Andromeda sat dreamily on some crates while she watched Keisha work on the landing ship. "Hey Anj, can you hand me that wrench next to you?" A coolant spill barely missed her face as she tried to keep the seal together, "Hey! Andromeda! The wrench please!"

"Huh?" Andromeda slowly came back to the docking bay. "What did you need Keish?"

"The WRENCH!" By now Keisha was covered in coolant.

Another crew member found the wrench and brought it to her while giving her a dirty look. Keisha fixed the leak on the ship and got up and grabbed a rag. The hangar bay she worked on was one of the biggest on the ship. There was a smaller hangar bay for smaller check-ins on the other side of the ship, but it was rarely used. This bay held six fairly large ships specially designed for research teams to meet up with the various projects being held. She was in charge of the ship Thyella, a larger ship that had various modules you could attach depending on the mission. Zayd had told her the name meant storm, as in to hold back the storm. Keisha didn't know if that was a good or bad thing, but the ship was her responsibility and she took it seriously. Her missions usually involved big and potentially dangerous cargo. She loved it.

"Keisha, you're very dirty. You should go freshen up before dinner." Andromeda said. Keisha looked up at the young woman and just shook her head.

"Thanks, Anj." Keisha just shook her head. At times Andromeda could be one of the kindest souls and at others, it seemed like she lived on another planet. Oblivious to everything and everyone around her. As far as Keisha knew, Andromeda was the only person to ever be born in space. Everyone took great care to make sure it never happened. For the Captain of all people to be her mother, she guessed no one talked about it because she had forbidden it. It was a shame, Andromeda was one of the most brilliant minds Keisha had ever met, yet hardly anyone ever spoke to her. Andromeda just walked away and waved goodbye. She floated around this ship wherever the wind took her.

As Keisha walked out Zayd Runslo walked up to her, "Looking good Pilot Brakas." Keisha gave him a scowl and he laughed. "Hey did those plants give you any trouble?"

"Nothing the Thyella couldn't handle. Although before they got it contained it tried to grow straight into my..."

"You get it fixed for tomorrow?" He cut in.

"Of course. What, you think I get covered in intercoolant fluids for fun?" She rolled her eyes at him and they chuckled as she walked out of the bay leaving a trail of ship fluids. She had fallen into a pattern here aboard the Starship Pytheas and the familiar routine felt good to her. It reminded her of going to military school. Every day had a purpose to it. She didn't need to wonder what she should get up and do that day, she just looked at the schedule and did it.

As she walked down the brightly lit halls towards the shipmaster quarters she passed several people making their way to the hangar, researchers who were meeting up with those gone before them. Everyone on the ship was a part of three different groups, the researchers, the shipmasters, or the commanding officers. The researcher's uniforms were white and had a color accent to show what group their specialty was in. Those in the med bay had green accents, red were biologists, blue were astronomers, yellow meant robotics. There were a few others but she wasn't entirely certain what they were.

Her background as a pilot and electrical engineer put Keisha squarely in with the shipmasters and found herself hard at work caring for the various landers they used to check in with all the research centers they hooked up with. Shipmasters wore black, gold accents meant you worked on the Pytheas itself, and silver accents meant you worked in the hangar bay on their small fleet of ships they had taken with them. The commanding officers wore grey and their accent color matched the group they were in charge of. Zayd Runslo wore grey with silver accents on them. He was a broad-shouldered guy who had a thick long beard but his eyes looked young. Keisha thought the beard was simply to make himself look more senior to the other officers. She had to admit the grey and silver looked distinguished with his beard.

As she reached her quarters, Fiolas caught up with her. She tried to make it into her room but his wheelchair was fast down these hallways. "Hey, wait up!" He bumped into the back of her legs, "Sorry! it's hard to stop in these mid-rings with this thing." The starship Pytheas was comprised of an outer stable ring with the bulk of the command center and med bay across the diameter of the ring. Surrounding that hallway were five concentric rings that were constantly moving in a random dance that the scientists assured her were giving the artificial gravity. The more inner rings had more gravity than the outer rings.

"It's ok, I think I have permanent bruises on the back of my legs now." She turned around while rubbing the back of her legs. It was strange looking down to talk to Fiolas, it had only been a few months ago she had to constantly look up at him as she only came up to his shoulder when he was standing. "What's up?"

"I was just going to ask if you were going to dinner soon?" Fiolas finally noticed how dirty she was. "What happened to you?" he asked as he followed her into her quarters.

"Andromeda," Keisha said with a smirk. "She was keeping me company while I fixed the Thyella after the last research team demolished the hydraulics by hauling that plant monster up here." By now Fiolas was laughing. Keisha threw the dirty rag at him. "Laugh it up. She can help you tomorrow."

"Hey, she's one of the smartest people on this ship, and that's saying something." He paused and laughed, "at least she is when she pays attention."

Keisha motioned for him to turn around while she got in the vapor shower and he did. "That's what you get when you're raised by scientists." She said.

"That's what you get when you're mom is a high-ranking official and hides your birth to the point you've never been off a ship," Fiolas said. The three of them had bonded after Keisha and Fiolas had been rescued as none of them technically existed on this ship's manifest. Andromeda didn't exist in any records. Keisha wasn't sure how many people aboard the ship knew Andromeda wasn't technically a part of the crew. When the Captain saved them she had given them a choice, they could keep their lives and be dropped off at the nearest planet, or be assumed as KIA and join them on their mission. After what they had been through Keisha and Fiolas had decided they would never set foot on a planet again and the Pytheas could offer them that.

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Keisha got out and put a fresh uniform on. Fiolas turned around and smiled. The white with a blue band on his collar looked good on him. It looked even better on him when he wasn't forced into a wheelchair. A wheelchair she had forced on him when she left him for dead.

Fiolas must have watched her expression change. "Hey, what's your mission tomorrow? Anything exciting?"

Keisha came back from her guilt, "Uhh, yeah. We're going to check out a project that was sent out about 50 years ago. Someone invented an O2 bubble, we're going to see if it's still intact. If we can bring it back they want us to, but I have no idea how they're planning on doing that. I don't think they do either."

She finished braiding her hair and Fiolas started wheeling out the door.

"Hey! Watch where you're going. You should be required to get a license for that thing." Zayd yelled, Fiolas must have run straight into Zayd's shins again.

"Sorry! I didn't know I needed to look out for someone right outside Keisha's door." Fiolas yelled back. "What are you doing here anyway?"

Keisha walked to the door, "Both of you chill out." The two of them hadn't gotten along ever since Fiolas was relocated to be next door to Keisha on the shipmaster ring. Generally, everyone stayed with their group for their quarters, but they had requested to be next to each other. She shot both men a look of contempt. Then focused on Zayd, "What can I do for you?"

He looked at Keisha and then at Fiolas, "Nothing, I'll catch you on tomorrow's flight?"

"Yeah, I already said that." There was an awkward silence for a moment.

"Great. Make sure you get plenty of sleep. I hear this one is pretty crazy." He eyed Fiolas and walked toward his room.

The two of them went the opposite way towards the mess hall, "You know he's got a thing for you right?" Fiolas said a little too loudly for Keisha's like.

"You know he's my commanding officer, right?" Keisha responded. "I don't want to talk about Zayd. How's your project coming along?"

Fiolas rolled with it, "It's ok, I'm stuck on a bit of programming. Dark Space defies all the usual navigator tools. The stars never seem to be where they're supposed to be. If the artificial intelligence sputters out, we're never getting out of here." He laughed, "chances are we aren't getting out of here either way."

"No probably not." She agreed, "Not a bad place to end up though huh? Three square meals a day, one vapor shower, some of the coolest scientific discoveries the human race has ever seen?" They fell into a comfortable chatter about the day and a comfortable rhythm at dinner. It was times like this when Keisha could forget about what she had done, that she wished she had taken Fiolas up on his offer to share quarters with him. He was so smart and funny. He read everything that he could get access to on the ship and would tell her stories about all the research going on within the ship. Hanging out in the hangar bay all the time, she sometimes forgot that not all the research was being done out in space. A lot of it was happening right here on the Pytheas. Keisha loved that he never made her feel stupid and automatically spoke in a way that made sense to her. He truly belonged on this ship. His mind was made for this.

After dinner, they went to their usual hang-out spot on the outer ring. No gravity meant no wheelchair for Fiolas. They locked it in place and floated down the almost empty halls. No one spent much time in the outer circle, most people liked to have at least a little gravity to keep them under control. Tonight Andromeda joined them and the three of them floated around the ring just talking and hanging out.

"Hey Fiolas, you should tell Anj about your programming problem." Keisha grinned at him and he shook his head. Andromeda looked at him expectantly.

"I'm kinda burned out on it. Maybe another night?" he asked her.

"Of course. You know I do love to solve little problems." Andromeda responded. To her, all problems were little problems. Keisha supposed when you lived amongst the stars and saw scientific breakthroughs every day you didn't know how much those breakthroughs would mean to people who lived on the ground. Big problems the core worlds faced were little problems to someone who lived in the stars. She tried to hold back a laugh. Fiolas could get so annoyed with her at times.

"OK, fine." he sighed, "So I've been trying to find a way to map out dark space in case we ever find ourselves without the artificial intelligence to find a route or keep track of where we are. The problem is..."

"Rigel's Collapse." she finished his sentence.

"Right." he glanced furtively at Keisha, "Rigel's Collapse into a supernova has skewed all the light data points we would normally use. Usually, we could account for the skewed data points with previous charts to compare it to, but when Earth's records were all destroyed,"

"You lost all your comparison points." She interrupted again.

"We have some really old comparison points, but they don't seem to match anything. Their technology was so old at the time, that their measurements could be lightyears off. Even then, I should be able to use them for approximations at least, but the maps the Pytheas has can't even rectify the use of the old information."

"Interesting." She paused, "It seems you haven't even come up against the problem that the lights are shifting." She gave him a smile as though he were a small child she was amusing.

"Excuse me?" he stopped and asked.

"The lights are shifting ever so slowly, however, it's enough that the charts you made this morning would be rendered useless by the end of the day." She shrugged her shoulders as though everyone knew this. She smiled, "This really is the perfect sector to do research in. Normal ships would never make it here."

"What do you mean the lights are shifting? I've taken multiple scans of the stars in this sector and I don't see any daily shifts." Fiolas said.

"Of course not, the AI automatically adjusts for it for your maps." She said.

"How does it know to do that?" he asked. "How do you even know it is doing that."

"Oh, I programmed it to a few days after entering dark space. If I hadn't we would have been so off course we wouldn't have even made our first rendezvous." She smiled at him. "Once I accounted for the shift the ship was able to create a new path towards our first mission." She just kept smiling and kept going. Fiolas looked like someone had just knocked him off his feet. "You know I want to go see those plants Keisha brought in. I should go see Dr. Mirlaj about them. Good luck with your problem Fiolas." She waved and then floated down the hallway back towards regular gravity.

"How could she do that?" He asked mostly to himself.

"I do course corrections all the time when I'm out flying," Keisha said.

"Right, every pilot does. The difference is you're out doing short-term missions. We're generally close enough you barely even need the ship to route a course, you can just manually fly it right up to wherever you're going. Hell, even on the Excelsior we were asleep most of the trip. By the time we woke up, you basically had to just not screw it up." Fiolas' mind was working overtime. "I've tried to get access to the navigation for the Pytheas. I'm one of the top astronomers on this ship. I couldn't have made the changes Andromeda just casually told us about. She's not even technically a crewman. How did she get access to that Keish? If anyone finds out, she could get in big trouble."

"Maybe she's just kidding?" Keisha was worried. Andromeda didn't have much of a sense of a humour.

"I hope so." Despite being annoyed by her Fiolas felt like an older brother to Andromeda and was always trying to look out for her. "I'm going to back to my quarters to work on this a bit. Want to go back with me?"

"No, I'm not quite ready. You go ahead. I'll see you tomorrow after my mission ok?"

"Ok, goodnight Keisha." He grabbed her hand and squeezed then left towards their quarters.

"Goodnight" she whispered back.