[C]Her emotions were always mixed, ever since she had started working with the newcomers.

  She couldn’t call them intruders as she had chosen to work with them. But she still very much disliked them for coming into her pce, even if that work would benefit Moose.

  She worked diligently at her data pad, recreating everything she had seen.

  She was proud of her memory. It might have saved her pain before, but that wasn’t nearly as important as now. Now, it let her anticipate what Moose wanted. Let her get started early so that she could present whatever it was as soon as Moose bothered to ask.

  As she came up to the newcomer’s room, she started to pay attention to her surroundings. She didn’t know this part of the ship all that well, the intense light chasing her away from the area after a short time.

  ‘Maybe I should ask for something to cover my eyes. The stations are very bright as well. Would Kitty even bother to rey that to Moose?’

  She opened the door, contempting the best way to get the question to Moose, and looked towards the newcomers. She guessed they weren’t expecting her, because they had been very close and the Crova seemed ruffled.

  “We need to teach you how to knock young dy.”

  Her eyes snapped to the male, the near constant urge to growl when he was nearby returning.

  “Then do that weird hugging stuff when I’m busy. I don’t have time to wait for you to finish pying.”

  “Wha--. That’s not wh--. You can’t sa—”

  Her eyes flicked back to the Crova, but the male shushed her. She might hate him, but at least he understood when it was time to work.

  “That’s still no reason to be rude. You might not be a sve anymore, but would you have gotten away with it if you still had that colr?”

  She huffed. She never figured out why non-sves always tried to sound smart about things they didn’t know.

  “Don’t try and sound smart to me. It wouldn’t matter what I did, the colr still worked fine. Not doing the work was more likely to be punished than waiting anyways. Besides, I am a sve. I belong to Moose and Moose doesn’t need a colr.”

  She would like one though.

  She had worried about it several times when she didn’t have enough work to do. When she ran out of things to busy her mind. What happens if someone asked? Could she bring them back to Moose? Would Kitty know what to say when Moose was asked? She might know that she belonged to Moose, but without a colr, how would anyone else? Those colrs might bring her more nightmares than she cared to admit, but they also stopped her from being stolen. No one would steal a sve, the colr made sure of it. You needed both the new and old owner there to change anything. She had felt freed from a massive weight when Moose had broken it, but as time went by and she realized how little its functions meant to him, she had begun to have second thoughts.

  Begun to crave the security she had never really been aware of.

  The colr marked her. Made her property. Without it?

  She might just be forgotten.

  She pulled her hand down from her neck, breaking out of the thoughts that had ambushed her at the unexpected mention. Though it seemed the other two were uncomfortable for some reason.

  “Now stop pretending and tell me what this means.”

  She fiddled with her data pad and turned it around so they could see what she had made. She hoped it was a word and she had made the letters correctly. If it was some kind of magic her pns might be in trouble.

  “That’s… not really a--. Uh, I suppose that says quartermaster, if you squint and try really hard to make it say that. Are you trying to learn to write? I can teach you better penmanship, but I would need help in return.”

  She squinted hard at the Crova, hard enough she started to squirm. At least until the male coughed.

  “Teaching and all that can wait until we are out of the system. We should save things like that for the long periods in transit. Why don’t you let me help you figure out where to go?”

  She could tell his smile was fake. She nearly ughed at him. She did let out a slight chuckle at the presumption.

  “You’re fake. I don’t believe you can do any of the things to go to a different system. I don’t think you know even a little magic.”

  She puffed up her chest, proud at how much magic Moose could do. She had yet to see anyone outside the ship that could match Moose at anything!

  ‘Well, that’s not really true. Moose can’t really beat anybody at being small.’

  “That’s…. FTL isn’t magic young dy. It is a very difficult use of numbers. I may not be a navigator, but I can at least get us to a new system. It would be much safer if we did find a navigator though.”

  “I don’t believe you. Kitty said that Moose said it was magic. Or maybe Kitty just said it was magic? … It doesn’t matter. Moose can do magic and you can’t. You just said so. Besides, Moose already picked where to go. I wouldn’t have time for this if Moose wasn’t missing.”

  She wanted to bristle at the utter ridiculousness of what she had just heard. Moose not having magic? It was impossible, she had seen it herself. Kitty had said so.

  ‘Wait, did the Crova just say Mooses’ writing was bad?’

  “Ah! Don’t try to distract me with that, Moose doesn’t have bad words! He is good at writing! If you can’t read it then you’re bad at reading.”

  It had seemed like the male was about to speak, but she ignored him and gred at the Crova. She wouldn’t ignore an insult like that.

  “Didn’t you ask us to read it because you couldn’t?”

  “Of course I did, I can’t read. I didn’t pretend to be good at it. Since I can’t learn from Kitty that leaves you two.”

  The Crova had seemed amused until she had given her reasoning. The amusement seemed to dry up after that.

  “Why not just ask this Moose to teach you then? You said it came from him, right?”

  She wasn’t sure what to call the look she gave to the male, but it clearly had a name as the male had to look away and the Crova covered her beak.

  “Right, well, it has the letters for quartermaster. If you can’t read and no one has taught you, where did you get those letters?”

  She ignored the male for now and focused back on the Crova.

  “I watched Moose. Now what does this one say?”

  She had taken the first step.

  Now she just had to memorize every word.

  [B]His rationing math said he had several months’ worth of supplies and he was going to use it.

  He had chosen a retively short hop for the first leg of their new journey. It had taken him less than half a day to get the math ready and for the computer to check everything. If the math was all correct, the flight itself wouldn’t be more than a couple of days.

  Which worked just fine for him.

  While the others seemed to take that first day as a rest and recover period from the station, something he wholeheartedly agreed with, he had spent it all doing math. Most of the next day as well, though Pup and Kitty had finally come to see what he was up to.

  ‘Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t go to the station. I don’t know how I would handle being surrounded by that many people after so long. Even just Pup and Kitty are draining if they are both awake at the same time.’

  He had always enjoyed his extended bouts of isotion, much more interested in tinkering or reading than interacting with people. The occasional buddy dragging him out to be human again was appreciated, but it took so long to recover afterwards.

  ‘Probably why I was accepted for the cryo tests. They made it pretty clear they didn’t want top performers, but there had to be better choices than me.’

  That first contact with aliens had been a big deal… for all of a week. The advanced communication tech that allowed the contact got more press in the end. It wasn’t surprising, since it took nearly three months for a call and response. Not exactly riveting entertainment for public consumption.

  He couldn’t say much though. He had been equally as wowed by aliens as everyone else, then promptly forgot about that altogether when the cryo tech debuted. Supposedly from the aliens, but he never got confirmation on that part.

  He wasn’t going to question it too hard.

  It nded his ass here after all.

  ‘If the math was right, we should be in FTL for nearly a month. It will have fits and starts, as I couldn’t find a good straight path without an obstacle. Shame I haven’t figured out if I can curve the FTL travel.’

  He was keeping track of days, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour to pop down to the bridge and start the FTL again. He hadn’t done all that math for nothing after all.

  ‘Still best to check fuel and other levels between each jump though. Better safe than exploded.’

  The extended periods would give him a lot more time to pursue the bs on the secret level. While the fate of the crew had never left his mind completely, it had been overshadowed by everything that needed immediate attention. Like watch standing and docking. He might know where they had ended up, but it didn’t tell him why. Or how.

  ‘Didn’t seem like enough of a mess for a ship this size either. I wonder how long they had really been there.’

  He had zero guesses on decay rates in an air lock. He supposed it depended on what was doing the decaying, but he had zero guesses on that either. He had hoped to find the answers in the ship logs, but not only did they prove to be illusive, the answers he did find were not very helpful at all.

  He had learned more from those b reports, even if it was mostly guesswork.

  His pn was to spend most of that flight time locked up in the bs, reading reports. He not only brought what he thought was essentially a crowbar to pry open anything that was locked, he got something he might be able to use to pick a lock.

  ‘Got some pillows so I can sit somewhere that isn’t a metal floor as well. All I’m missing is a nice hot drink.’

  He grimaced.

  ‘One that isn’t water at least.’

  He had tried to make hot chocote with those choco-sticks, but whatever they were made out of didn’t melt well. All he managed was a mess and a wasted snack.

  ‘Let’s hope the young’uns don’t cause too much trouble while I’m not watching.’

  It didn’t take him long to get settled in and transting. Having to leave at the end of the day to do small things like eat and sleep didn’t help with the speed, but he felt he made good progress. The problem being that he had no way to really pce things in a timeline.

  ‘There are a lot of b reports full of jargon, some of which I might actually understand. But I can’t figure out how or even if they are dated. Did the successful gamete extraction happen before or after the artificial wombs were verified at a high effectiveness?’

  Did it matter? He had no idea. Maybe. Did gametes need artificial wombs to be successful? All good questions he didn’t have answers to. He supposed it didn’t really mean much to him, he needed a timeline of events, not a head full of research notes. The science was too interesting to dismiss though, always tantalizing with a ‘this might be important ter’ vibe.

  ‘If I transted this right, it does seem like this isn’t the only ship. They gave something to a ‘sister ship’ to begin testing. Something about editing senescence.’

  He wasn’t sure how you edited entropy, but interesting was certainly an apt descriptor.

  If he could find more references to this ‘sister ship’ he might be able to find a location or a radio code or something. It would at least give him a reason to seek out a particur destination rather than just randomly pop into star systems.

  “Oh, here we go. ‘C.UeH dies in childbirth, fetus never matured. Viable genetic materials collected.’ I have seen that abbreviation before. It had something to do with moving cryo pods.”

  It meant that said abbreviation was talking about a person. A female person, considering the fetus was also mentioned. The abbreviation had thrown him off before, ruining his ability to grab context where it was used. He started to go back over the papers he had put aside, looking for where he had seen it.

  Finding it and giving it a quick look over, he found the spot he had gotten stumped.

  ‘I still don’t know what it stands for, but it is clearly talking about a person. It clears out some of the context I couldn’t parse before.’

  If he was reading what he transted correctly, and that was a very big if, this might be a big change.

  It might mean he wasn’t the only one here.