Thank you for reading my story. I love to receive comments, but please don't use a fake email, that just invalidates you and doesn't give me a chance to respond. Please enjoy, love Mica xx
Dad and I had been upgraded to the Mars resupply run. The new space ships could do the journey in about four and half months, but that did depend on where Earth and Mars were in relationship to each other. I had been flying Earth to Moon station supply shuttles for about a year, and dad had just returned from Mars where he had been running supplies from Mars station to the surface. I hadn't seen dad in over a year.
Due to the long flight times, the Mars Earth Space Authority preferred close couples to pilot the supply shuttles, but not husband and wife, that had been tried and had proved problematic, with divorces being the inevitable outcome on each mission. The favoured staffing was mum and son, or dad and daughter, and there were only a few of us that could meet that criteria on roster, and so I guess it was no surprise when I get the summons just after dad returned from Mars.
It had been a long time since American Elon Musk had opened up the Mars routes and now it was just routine. The colony on Mars was quite large now and Mars had proven to be quite rich in rare minerals and so investment to keep things going was not in short supply.
We were not known as 'astronauts', no, just pilots, although I guess, in the old twenty first century parlance we were astronauts, or cosmonauts, but generally we thought of ourselves as spacers, and our company referred to us as pilots. The roster had quite a few different Nationalities, a few Brits like dad and me, a few Australians a few Russians and I think one or two from China, but mostly Americans. There were very few related pilots, the company did try to recruit families, but the problem was always the amount of time away from home, from family, it tended to more suit the singletons than family people.
Mum had passed and dad, who had been an Earth Moon pilot for a while no longer felt the need to be at home. I was an only child and was already in Pilot training. So dad put himself forward for the longer Mars runs. The asteroid runs were longer at about a year each way, and they paid a lot more, but he didn't fancy them. Mars was enough he told me in one of our video calls. When I got my licence and started doing the Earth Moon runs, I had let it be known I would not be averse to Mars.
And now, here we were, about to start. I lived aboard a Mars shuttle in orbit around the moon for three nights. It gave me chance to acclimatise myself, see where everything was, how it all worked, run simulations, and get used to the quirky AI that would do most of the computations. Whilst I was living there the cargo was loaded and stowed.
The ship was around a hundred and fifty feet long, of which one sixth was crew, one half cargo and the rest engines and fuel. The crew accommodation was spacious compared to the first generation ships, but then, it would be home, on a return journey, for the best part of a year, and so, really it needed to be. Forward facing was the cockpit, two seats in front of the consoles and computer screens. The AI interface was here too, although there were several auxiliary interfaces elsewhere.
There was a lounge area and then in the side walls were a number of sleeping cots. To the rear was the toilet, galley and shower. There was a small functional laundry, and a storage area for the food. Solid wastes were packaged and sent flying towards the sun, liquid wastes were purified and re-used. No spacer even gave wastes a thought, it was what it was.
There was no gym equipment, it had little benefit for the weight and space it needed. The journey was 5 weeks of acceleration up to our max safe speed. We could have gone faster, but again, the cost benefit case for the extra strengthening of the ship for the higher speeds just wasn't there. After we reached cruise speed the engines cut out, the ship rotated so that when the engines fired again they would slow us down. In the interleaving cruise state the ship was weightless and so to combat this, especially for when there were passengers on board, the ship spun about its central axis, providing a gravitational effect.
All very straight forward and stuff most children knew. I was to meet dad in the briefing room at 1300 UCT. Time had very little meaning in space, and so the earth day of twenty four hours was pretty much the standard everywhere, and UTC was as useful a yardstick as any. I headed over to the room for the indicated time.
"Mica," dad said and crushed me in a hug. "How are you?"
"Fine dad, excited for this new opportunity and pleased to be able to spend some time with you, I think it has been over a year since we last saw each other in person and not on a vid screen."
"Mikhail, Mica, please" The briefing manager called us over to him. "There will be plenty of time to catch up over the next few months."
Snotty, but I guess he had a point. He checked our credentials, making sure that we had attended and passed all of the required modules. We had to sign on board and then the ship was ours. We would embark at midnight and then we were on our own, apart from our AI, for the next eighteen weeks. We would have a week on Mars station to unwind whilst the ship was prepped for the return, and then another twenty weeks for the return, the extra travel difference being that the two planets would have moved apart relative to each other.
I already had my gear stowed, having been aboard climatising for a few days, and walked with dad as he carried his bag, I helped with the smaller bag. In the lighter atmosphere here at lunar station it wasn't as heavy to carry, but it could still get away with you due to inertial mass, so I had the lower mass bag. Physics was physics.
The door was shut behind us, we sealed it internally and that was us, we were in.
"Let's get this stowed, have half an hour catching up, and then I suggest a decent sleep for us both before we fly. What do you think dad?"
"Sounds good Captain." He laughed and we took the bags to the crew stow, and he started unpacking and stowing. Like me, he had mostly shorts and tops. Spacesuits were not worn unless in an emergency, the cabin temp was around 21ËšC, and so just the lightest of clothes were worn, this saved the chore of laundry. For me, basically short shorts and bras, for dad, shorts. We both had more covering clothes for when we were on station.
The ships were planned to go each week, but there was a lack of crew, and one ship a month was the capability at the moment, although I had heard that another couple of crew were due to roster in any day. That would be good.
It would be worse when the asteroid mines fully opened up and more ships were needed there. I had heard however that they were looking to do them as pilotless drones. I guess it depended on how reliable the AI was.
"How have you been Mica?" Dad asked.
"Oh, okay dad, nothing really to report since we spoke last month, after a while it gets a bit same old, same old, the Earth Moon run, but there is the rush of the launch from Earth, but even that tires after a while."
We were sat in the lounge area, I had on a grey bra and panties, dad was in pale grey shorts, we both wore nothing else, nothing else needed.
"Yeah," dad said, "I don't miss the launches. Once you have done orbit embarks, you don't miss the stress of a gravity launch." We sat and chatted for a while and then went and hit our cots.
"AI, Timer, 5 hours, Alarm," I said to the air.
"Alarm, 5 hours," the AI confirmed.
I lay in my cot dozing, too buzzed to grab any sleep and was slightly alarmed that my head was full of mental images of my dad's bulge in his shorts. Really? Should I be thinking of such things? That I wouldn't is probably why they prefer parent child crews, that I was is a concern and one I would have to keep from my psycho review during the return cycle stand down.
The time came, dad and I went around the ship each checking that everything was stowed and checked as it should be. Both satisfied we went and took our seats up front.
"All clear AI," I said.
"All clear AI," dad said.
"All clear," AI confirmed, "embarking".
There was a small push and we were moving. The AI controlled acceleration and direction, dad and I just cross checked that everything was as it should be. In theory the AI could do the Mars run without human control, but no one really trusted them enough, and the ships and cargo were just too valuable to risk.
The push into the back of the seat continued, we were accelerating at a steady pace, just as we would do for the next five weeks, the ION impulse engines working at near capacity as they sent us on our way. No turning back now. I looked across at dad and the only thing my eyes saw was his bulge. What was the matter with me?
I shook my head to try and change my focus.
"Drink dad?" I asked.
"Yes Mica, a tea please."
