Althea's jump ship rammed through the airlock's force fields at a ludicrous speed. The shockwave from the sudden appearance of molecules where there were none before rattled the landing bay. Several other nearby landers almost jumped their chocks. Tremyr stormed over to the jumpship and tried several times to say something, anything to Althea. He finally settled on crossing his arms and glaring at her. Althea popped the door of the jumpship. As she shook off the last of the deceleration disorientation, she smiled and gave Tremyr the thumbs-up signal. As she stepped down the ladder, several beer cans clattered to the deck. She nodded toward the mess on the deck. "Have your minions see to that will you?" "I'm not in charge and they're not my minions. You said you were coming in on fire. That..." he said, indicating a fully not-in-flames jump ship, "isn't hot! There're emergency protocols to follow! You should've cleared--" Althea held up one finger and waved it in Tremyr's face. "I _am_ hot." Her finger point gesture turned into an elegant hand wave across the curves of her of her nanosuit as if to present a great work of art. "I told you before not to get your panties all wadded up. Now, I'm headed for the showers and you're not invited... this time." She gave him a wink over her shoulder and strutted to the nearest exit. He steamed for a moment, then muttered to no-one in particular, "Yeah, you _were_ hot... twenty bloody years ago." Tremyr startled a little as a hand grasped his shoulder. Ingdor, the dockmaster smiled at him. "I beg to disagree, mister." Ingdor pointed at the retreating form silhouetted against the bright lights of the transition corridor, "She's still pretty hot." Tremyr shook his head slowly. "Isn't there some cargo you should be unloading somewhere?" Ingdor raised both hands, palms up and shrugged, grinning as he turned to address his crew of AI robots. "Come along, my minions. There's cargo about!" - - - - - - Another bit from my ongoing space opera started here: Amazon CE:4396 This image almost didn't make it out of my computer. 3 hard reboots and various compromises later, here it is. I like the dialog and scene itself enough that I'm going to try to animate it. Lots of compromises will have to made in the lighting and probably textures to get render times lower (4 hours for this one). Should be an interesting exercise! At least one other still image will come from this bit of narrative. Thanks for stopping by and having a look!