Rasa didn’t like talking about how she had survived, and Tina didn’t press her. But it was frustrating sometimes.
Tina started making dinner, while Rex and Rasa finished up and packed all the bits away.
“How did you do?” Tina asked.
“We need to buy a few things to make it work,” Rex said.
Why didn’t that surprise her? “All I want is a simple lock on the gate so that it can’t be opened accidentally.”
“Yes, but that won’t happen without the lock hardware. We have spare controllers, but we need a different lock.”
“We need a lot of things before we can afford that. We’ll just have to make do and remind everyone not to open the gate to the goose cage in zero g, or they’ll get to clean the entire cabin of goose poo and feather fluff.”
Rex and Rasa went off to reinstall the lock in the cargo hold in the other end of the arm that held the living areas. Their laughing and chatting was audible all the way up the ladder.
Tina liked how they got along so well. That friendly relationship had taken the tension off disagreements between her and Finn many times.
Finn now came back, his hair wet from the shower. He went to put the cups and plates on the table without saying a word.
He’d been doing this a lot recently, where he used to be quite chatty. In fact, she had only asked him to come because he seemed lonely and she could use an engineer. She had soon found out about his infamous family, though he said little about them other than that he’d signed up to the Force to escape them, only to be forcefully retired from the Force for disagreeing with a superior on a matter of safety.
She said, “Is there a problem?”
“Other than that I worry about my family’s enemies catching up with me at Aurora?”
“Yes, because you’ve been grumpy for much longer than this.”
“I’m just like that. I’m not a very cheerful person.”
“You weren’t like that at Kelso Station.”
He replied to this with his usual silence, and it was beginning to get on Tina’s nerves.
Rex and Rasa came back, filling the tense space with their laughter and chatter. They had been to feed the geese, which lived in a pen next to the gym and the farm.
They sat down at the table, and Tina brought out the ubiquitous curry with eggs that no one complained of having to eat, because there was no alternative.
“Does it mean that when we go to the station, we need to pack up everything that’s in the habitats?” Rex asked.
“We do,” Tina said.
Rex groaned. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?” He spread his metal hands.
“It came out of the habitat’s storage, so that’s where it will have to go back. We’ll have a week or so to do that.”
“Even the farm and your cactuses?”
Well, that was a different issue altogether. The ship consisted of a central tube that held the control cabin and the four in-flight cabins, and this ensemble sat atop the engine.
Both sides of the ship sported two swinging arms that rotated in opposite directions. The arms were attached to the ship by a central access tube, and each led to a habitat section and a cargo section. The habitat section was attached to the longest part of the arm. On one side, there was the living room, kitchen and sleeping areas. The mirror on the other side held the gym, farm and showers. The shorter arm, attached to the farm habitat, held the recycling plant and other equipment, and on the mirror side held the cargo hold. This section had an extra airlock that could be hooked up to an access tube when the ship was docked at a station.
After they had finished dinner, Tina climbed up the tube to the zero-g part of the ship and descended the other tube into the gym.
The open-plan space contained a treadmill, a bike and a few racks of pull-up and pull down machines bathed in the glow of the warm light that hung above the growth benches. The installation consisted of racks of tubing that contained constantly circulating water. Lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, mini-cucumbers, salad cabbages in different colours, strawberries and herbs grew from little holes in the tops of the tubes.
When the ship was in mid-flight, the habitat was unfolded and both sides, each with a living space and a utility space on the opposite side of the beam, could be used, but now everything that was inside the living areas needed to be packed away. Things that couldn’t be packed needed to be moved to the cabins behind the control room, so that the revolving habitat could be folded for docking.
And while even the habitat was not huge, it was amazing how “not a lot of personal possessions” of four people could expand to fill the available space.
In the case of Tina’s cactuses, they literally had filled the space of their own accord.
When they needed to stow the habitat, the farm had to be emptied, because otherwise the water would go everywhere in zero-g. But the cupboard at the back held a water tank that would hold the nutrient-filled water, and the installation’s pipes came apart and fit neatly in the cupboard next to it. The tidiness of this ship was what had attracted Tina to buy it in the first place.
However, the prickly jungle on the far side of the room was going to be far more of a problem.
In the months of flight, while looking for something to do, Tina had grown them from the seeds she had rescued from her jacket, and they seemed to like the conditions so much that they now formed an impenetrable mass that occupied half the gym and solarium room.
Tina got off the bike and stood at the door, feeling both proud and
