“I don’t need clothes. It’s space. Nobody cares what you wear in space.”
“OOPS courier regulations require all vessel occupants to be over the age of sixteen unless accompanied by a licensed guardian during approved non-hazardous transit windows,” Dove says. She’s using her official voice—the one that handled Inspector Patel and three Blackstar enforcers—and Tavia recognises it.
Her markings dim. Not defeated. Regrouping.
“What if I got special permission?”
“From whom?”
“Mother Morrison. She runs OOPS. She can make exceptions.”
“Mother Morrison,” Dove says slowly, “once told a fully grown Kytherian commando that if he didn’t file his cargo manifests in triplicate, she’d have his docking privileges revoked across six systems. She is not going to override age requirements for an eight-year-old who packed a jar of dirt.”
“It’s a soil sample! It has scientific value!”
“Tavia.” I kneel to her level. Her markings are flickering between frustration and the particular yellow-bright intensity that means she’s formulating a counterargument. “When you’re sixteen, Dove will take you on a run. A real one.”
“Sixteen is eight entire years away!”
“During which you will learn navigation, emergency protocols, cargo management, and—”
“I already know cargo management! I managed the cargo when Dove-Mom first landed! I supervised!”
“You sat on a crate and ate a protein bar,” Pickles interjects.
“Supervisory eating!”
Dove kneels beside me. She takes Tavia’s hands—small, the tiny claw-tips retracted, trembling with the force of wanting something she can’t have yet.
“Here’s the deal, small person. I come back every time. Every run, I come home. But out there isn’t safe enough for you yet—storms between systems, debris fields, stations that aren’t set up for kids. When you’re old enough, I’ll teach you everything. Navigation, docking procedures, how to talk your way past a customs official who’s having a bad day.”
“What about a good day?”
“Those are harder. You’ll need the extra years.”
Tavia’s lip wobbles. She glances between us—father and Dove-Mom, united front, immovable—and employs her final weapon.
“Pickles. Tell them I should go.”
“I cannot in good conscience support a mission plan that rates two out of ten on preparedness,” Pickles says. “However, I will note that the small human’s enthusiasm for interstellar logistics is... commendable. And I look forward to training her myself when the time comes.”
“When I’m sixteen.”
“When you’re sixteen,” Pickles confirms. “At which point I will have had eight additional years to prepare a curriculum so thorough that no customs official, regardless of mood, will stand a chance.”
Tavia sighs with the full dramatic weight of a child denied the stars. She unpacks her rucksack, returns the soil sample to the lab, and pockets the stolen ration bars with a stealth that suggests this particular negotiation is far from over.
The colonist preview meeting runs the full four hours.
Dove commands it from the operations centre, and I watch her do it from the secondary console, where my official role is “technical advisor” and my actual function is trying not to broadcast mating displays on a live feed to four households.
She walks the Vasquez family through housing allocations. Answers the O’kere’ke family’s questions about medical provisions. Builds a recreational programme for the Nax’k children in real time when they mention their daughter has mobility limitations. She is calm and authoritative and prepared for every question, and she runs the entire meeting without referencing a single note because she built every system from raw data and holds it all in her head.
The claiming bond pulses steadily through my markings—gold, warm, proprietary—and I do not conceal it.
“Your father is glowing,” the Vasquez matriarch tells Tavia, who has stationed herself beside the camera with her own data pad and the gravity of a junior attaché.
“He does that,” Tavia says. “It’s a mating display. He can’t help it.”
