If Desna had ever had dreams, abandoning them was not only inevitable—an adults' world killing the girlishness in her—it was naked survival. For on Venus there is no travel but for what brings one closer to a whalefall and all its half-slagged treasures, no art save for what can be sold offworld. Only maggots, living maggots beset upon durasteel carcasses. Sectioning and chewing and repurposing.

Where other places' mothers seek to enrich their children—with opportunity, with education—that they might one day return and enrich their families and communities in kind—the Venutian mother sends them away hoping to never see them again; never to reminisce, those children, never to feel the longing ache of homesickness. For what livelihoods could they hope to return to? Cutter, melter, or scrapjack. Rivetman or keelbreak. (Or one other, if a long span arrives where there is nothing fallen to the sands, naught to salvage; but so as the Venutians hesitate to speak of that, so should we.)

Any gig would have sufficed, in truth. Cooking aboard an Ad Astra cruise liner, maybe; or hauling and dumping the very same wrecks on which the dregs of Venus subsist. That a freight and logistics company was the first of maybe thirty applications to reach out with an interview was only happenstance. Still, Desna already had experience operating tunnelers and sand crawlers and a few other heavy machines, so earning her Mikeys proved trivial enough, even for someone as roughspun and uneducated as she.

She knew the precariousness of her position—knew if she screwed it up there were a thousand others lined up vying to take her place—so for a couple years Desna worked hard and stayed loyal. Long hours, and she was always picking up more. Not that she minded. What few satellite apartments she could afford they seemed a waste of money anyway, what with her spending three weeks every six on the road. Why pay rent for a roof she barely ever slept under, why pay utilities on water and power she didn't get to use?—so she never let much time pass between hauls. Never handed in her rig. Simply hooked up the next train and went back out again. Over time she gutted out the cabin of all its extremities and filled it in again with all her little touches. Posters, fun ashtrays picked up here and there, potted plants. Oh, how she loved her plants (had never seen any before going starbound, after all). Her ryegrass and her thale cress, nasturtiums and dwarf peas. And she got to listen to her music, sleep on her schedule, eat whatever she wanted, and the work may have been hard and long and filthy but it wasn't all bad. Very soon the ship was her home.

So when the disillusionment started it started small. Insidious. Noticing if she bought the expensive clamshelled microwave dinners instead of the cheap styro ones sometimes she'd be rationing the last of her cigarettes at month's end. That if she splurged for the fancy water-retaining flower feeds she had to skip every other cyberbooster shot. That she was patching and taping her boots instead of buying new ones. That sorta thing. It didn't make sense with how far she'd trimmed back her cost-of-living, but there it was. She tried just about every polite recourse; every legal, HR-approved avenue of conflict resolution. She'd ask for a raise, or if not a raise then at least for commuting hours between gigs to count toward overtime, because she was still moving the ship wasn't she, it wasn't personal time or any kind of vacation, she was still keeping company property safe from thieves and asteroid dings, still keeping insurance premiums down with her squeaky-clean driving record, no tickets, no accidents. No dice, of course. So she'd backpedal, saying at the very least, at the very least, she wanted a PPE stipend, because she was sick of buying new boots and new jumpsuits out of pocket. But it always ended the same way; they'd say, well, DeeDee (that was her radio callsign, DeeDee), if you have enough money for booze and cigarettes then you must be making off alright ("making off," like she was a fucking thief for even asking, like she was the villain for being there for the paycheck and not for the love of the company). And it was always the way they said it, their tones dripping with insinuation like she was taking advantage of them. And every time she had to bite her tongue it tasted slightly bitterer. Until eventually the resentment became something she couldn't bury anymore, couldn't ignore like a toothache too expensive to bring to the dentbot for filling.

A little time theft here, a little drinking on the clock there, nicking company supplies, these made Desna feel better but didn't amount to much in the way of her due compensation. It was through her coworkers that she found her answer. See, she had known more or less her entire stint at QuadOptimum that some of them had a kind of side-gig going on. From the way they whispered, glancing over their shoulders, she knew not to inquire; not to pry; not if she was going to make enemies out of it, and the retaliation was going to bite her back in the worst of ways. Even so, spending all that time onloading and offloading, invoicing and pre-flight-checking, she was bound to notice sooner than not. When the supes and the foremen weren't in, these coworkers would switch off the warehouse cameras and load up other, surreptitious goods alongside the legitimate; goods which didn't appear on the bills-of-lading; ones they were most particular about stashing well out of sight, behind dozens and dozens of freight containers, in odd corners and little latched alcoves. These illicit shipments and deliveries added trivial minutes to their ETAs if any at all, but made the drivers thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of heliodollars in a single round trip. They were, in the simplest terms, mules: each taking what seemed the merest modicum of risk, but raking it in big. All Desna had to do was convince the right people she was on the level (ie. not a company narc); get connected; do what she was already doing, just with one or two more little stops on the way; and finally she wouldn't have to merely survive anymore but could finally live. It worked, and on her next delivery, stowed among box after box of Grabbitz!™, the latest collect-'em-all vinyl figure craze, were a dozen small crates of bootleg infolink cracking kits. And all she had to do was play it cool through the Anchor checkpoints, and leave a certain side door to her rig unlocked in a certain hangar at a certain time, and a certain someone would go inside for an inspection, and the contraband would be out of her hands and on the next ship before she could even fret about it. And Desna's eyes bulged when she checked the number on the debit chit awaiting her beneath her floormats (just where the very nice man had said it would be), and she used the money to buy an expensive bourbon to celebrate, and whiskey had never tasted so sweet.

Ten months later, wearing a robin's-egg-cyan jumpsuit, the shackles chafing her ankles and the gavel gleaming under hot yellow lights, she considered blaming those coworkers for putting the idea in her head with their nice landcars, their shiny cybernetics that never jammed or stuck. She considered blaming QuadOptimum; the wage theft, the deduction of "wasteful and fraudulent" fuel use from her paystubs, simple managerial embezzlement, all these things she was so sure were happening but couldn't prove. She considered blaming a society which had made it too expensive to live and then punished everyone who refused to roll over and rot. But in the end she plead guilty, and so began her life as a criminal. Blacklisted from her industry of expertise; unemployable, except as min-wage grunt labor. Getting herself thrown back in almost as quickly as the wardens could process her release papers because at least in the slammer there was work, there were lights, there were heaters, clean water, food, medcare. No longer a mere jaywalking dilettante but a true-blue, in-and-out yardbird.

Only now it's thirty years later and the points on her record have racked up, and if Desna goes back then she's going back for good; no more digging up the keys to her cell from the bottom of a desk drawer, no more good behavior appeals, no more "And don't come back this time!" And something about the permanence of it, about staring at her own little slice of eternity with its metal walls and metal door and metal toilet, has utterly and thoroughly terrified her. She doesn't want to go back. She can't go back. But what can she do? Blacklisted by the only industry she's ever worked in, her skillset not transferable anywhere else; who could possibly have a use for a part-time smuggler, part-time bail dodger, a washed-up freight pilot with a rap sheet?...

Astute enough to recognize when she is being mistreated, exploited, or dehumanized—yet not so gifted with the emotional or linguistic intelligence to alter her situation, as might a cyberpunk or even the typical corpo climber—Desna leads a resentful, deeply distrusting existence. Lied to and stolen from, swindled and scapegoated and cheated, always the little guy taken along for a ride, always the easy mark, the customer, for over half a century she's had to learn the hard way. The costly way. Placing her faith in people, in institutions, and time and time again having only the dust, and the ashes, and the bitter, ugly taste in her mouth to remember them by. Employers, lovers, pension plans; shit, she can't even fall in love with a hole-in-the-wall ramen joint or dive bar without the place going under or getting bought out or shrinking its portions or raising its prices or all of the above a few months into the whole sordid little affair. And then the friends. Yeah. Especially the "friends."

So Desna's not here for anyone else, and damn well not for the fond memories. She's here because she's up to her raisined tits in medical debt; desperate and out of any better options (safer, more legal options), and her retirement plan is to work until she can't anymore, until she literally falls over one day and breaks a hip and lays there helpless, squalid until the rot sets in. She knows it. Cpt. Everest knows it too (probably why she despises him). Only question is how many days she's got left in her. She'll sooner bust an airlock and suck the rest of the crew and herself out into space than let someone pity her over it, but it's the naked truth: she's damaged, obsolete, a downgrade from someone younger and less experienced and willing to work harder for less. Slow, and slower every day. Yes, some deep-seated part of Desna is acutely aware of the injustice of it all. All the decisions she can't take back. Every missed chance. Every self-absorbed, petulant, cozily moronic nepo-baby born into a smoking jacket and a stim addiction while billions of good, hardworking people break themselves for a heeliebuck.

And yet somehow every time she wakes in the "morning" and peers out through a porthole or through the breath-dewed visor of a pressure suit, she still manages to marvel at the stars. She still enjoys every single cigarette as much as the first, even after forty-something years at two packs a day; still savors every beer cracked open alongside her reconstituted breakfast. A part of her still hums or sings when she thinks no one can hear her (somehow having gone her whole life not knowing how a ship's conduits like to carry away with the sound). Almost like somewhere in there, behind the thorns and the cynicism and the vitriol, there is still a little Venutian girl looking up at a sulfur-colored sky and wondering what lies beyond the impenetrable, interminable clouds. What opportunity. What boundless resplendence.

A squat, stout creature with a distinctly waddling gait—sturdy in her core, and stronger than she looks, yet balanced upon ruined knees, ruined hips and ankles; swollen, spongy, arthritic. A variety of gouts, corns, and bone spurs ruins her extremities, leaving her gnarled and knobby, tumid-seeming in the joints. And her hands bow and curl in ways hands shouldn't: crushed and never casted; never splinted, never iced; until after each ensuing injury they began to shore up strange and aslant. Until, in the hammering, and the weathering and the straining, they resembled bent roofing-nails more than fingers at all.

Her leathery, flabby rind is a tapestry of erratic burn scars and faded, blurry prison tats. Other colors too. The third knuckles on her left hand tarred yellow by the cigarette smoke. The surrounding skin an oily blackish-gold—dirty supercoolants and engine oils worked into every groove, every crevice of her handprints and never coming out no matter what chemical she uses, what brush what scourer. (It was long ago she stopped trying to get them clean again.) Always a cigarette between her diamondoid-enamelate teeth. Those lumpy fingers always wrapped around a tool handle or if not a handtool then the scrawny neck of a bottle.

Ever wearing the same shabby, grease and tar-stained tac boots. Always the same boilersuit. If she's cold she throws over it a type of bathrobe she's fond of, flower and cherry blossom print in thick terry. But louder than these colors and patterns, more pungent than the tobacco smoke and the dirty oil and the sour sweat, she wears the melancholy softly as a perfume, and it's the November rainwater scent of someone who stopped trying to be beautiful a long, long time ago.