The fact that this program was coming together in a hurry was very obvious from crew the manifest; they were pulling people in from all over the service, and all of them on short notice. A lot of them shared previous services in ships which had just been decommissioned;
Hadfield-3, Hawking-21,
Tereshkova-4… and
Mendel-5.
Looks like the old girl hadn't made it. I wasn't surprised, it was already two years into a three year mission and it probably needed a serious rebuild given damage, neutron activation, and the Zinovian shuttle still sticking out the side. Still, good on Selena for making the jump to Security Senior, even if that meant she had to get stuck in a rocket with us again.
This was going to be interesting.
Every entry had a variety of statistics next to them; departments, years service, station and ship postings, and medical alerts. That was important for logistics and so on; for instance, if you gave a flatlining gene-edited Martian the same jolt of oxygenated plasma you'd give a baseline Terran, they'd live, sure, you'd just end up with a grand-mal seizure on your hands from oxygen poisoning. So having that info on their ID card made perfect sense.
This crew was a diverse lot; we had a couple cyborgs who needed stocks of replacement parts, a few medical dependencies, allergies both trivial and serious, normal stuff. I'd looked through these records before as part of my admin duties, but I was seeing stuff that I think had been censored before. I guess it's probably pretty important for a vehicle commander to know who had minor psychic abilities, who was augmented beyond nearbaseline, and who was taking antipsychotics, but it was still a little uncomfortable.
That's life in space, though. If you expected privacy, you're in the wrong line of work. There were consent forms for this information's release, which we knew because you and I had to sign a bunch about our plural stuff. Rubbing shoulders on a ship, anything that could be problematic had to be known.
Which is how I noticed we had an alien crew member. I might have just scrolled over the name, but it was impossible to miss the giant warnings of the commonplace painkillers that would be poison and the alternate resuscitation methods that the crew would need to be taught and so forth. Specialist Kroshtnyr Satkol was a Zinovian.
Curious, I opened the file. A picture greeted me of a woman with brownish, almost orange skin, yellow-white furlike hair pulled back tightly, and ridge lines along her forehead and cheekbones where subdermal plating was installed. Her eyes were an unnaturally deep green. There was a vaguely feline energy to her, but more terrifying adult lioness stalking a gazelle than your average cute kittycat girl with access to gene mods.
Her file said she was a defector, jumped ship from a spy station five years ago and had tried to settle on Titan. Not for long, though, she applied to join Star Patrol within a year, but she'd been held up for a long time in security review. She'd done a mixture of Academy classes and tested certs, then a rotation of posts on refuelling centres and near-Earth science posts. Her file was filled with affirmations of her loyalty, competence, and drive, though no particular commendations owing to the frankly boring nature of the posts
I'd served with aliens before, but mostly various Aquillians, who were by far the majority of alien volunteers. Never a Zinovian, I wasn't even really aware there were any in Star Patrol, though I knew there had to be a few because Zinovian defectors and refugees weren't uncommon. Hell, some of the prisoners we'd taken (you'd taken, to be accurate) were probably applying for asylum right now, given that their government didn't tend to look kindly on those who surrendered.
Curious, I poked my head in on the biological section, just to see if there was anything important to note. From what I remember, the Zinovians made aggressive use of genetic modding. Sure enough, her file claimed she'd been modified pre-natally for 'analytical intelligence', with scare quotes giving that all dubious weight it probably deserved. As a result, she was medically dependent on neurotransmitter receptor blockers or she'd start suffering dissociative episodes and photosensitive seizures.
There was a laundry list of other warnings, given how far removed her biology was from terran life, but all of it was manageable and she could at least eat the same food for the most part. It was fine, it was going to be fine. I set the file aside, stretched, and glanced out the window. Most of the crew would be arriving tomorrow, so that meant I had a little time.
I thumbed through the comm controls until I saw a familiar name.
"Monty to Specialist Shilubana-Bolonkin, you there Nyiko?
"What's up, captain?"
"Have I got time for a little EVA before we test-fire the engines?"
---
A thing that downwellers sometimes struggle with is that not all spacers are quite the same, there's a pretty wide variety of lifestyles out in the stars. That was evident right now as we walked along the outside of the hull, if you compared Nyiko's confident stride with my more measured steps and insistence on looking at my feet.
"You okay, Monty?" he asked.
"Yeah, just a little more of an indoor cat, that's all," I replied. I forced myself to look up, and I felt my hands tightening against my safety line as I did. It wasn't the zero G, we're great at that, nor was it the pressure of the suit or anything. It was the
size. Don't like anywhere you can't see the walls.
"Cool, isn't it? Look, my granddad lives right down there in that section, left of the round piece, see?" Nyiko exclaimed, reaching a head above him to point to the Lunar surface which loomed in the sky.
"That's awesome," I replied, very distinctly not looking. "Come on, we're going around back."
"I still don't understand, the dock'll have been over it a dozen times," Nyiko insisted.
"Yeah, well, this is our one chance to look at it with our own eyes. An hour from now, everything behind those lights is going to be so radioactive you'll get cancer if you think about it too long. I want to see the whole ship while I can. Call it a safety thing."
"Alright. No handholds back there, just warning you," he said. "Not much use for them."
"That's why we have the boots," I replied.
We pushed off onto the nacelles and walked back, the spire of the FTL ring strut jutting out like a tower, then down toward the far end of the ship. It wasn't very far at all; ships always seemed large and looming when you were just a ways away and then surprisingly small when you got close.
Yeager-1 was just over a hundred metres from end to end, and we're exited at roughly the halfway point airlock.
Finally, we arrived at the corrugated engine radiator panels; they looked like the rest of the ship, but instead of the outer layer of aluminized steel, it was tantalum hafnium carbide alloy. When the engines operated in economy mode, firing pure reaction products, these radiators kept the assembly cool, and could reach temperatures in excess of 3000k.
"Welp, it's a ship," Nyiko said, clapping me on the back. "You wanna swing over and take a look at the magnetic nozzles too?"
"No, this should be good. Gimme a moment," I said, walking along the outer curve until I arrived on the inner surface, the other four engines looming around me. More power than this ship's namesake could have imagined when he broke the sound barrier, so much that the speed limit on these engines was how much reaction mass we were willing to burn, how many Gs the gravity systems could cancel before it squished us into our crash couches. The primordial power of the early universe, channelled by magnetic fields to bring us the stars. In exchange, that power would poison this place; nobody would ever see it up close again.
I drew an engineering pen from my bag, and knelt down.
---
What do you write or draw on the side? Cultural context: your character is a vaguely American communist astronaut whose pop culture is very 1960s inspired, so midcentury memes encouraged.
[ ] Write In
After your crew arrives, you'll be going on your shakedown cruise, and doing some tests, then heading out along the beacon network to your mission area.
What sidetracks you?
[ ] A distress beacon from a Star Rescue ship which is being chased by unknown attackers!
[ ] A distress beacon from a station which is being threatened by extremists!
[ ] A distress beacon from a cargo ship which is being menaced by pirates!
