Author's Note:
This continues to be written and published a few paragraphs at a time over several days on Bluesky. Posts there are limited to 300 characters.
*
In the shielded heart of the Pendragon, a light changed from green to orange. Six passengers slept like the dead in technological coffins, within which the temperature was maintained at precisely 4°C. Dead, but not dead, their hearts beating twice per minute. All except Shula Mistral da Terra, whose heart was pounding at nearly twice the appropriate rate. Precisely calibrated medical instruments noted an alarming rise of body temperature to 7°C, and recorded brain activity consistent with REM sleep.
A light changed from green to orange, an audible alarm sounded, and a message was sent to the Pendragon. Shula Mistral, of course, was not aware of any of this. Her stirring, fragmented consciousness spiralled almost obsessively in a craving for elusive logic. One memory in particular. Her research supervisor, the professor, shaking his head sadly. "I'm sorry, Shula," he said. "There are only six spaces and you are the most junior member of the team."
Shula suppressed a scream. "But I'm the one who found it!"
"You are, it's true," he said in a magnanimous tone, "and you will certainly get credit for that discovery, once we are ready to go public, but you must be patient. It has already been decided who will go."
"You haven't filled the sixth place yet," she pointed out through gritted teeth.
Six spaces. The professor himself would lead the expedition, and he had selected and announced the names of four others too - all men, of course. But Shula was the one who had spent three years sifting through a year's worth of probe data. She should be going too.
The professor shrugged. "It's policy, dear. The Wolf system is categorised as deep space, and the research council will not fund unmarried female researchers on deep space missions."
Shula wanted to cry. It was to escape such casual misogyny that she had left Colony Mistral.
"I know, I know," the professor said. "It's deeply unfair to you, but you have to understand how important it is in the colonies to protect fertile young women like yourself. This research expedition is likely to last several months. You could use that time well."
It was a sentiment she had heard too often. Return to Mistral, allow some young man to impregnate her. Mistral might be nothing but a ball of ore-rich rock with an icy coat, but the medical facilities there were first class. It would be a safe place to bring a child into the universe. "I'm not going home," she insisted.
The professor sighed unhappily. "There is one possibility," he said. "The funding rules will permit a married female researcher, provided her husband - or husbands - accompanies her. We have already placed an advertisement for such a woman. I would not object to you fulfilling that role."
Shula was speechless. All her life, she had avoided relationships. She had thrown herself into her research partly as a way to avoid having to interact socially with men. It wasn't that she found them unattractive, but the men in her life were always so focussed on impregnating women. She hated the idea of being seen as a womb first and as a person a distant second. The possibility of marrying was an event in her distant future. Being contracted, even temporarily, to five men would have been comical as the plot of some romantic fiction, but... this was no fiction.
The advert was real. Once she knew what to look for, she found it easily. "Wife sought," Shula read. "A one-year contract with five men. Must be certified for deep space. Research experience required." Shula was qualified. She was single, certified for deep space, and had research experience...
... but did she really have to marry her own professor to get the very opportunity that should by right be hers anyway?
"Bastards!" she screamed, her hands itching to break something. A friend of hers had once joked that women were only good for two things: taking to bed; and being bred.
The orange light turned red and the volume of the alarm increased until a fingertip pressed the emergency resuscitation button. "Wake up, Shula Mistral da Terra," said the Pendragon's captain. "Maybe you can answer some questions for me."
*
On the bridge of the Pendragon, Ahsan studied the large display and pondered those same questions. Why all the mystery? Why charter a salvage vessel? Why set course for a dangerous gas giant at the very edge of charted space?
Seven weeks had passed since the Pendragon jumped into the Wolf system. During those seven weeks, Cub had grown from a black dot into a mesmerising orb with bands of blue and brown and white, broken by angry red storms.
Ahsan understood very little of it. Being in space was a constant surprise for him, despite having lived in space for almost as long as he could remember. In the warrens of many-ringed Station Eight, it had been possible to live with only minimal awareness of the precarious nature of life there.
Even when working at the port and going EVA, there had been something reassuring about the presence of the ice giant Yeti, whose vast, deep ocean of water was the lifeblood of Station Eight. He had never imagined that one day he would be at the controls of a starship, light years away from the nearest human colony. Not, of course, that he had any confidence in being able to fly the ship or navigate between the stars, but he was getting better at following simple instructions.
Captain Therese had taught him much, and he had become reasonably proficient with the robotic salvage equipment, spending hours each day in practice. That was in addition to his daily routine as a cabin maid, tidying up after the rest of the crew, and preparing food and in the galley. And exercise, of course. Four times a day in the wheel, cajoling lazy muscles back to full strength. The worst part of working at Station Eight's port was always returning to the artificial gravity in the rings after hours of weightlessness. On the Pendragon, weightlessness was the norm.
"This is Ahsan," Captain Therese said, leading a young woman onto the bridge. "Ahsan, this is Shula Mistral da Terra."
She wasn't pretty, Ahsan decided, feeling instinctively threatened. But she was a real woman, young and presumably fertile, and therefore rare and valuable in the eyes of men. Although, to be fair, she had just woken up from being nearly frozen for two months, and even half an hour beneath a hot shower was probably not enough for her to feel properly alive again. And maybe the weightlessness didn't help either.
Shula was dressed in a tight-fitting orange ship suit that served only to accentuate her curves. Pretty or not, her breasts were large. Ahsan had on occasion considered getting breasts, but they had, on balance, seemed a lot of bother for little value. Men, after all, were primarily interested in something else. Ahsan was skilled at applying makeup, knew how to walk seductively in high heels, and had legs that, in all modesty, looked very attractive in hold ups and a short skirt.
What men wanted, ultimately, was a pretty face to suck their cock, and a tight, well lubricated ass beneath an easily lifted skirt. Usually in that order. Sure, they talked about settling down with a real woman, but women were rare in space.
Shula met his eyes with startled curiosity that gave way swiftly to a guilty flinch. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she looked away again. The display of Cub, superimposed with bright annotations, field contours and the Pendragon's projected trajectory, immediately captured her attention.
Vesta Kane and Lyn Murray arrived on the bridge. Vesta had spent most of the past fifty days studying the Pendragon's shielding against radiation. The painful reality was that the Pendragon was a salvage vessel, not a military or specialist craft, and this mission was testing its limits. The starship's primary computer was relatively safe, housed as it was within the thick-walled cell at the Pendragon's heart. That cell was designed to serve as an emergency shelter in the case of catastrophic failure of ship structure, and could in theory keep four people alive for several months.
But the rest of the ship? Hit and miss. The drives and the fusion reactor were fully radiation-hardened, and the bridge too, but in between them were hot zones that played havoc with her cybernetic implants. The closer they got to Cub, the more hazardous these zones were for her.
She analysed the young woman with senses both human and machine. Shula's temperature was elevated, her body overcompensating from the suspended animation, and she was definitely a woman. Seeing a young woman of breeding age in deep space was rare. Vesta too had fled into space at a young age to escape the pressure to breed. The Union of Independents liked to claim they were the enlightened branch of humanity, but the fundamental demand of human expansion into space was that of making babies.
Different colonies addressed the ethics of it in different ways, but ultimately a woman was expected to be a mother. Even in space, the pressure could be felt. To be a woman in space was to bump up against regulation after regulation, all designed to keep her womb safe for reproduction. "Our young bride is awake, I see," Vesta said. Shula's answering scowl was all the confirmation Vesta needed to understand that this was no romantic union.
"Shula, it seems," Lorna said, "has spent the last three years studying Cub."
"Well, no," Shula said. "Not Cub, exactly. Apollo."
Vesta glanced at the display. Apollo was Cub's largest moon, a million kilometres out from the gas giant. It was gravity-locked, of course, but with an orbital period of forty-five hours, so the day length there would be just under two standard days. It was within the Goldilocks zone too. "A good candidate for a colony," Vesta mused. "Why hasn't it been surveyed?"
"Because no one wants to live near that," Lyn muttered, indicating Cub. "I know I wouldn't."
"Three years," Shula interrupted. "I have spent three years sifting through a year's worth of data. That was how long it took the cartography probe to pass through the system, and Apollo was not a priority."
Lyn nodded. "Long-range probes are instrumented for mapping mass distribution and energy fluctuations."
"There are currently one hundred and three potentially habitable planets awaiting survey," Shula said, "and many more exploitable for other purposes."
