Chapter 1

“2 Pallas is the second asteroid to have been discovered (after Ceres), and is one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. With an estimated 7% of the mass of the asteroid belt, it is the third-most-massive asteroid. It is 512 kilometers (318 mi) in diameter. It is likely a remnant protoplanet.” - Wikipedia

... it is also in a very unusual orbit.

Atarah stretched her legs in the cramped confines of her sleeping module. She drifted away from her bag. The ion Drive was offline again. She wiped her face with a cleaner towel and unzipped the cubical door. Voices rose from his open cubical.

“Oh John2, you, you fracking BASTARD!”

“Shut up Mary5, you mechanical BITCH!”

“But, John2! How COULD you? With our Nanny Bot!”

“As the Worlds turn, these are the Days of our Liv...”

With a finger touch, she froze the vid as she thought, shaking her head, ‘How can he watch these old android soap operas?’

She floated towards the core tube. Hearing no alarms, Pilot must have shut the Drive down under unscheduled maintenance.

“Jabin, what’s happening with the Drive?” Atarah questioned into her wrist term.

Without waiting for his reply, “Pilot, what is the status of the Drive?”

Pilot replied immediately with a display of diagnostics. Jabin replied before Atarah could digest the data.

“Well, top of the mornin’ to you, my love. Feel free to get your ass down here sometime today.”

“Love you too...”, she saw that Pilot had shut down the Drive due to a thruster variant.

Down was relative in freefall, but always meant towards the stern Drive Pod and ‘up’ was towards the bow Storage Pod. They were normally in the Living Pod, mid-ship of the hundred meter long Cecilia Payne. They were headed to the asteroid 2 Pallas where Atarah’s father, Seth Branson, was running a mining team. A few years earlier, they had discovered that this particular asteroid contained an unusually large amount of lithium, osmium, ruthenium and rhodium; all rare metals, along with oxides to split for oxygen and even helium3 for their fusion reactors.

Atarah and Jabin had been paired several years earlier, back at Armstrong City on the Moon by her mother, Naarah, and his mother, Caare, and had been working towards this trip almost since then.

She and Jabin were allowed to replace the two Blue Ion crew on this journey, not just to see her father after several years, but to lend her experience in atomics as her father’s engineering group assembled the automated mining station. Her mom had convinced Seth that Atarah knew more about nuclear physics and fusion engineering than anyone else on Luna, even at the tinder age of only 17. She ought to, considering she had studied the field since she was ten.

Jabin, too, was highly trained in engineering, particularly with plasma propulsion and robotics. The two were as capable as any of the Blue Ion team in Armstrong City, even if low on practical experience. You only get experience by actually doing was their final argument.

Atarah pushed through the core tube down towards the Drive Pod, where Jabin was. Jabin had been involved in the Cecilia’s propulsion system design for nearly as long as Atarah had with her studies and was half a year older than Atarah. Their two mothers had, with the aid of Armstrong’s AI predictive analysis, paired their profiles when they were just children.

The two teens were well suited for each other, almost yen and yang together and would have likely made good parents. But like most of offworld youth, they were both sterile; sterilized when they were very young. Radiation damage from growing up outside of a magnetic bubble, such as Earth’s, just created too many DNA replication errors from cosmic and solar radiation. And no one wanted to live underground all the time. But like all children, their DNA was captured and stored when they were born. They could have kids, built from a mix of their genes, but gestated on Earth as they themselves had been.

Had Atarah and Jabin grown up mainly on Earth, this would have been unnecessary, but their parents, living on the Moon had wanted the babies with them. Atarah’s first space flight began only a year after she was born just after the doctors were certain the gene spliced IQ accelerants and rad resists had taken properly.

Atarah’s first memories were of her home in Nursery in Armstrong City, the only ‘city’ on Luna. She remembered her mother holding her and her father talking with the doctor. They were about to give her the injection that would create her Brain-Computer-Interface, BCI. All children received the injection at around 2 years of age so that the growth of the interface would coincide with the development of their young minds. It would take nearly a year for the process to complete; being partially biological and partially nano-electronic. It tied into the centers of emotion and thought, much like the optic nerve and the auditory nerve did to their respective portions of the brain. The original design was for the thought processes only, but it was found that learning needed emotional impact to anchor memories for best recall. Once the child’s BCI was deemed functional, they graduated from Nursery to School.

Atarah’s dad was surprised when his daughter showed integration at a mere six months after injection. Her mom, though, was skeptical and tried to resist Atarah beginning School at only two and a half. She relented only after Atarah’s dad snuck a language lesson to Atarah and she began to speak to her mom in her mom’s native Tahitian. Atarah still remembered the ‘heated discussion’ that her mom and dad had after that. Language lessons weren’t supposed to be applied until at least three or four and only after preliminaries were completed by School.

But within a year, Atarah was already matching five year olds in math and science, along with fluency in five languages.

“Jabin, I see you messed up the Drive again!” she kidded him as she smoothly slid into the Drive Pod work area, now used to weightless environments.

He ignored her, “Pilot, please re-initialize thruster D4 and hot fire at 1% when possible.”

Then to her, “Hi sleepy head, you missed all the fun. You can’t blame me on this one. I think we just had some crap collect on the positive grid. Gotta get after those guys in Propellant next time we are in Armstrong.”

“Ha! That’s two years from now. They’ll have invented something better by then.”

She came up to Jabin, grabbed a handhold with one hand and the back of his head with the other. She pulled the two of them together and holding his lips to hers for as long as she wanted. He reached around, seized her bottom and pulled her against him as the rest of her body did a slow motion collision with his. Each of his hands squeezed a butt cheek and his legs intertwined with hers. He floated holding onto her, no longer touching the wall. She let go her remaining handhold and they drifted off as they kissed.

“Initialization complete. D4 firing in three, two, one, initiated”, said Pilot.

The gentle push of the single plasma thruster at minimum power was nearly imperceptible to the two lovers.

Jabin broke their kisses, “Pilot, continue hot fire for five minutes, then rerun diagnostics.”

He went back to kissing Atarah. It was a rare treat to get to float weightless together, but duty called. She explored his lips with a long, slender finger.

“Jabin, I need to go look over Pilot’s findings to be sure we didn’t miss something. This is the second time a thruster has caused the Drive to go offline. I want to send your data back to Blue Ion to have them look at it as well.”

“Atarah, I want to make love to you in zero-g. We haven’t gotten to...”

She smiled, “Stinker, this is important. MORE important. Anyway, we’ll have a day of weightlessness at mid-point.”

“That’s weeks from now, my love!”

“Silly, we will be fucking in quarter-g soon”, her mind wandered, “Can you imagine having someone screwing you in full Earth-g? UGH!”

“That will be like making love to an elephant!” he responded.

“A what?”

“Big, grey skin, trunk, tusks...”

Atarah laughed and untangled herself from him. She pushed off sending him backwards as she was propelled forward, deafly catching a handgrip and sliding into the core tube ‘up’ towards Control. She heard him do a strange noise, like a sick tuba horn, as she left the Drive Pod.

She flipped her wrist term, “Jabin, you only wanted me down there so you could mate again.”

She didn’t wait for a reply from him, smiling as she cut the connection.

Pilot interrupted, “Hot fire of thruster D4 complete. Diagnostics underway. Results in two minutes thirty five seconds.”

In Control, Atarah went over the report, before and after. The change was easy to see, but the cause eluded her. It did not look like Jabin’s ‘crap’. Pilot’s data inference showed several low probability vectors, but requested more information that neither she nor the sensors could provide here in mid-flight. She recorded a message to Blue Ion attaching the data. She also recorded a message to her mom, just telling her that Jabin is horny all the time and she might have to give him a progesterone shot. She laughed at that idea as she thought about it.

“All diagnostics complete. No anomalies. Orbital recalculation complete. Suggested initiation in five minutes twenty-eight point three seconds. Drive level of 98% of maximum required to return to nominal arrival in 56 days 11 hours, 5 minutes.”

“Pilot, what is the G load for this calculation?” Jabin’s voice came up from the core tube just as he entered Control.

“Zero point three three gravity.”

“Ugh”, he replied, “elephant.”

“Small elephant. 1/3^rd gee isn’t THAT bad!” Atarah replied, knowing that it was nearly twice their normal ‘weight’ on the Moon.

She continued, “Pilot initiate at calculated time. 98% Drive”, then to Jabin, “At least we can eat real food and I can take a shower! Not like now in zero-gee. It’s only for a day or two, then back to normal.”

She strapped into a control chair, more out of safety of floating out now or falling when the Drive kicked in than anything. Jabin did the same. She scanned the status screens, out of habit. The magnetic bubble around the Living Pod was at normal strength. She reflected on that. It helped shield them from much of the radiation from the solar wind and even a fair amount of cosmic rays. If they could figure out how to expand that bubble to the size of Armstrong City on Luna, then ... She paused, a little sad. Then they could have babies. On the Moon. And nurseries wouldn’t need to be deep underground. And Jabin could make her belly grow round instead of its current flat low muscle self. She absently rubbed her bare midriff.

Pilot interrupted, “Drive to 98% in three, two, one, initiated.”

She felt herself sink into the chair. She felt heavy, bloated, pregnant.

Jabin spoke up, “I’m going to go get breakfast. Atarah, come join me?”

“I want a shower. Come join me?” she replied.

He smiled.

They had to hand-over-hand down the core tube now, grabbing every other handhold to slow their decent. At least going down was down now and easier than going up. In the Living Pod, she did little bounding hops, not quite as prominent as the “Lunar Bunny Hop”, but not like Earth walking. She had only seen vids of walking on Earth, her bones and muscles too weak to actually go there. She didn’t care. She loved Space. She also loved Jabin. She had better love him, 56 more days of just the two of them in this container ship.

Normally, this run would have had two Blue Ion pilots to deliver the rest of the ‘crew’; twelve Boston Dyn construction robots along with much needed supplies that couldn’t be constructed, including feedstocks of elements unavailable on the asteroid that were needed in the replication printers. All of this was stored in the forward Storage Pod whose shield and bulk helped protect the two weak humans from oncoming micro debris and a fair fraction of oncoming radiation.

They would be travelling at a couple hundred thousand kilometers per hour, thus even a salt grain size object would hit the oblation shield with significant force. And the Cecilia Payne could accelerate at one third gee for years; full velocity would start approaching one percent of the speed of light.

Their ship’s namesake, Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin had proposed, correctly, in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her idea was initially rejected, almost offhandedly. How could those elements put out so much energy? Now Atarah knew that it was possible for humans to actually travel beyond their Solar System to one of those stars with the help of the nuclear hydrogen fusion driven plasma engines that they now worked on.

She felt hands removing her clothes. She smiled, returning to the here and now.

“Jabin, make love to me.”

“I thought you would never ask.”

He removed his clothper shirt, crumpling it and Atarah’s and tossed into the recycler. Her back was to him as his hands came around her waist and unfastened her sleep pants that she hadn’t changed out of. He pulled them down over her hips, wide hips, good for babies that would never come. She sighed and turned around, kicking her pants off at the same time. He looked at her sapphire green eyes, slightly enlarged for better night vision, irises partially oval, mimicking cat eyes. Human gene’s altered slightly, following their animal analogs.

She smiled into his deep blue eyes, similar to hers in shape, if not color. Her hands glided down his hairless body. Like hers, hair had become more of a nuisance in space; having to be cut, requiring precious extra water to clean, with loose hair floating and clogging filters. Thus another slight gene modification. Both were so used to seeing everyone bald from head to toe that watching vids from Earth made the people there look like they were all barely out of the Stone Age. The pair did have tattoos; hers a Polynesian design on one side of her head, signifying her roots. Another was a sunburst in the center of the small of her back. She was a child of the stars.

His body had nearly a dozen tattoos scattered in no apparent order. He had described the reason for each as they had lain in bed together long back in Armstrong City when they had first mated at 14, under their parents’ approval. Since their mating wasn’t necessarily for having babies, but for love and companionship, their matching had been predicted to have a strong bond, with over 90% full lifetime longevity of about 60 years. Radiation and accidents were hard on offworlders. Neither the young Atarah nor Jabin had ever thought anything unusual about the arrangement. The two kids had been predicted a match, successfully so far, at the tender age of 12. Thus they had known each other for about five years now.

But Jabin always stared in awe of his beloved Atarah each time he saw her nude. His eyes flowed down her body, over her perfectly rounded, bowl shaped breasts, nipples now hard in the cool air. Breasts that would never sag under the gravity of Earth. He watched her breath stretch her ribcage in slow rhythm, then his eyes drifted down to her abdomen, soft and flat, her ‘innie’ belly button he so loved to play with. Her hips, with pelvic bones protruding on each side, narrowing into that childlike permanently bare mound and diving between her legs showing her pouty lips with her perfectly smooth slit; his favorite place on her, visible in the thigh gap of her thin legs, where muscle wasn’t needed anymore. Her toes and fingers, longer and thinner than Earthers, again thanks to slight gene alterations; he loved how she could clench her toes, using them to hold onto a hand rail, in the mist of love making. She was only four and a half feet tall and him only six inches more than her, again due to slight gene tweaks, more for conserving space and weight in a world where space and weight were at a premium.