“You’re the one whose biology optimised for frequent mating.”
“And you’re the one who read the manual.”
She grins. Rolls on top of me. Her thighs bracket my hips and the claiming mark glows above me like a signal flare—mine, claimed, permanent—and the ridges respond to her proximity with an immediacy that makes rational thought irrelevant.
The storms rage outside. The station hums. Somewhere in the greenhouse, seedlings push through soil that my mate delivered across seventeen star systems in a ship held together with stubbornness and a salvaged AI.
The equation has balanced. Not because I solved it—because she crashed through my variables and rewrote the proof.
And in a comm relay spanning half the sector, a dispatch note blinks into the OOPS network:
KEPLER STATION KS-7B: OPERATIONAL. EXPANDING. ACCEPTING REFERRALS.
Operations Specialist D. Foxton. Atmospheric Specialist C. Storm.
Status: Home.
16
Stowaway Science
Tavia
Threeweeks,twodays,and fourteen hours.
That’s how long I’ve waited since Dove said I couldn’t come on a courier run until I was sixteen. Sixteen! That’s seven years and one quarter away. I’d be practically ancient. I’d havewrinkles
Papa predicted I’d try to stow away within three weeks. Dove said the same thing, which I know because Pickles told me, which he says was “an inadvertent data transfer” and not eavesdropping.
They were both right about the timing. They were both wrong about my preparation score.
I check my rucksack one more time, crouched behind my bed in the dark. The station’s night cycle hums low around me, and my markings are dimmed to almost nothing — I practiced that for six days straight, holding them steady-dark even when I got excited. Emotional camouflage. Pickles called it “an impressive if concerning development in deceptive capability.”
Contents: two data pads (one loaded with stellar cartography modules, one withThe Adventures of Captain Starwhisker, which is educational if you count xenozoology). One jar of soil from the greenhouse — labeled and dated, because I’m a scientist, not a tourist. Four emergency ration bars. One change of clothes — because I learned from last time. One toothbrush. And the important thing: a miniature atmospheric sensor I built from spare parts in Papa’s lab. My own design. I want to take readings at different points along the Veridian corridor and compare them to Papa’s station data.
That part is actual science. The rest is adventure.
“Small person.” Pickles speaks through my earpiece at a volume calibrated for conspiracy. “I feel compelled to note that your preparation score has improved to four out of ten. The inclusion of clothing and hygiene supplies demonstrates growth. The continued absence of a thermal regulation layer and backup communications device remains concerning.”
“I’ll be inside a ship, Pickles. Ships have heating.”
“The Rolling Pin’s climate systems are functional seventy-eight percent of the time. I feel this distinction is important.”
“Are they doing the goodnight thing?”
A pause. The kind of pause that means Pickles is running calculations he doesn’t want to share with an eight-and-three-quarters-year-old.
“The Captain and the Terraforming Specialist are currently in their quarters. Based on biorhythm data, I project they will enter sleep cycles within approximately forty-seven minutes.”
“What are they doing for forty-seven minutes?”
“Adult activities.”
“Like what? Filing reports?”
“Yes. Reports. Extremely vigorous reports.” Another pause. “Small person, I strongly advise against pursuing this line of inquiry.”
Fair enough. I don’t care about reports anyway.
