“Come inside Alaya, your father’s working on the reclamation tanks again!” Mother’s voice called to her with a sense of urgency Alaya did not share. The water from the reclamation tanks was clean and smelled so fresh. She hoped father would tip it over again and drench her with it.
“Just hand her up here to me, Lena.” His voice drifted down to Alaya and she briefly considered bolting through one of the broken sections of grating between their house and the other sections of their home cylinder station.
“Run young lady and I will tan your hide when I find you.” Mother knew the place almost as well as Alaya. There weren’t a lot of nooks Alaya could hide where mother wouldn’t find her.
Darby, their assistant robot floated over. “Miss, your father is also working on one of the decryption resolvers for DallNet.”
“Really?” That was all anyone needed to say. The cost for things like DallNet were far, far outside of their family’s budget. But if father had found a way to decrypt the signal, at least that meant Alaya might be able to read some.
“Valen Einhart, tell me you are not trying to steal for our daughter!” Mother had redirected her ire at father.
“It’s for me too, Lena.” Mother stomped her foot and narrowed her eyes at father. Alaya was reasonably sure she couldn’t actually see him. And then there was that amused smile mother wore on her face whenever she acted like she was mad with father. Adults were stupid. “Come on up here, boop, let’s see if you can help me get this thing working. Okay?”
Alaya scrambled up the old rusty gantry with Darby at her back making sure she didn’t fall, or if she did, he caught her. Father sat cross-legged over the reclamation tub and waggled his eyebrows at it. It looked fine as far as Alaya could tell. Before she could ask, he wiggled his fingers and a little sheen of light passed over them. Using his magic, he lifted a piece of clear plastic out of the reclamation tub, which made it begin to flow again. “I cleared the problem hon, gonna make sure it won’t happen again!”
Mother shouted something indecipherable back to him and father turned to Alaya with a grin. “Now show me what’s wrong with it and how you’d fix it.” Father tapped the little beige box next to him with its cover pulled off. He guided her through the process with patience. Father knew everything about technology and magic. Mother knew a little about that stuff too, but she knew all there was to know about everything else.
Today was an exploration day and only the promise of science and tinkering kept Alaya here and not crawling through the dilapidated old cylinder. It took them about an hour, but together Alaya and her father — mostly him — got the decryption device working.
While mother was still inside, presumably cooking from the delicious smells rising out of their little metal hut, father connected the decyrpter to a display and turned it on. Alaya held her breath and sagged when only blue appeared on the holograph. A tap of the nose later, father tweaked something in the connection and it came alive. There was no sound, father was smarter than that, but there was a visual display.
They happened on a scene of a woman wearing a torn purple space suit fighting off men in black uniforms. She was gorgeous: short, red-haired, and slender. But with strong arms and square shoulders. Those heels and the way the uniform tugged had to be in the way.
Father turned it off with a cough and said, “maybe we should find a more age-appropriate show.”
“Valen! It’s time to eat. Hide that thing and find an explanation for the light show later.”
Father blushed and coughed into his hand again. “We should go. If I were going to hide it, I would probably hide it in the usual place.”
It was deceptive what they were doing. Mother didn’t approve. But it felt naughty and transgressive, and it was something Alaya could share with her father. “Right, I’ll never find it.” She didn’t say “behind the broken 580-transformer from the crashed single passenger Galehawk.” Cause that would have ruined it.
Dinner was fresh hydroponic greens, synthetic meat seasoned with herbs and chilis from mother’s gardens. The chilis and greens weren’t “calorie dense enough” mother lamented every time they ate them, “but they tasted so good!” Alaya thought they tasted like starched dishwater sponges with something disgusting and bitter injected. But refusal to eat the green stuff brought down a whole host of problems from mother and father, Alaya had given up that particular battle long ago.
Besides, she really liked the other stuff. Mother had always been good at working with substandard ingredients.
“Okay boop, who wants to play scavenge the cylinder?” Father clapped his hands once, but there was no need to drum up further support from Alaya.
“I do! I do!” She jumped up from the table, almost sending the old hunk of plate steel on legs toppling over. Mother grabbed the edge and gave a long suffering look.
Before she could speak, father tapped his nose and said, “after we clean up the kitchen, of course.”
“Yay!”
Mother poured herself a cup of tea and kissed father on the neck, patting his shoulder as she did. They chuckled at each other and whispered stuff Alaya couldn’t hear. It made her roll her eyes and gag. Not only was father not helping, but they were doing gross stuff when there was exploration and adventure to be had.
Growing up was the worst.
When they’d cleaned the last dish and wiped up the last of the mess from dinner, mother surveyed the kitchen, running her fingers along the cracked formed plastic counters and over the front of the warped cabinet doors. Father had said those were once so well-made they were effectively air-tight. Alaya had found a few places on the cylinder still like that, with cubbies and hallways that could be sealed with the press of a few buttons or a command. The whole cylinder obeyed Alaya and her family as if they were the original owners, though Alaya knew they’d moved here from… somewhere else. Mother and father hadn’t like it there.
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When mother nodded her head, Alaya shouted. It was the signal they’d cleaned to mother’s satisfaction and were free for the evening.
“Tonight is a family scavenge the cylinder night!” Mother made her announcement as she pulled father into their room. “We’re getting ready, be quick little miss boop.”
As much as she liked it when father called her by the family nickname, Alaya loved it when mother did. It was as rare as cake or real flour. And just as sweet to Alaya’s ears. She skipped over to her bunk where all of her tools and supplies were.
“Lists were important business aboard ship, yes they were.” Alaya chanted to herself. “We have food, water, and shelter.” With each item Alaya patted a different small container aligned across the foot of her small mattress. She’d dug the items out of the cubby beneath. The first were food capsules. Minimal nutrition packaged into a really small container. They were intended to be eaten with a fiber/protein/carb supplemental meal, but Alaya didn’t have that. Besides, those took up a lot more space than these little capsules. The second was a small compressed water package along with a compact purification and testing system. That had only been used once. When Alaya and father tested it to make sure it worked properly. And the final was a simple thermal tarp with piezoelectric controls. It could seal against vacuum, assuming it fit over the breech, was warm enough to insulate in well below freezing, and father had helped Alaya program various beds and tent shapes into the little blanket.
There were a smattering of other little doodads and trinkets Alaya squirreled away over the years which she added to her explorer kit. But the only other real essential was the multitool her father had given her. It did… everything. It never left her side under normal circumstances — meaning unless she laid it down and forgot where it was — but it could be tracked, used to communicate with mother and father, it provided a map, lighting and a dozen other functions. Not all of them worked for Alaya, father had locked them out. One day he said he’d show her how to access them on her own, but only when she was older. Alaya always planned to jump ahead and unlock the thing without father’s help.
Not tonight though. Tonight was an exploration night. Alaya hopped down the stairs from her room and found her parents waiting. Father wore his usual spelunking gear: rope slung over his shoulder, helmet with a special light on the brim, his canvas jacket with lots of pockets, and his cargo pants. Mother wore utterly impractical gear tonight. A slim, hip-hugging skirt, an almost see-through blouse which clung to her chest and she’d even done her hair. Father’s own multitool hung from his belt. Mother never carried one. It was weird. She was even wearing heels.
She looked pretty. Alaya appreciated that maybe she’d be as pretty as mother one day. What Alaya didn’t understand was the impracticality of it all. And the danger. All other uses aside, the multitool could create a bubble of breathable air, perform first aid or even more serious medical help… Alaya couldn’t remember all of it by herself at first, her father had made her recite it until she could do it by rote. She had no idea what kind of medical help her multitool could offer. Her’s was keyed to her body so it would do a lot of the important stuff automatically.
The way her parents were looking at each other made Alaya’s brain rot. Better not to worry about whatever dumb adult things they were thinking. When they left the secure area around their shelter and ventured into the larger cylinder, Alaya had already cut ahead of her parents by twenty meters.
Here the metallic corridors and service tunnels opened into the grand interior of the ancient station. The smell hit you first: salt water, moldering sands and algae blooms the size of an old Earth nation. Even though Alaya had a rag in front of her mouth, it didn’t do much to keep out the stink.
Father’s voice buzzed over the intercom. “Mother and I are going to check out subsection Hammer. Don’t go outside the environmental zone. And no hide and seek tonight. If you don’t come when we call, we’re just gonna activate the tracker. Understand?”
“Yes papa.”
“Thanks sweetie. Be safe and make sure Darby doesn’t get lost. Love you”
The servant bot hummed and twitched in annoyance at father’s message, but Alaya just smiled. She loved that he trusted her this much. “Love you too.”
Before her father had interrupted her, Alaya had switched over to personal contest mode. Today’s tournament, get across the old sand oceans before they made her tummy hurt or her head woozy. Holding her breath while running was the real challenge and one Alaya could never quite manage. There was no one else but her parents and Darby to compete with. Might as well compete with herself.
Feet squelched across the gray sands. Overhead, lights flickered through a gaze of clouds which never lifted from the area. Climate controls for a station this big failed in amazing ways. Alaya skirted the fungal blooms across the beaches, the spores would make her sick for sure even if she might save some time. At least her boots were watertight.
According to the chronometer on her multitool, she beat her old time by five seconds today. But her stomach ached when she darted into a maintenance shaft at the end of this little archipelago. Mother taught her that word — archipelago — and Alaya was especially proud of it. Inside of the service hallways, the environmental systems worked much better. The taste of mold lingered, but soon faded as Alaya ventured into the darkness.
Her multitool lit the space before her, showing old printed plastic stairs which had been reinforced by Alaya and father’s efforts: metal bits jammed under the steps kept them rickety for adults but stable for Alaya.
Only a few meters through empty corridors, Alaya came to the first and most familiar of her four-way intersections. She cherished her choices down here, like some kind of magical princess choosing the best knight to protect her, or a maidservant best friend. The princess never knew how portentous — another mother word — a choice she’d made right then.
Right was familiar and old. It was also the safest route through the area. Alaya and her father had explored the secrets right out of that fork so it was off the roster tonight. But the front and left forks… Front was almost entirely unexplored. Father had been down there and told Alaya it was broken and boring.
It was tempting to ignore him and go anyway.
The left fork was one her father had only recently un-forbade for her. Was it months now? Alaya wasn’t going to check her multitool for such a minor detail. She was checking it for the map she’d made. A whole dark area not far from his fork lay undiscovered on her map.
Left it was.
The night wasn’t a complete waste, Alaya found some old MN — macronutrient — rations which might go with her other rations, assuming they were still good. It had been hundreds of years, so Alaya would have to have father check.
When she got home, father was sipping from a tin cup filled with his moonshine. Alaya hated the smell, the taste and everything about it. They sometimes used it to clean mechanical parts. How could anyone drink that stuff?
“Hey boop.” His voice was clear and unslurred. He hadn’t had much so far. “Find anything neat?”
“Yeah here,” she handed her find off to father who grinned at her.
“Ooh, fibe-car rations. Even if they’re bad, the recycler might be able to do something with them.” He waggled his eyebrows. “These are old school, they might have the recipe encoded in the packaging like they used to.”
“Yay!” Alaya squirmed with joy at the news. “Where’s mama?”
“Oh,” father blushed and a faint smile crossed his lips, “she’s exhausted and needs to get her rest.”
He didn’t look concerned so Alaya had no reason to be either. They stayed up and talked that night about DallNet, in the morning, father told her he and mother would head out to look for some specific machines on the lower decks. “You’ll be all alone here Alaya. Expect you to know what to do.” He winked at her and Alaya squirmed.
She never imagined that would be the last thing her father ever said to her.