We ended up standing in the middle of the freighter’s main loading bay for most of an hour. I wasn’t angry, I’m sure the captain was busy, but we didn’t quite know the reason for our wait.

“It’ll be all right,” Brenda said.

“Probably,” I replied. “But I’d feel a lot better if we weren’t standing next to those space doors. That’s hard vacuum on the other side and we don’t have any spacesuits.”

“You got on board,” Brenda pointed out. “And the ship was already in space.”

“Yes, but that’s different.”

“Not really,” she said. “There was always vacuum beyond the other space doors.”

I looked across the loading bay and felt foolish.

Eventually the captain came. “How long you two know each other?”

“Uh, nearly all our lives. Twenty years,” I said.

“And you just got married here?”

“We wanted to be married on the starliner,” Brenda said. “But they were overbooked. There was no time.”

“As soon as we boarded, they put us in stasis,” I said.

“Not drowned in blue goo?”

“No sir.”

The captain swore.