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Orla Caitlin Rhatigan was born on a space ship, the youngest of four children. It was her father's ship, a cargo hauler, while her mother was a software developer for an entertainment company, specializing in the manipulation of the inner ear to create holos with a sense of movement.
Ships comfortable enough to live and have families on were only about twenty to thirty years old when Orla was born. Before the invention of artificial gravity plating and shielding, ships had to imitate gravity with rotation forces or go without it, and new stabilization technologies made faster-than-light travel tolerable for children and pets. It was only around the birth of Orla's oldest brother that the negative effects of growing up in space began to be realized; small stature, fragile bones, and problems with future living in near-Earth non-artificial gravity. Moons, certain space stations, and other ships are all that a typical spacer will be able to live on (presumably, if Orla lives in Duplicity long enough to have problems, the more dangerous ones can be healed as needed). By Orla's adulthood, the official UEP (United Earth Powers, the human spacefaring government) position is that raising children in space is likely unsafe, but not enough that they can actually restrict reproductive rights or remove children from their parents.
The full spectrum of issues were still not well understood by Orla's birth, however, so she grew up with three older brothers, bouncing around a zero-gravity cargo hold, playing hide and seek when it was full and dancing across the open space when it was empty. Learning of the problems she may have one day only made her more determined to prove that she was strong, more determined to keep up with her brothers.
At 16, Orla jumped between two airlocks, separated by thirty meters or so, without any protective gear. This is perfectly survivable -- humans can generate enough force to propel themselves several meters a second, in a vacuum, and we can hold our breath for a couple of minutes. Space is cold, yes, but a vacuum doesn't conduct heat very well. The real problem is the pressure -- if you get the tube of a very strong vacuum stuck to your skin, you'll get a bruise, like a hickey. Full-body hickies are unpleasant, but not especially disabling. Unfortunately, Orla's eyes were damaged as part of this stunt. She could see, but she had to spend a couple of weeks with her eyes bandaged, and she was warned that they were still healing when the bandages came off.
Angry, she came back from this incident only more determined to prove that she was totally strong and a badass. More reckless behavior ensued (mostly not involving airlocks). A few months later, she was technically grounded, not allowed to leave the ship, but her brother Kerry (the youngest of the three boys, not quite two years older than Orla) helped her sneak off. The two of them snuck onto another ship, a small maintenance boat, and took it out of port, intending to have a little joyride around the station and be back before anyone noticed.
Unfortunately, someone noticed. Within minutes, they were being chased dead away from the station by more UEP police and military force than they knew how to deal with. Kerry was in the pilot's seat, so Orla was with the engine, trying desperately to bypass the anti-theft measures slowing them down. Like teenagers since time immemorial, they'd done something stupid and gotten in over their heads. The most surprising thing was that Orla's efforts eventually succeeded...only for security measures to kick in.
Orla was at her adult height, but her adult height is well under five feet -- if she'd been taller, the nonlethal electrical shock would have hit her in the upper center mass, making her fall. And if she'd been healthy, a nonlethal electrical shock to the face would hurt like hell, possibly doing some damage, but she would likely sustain only mild injuries. Instead, Kerry could only see his little sister lying still on the deck, her face turned away, but blood on her shirt.
Now in a flat panic and with the ship's full capabilities available, Kerry ran to the only place he could think of, an "unlisted port" his father had visited for work a few times. In the next few hours, it turned out that Orla was alive and could be healed, but her eyes were beyond repair -- the only way she could be expected to see again would be with expensive implants which often provide something very different from real vision, and have a small chance of not working at all.
Kerry was young, but he understood risk-reward calculation, including the fact that every minute of Orla's care racked up a debt that he didn't know how they'd be expected to pay. So he made the decision: no implants, just get her healthy.
Orla and Kerry were allowed to recuperate for a couple of weeks, and Kerry was able to send one message to his family, carefully scrutinized and scrubbed of any details that might lead law enforcement to this port -- they can overlook some light contraband, some harmless smuggling, but what amounted to kidnapping two UEP citizens, one of whom was underage, would bring a great deal of force to bear.
When the bandages came off, Orla had healed remarkably well. Her care had been minimal, but of solid quality, leaving her scarred, but fully functional. She did still have to wear bandages at certain times, still healing from the original pressure injury, but most importantly, she had enough light perception to be able to navigate around a ship by the lights. She was handed a white cane and told to bang around her new ship until she figured it out, because she had a debt to pay.
At this point, Orla finally met the woman who had bankrolled her care, Mariana. Mostly, Orla remembers her cool hands and businesslike touch as she placed Orla's hands on various significant points, showing her around in the way that would be useful. The ship they'd stolen had been pulled into dry dock to have its identifying information scrubbed and extra security and tracking measures installed, including a remotely-triggered disabling device.
("What, like a bomb?"
"No. It will merely break down the molecular bonds of your engine, leaving you to freeze, or cook, or starve, depending mostly on what you were doing when I pressed the button.")
Orla and Kerry were left alone to talk in their new ship, and Kerry pointed out that they could make it home, get current coordinates from Mom and Dad and flee back into the arms of society. Their parents could afford the debt, or at least some of it, enough to keep these people off their backs and go back to their lives. But Orla saw her opportunity to finally do what she'd been trying to do her entire life: a chance to really, truly prove that she could keep up with anyone she felt like, that her physical limitations were nothing. It would only be sweeter for having a new limit to push against.
So Orla went to work as a smuggler for a woman who turned out to be the head of a pretty significant crime syndicate. Smuggling work is pretty boring 90% of the time, and deadly the other 10% if you can't think your way out of something fast. Fortunately, Orla had always been whip-smart, and Kerry (having always been somewhat Orla's follower despite being older) was perceptive, quickly learning how to fill gaps for Orla when she didn't have information she needed.
By the time Orla was 22, she and Kerry both had rap sheets of modest length, and they had long since worked off the debt of her medical care. The Rhatigan smugglers were also known for reliability, a willingness to be reckless in pursuit of getting the job done; Mariana dumped a pile of requests to hire them into Orla's inbox when they finally left her service with their own ship: the Lonely Sidhe.
This was why Orla and Kerry had stayed in Mariana's employ so long: they paid off Orla's care and the associated costs, they paid off the alterations to the ship (after which the disabling and tracking devices were finally uninstalled, as they were now willing and not indentured), and then they saved up enough money to get the ship they really wanted. Orla had scrimped and saved enough to pay a larger share of their new (legally acquired) ship, the Lonely Sidhe, making her officially, legally, Captain Orla Rhatigan.
They flew to one of the deeper unlisted ports, the kind of places that family men do not go to buy duty-free nicotine sticks. Here, they hired their own crew. Phil became their pilot, being fresh off a five-year tour with UEP pirate hunters and having decided to switch sides. Gemma, a wealthy man's daughter with no criminal record of her own, was brought on to help open doors that a former kidnapping victim did not have access to. Finally, Rich was muscle.
Other crew were hired at this time who came and went -- building a pirate and smuggling crew takes some trial and error, and most new crewmates go through a few captains with no hard feelings before finding someone they want to throw their weight behind. Others settle with split loyalties, like Gemma, who still comes and goes from the crew, an untamable free spirit. Orla was never actually entirely sure why Rich didn't move on, because he never actually seemed to like her much, but he did what he was told and he was good at his job.
A few years into the life, Orla hired Bree, who openly came onto Orla from the start (not entirely taboo, but really not the done thing). A few months later, Kerry sat down and told Orla he wanted to leave and start a family. That was the first night Orla crawled into Bree's quarters, and a month later, the crew attended his wedding. With Kerry gone, Phil was offered a promotion and turned it down, so Bree was made first mate. Not only because Orla was fucking her (though it didn't hurt), but because she and Orla understood each other, often thinking on the same wavelength with much less effort than others.
This, apparently, was a silent last straw for Rich, and he began plotting mutiny. He was all right at it, knowing who to not bother approaching, but he wasn't counting on Phil listening to all of the recorded voice logs in the ship. Phil managed to hear one too many "casual" comments as Rich worked at sowing discord, and once he began looking for a pattern, it jumped out. Phil brought his findings to Orla, who had Rich locked in his quarters. It transpired that he could stomach working under Orla when he felt it obvious that Kerry was the real showrunner, but to be under a small, blind spacer with no particular intimidation factor and only the woman she was fucking for a first mate, this could not be endured.
Rich had been speaking to other crews about his mutiny, so an example needed to be made. Orla spent a couple of days harming him in whatever manner she could think of -- she had him beaten and cut by anyone in the crew who was willing, of course, but she also fucked with the temperature settings, played loud sounds, starved him, everything she could think of. At the end of it, the Lonely Sidhe flew to a large unlisted port and jettisoned the body out an airlock in front of one of the port's external view windows. Anyone who'd been caught on record collaborating or agreeing with Rich was sent video. Additionally, two of his cousins went missing soon after, his sister lost an eye, and his widow walks with a limp.
Orla was ready to take this incident as a reminder never to trust anyone. But in the middle of it, at night when Orla crawled into her bed for stress relief, Bree took Orla's hands and told the captain her father's name. Then her mother's name, then her aunts and uncles, and all the rest of her family. Orla realized after a little while what it was: Bree was giving her all the ammunition she'd ever need to keep her first mate in line, or punish her should she step out of it. Such an act of vulnerability and trust was incredibly powerful to Orla in that moment of her life, and Orla would later credit this as the night she fell in love with Bree.
Orla didn't exactly reciprocate, not with words, but she arranged a few hours in holo beds for them and arranged for them to go visit Orla's less-accessible brothers, then left Phil and the other crew with a couple days of shore leave while they took the ship alone to visit Orla's parents and Kerry. Orla introduced Bree as her girlfriend rather than her first mate, and said that yes, things were getting serious, when her family asked. The time in the holo beds also marked Orla's first time seeing Bree's face.
("You better marry me now, viewing me with unprotected eyes like a whore."
"Maybe I will!! Bitch!!")
Over the next few years, Orla began to rely on Bree more in private. Though Bree was the loyal guard dog in public, never daring to do anything that wouldn't just reinforce Orla's authority, in private they strategized together and made a good team. They were making more money, but also attracting more heat. It was around this time that Orla got a neural implant for disguise purposes, and Bree got one for...other reasons. Other crew came and went during this time, but Orla's reputation for how she handled the previous mutiny has kept away those who might make trouble for her.
Orla and Bree married, and in order to maintain the image of Orla being totally in control, Bree took her name. Finally, "the Rhatigan criminals" was a phrase on tongues again, only this time it referred to wives instead of siblings. A couple of years after their marriage, Orla and Bree decided to have a child. Most of their jobs weren't an active danger to their ship, so the baby would be safe on board until they were ready to retire, and there are cheap, basic robots that can take care of an infant for a few hours while the parents work. They underwent a procedure to harvest eggs from both of them, as well as a Y chromosome from one of their male relatives so the gender could be randomized (the clinic basically flipped a coin about whether to swap out an X or not). They decided that, since she already didn't require any physical prowess, Orla would carry.
Spacer pregnancies can be hard at the best of times, and Orla was injured on a job early in her pregnancy, making the rest of it difficult and painful. When her time neared, Orla gave her crew shore leave again and went to her parents' ship, equipped with a much better infirmary than the Lonely Sidhe, and they were able to call a doctor friend in for help. After a day of labor, she delivered a baby boy by c-section. Shore leave became "take any temp job with any other crew who will have you, it's going to be a few months."
Declan is now seven months old, and Orla is beginning to gather her crew back to her for their next job. She wants more children (Bree will carry this time) and to make a home somewhere, at least until her kids are old enough to decide whether they want to pirate with their moms or go have legit lives with their grandparents. But sure as the sky's black, she's not ready to retire just yet.
Ships comfortable enough to live and have families on were only about twenty to thirty years old when Orla was born. Before the invention of artificial gravity plating and shielding, ships had to imitate gravity with rotation forces or go without it, and new stabilization technologies made faster-than-light travel tolerable for children and pets. It was only around the birth of Orla's oldest brother that the negative effects of growing up in space began to be realized; small stature, fragile bones, and problems with future living in near-Earth non-artificial gravity. Moons, certain space stations, and other ships are all that a typical spacer will be able to live on (presumably, if Orla lives in Duplicity long enough to have problems, the more dangerous ones can be healed as needed). By Orla's adulthood, the official UEP (United Earth Powers, the human spacefaring government) position is that raising children in space is likely unsafe, but not enough that they can actually restrict reproductive rights or remove children from their parents.
The full spectrum of issues were still not well understood by Orla's birth, however, so she grew up with three older brothers, bouncing around a zero-gravity cargo hold, playing hide and seek when it was full and dancing across the open space when it was empty. Learning of the problems she may have one day only made her more determined to prove that she was strong, more determined to keep up with her brothers.
At 16, Orla jumped between two airlocks, separated by thirty meters or so, without any protective gear. This is perfectly survivable -- humans can generate enough force to propel themselves several meters a second, in a vacuum, and we can hold our breath for a couple of minutes. Space is cold, yes, but a vacuum doesn't conduct heat very well. The real problem is the pressure -- if you get the tube of a very strong vacuum stuck to your skin, you'll get a bruise, like a hickey. Full-body hickies are unpleasant, but not especially disabling. Unfortunately, Orla's eyes were damaged as part of this stunt. She could see, but she had to spend a couple of weeks with her eyes bandaged, and she was warned that they were still healing when the bandages came off.
Angry, she came back from this incident only more determined to prove that she was totally strong and a badass. More reckless behavior ensued (mostly not involving airlocks). A few months later, she was technically grounded, not allowed to leave the ship, but her brother Kerry (the youngest of the three boys, not quite two years older than Orla) helped her sneak off. The two of them snuck onto another ship, a small maintenance boat, and took it out of port, intending to have a little joyride around the station and be back before anyone noticed.
Unfortunately, someone noticed. Within minutes, they were being chased dead away from the station by more UEP police and military force than they knew how to deal with. Kerry was in the pilot's seat, so Orla was with the engine, trying desperately to bypass the anti-theft measures slowing them down. Like teenagers since time immemorial, they'd done something stupid and gotten in over their heads. The most surprising thing was that Orla's efforts eventually succeeded...only for security measures to kick in.
Orla was at her adult height, but her adult height is well under five feet -- if she'd been taller, the nonlethal electrical shock would have hit her in the upper center mass, making her fall. And if she'd been healthy, a nonlethal electrical shock to the face would hurt like hell, possibly doing some damage, but she would likely sustain only mild injuries. Instead, Kerry could only see his little sister lying still on the deck, her face turned away, but blood on her shirt.
Now in a flat panic and with the ship's full capabilities available, Kerry ran to the only place he could think of, an "unlisted port" his father had visited for work a few times. In the next few hours, it turned out that Orla was alive and could be healed, but her eyes were beyond repair -- the only way she could be expected to see again would be with expensive implants which often provide something very different from real vision, and have a small chance of not working at all.
Kerry was young, but he understood risk-reward calculation, including the fact that every minute of Orla's care racked up a debt that he didn't know how they'd be expected to pay. So he made the decision: no implants, just get her healthy.
Orla and Kerry were allowed to recuperate for a couple of weeks, and Kerry was able to send one message to his family, carefully scrutinized and scrubbed of any details that might lead law enforcement to this port -- they can overlook some light contraband, some harmless smuggling, but what amounted to kidnapping two UEP citizens, one of whom was underage, would bring a great deal of force to bear.
When the bandages came off, Orla had healed remarkably well. Her care had been minimal, but of solid quality, leaving her scarred, but fully functional. She did still have to wear bandages at certain times, still healing from the original pressure injury, but most importantly, she had enough light perception to be able to navigate around a ship by the lights. She was handed a white cane and told to bang around her new ship until she figured it out, because she had a debt to pay.
At this point, Orla finally met the woman who had bankrolled her care, Mariana. Mostly, Orla remembers her cool hands and businesslike touch as she placed Orla's hands on various significant points, showing her around in the way that would be useful. The ship they'd stolen had been pulled into dry dock to have its identifying information scrubbed and extra security and tracking measures installed, including a remotely-triggered disabling device.
("What, like a bomb?"
"No. It will merely break down the molecular bonds of your engine, leaving you to freeze, or cook, or starve, depending mostly on what you were doing when I pressed the button.")
Orla and Kerry were left alone to talk in their new ship, and Kerry pointed out that they could make it home, get current coordinates from Mom and Dad and flee back into the arms of society. Their parents could afford the debt, or at least some of it, enough to keep these people off their backs and go back to their lives. But Orla saw her opportunity to finally do what she'd been trying to do her entire life: a chance to really, truly prove that she could keep up with anyone she felt like, that her physical limitations were nothing. It would only be sweeter for having a new limit to push against.
So Orla went to work as a smuggler for a woman who turned out to be the head of a pretty significant crime syndicate. Smuggling work is pretty boring 90% of the time, and deadly the other 10% if you can't think your way out of something fast. Fortunately, Orla had always been whip-smart, and Kerry (having always been somewhat Orla's follower despite being older) was perceptive, quickly learning how to fill gaps for Orla when she didn't have information she needed.
By the time Orla was 22, she and Kerry both had rap sheets of modest length, and they had long since worked off the debt of her medical care. The Rhatigan smugglers were also known for reliability, a willingness to be reckless in pursuit of getting the job done; Mariana dumped a pile of requests to hire them into Orla's inbox when they finally left her service with their own ship: the Lonely Sidhe.
This was why Orla and Kerry had stayed in Mariana's employ so long: they paid off Orla's care and the associated costs, they paid off the alterations to the ship (after which the disabling and tracking devices were finally uninstalled, as they were now willing and not indentured), and then they saved up enough money to get the ship they really wanted. Orla had scrimped and saved enough to pay a larger share of their new (legally acquired) ship, the Lonely Sidhe, making her officially, legally, Captain Orla Rhatigan.
They flew to one of the deeper unlisted ports, the kind of places that family men do not go to buy duty-free nicotine sticks. Here, they hired their own crew. Phil became their pilot, being fresh off a five-year tour with UEP pirate hunters and having decided to switch sides. Gemma, a wealthy man's daughter with no criminal record of her own, was brought on to help open doors that a former kidnapping victim did not have access to. Finally, Rich was muscle.
Other crew were hired at this time who came and went -- building a pirate and smuggling crew takes some trial and error, and most new crewmates go through a few captains with no hard feelings before finding someone they want to throw their weight behind. Others settle with split loyalties, like Gemma, who still comes and goes from the crew, an untamable free spirit. Orla was never actually entirely sure why Rich didn't move on, because he never actually seemed to like her much, but he did what he was told and he was good at his job.
A few years into the life, Orla hired Bree, who openly came onto Orla from the start (not entirely taboo, but really not the done thing). A few months later, Kerry sat down and told Orla he wanted to leave and start a family. That was the first night Orla crawled into Bree's quarters, and a month later, the crew attended his wedding. With Kerry gone, Phil was offered a promotion and turned it down, so Bree was made first mate. Not only because Orla was fucking her (though it didn't hurt), but because she and Orla understood each other, often thinking on the same wavelength with much less effort than others.
This, apparently, was a silent last straw for Rich, and he began plotting mutiny. He was all right at it, knowing who to not bother approaching, but he wasn't counting on Phil listening to all of the recorded voice logs in the ship. Phil managed to hear one too many "casual" comments as Rich worked at sowing discord, and once he began looking for a pattern, it jumped out. Phil brought his findings to Orla, who had Rich locked in his quarters. It transpired that he could stomach working under Orla when he felt it obvious that Kerry was the real showrunner, but to be under a small, blind spacer with no particular intimidation factor and only the woman she was fucking for a first mate, this could not be endured.
Rich had been speaking to other crews about his mutiny, so an example needed to be made. Orla spent a couple of days harming him in whatever manner she could think of -- she had him beaten and cut by anyone in the crew who was willing, of course, but she also fucked with the temperature settings, played loud sounds, starved him, everything she could think of. At the end of it, the Lonely Sidhe flew to a large unlisted port and jettisoned the body out an airlock in front of one of the port's external view windows. Anyone who'd been caught on record collaborating or agreeing with Rich was sent video. Additionally, two of his cousins went missing soon after, his sister lost an eye, and his widow walks with a limp.
Orla was ready to take this incident as a reminder never to trust anyone. But in the middle of it, at night when Orla crawled into her bed for stress relief, Bree took Orla's hands and told the captain her father's name. Then her mother's name, then her aunts and uncles, and all the rest of her family. Orla realized after a little while what it was: Bree was giving her all the ammunition she'd ever need to keep her first mate in line, or punish her should she step out of it. Such an act of vulnerability and trust was incredibly powerful to Orla in that moment of her life, and Orla would later credit this as the night she fell in love with Bree.
Orla didn't exactly reciprocate, not with words, but she arranged a few hours in holo beds for them and arranged for them to go visit Orla's less-accessible brothers, then left Phil and the other crew with a couple days of shore leave while they took the ship alone to visit Orla's parents and Kerry. Orla introduced Bree as her girlfriend rather than her first mate, and said that yes, things were getting serious, when her family asked. The time in the holo beds also marked Orla's first time seeing Bree's face.
("You better marry me now, viewing me with unprotected eyes like a whore."
"Maybe I will!! Bitch!!")
Over the next few years, Orla began to rely on Bree more in private. Though Bree was the loyal guard dog in public, never daring to do anything that wouldn't just reinforce Orla's authority, in private they strategized together and made a good team. They were making more money, but also attracting more heat. It was around this time that Orla got a neural implant for disguise purposes, and Bree got one for...other reasons. Other crew came and went during this time, but Orla's reputation for how she handled the previous mutiny has kept away those who might make trouble for her.
Orla and Bree married, and in order to maintain the image of Orla being totally in control, Bree took her name. Finally, "the Rhatigan criminals" was a phrase on tongues again, only this time it referred to wives instead of siblings. A couple of years after their marriage, Orla and Bree decided to have a child. Most of their jobs weren't an active danger to their ship, so the baby would be safe on board until they were ready to retire, and there are cheap, basic robots that can take care of an infant for a few hours while the parents work. They underwent a procedure to harvest eggs from both of them, as well as a Y chromosome from one of their male relatives so the gender could be randomized (the clinic basically flipped a coin about whether to swap out an X or not). They decided that, since she already didn't require any physical prowess, Orla would carry.
Spacer pregnancies can be hard at the best of times, and Orla was injured on a job early in her pregnancy, making the rest of it difficult and painful. When her time neared, Orla gave her crew shore leave again and went to her parents' ship, equipped with a much better infirmary than the Lonely Sidhe, and they were able to call a doctor friend in for help. After a day of labor, she delivered a baby boy by c-section. Shore leave became "take any temp job with any other crew who will have you, it's going to be a few months."
Declan is now seven months old, and Orla is beginning to gather her crew back to her for their next job. She wants more children (Bree will carry this time) and to make a home somewhere, at least until her kids are old enough to decide whether they want to pirate with their moms or go have legit lives with their grandparents. But sure as the sky's black, she's not ready to retire just yet.