I spent the next several weeks sweating through every shipsuit I wore for more than an hour.
Taj, Amanda, and I elected to change our regular route through the Scutum cluster to a more circuitous one that took us through Aquila for the sole reason that Aquila had a strong Fleet presence and was a regional hub for interstellar traffic. We did that in the hopes that would make us too dangerous to track closely and obfuscate our destination.
Elladan was, technically, within the Second Expansion Ring. On the maps, it sat near the edge of the Third Ring near the skinny spot facing away from the Spinward Fringe and more towards the Galatactic Core, called the Thin Margin, where the exocolonists hadn't made as much of an outward push. As a result, there wasn't much of the Third Ring to get through before we officially broke into the Fourth Expansion Ring and the New Frontier.
We hadn't been approached by any suspicious vessels so far and I was finally ready to admit that we probably wouldn't be, by this point. The Thin Margin was largely unpopulated, except by various mining corporations and the occasional uncharted colony. It wasn't technically Gray Space there, but it was about as close as you could get without actually leaving the officially charted space lanes. At the same time, anyone who wanted to reach the Frontier had to pass through there.
In other words, the Thin Margin was perfect pirate country and I was glad to be leaving it. Taj's voice on the feed reporting, "I'm picking up the outer beacons for Freeport Romulus," came as music to my ears.
"Finally," I sighed and dropped my forehead into my open palms. I'd been at my desk, trying to get some forms filled out and I had only really succeeded at catastrophizing in my head about our delayed time table.
I acknowledged him in the feed and passed the message on to Amanda to start drawing up the leave schedule. I owed my crew some extra time after the clusterfuck on Elladan station.
Rather than answer me, Amanda let herself into my office with a scowl.
"Good timing," she sighed. "We may need to run the verminator protocol while we're docked."
I frowned. "Has something gotten into the ship stores?" Or, worse, the cargo?
Amanda shook her head. "Not that I've seen and I had Sin do a visual inspection of all the crates in the hold with her auxiliaries. She's reported no evidence of holes or damage to any of it, but twice now I've spotted something moving in the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was a bot, but it was too small to be either of the kind we have. I thought I was making it up until Brando reported seeing something similar. I think we picked up a little stowaway on Fjord Orbital or Elladan."
I checked my mental calendar. "We're due for an air flush anyway," I admitted.
For context, the verminator protocol was when we unloaded everyone and everything off the ship and opened the airlocks to flush out pests or persistent bacterial infestations. If the vacuum didn't dispose of your problem then a few hours of the cold would. As a general practice, we flushed the ship a few times a year. We traveled too much to risk transporting invasive vermin to new ports. Obviously, not everyone was as conscientious and only ran the verminator protocol when their insurance made them do it.
This would eat further into the safety margins I built into our original schedule, but if whatever got on board managed to breed then we might end up with a worse problem.
Amanda made a surprised noise that startled me out of my pensive thoughts. I looked up at her.
"What?"
She wet her lips and looked back at me, "The Dockmaster just sent us a dock assignment and approach vector."
Odd. I hadn't contacted them yet, much less paid the deposit on a slip. We'd only just now gotten in range of their beacons.
"Were they waiting for us?" I joked, but it stopped being funny when Amanda nodded.
"They're directing us to the Station Supervisor's private dock and say that transports and a tankage service will be waiting for us on our arrival. Do you have a hopeful ex in management there or something? Does Taj know?"
"No!" I hissed. "Do you?"
"Not anyone with money like this," Amanda replied, shaking her head. "If that's not the case then I wonder what they want from us?"
Hopefully, it was something we could safely do.
An automated reminder in my feed popped up to tell me it was time to eat and that I'd run out of 'snoozes' before it automatically rolled over to my husband's alerts. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. "I guess we're going to find out. In the meantime, I need to hit the mess."
Amanda thought about it for a second. "I'll come with you. I can't remember if I ate anything at the beginning of my shift and that usually means I didn't. Might as well grab a bite now before I turn into a monster later."
I chuckled and we made our way to the galley. I pinged Taj to see if he wanted to eat with us, but he messaged me back to say he'd eaten earlier and was occupied at the helm.
To my surprise, Sin and Elaine were already seated at a table there with their ankles loosely tangled together under the table. Elaine was barely awake and they both had breakfast trays. I really had snoozed my dinner alert too many times if I'd ended up working past the end of my shift and into the start of theirs. Captains ended up with odd, unpredictable hours sometimes, but I tried to keep that to a minimum.
"Morning, Captain," Sin greeted me with a polite nod as we passed. "Or evening. You're both up late."
"We're coming into range of the Freeport," Amanda explained so I didn't have to. She grabbed a seat at their table, leaving me to get both our trays.
I'd have been annoyed except the heater hated Amanda. She'd been the one using it every time it had broken in the past and, while we weren't a superstitious group, no one let her heat her own trays anymore. I grabbed white trays for both of us, since that was what we currently had more of. They both turned out to be a kind of cream stew, which smelled fine when I pulled them out of the heater.
Elaine seemed marginally more awake when I returned. She was clutching a mug with both hands and finally recognized my presence. "Hi, Jack."
"Hi, yourself," I chuckled and slid Amanda's tray over to her. "Late night?"
She nodded. "Lost track of time when I was doing a PH study on the fern farms and didn't realize I'd worked through my downshift until Sin came to get me for breakfast. Don't worry, I'm gonna take a nap after I eat."
I checked Sin's expression. She looked wry and indulgent, so I took that to mean that Elaine was telling the truth and they hadn't stayed up all night together. I couldn't penalize anyone for fraternization on board, but I would have to intervene if it affected their work. I wasn't sure how far these two had gone. Their relationship seemed pretty professional from the outside, except that they always seemed to be together when off duty. If they were getting together, they sure were taking the scenic route.
"Good, we're coming up on a port stay so you can reset your clock there," I reassured her.
Elaine brightened and elbowed Sin before leaning against her side. "Are you excited?" she asked.
Sin nodded. "I had a note for Romulus queued up to be sent as soon as we got into beacon range. He'll probably reply once we're a bit closer. Adding transmission times to an already slow conversation can be a little frustrating for him."
I saw Amanda pause with her spoon halfway to her mouth. Her face looked like how I felt.
"Romulus?" I asked. Maybe the name was just a coincidence. "A friend of yours on station?"
"Technically," Sin agreed. "Although, he considers himself to be the station. Romulus is the 'Romulus' in 'Freeport Romulus.' He founded the community with some other investors who now sit on the Governance Board. He's the majority shareholder and runs the station's daily operations."
Sin sent us all some pictures taken from an observation station of Freeport Romulus during construction before she explained. I'd been there before and I already knew the place was massive with two concentric tori orbiting its center spindle, but the pictures showed a time when it was just the spindle with a few docking arms attached. She and I were both in our sixties, which wasn't old for spacers. Even then, Freeport Romulus was coming up on its thirtieth anniversary.
She must have been pretty young when Romulus went out into the world and he was the second AI she'd spawned? She must have had the first one when she was barely out of the creche.
I found that thought less worrisome than I might have if she'd been having organic children who were helpless dependents for a minimum of fifteen years. At least someone out there had been on her side.
"Romulus is my second eldest. I haven't been able to visit him before even though he's been after me to come out for ages. He left while I was still under contract and I never had an opportunity before now. I get pictures of the new wings and expansions all the time, but this will be the first time I'll have seen any of it in person."
"You couldn't take leave?" Amanda asked. I sensed that she, like me, wanted to know why she hadn't gone to live with her successful kid rather than stay aboard a dangerous posting like Mimir.
Sin crinkled her nose. "Passenger liners are actually less safe than crewing a starship," she explained. "Every credible story I've heard with someone getting killed for having a cursemark happened aboard a passenger liner or a yacht. If you're a crew member and have a verified history of serving aboard other vessels that are still in operation then spacers tend to be more willing to overlook it—at least, if they're post-exodus stock. The core worlders have gotten really touchy about the subject in the past twenty years or so."
"Unless it's the handprint?" I asked. "Someone brought it up when I asked around before you signed. What's different about that one?
She nodded. "Witch marks are a little different. No one is born with one of those. You have to fuck up to get one and who knows what other problems you'd cause if that's the kind of judgment error you've made in the past."
"So, you're saying witches are real?" I asked in surprise. I'd been assuming it was an interstellar cryptid when Coro brought up the subject.
She shrugged. "I've never met one and the stories can be contradictory. Some people say they're shapeshifters or brood parasites who take on the shape of their host species. Other people say the witches are a criminal organization and the mark is what they do when they ostracize a member. All I know is that the few people I've seen with a witch mark are all dead now except for one."
"I hadn't heard the brood parasitism theory before, but I've heard the other two stories," Amanda said. "So, who's the one who's still alive?"
I didn't like the expression that flicked through Sin's eyes in response to Amanda's question, but I liked her answer even less.
"Someone I knew from the creche. He was a bully named Wasp. He nearly killed one of the younger kids and got 'graduated' early; dropped off on a mining colony where fifteen was the legal age of adulthood and there was work for him, if he wanted it. The next time I saw him, he was acting as an enforcer in the middle of the mutiny on Mimir. I hadn't even realized we were on the same ship. It—wasn't a happy reunion, let's put it that way. He had a witch mark on his neck. That tends to be the kind of person who ends up with one, so you can see why no one wants them around."
Amanda asked a followup question, but I couldn't hear it. The conversation receded into the distance as a buzzing took up place between my ears, but that was fine. I didn't need Sin to explain to me who Wasp was. I already knew him.
That 'younger kid' she'd mentioned? That had been me.