signal that just went out to the original course that was plotted. The AI knew about the malfunction before we did. It plotted a course before we did, determining that Luna 12 was the closest place—in this case, a moon—we could safely land. We—Jeffreys and I—were the extraneous parts of this voyage. We were here “just in case” of AI malfunction.
I pulled a tablet from the wall and read the report: this moon’s atmosphere was thin but present. Thinner than the highest peak on Old Earth, but it was there. Our ship’s life support system could easily siphon enough oxygen to keep us alive for the rest of our lives. And it was thick enough that we wouldn’t die if we stepped outside, assuming we could stomach the cold.
But Jeffreys is a man of action, and the ten minutes of waiting was already killing him. I took the tablet and followed him to the engine room.
He was already bent down over an open control panel, performing scans at a speed the AI would have laughed at if AI could have senses of humor.
“It’s all right,” I told him. “Earth 3 is on it, we’ve got entire libraries here, and all the movies in the history of mankind. Three months will fly by. It will be like a vacation.”
“You know they were counting on us.”
I knew he wasn’t really talking about Earth 7, it’s not what he was really upset about, but I played along. Earth 7 was a new colony, and up until now, they were in pure survival mode. You know, like the Puritans of Old Earth. All work, no play. Oxygenation of the atmosphere, terraforming, farms, livestock. Recently, life stabilized enough to support the call for luxury. Last year, it was a call for pine wreaths at the Solstice. Pine was not native to the planet, and its introduction had been slow, so one of our cargo ships transported live greenery, some for them to plant, and some for them to waste in wreaths that hung on primitive doorways and spoke of the luxuries to come.
Our hull was filled with something edible this time. Chocolate. Tons and tons of chocolate, freshly produced on Earth 3’s lush, forested ground.
“They’re not going to have Valentine’s Day,” he told me.
“You can have Valentine’s Day without chocolate,” I reminded him. It’s funny. All the colonies took the main holidays from Old Earth, but they were made new, interpreted in different ways. Religions blended together, traditions were modified. For Earth 7, Valentine’s Day had always been a celebration of literal coupling—as population growth was needed for survival, and they celebrated with sugar cubes at first, then small bits of chocolate that were sent in with essential supply ships.
Our delivery was to stock every store on the planet with chocolate. Bars of chocolate, chocolate lips, chocolate hearts, chocolate wafers. You dream it, we probably had it in our hull, so long as it was made of chocolate.
“There’s no Valentine’s Day without chocolate. How many couples would have come together over the sweet treat, and now they’ll spend their days alone.” Jeffreys glanced once again at the open panel. He knew it was futile. He tried to replace the panel, but it didn’t snap.
“I think they’ll find a way,” I told him.
He twisted the panel, pushed in a wire or two. Snapped it back into place. “Well, I don’t have three months to waste away here.”
It was perhaps the first time I truly felt sorry for him. Back at the station, we all saw the way Teresa acted. We heard the rumors. Being engaged to a transporter was a lonely life. Jeffreys hoped that after marriage, he could upgrade to pilot a passenger ship and bring his wife along. I wondered if he’d get that far. Not only couldn’t I see Teresa waiting another three months, I couldn’t see her having waited the months we’d already spent on the road.
I just wondered how much Jeffreys had accepted. How much of him was still in denial? What part of him truly thought there would be a wedding?
I went to the lab hallway to check on the AI bots that were already being deployed to study the surface of our moon. Everything was running smoothly. Everything would run smoothly until rescue could come with more sophisticated repair capabilities. Until then, I returned to the bridge and scrolled on the tablet and added about 17 books to my “to be read” list. I could think of worse ways to spend three months.
Jeffreys came in with his tablet. It was open to a communication tab. I saw a flash of Teresa’s face before he turned the screen to black.
“Well, that does it…” Jeffrey’s said.
His eyes were almost teary. I took the bait.
“That does what?” I asked.
And as he started his litany of complaints, I mentally walked through the boxes and boxes in our cargo hold, and I thought, nothing eases a breakup like a little bit of chocolate.
The Spot Writers—Our Members:
Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/
Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/
Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com
Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/
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