I was left alone with my thoughts for the first time since waking up. I hadn't made any sense of anything yet, but at least I was safe for the moment, and I was sure I could return to my crew at some stage, which was the main concern. The day before, a dozen people from my crew had seen me off to my trip back home and today was three hundred years later and mankind was sort of screwed. I grabbed a datapad but before I could figure out the interface, the door to the infirmary slid open and a redhead with a pixie cut burst into the infirmary.
"Bettina Jarno, chief engineer, how are you?" she smiled and extended a hand, which I shook.
"Lucas Shaw, doing well, thank you, all things considered."
I have no problem to admit why I went to the academy to become a spacer. Some people went to have a career. Some people wanted to explore and do science. I just love women in uniform. Even civilian spacers wear uniform, and the only thing better than watching women move around in them is to peel women out of them. Bettina already was dressed for the occasion. Dark deck boots that went to the middle of her calf. Tight charcoal pants with a bright blue stripe on the right, showing she's civilian. Military dress uniform traditionally has a red stripe. The jacket closed with two by two buttons over the stomach and a slender lapel made way for a white dress shirt and a charcoal tie. She had stuck her white gloves under the epaulets. Bettina was maybe half a foot shorter than me and she filled the jacket out nicely. Maybe it wasn't the only reason to become a spacer, but women like Bettina helped with motivation.
"Gina tells me you need a uniform, but your communicator isn't doing so hot, so I have to stick you in the scanner." She didn't even try to hide her enthusiasm.
"Lead the way, chief engineer." I motioned her to take us out of the infirmary.
The hallways were tight but not claustrophobic and you could tell the ship wasn't all that long. Deck numbers told me that I had been on deck two and we took the elevator down to deck five.
"Welcome to my kingdom." Bettina spread her arms wide. Deck five was very much open plan with the exception of a large gate at the front of the ship. A number of shelves surrounded what looked like a workspace with various power tools and a large part of the rest of the space was taken up by the fabricator.
"Take that off and step on the scanner." Bettina went straight to work.
"Nobody gave me any underwear." I responded, more out of politeness than anything else. I didn't want to appear inappropriately enthusiastic about taking my pants off.
"If you want underwear that fits you'll need to be scanned." Bettina reminded me, which I couldn't really argue with.
"Ok, can't argue with that." I shrugged and stepped on the plate, unceremoniously shucking off the sweatshirt and pants.
"Oh, if the girls upstairs knew what I got down here." She quipped, working the display to get proper measurements. "All done, you can put that back on." Which I did. The fabricator whirred to life.
"Uniform will take fifteen, maybe. Want to kill some time and look at your shuttle?"
I was dying to see why I landed here at this time. "Absolutely."
She opened the large door which led to the staging area for the outside cargo hatch. My shuttle had been put on the floor, slightly tipped to the side, lacking a proper landing gear.
The canopy had been popped open, but the rest of the teardrop shaped craft was covered in fifteen inches of foam, with the exception of a small sensor port and the positioning thrusters.
"From what I could tell you had a foam penetration around here." She climbed up to the open canopy and showed me a dark spot, not wider than an inch in diameter. The foam was there to protect against small particles and should have kept space dust out, but this looked like a space pebble. "So you got a pebble in your shoe and by shoe I mean main propulsion." She had taken a flashlight off a tool cart. I could see the light shine all the way through and break up the shadow under the ship. "An inch to the right and you could have blown up this entire half and you would be somewhat dead right now. So for someone who got incredibly unlucky, you got incredibly lucky."
I saw that the hole not only had grazed propulsion but also barely missed the power connector for the cryostasis unit.
"How did you get that coffin working in there anyway? This model was never built with a cryo unit."
I shrugged. "We pulled one out of the main ship and the chief engineer put it in. He's probably forgotten more about cryo units than most people have ever known."
"Now I haven't seen someone use a foam shield against space dust, but then I haven't seen anyone fly around in a cryo coffin with an engine that they haven't built for two hundred and fifty years, so what do I know?" She looked at me to invite me to share my secrets. There wasn't much of a point to play hard to get here, I assumed she'd be filled in at the meeting anyway.
"I'm just back from a round trip." That being said, I let her do the math herself.
"Hang on," she dropped down from the ship with a puzzled, but not too puzzled expression. "When did you set off on that round trip?"
"Twenty two seventy four from E-Tauri 5." I said nonchalantly.
"Christ on a bike, you're ancient." She looked at my crotch. "So, you've been read in on 'recent' developments?" she asked making some air quotes.
"The doctor and captain gave me the cliff notes version. There's a chance I'm unaffected."
She looked at me for a few moments, taking in the information. "Damn, now the girls upstairs would really like to know what I got down here."
"I've been warned I'm somewhat of a hot commodity," I joked. "But seriously, is it really that bad?"
"Yes." She said without hesitation. "If you got the cliff notes version, it's probably worse than you think." She had been the poster child for good vibes until now, and seeing her turn this somber this fast told me a lot about how serious things were.
"Doc Galanis tells me men are mostly non-existent and the ones you have are slowly losing the ability to father boys?" I summarized what I had been told thus far.
"It's way worse than that." She ran her hands though her short hair and pointed to some storage crates. "Sit down." We sat across from each other. "Normally I wouldn't tell this to anyone, but I guess it became a lot less important as of roughly a minute ago." She looked over her shoulder to check if anyone had come to the engineering bay. "I actually have a dad." She stopped. "Well, technically, everyone has a dad, but these days that means you met your dad. I actually grew up in my dad's household. Some men want to have a selection of their kids around and my dad requested custody when I was about three."
I didn't interrupt her, but I made a mental note that 'requested custody' sounded quite casual.
"What people generally don't know is that they stopped having boys fifty years ago. The boys being born these days come from the last generation that could actually pull that off, but those geezers are in their seventies and older and they're being milked for all they're worth." She leaned back on her hands and gave me a minute to take that all in.
I really couldn't make sense of how that wasn't public knowledge. "I don't get it. How are they keeping a lid on that? Don't they have doctors working on that?"
"Yeah, sure," she shrugged, "but what's the point? Do you want to tell everyone that this is it? Mass panic, riots, despair. It's not like we don't have enough of that already. Men are mostly isolated, and the fertility programs are all run by the government. It's the reason I'm here." She shrugged.
After feeling like I had a vague understanding of the situation, things rapidly stopped making sense again. "You'll have to explain that to me, Bettina."
"I should be sitting in a nice mansion somewhere in Bucharest right now. But little Bettina had the bright idea to read daddy's messages when he left his datapad unattended. They had some fertility scores in them, so she started digging. Took her a while to piece together, but he and all his friends were shooting blanks. They even assigned some son to him that actually came from an older guy so he could claim he's having boys." She sighed. "I got caught snooping a few days after my nineteenth birthday and daddy dearest disowned me, which legally is super easy when you have to assume most men have to have a few hundred kids." She looked at the ceiling. "Got a visit from women in black the day after, telling me to keep my mouth shut and they'd pay the academy and all that."
"I'm sorry." I said, truthfully.
She looked back at me. "Don't be. I learned the most important thing I'll ever learn."
"And what's that?" I asked after she let the statement linger for a moment.
"They're all cunts. My dad, his wives, his friends, his friends' kids, rich people in general, they're all just the cuntiest cunts you can imagine." She gave me a cheeky smile. "I was a cunt that had to learn how actual people treat each other."
"What about your mother?"
"Oh, my mom's great. When my dad requested custody, she was given another shot at a kid as a kind of pay off. Unfortunately my sister has trouble getting around. This actually pays for a lot of the costs." She waved her hands in the direction of the engineering bay. "Job's tough on your own, but I get paid what the miners get, so I can afford a nice wheelchair and all that for her."
"You get to be chief engineer with an engineering staff of one?" I chuckled.
"I spend a lot of time teaching the miners basics while we're in transit. I'm on call while we mine and we spend the travel times to do all the maintenance on this old bucket." The fabricator chimed. "Uniform's done." She went to the fabricator and peeled out clothing items. She went to work with a pair of scissors cutting a few threads that peeked out where they weren't supposed to. "I hope boxers are ok, didn't bother asking." She winked.
