Dick closed off bulkheads to prevent Adam from straying too far in his pointless search for Eve. This helped Katomi corner him near her living quarters.

“Adam!” she yelled. “You know that’s your name, right? Come in here with me and I’ll explain.”

He nodded, then trudged into the room like a forlorn puppy. She patted the bed, and he sat next to her.

"What have you done with Eve?” he asked.

“We haven’t done anything with her. She’s not here, but we are taking you to see her. Don’t worry.” Katomi tried to keep her eyes on his face rather than looking any lower down, and she remembered that she’d put Brother Jacob through a similar scenario.

So, this is how it feels to be the awkward one.

Adam’s demeanour brightened. “That’s good!”

A man of few words, too. Can this guy get any more perfect?

She walked over to the far wall and touched a sensor pad. A panel slid aside revealing a tightly packed wardrobe. “Let’s get you dressed first, so that we all feel a bit more comfortable?”

Katomi searched through her outfits looking for something suitable. She also did her best to explain the situation to Adam, who sat on the bed with a rather bemused expression on his angelic face. He only interrupted her when she described the monk’s handing over the cargo— that cargo being him!

“They didn’t have Eve as well?”

“No. After the attack by the other church group, the station’s security team did a full sweep. We’ve checked all their comm records. No mention of another pod. And there wasn’t one on the ship that chased us either. I’ll get to that bit.”

She finished her story, emphasising that they all thought Eve must be on Mars, so he should just chill out until they got there. “Hey, how’s this?”

She held up an outfit comprising white trousers and a white jacket with a deep black V collar. Sequins glinted from the cuffs and lapels. “I don’t have many guy’s clothes, sorry. But I wore this to a retro-Earth dance party once. Everyone said it was cool.”

Adam wasn’t listening. He complied with her instructions to put the clothes on, although getting his thick muscular legs into the trousers proved a challenge. Their flared bottoms finished halfway up his calves, and his manhood bulged through the fabric.

Katomi cautioned him, “Don’t dwell on Eve too much. I doubt that zip can take any more pressure!”

They left to look for a pair of boots on the supply deck.

“So, you’ve got no memory at all, but you speak English. And you know you have to find a woman called Eve?” Katomi was asking him as they walked.

His answer was a dull thud as he fell through a hole to the deck below.

“Adam!” she called out, peering into the hole.

He lay curled into a foetal position, holding an ankle and whimpering.

Rat’s face appeared in the frame, blinking up at Katomi. “Sorry, we’ve repurposed some of the floor panels.” He bent down over Adam. “He’ll be fine. Probably just a twisted ankle. Hey! like that other guy in the bible, the one with the weak foot.”

Dick made his presence known. “That was Achilles. And he wasn’t in the bible.”

“No? Just as well, then. He wouldn’t have gotten far.”

Katomi jumped down. “Rat you moron! Who in their right mind repurposes a floor? What better purpose can it serve other than a floor?”

“We need the titanium for the ship’s weakened belly, and it’s not all the floor. We’re just taking some plates around the living quarters. They’re the thicker ones, to help shield occupants from engine radiation.” He shrugged.

“Excellent, so now we’re exposed to more radiation, anyway.” Katomi helped Adam stand; on one foot at least. The other hung a few inches above the deck, swelling.

“Ah, stop your moaning.” Rat decided he’d suffered enough nagging on this trip. “I’ve got important engineering shit to do. Namely, configuring this ship to survive a Mars entry, so that your sorry little ass doesn’t get burnt to a crisp.”

Deciding it would be unwise to hassle the engineer anymore, Katomi led a hopping Adam to the med bay.

Rat called after them. “When you’re done kissing it better, can you send Adam back to me?

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Dick and I could use some more muscle.”

With the ankle wrapped in a bandage, Katomi could see no reason why Adam shouldn’t join “the boys” and help with the modifications. It would be good to escape the awkward silences, so she had Dick guide him back while she checked the system-wide comms from her desk.

The voices that made their way to the Vagabond, from the planets, moons, stations, and other ships, were bereft of anything unusual or threatening. They spoke of mining and politics. Contracts and taxes. The death of the elderly and the birth of the next generation. Still under the same sun as thousands of generations before them. Just scattered a little wider. The hum drum soap opera of humanity played itself out as they crawled ever closer to the inner planets.

Rat, Dick, and Adam ferried more and more material down to the ship’s belly. They even enlisted the help of the cleaning bots. After reprogramming, the bots dragged smaller pieces behind them, or shone lights over the work area. Rat taught Adam how to weld, and Dick directed them to sections that needed reinforcement.

A couple of weeks later, Katomi reported to the bridge, skirting around the increasing number of holes in the floor.

“Captain, there’s some chatter coming through the dark web. Talk of a disturbance on Mars.” She sat down at her comms panel.

“Finally!” Brenda said, swinging around in her captain’s chair. “Something to ponder other than our own belly button fluff!”

“It’s escalating. The Martian council are playing it down as another minor tax protest, but my sources are saying there’s been an explosion at the Olympia space port.”

Brenda brought up the Vagabond’s nav data on the main screen. “We’re still a month out. But I wonder if cronies of the bishop want to prevent our arrival?”

“It’s possible. They can’t reach us from Triton or Saturn anymore, Dick?” Brenda spoke to the ceiling.

“Yes, Captain?”

“If we can’t use the space port, can we still make planet-fall?”

“Hang on, let me check with Rat.”

Katomi raised her pencil thin eyebrows. “Wow, Dick doesn’t know everything after all.”

“Good!” said Brenda. “Rat might be annoying, but I’d rather put my trust in him than some inhuman AI. Rat knows his stuff. This won’t be the first scrape he’s gotten us out of, and it hopefully won’t be the last.”

“Amen to that!”

Rat came on the line, “Why thank you, ladies! That’s the nicest thing anyone has said about me all month. I sense a hot and heavy threesome soon.”

“And,” added Brenda, laughing, “he’s consistent.”

A loud metallic clang echoed through the speakers before Rat spoke again, “Sorry, that was Adam dropping another plate. He lacks any kind of finesse, this guy. Anyway, to your question. Yes, I reckon you could put the Vagabond down pretty much anywhere on the surface. You don’t need a spaceport for that. The issue is whether you can get it off again. The spaceport pads are flat and solid, so you can get maximum uplift from your engines. If you land the Vaga’ on an uneven surface, it’s going to be very hard to lift off. Not to mention, there’s a few inches of that lovely red sand that might get sucked into the intakes. And the regolith underneath the sand is likely to shake loose and go all over the show.”

“Told you.” Brenda winked at Katomi. “He knows his stuff. Ok, thanks Rat. Katomi will keep monitoring the channels.” She hung up on Rat. “I get the feeling we’d be crazy to land at Olympia. We might be better off putting down next to the church’s dome. That’s where Eve will be, don’t you think?”

Katomi frowned. “I suppose. I’ve been out of touch with Mars society for a while. I just know the church was not liked. I doubt that’s changed any. Their Eridanea colony is as far away as you can get from everyone else. Very rarely did they make any contact. The government obviously doesn’t have them under very good surveillance, if this internal split was allowed to go unchecked long enough to threaten the spaceport.”

“The getting out part might be tricky though, if what Rat said is true.”

***

A week out from Mars, the space lane traffic increased to the point where Vagabond could no longer keep radio silence. Not without attracting attention. Katomi stayed on her toes, answering repeated identification requests from traffic control on Phobos. She called on Dick when overzealous controllers demanded AI verification. When she wasn’t being interrogated, she monitored the local chat channels. Word had spread, and so had the troubles. It seemed the church colony was in a state of full civil unrest. The Martian government had banned any travel to and from the Eridanea region, to prevent a repeat of the spaceport bombing.

The boys announced they’d finished strengthening the Vagabond’s belly, with just a few days to spare. Brenda called everyone together. “Rat, is there any way you can adapt our take-off thrusters to allow launch from an uneven surface?”

“Yes, and no,” Rat mused. “I’ll start with the no. There is no way to adapt the engine’s hardware to that degree. The lift-off plasma exhaust cones are not a separate component, they are part of the entire structure. It was designed for the ship to take off from flat space ports.” He let that sink in before continuing, “But, yes, I think we can achieve directional thrust at take-off with a software solution.”

“You mean a big fat Dick solution?”

“Correct! Dick?”

Dick answered, “I am neither big nor fat. I do not have any mass. But Rat is correct. Since this conversation began, I’ve written a new flight control program. It should allow us to fire individual plasma streams from within the engines at slightly different timings, to account for uneven terrain directly below. I’ve run though a couple of hundred simulations already.”

“And?” Brenda asked the ceiling.

“You die in all of them. The ship fails to re-orient itself before the internal counter forces rip it apart.”

“I thought you said it’s doable?”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. I just have to tweak some things.”

Katomi sighed. “Oh shit. We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”

“No!” Adam startled everyone with his shout.

“Well, it looks like the cat has let go of boy wonder’s tongue,” said Rat.

Adam’s tongue, and the rest of his face, was set into an expression of grim determination. “We must rescue Eve!”

Brenda smiled. “We will, Adam, don’t you worry. Dick?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Keep working on it. Let me know as soon as you’ve run a simulation that doesn’t end with our insides making lovely patterns on the Martian landscape.”

“Will do.”

“Now, Katomi?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Any reason Adam is wearing hot pants and a tank top?”

“I’m out of better options. None of Rat’s stuff fits. If he can’t make this outfit last, he’ll be in an evening gown next time you see him.”

“God help us. I wonder what Eve is going to think?”

“Eve!” Adam shouted.