June followed Captain Konrad into the spaceship. As soon as they had entered, the bulkhead closed again with a soft hiss and a satisfying clunk, and the ever-present hum of the space station subsided. June let out a sigh of relief and felt her cramped neck relax, just a little. There was still so much to worry about. Then she realized that it was not just the hum, but the feeds as well. Her connex tried to ramp up transmit power briefly, then gave up.

The corridors were much tighter than June had imagined. The only ships she had ever been on had been corporate, all shiny, spacious, and soulless. The TORI felt different, not tight and shabby but lived-in and cozy, where things that were used had polished handles and the walls were decorated with more graffiti.

The captain led her into a room with a big table where someone was already waiting for them. A small person with long, iridescent hair, wearing oversized, baggy clothes covered in patches and logos June could not recognize. A stark contrast to the tidy captain. As soon as they entered, June got an introductory feed packet from Marga, who sat up and stopped biting her nails.

"So how does this work, exactly?" June sat down and set her backpack on the table. "I give you the data, and you let me join the cooperative?"

"Something like that." Captain Konrad smiled. "We'll take you to co-op space either way. If you can stay there or on the Tori, is up to you. For now, Marga would really like to see the data; you were pretty stingy with details."

"Here goes nothing." June sighed and emptied the backpack onto the table, producing dozens of paper notebooks. Another load off her shoulders. Literally.

Marga's eyes bulged.

"Paper?!?"

2/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June sat next to Marga at the big table in what seemed to be the ship's common area. She had sorted the notebooks chronologically and recognized the glint in Marga's eyes as she leafed through the notebooks, indicating that she was recording what she saw. Captain Konrad was watching them with an unreadable, but not unfriendly face.

"Please don't digitize this." June laid a hand on Marga's shoulder. "If this leaks I'm dead."

"Don't worry." Marga gestured around the room. "This part of the ship is caged and gapped, we're on a private node."

June was surprised when a feed for a workspace opened for a shared database with the transcribed entries. In her old lab no one would have done that without payment, orders, or a subpoena.

"Yeah, that's above my paygrade." Captain Konrad stood up and headed for the door, then looked at Marga. "You let me know." Marga nodded absent-mindedly.

June checked the data and was surprised how much of it was already processed and annotated.

"You are very fast." She looked at Marga, whose eyes had the unmistakable glaze of someone deep in a feed. "And very thorough."

"Got a little help." Marga smirked without looking at June. "Explain this to me."

Tables and plots popped up on June's feed and the two of them spent the next hours pouring over the data, until Marga finally closed the workspace and looked at June with big eyes.

"Well I'll be damned."

3/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

The rest of the crew had joined June and Marga in the meeting room, and together they were looking at a big screen showing a star chart with a destination marker. Although she found it interesting that they were not using a feed instead, June was not paying the screen much attention; she was much more interested in the three new people she had not met before.

Bjorn, apparently the second in command, wore the same brown, not-quite-uniform, as the captain. With his clean shaven face and tidy haircut he looked much more like he belonged on a spaceship than the others. He had asked lots and lots of questions. Good questions to build a mental picture, while accepting her expertise. June liked that.

Then there was the one called 'Rip'. They were bald, tall, and massive – a mountain of a person – but had come wearing an apron and bearing fresh cookies of excellent quality. Their genuine smile, when June had praised the treats, stood in stark contrast to the crooked nose and scars all over their rugged face.

The last person staying in the background and observing with a stoic face was Ada. Her long, black hair was bundled in a ponytail and her simple, but elegant clothes matched her demeanor. When June asked what she did on the ship, she had said: "They get in trouble and I patch them back together, and in return, they keep me out of trouble."

"Listen up." Captain Konrad's voice pulled everyone's attention. "Marga still wants to cross-check details, but it looks like June has actually found a new fold-gate."

Attention silence turned into stunned silence. June remembered the first time she had accepted that what she had found was not an artifact in the data or a mistake and smiled.

He tapped the marker on the screen. "And it is sublight reachable." A series of waypoints appeared on the display. His face grew stern. "This does not leave the ship."

Ada was now standing next to June, staring at the display with a smirk.

"So you come bearing trouble."

4/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June watched the shared feed as Marga put the finishing touches on the data. Cleanups, annotations, and references appeared all over the place with extraordinary speed. Unease started churning in her stomach, and a cold, calculating part in her head began going over her contingency plan.

"I thought we were on an island node?" June leaned forward and studied Marga's face while she sent out stealth probes to scan the perimeter of the feed.

"We are." Marga kept staring into infinity. "But we do have a powerful neural subsystem." She blinked and looked June in the eyes with a gentle sadness. "We don't lie to you. If we need what you have, we take it."

June's probes were terminated.

"I want to send these queries out on the global. Can you check if they're vague enough?" A series of documents appeared on the feed, and Marga stood and stretched. "I'll get us some drinks." She took the last cookie and left.

The unease in June's stomach was replaced by something else. A deep loneliness.

5/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Captain Konrad was studying the projected route to the new gate while slowly shaking his head and grumbling dissatisfied.

"Who made this?" He looked at June.

"Uh, me." June blushed. "I couldn't really go to nav control and ask for a route. What's wrong with it? I had to kinda learn starnav on the fly."

"It's technically fine." The captain rotated the view on the screen and zoomed in on a slightly blurry part close to the beginning. "It'll take a couple months, if all goes right." The projected path went right through the unsharp blob. "You know what this means?" He pointed at the aberration.

"It said unreliable sensor readings." June sighed. "It's not, is it?"

"It might be, but if we look at the surroundings, it looks like a very good place to play hide and seek from." Captain Konrad looked at Rip. "Far enough to make it impractical to attack, close enough to work as a base." He highlighted some darker spots. "Asteroids to mine."

"Pirates?" June's eyes widened.

"Maybe." The captain connected to the screen, and several alternative routes appeared. "Or some con hiding a secret." The routes shifted, and some vanished again. "Or something else." Only a handful of routes remained. "Taking a detour would add weeks." He looked at Bjorn. "We'll add 'finding out what that is' to the list."

"Oh, I have something else for the list then." June said. "I'm loanbound; I cannot leave the station."

Captain Konrad groaned.

6/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

"So, how much do you owe?" Bjorn asked and paled when he received June's latest statement. "How? Did you buy a planet?" He gasped.

"Some of it is inherited; my parents weren't good at playing the corpo game." June shrugged. "But I used most of it for my clandestine operation." She nodded towards the star map on the screen. "You can't hide anything from the corps, but you can disguise and distort it enough to pass for something else."

"So someone there might piece this together as well?" Captain Konrad looked concerned.

"There's a slight possibility." June said while chewing her lip. "I did my best to hide it in legitimate deep space research and made sure to produce enough output so I wouldn't draw attention and get more funds." She looked at the notebooks. "The most interesting stuff is only in those, but they have all the underlying data."

"So they must not get suspicious when you leave." Bjorn nervously thumped his fingers on the table. "We'd have to buy you out."

June nodded. "Only way out of a corps is via cash or corpse."

7/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

It took hours until June, and the crew of the Tori could finally find some rest. It was obvious that each and every one of them was tired beyond reason, but no one stopped talking until Captain Konrad put his foot down and sent the crew to their cabins.

June was now lying on a cot in a tiny spare room and trying to sleep, but her eyes were burning and her head was still buzzing. They were the first people she had shown her discovery, but revealing the secret had not provided the relief she had hoped for. What if they told someone else? What if she had made a mistake and there was nothing? What if they all died in a pirate ambush?

She tried to concentrate on her breathing and refocus.

Seven gates. That was a fact she had learned in kindergarten. They trace a route following the galaxies spiral, and the second gate is closest to Sol. She tried to remember the nursery rhyme but could not find it in the chaos left by the day. Humanity had worked for decades until they had gotten the Sol gate to open, but soon after that, any interference was forbidden. No experiments on the gates were allowed; they were 'vital infrastructure'.

June realized she was grinding her teeth in frustration. The greatest alien artifacts ever found, held hostage by politics and money, were reduced to an all-too convenient interstellar highway. The new gate belonged to her and she was planning on interfering.

She sighed and checked the levels on her dispensers: they were running on fumes. It had to suffice for now. She sent the command and felt her body relax. 'I shouldn't use them so much.' were her last thoughts before her consciousness drowned in black.

8/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

For the next couple of days, June was fascinated by the speed with which things developed. For all the rag-tag impression the Tori and her crew made at first glance, they were very effective at getting things done, and despite the importance of the situation, there was a lightness in the way they worked together.

When Rip came back to the Tori with a black eye, a sour mood, and confirmation that there was indeed a colony of freedom fighters – as they liked to call themselves – on the flight path, Ada handed them a bag of frozen peas and declared the need for 'team-building exercises', which consisted of laughter, food, drinks, and a board game which pitted the crew against an A.I. and was aptly called 'Cooperative'.

Marga could dive in the feeds for hours, unmoving and rarely blinking, which would regularly prompt one of the others to coax her out of her cabin – usually with a hot beverage – and go for a walk and talk. All June had ever gotten when she had vanished in her work for the corporation were report requests and health penalty warnings.

Captain Konrad and Bjorn were gone so much, she barely saw them, but every time they returned, she could see their faces light up a little. June tried to remember the last time she felt joy for a place, for a home, and found only child memories, faded and unsharp.

The daily reports felt like a get-together with friends, albeit very well informed friends with connections in all kinds of savory and unsavory places, both digital and physical.

Project 'Gatekeeper' was well on its way.

9/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

After another night with too little sleep, June and the crew of the Tori were assembled at the breakfast table (which was also the dinner, meeting, and board game table). Spending some of the meals together seemed important to them, which seemed alien to June, who had spent most of the meals in her life alone while reading through feeds, and she had turned out fine.

"'Project Gatekeeper' is a stupid name." Marga was nursing a bowl of soggy cereal with a pensive face.

"It's my gate; I found it and I'll keep it." June shrugged, then corrected herself. "OUR gate." She bit into her toast with jam, the fifth that morning, one for each available flavor. Apparently Rip was quite fond of making preserves. "What's your idea then?"

Rip had returned with an armful of coffee mugs and passed them around. "How about 'Project Gateaux'?" They accepted the communal groans with a bow.

"Always with the food puns!" Bjorn eyed the jars of jam. "I mean. Not that I'm complaining. You're just so... jam-packed with them." A short and awkward silence fell over the table.

Captain Konrad yawned into his hand and took a hearty sip of coffee. "I say we keep it; it's stuck in my head now anyways. Apropos: Emergency movie night tonight."

Marga groaned. "Noooo! Not another one of those boring, non-interactive, 2D snoozefests."

June looked confused. "Emergency? Movie?"

"Oh you'll see." Bjorn grinned. This time he got his groans. "What are we watching?"

"It's an all-time classic." The captain smiled. "Ghostbusters."

10/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June awoke with a headache and a clogged nose. Her brain felt slow, and she had trouble reading her autodoc report. Apparently it had tried to fight whatever pathogen had struck her down and lost. Too ill to decide what to do next, June sent out an SOS on the ship's feed, and a minute later Ada knocked on her door and entered.

"I'm dyim!" June lamented. "Eberytim hurbs!"

"There, there." Ada gently patted June's arm, helped her sit up, and handed her a hot drink. "I take it you didn't travel a lot?"

June shook her head, sipped the beverage, and grimaced.

"It's just ginger tea." Ada smiled. "I'll also update your autodoc with the latest signatures, but station-flu is station-flu, still nothing to be done than fluids and sleep. It'll be over soon." She handed June a nasal spray. "This'll free up the airways."

"Pfanks." June finished the tea and laid back down. A minute later, loud snoring filled the cabin.

11/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June and the crew of the Tori had assembled in the meeting room for their daily update.

"Good news and bad news." Bjorn pushed the latest cargo manifest onto the screen. "Good news: We're nearly ready to go. She's filled to the brim with food and fuel." He gently patted the table, then smirked at Rip. "We've also stocked up on mining equipment."

"Mining?" June looked puzzled.

"Yeah, Tori can't have weapons, but she is a registered mining rig." Rip pushed spec sheets onto the screen. "So we have a bunch of asteroid breakers."

June skimmed the sheets. "Those are missiles."

"They usually don't hit as hard." Rip shrugged, then grinned. "Unless you're going after sturdy stuff." They pushed a gold rimmed certificate onto the screen and beamed. "And we have PERMITS!"

June chuckled and turned towards Bjorn. "So then what's the bad news?"

"It's your contract. They won't let us buy you out, and we can't raise the offer anymore without drawing suspicion." A bunch of pictures popped up on the screen. "Those were the contacts. Know any of 'em?"

"Well fuck." June grimaced and highlighted a sleek looking man. "Let me introduce to you all: Alain, my supervisor and a professional nosy bastard. I suspected that he suspected that I was up to something." She looked at Marga. "We spent the last few days throwing smokescreens on the feeds, apparently it wasn't enough." Then panic flooded her face. "If I go back now, they will make me talk."

Captain Konrad was chewing his lower lip and sat in silence for a while. "I'll get us auth for an incursion."

"Incursion?" June looked around the table with a confused face.

Marga sat in her chair with a slight smile on her lips. "I'm going to burn you out of their system."

12/X

#writing #microfiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June stared at the mirror and sighed. She looked as tired as she felt. The stim levels on her autodoc were running alarmingly low, and she had dialed everything down as far as she could, but the stress was wearing her down. It had taken days until the cooperative had greenlit Marga's plan to erase June from her current employer's systems.

"Won't be clean though." Bjorn had said. "People have active knowledge of you 'cause we tried to buy you out."

June pulled herself away from the mirror and lurched into the meeting room, where Rip pushed a mug of steaming coffee into her hand. She mustered a thankful smile.

"I didn't know that future shaping space discoveries would involve so much paperwork and politics." She said after her first big swig.

"Yeah, you'd think that would be different with the rogues and renegades," Rip pondered, "but bureaucracy is everywhere."

Marga entered with a bowl of popcorn and set it on the table and sat down next to June. The big screen lit up, showing a map of the seven gates and surrounding systems.

"Like every good capitalist conglomerate, your employer has locations near every gate, so attacks need to be synchronized across all locations." A smattering of red dots appeared on the map.

"That'll take more days." June's heart sank.

"Nah." Marga flicked a popcorn into her mouth. "I set up everything immediately. It executed as soon as the auth came in; we're just waiting for the last relay."

All the dots except those around gate seven turned green, and a big countdown with a little more than twenty seconds appeared next to the map.

Silence descended upon the room as everyone stared at the ticking numbers, occasionally pierced by the crunch of popcorn. When the countdown hit zero, the last red dots turned green.

Cheers and popcorn fountains erupted. June sighed with relief, smiled, and stuffed a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

13/X

#writing #macrofiction #tootfic #scifi

June awoke and felt, for the first time in a long while, rested. She just lay in the darkness savoring the feeling until her stomach growled for a cup of coffee. With a sigh, she abandoned the warm bed and headed for breakfast, with a surprising spring in her step.

"Someone's in a good mood." Marga smiled at her over the rim of her usual, gigantic cereal bowl. "So, have you decided who you wanna be?"

June sat down with a steaming cup and downed half of it before answering.

"No." June sighed. "I can't stay me, but I never wanted to be someone else." She let her head rest on the wall behind her and stared at the ceiling, twirling the cup in her hands.

Marga mumbled affirmatively while chewing thoroughly.

"I won't miss my old life." June pondered. "Which seems sad. The only thing I will miss is my name." She took another sip of coffee. "My parents were botanists and, so I've been told, settled on Juniper after days of debate."

"What were the contenders?" Marga had defeated the last of her muesli and washed it down with some juice.

"Hortensia and Opuntia." June grinned. "Guess I got lucky."

Marga stifled a laugh. "You sure did." She got up and smiled at June. "And you've been stalling long enough. Two more hours, then I will pick a name in honor of your late parents." She put her bowl in the dishwasher and left, holding up two fingers, leaving behind a wide-eyed June.

14/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

June was no more. Juniper Rose Ortiz had died in a rapid, unplanned disassembly event while departing the space station Theseus IV. Without living family or, more importantly, corporate affiliations, her passing was a mere footnote in the global feed. The only person who truly mourned her sat in the common room of the spaceship Tori and was getting used to a new name.

"Isabella. Isa. Bella. Sabell." The woman formerly known as June was sitting at the big table with her eyes closed and a dissatisfied frown.

"You could always use your middle name, Hortensia." Marga interjected, eliciting a pained groan.

"I'll get used to it." Isa opened her eyes and checked the time. "We should make more tea before the others arrive."

Ten minutes later, as if summoned by the steaming teapot, the rest of the crew poured into the room and took their places around the table. Captain Konrad loaded his tea with his usual three spoons of sugar before speaking.

"As you all know, we're fully loaded and were only waiting for our new deep space navigator, so it is a pleasure to officially welcome the latest member of the crew: Isabella." He gestured towards Isabella, who smiled and nodded. "With the latest updates, we are fairly certain that we won't trigger any automated responses during our departure. We should still keep an eye out just in case a certain ex-supervisor gets too nosy." He took a big swig from his sugary abomination before continuing with a serious face. "We will leave in two days, and this will be a long journey. Get your things in order."

15/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa gasped as the belts on her seat pulled her in tight. "That's not how I remember it." She whispered breathlessly. The whole crew had gathered in the command room and settled into the launch chairs. Screens covering the walls, ceiling, and floor of the room came to life, showing the Tori's surroundings, which made Isa's stomach lurch. "That's sooo not how I remember it."

"Yeah, the Tori's still a gunship at heart." Bjorn noted without taking his eyes off his console. "A little rough when it comes to creature comforts. You can close your eyes and follow on the feed." He grinned. "Ada nearly puked the first time we pulled out of a station."

A balled-up piece of paper bounced off Bjorn's head, who caught it before it touched the ground. "You shut your trap." Ada grumbled.

Captain Konrad was tracking readouts on his console for a moment before nodding at Bjorn. "Fire her up."

Bjorn touched his console, and a powerful shiver ran through the massive hull of the Tori, leaving behind a subtle but steady vibration. "All green." He entered another sequence of commands. A deep metallic thunk reverberated through the ship, and gravity vanished. "Lock's off, we're free."

Slowly at first, the world around the Tori shifted and turned, sending another wave of queasy feelings through Isa. The busy station traffic of smaller shuttles and ships made way for the Tori, like a school of fish parting for a predator. Albeit a toothless and brightly painted predator.

Rip tapped Isa on the shoulder and pushed a paper bag into her hand. "Better safe than sorry," they said with a grin.

"Thanks." Isa closed her eyes and opened a nice, static view on the ship's feed. She watched the Tori slowly making her way through the station's main gate and tracked the station as it shrank away behind them. She opened her eyes again and stared into the void of space.

Now all that stood between them and the discovery of a lifetime were two gate-jumps and a lot of deep space.

What could go wrong?

16/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa watched the ships sensor feed as they approached the gate. The thousands of perimeter buoys indicating the edge of the passage formed a sphere of red lights. Hundreds of ships lay in wait just outside the border for the gate to open, and just inside the sphere hovered an unassuming and somewhat lumpy disk of metal. The gate itself. By now she had seen it open hundreds of times, as sim-caps, sensor feeds, and with her own eyes, but she still got shivers whenever it happened.

The buoys turned yellow in unison, and the space within and beyond the sphere changed. The stars flickered and faded into blackness, just for a fraction of a second, only to be replaced by a different set of stars, a different sphere of yellow lights, and hundreds of new, waiting spaceships.

Together with the new stars, a second metal disk had appeared on the opposite side of the perimeter sphere.

A couple of the yellow lights turned green, and ships began filtering through the folded space in both directions, orderly and calm. The gates were the great equalizer. Few dared misbehave here and lose gate privileges.

The Tori queued up for passage, and Isa pulled up the gate feed. A few ships popped up for inspection, and she began holding her breath and nervously chewing her lip as the GateSec shuttles made their way through the lines of waiting ships.

"Don't worry." Bjorn gave her a reassuring smile and winked. "We bought some good luck charms."

17/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Slowly, the Tori coasted past one of the green-glowing perimeter buoys, across the invisible boundary, and into the gate. Isa tracked the seam, where the skies of 'here' and 'there' touched, where ships from the other side slid into existence from nothing.

"It boggles the mind." Marga whispered, her eyes closed, deeply immersed in the feed.

"It sure does." Isa looked at the large metal disks, now floating on both sides of the sphere, and remembered the hundreds of papers on their function she had read, none of which had produced more than fancy theories. "Literally."

The Tori had passed the half-way point.

Marga opened her eyes and looked at Isa. "Where do you think the new gate leads?"

"I have no idea." Isa shook her head. "Maybe to one of the gates we know, maybe not. But my hope is that with actual, hands-on research, we can find a way to choose the destination. All the research on the seven gates is done with your hands tied behind your back. No one will let you interfere with their new silk road. I can't wait to get my hands on it."

Marga smiled. "Every now and then, when the realization hits what we're actually doing and where we're going, I get shivers down my neck and butterflies in my chest. This is wild."

The Tori floated through the perimeter on the other side and made her way to a parking position.

"And now for the most important part of any epic adventure." Rip sighed. "Waiting."

18/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa hated waiting. While the others seemed to have no problem with the downtime, she alternated between studying her notebooks and peeking at the timer for when the gate would reopen. Another fifteen hours to go. Bjorn and the captain were deeply engrossed in a game of chess with the occasional outbreak of mild profanities; Marga had vanished in the feeds again; Ada was reading an antique paper book; and Rip had yawned, waved, and vanished. She groaned.

"Just get some sleep." Ada gave her a friendly smile.

"I... I can't." Isa had to stop herself from chewing her lip again. "I'm a little wired."

"Hmm." Ada nodded with a pondering face. "Come." She unclipped from her seat and pushed off, floating gracefully towards the ceiling hatch where she grabbed onto a handrail and looked at Isa expectantly.

Isa hesitated briefly, then followed Ada as she vanished through the ceiling. After a short, but dizzying, zero-g journey through the innards of the Tori, they were floating in one of the top cargo holds. Containers were locked to the floor everywhere, and the ceiling had the smooth, rounded contour of the Tori's upper hull.

Ada entered a few commands on a control panel, and the lights went out, plunging the room into absolute darkness, followed by soft hissing as the hull slowly pulled away, revealing a transparent canopy, with a breathtaking view of outer space. She took Isa's hand and pulled her gently up, until they floated just under the ceiling.

"Pretty." Isa sighed. "But I don't think this'll calm me down."

"I know." Ada pulled an evaporator from her pocket, took a tiny drag, and held it out. "We'll need to work on alternatives, but for now, this should do."

19/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa awoke facing the universe. She was held by a blanket tied to the top of a cargo container, and for a minute she just lay there and stared into the starry abyss. Somewhere out there was a place for her to claim. She slid out from under the cover and looked around. Ada was sitting on a different container, reading.

"Feel rested?" Ada stuck a bookmark between the pages and made her way over.

"Yeah." Isa checked the gate timer; still more than five hours. "I haven't slept this long in..." she thought for a second. "I don't even remember."

"It was about time then." Ada smiled and pushed off for the door. "Let's eat; I'm starving."

As they opened the door to the common room, they were greeted by the warm smell of coffee and pancakes, which made Isa's stomach growl. The rest of the crew had assembled around the big table and were eating and laughing.

"Finally!" Rip gestured towards the empty seats at the table and launched two coffee pouches at them.

"Finally?" Isa caught one of the coffees, clipped herself into a seat, and drank eagerly. Bjorn handed her a silver cylinder, which smelled heavenly. Isa pushed on a little tab, and a rolled-up pancake slid out of the top.

"Jumpcakes are a Tori tradition." Rip explained. "For good luck."

"Superstitious nonsense." Marga mumbled into her tube.

"If you don't want..." Rip held out a hand and raised their eyebrows.

"I said super tasty nonsense." Marga grinned and pushed the rest of her pancake into her mouth.

"Sure." Rip snatched the empty tube out of her hand and handed her a fresh one.

"Ah, before I forget, schedules are on the feed." Bjorn announced.

Isa opened the latest documents on the Tori's feed and found a course table. "Pilates?!?" She nearly choked on a piece of piece of pancake.

"Yeah, gotta stay fit when you go deep space." Rip flexed an impressive amount of muscle in their right arm.

20/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

The Tori had just completed the second passage through the gate and was coasting past their assigned exit buoy. The rest of the journey had to be done the hard way.

"We're clear." Bjorn gently pushed the throttle controls, and the Tori swung around in a graceful arc. "This is it. This is our way."

The captain looked around the room. "Ready?"

Isa stared at the front screen, and while there was nothing visibly different from the other hundreds of times she had looked into space, she could feel a pull from between the stars. She nodded, as did the others.

"Then let's make history." Bjorn entered commands on his console, and somewhere deep in the Tori, the main engines roared to life.

Isa knew that civilian space travel was tuned towards comfort, but she was not prepared for the contrast. The pressure on her body built steadily with the crescendo of the growling furnaces ripping them away into space. For what felt like an eternity, she had to concentrate on breathing, and her head felt dizzy. Then, after a while, the force slowly faded, leaving only a tiny, constant push behind.

"Fhhhhhhuk" Isa gasped.

"First burn done." Bjorn said, apparently without issues.

"Anything behind us?" Captain Konrad looked at Marga, who had already vanished in the feed again.

"No." Marga's brow furrowed. "There's a blip in the data, but it could just be interference from the engines. I put an agent on it."

21/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa sat in the common room, eyes focused on infinity, chewing her lip, thinking.

"Here." Rip materialized out of nowhere, holding out a napkin, and Isa flinched.

"Rip! Don't sneak up like that!" Isa stared at them with angry eyes.

Rip raised their eyebrows. "I came in ten minutes ago to make tea." They wiggled the napkin. "Your lip is bleeding."

Isa wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stared at the red streak. "Shit." She took the napkin and wiped off the blood. "Thanks."

"What's troublin' you?" Rip placed two cups of tea on the table and sat down.

"We're just going to squeeze by a pirate base?" Isa took a careful sip.

"Freedom fighters." Rip grinned reassuringly and dropped a piece of rock sugar in their tea, which cracked in the warm liquid. "But yeah, we'll 'squeeze by' with a large margin; space is big. Cut the engines and coast through their turf on blackout. Recon says they shouldn't have tech to make us, and for an asteroid, we're too small and fast to be interesting."

"But what if they somehow do catch us?" Isa sighed. "I can't unthink it."

The warmth faded from Rip's face, and their eyes grew sad as they laid a huge, scarred hand on Isa's. "Hope for them they don't."

A shiver ran down Isa's spine.

22/X

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Isa and Marga had carved out a corner in one of the cargo holds as a workshop. For days they had been poring over hand-drawn schematics from Isa's notebooks, reconstructing complex electronic circuitry and antenna constructions.

They were now both standing in front of a 3D assembler, watching intently as the machine slowly built a circuit cube. The progress bar on the machine's small display showed '99%'.

"Got a good feeling 'bout this one." Marga tapped the screen with the progress bar, but it remained at 99.

"I wish I could've brought real schematics." Isa groaned. "At least this keeps my head busy."

The machine played a happy jingle, the progress bar jumped to 100 percent, and the machine's window swung open, presenting a cube the size of a fist. Isa picked it up, inspected it briefly, then shrugged.

"Looks fine." She carried it to a table holding a rat's nest of electronic components with a slew of wires leading to a rectangular recess, where she slotted the cube in.

Marga sat down in front of a terminal and entered several commands. "Tests look good; starting frequency sweep."

Nothing happened.

"We should've put some indicators on it." Isa pondered. "How's the output?"

A handful of graphs appeared on the terminal, and Isa leaned closer and squinted her eyes to read them. She tapped the screen to zoom on one part. "Looks good to me." Isa smiled. "We 'got our own gate interface. The last tangible result of research on the gates."

"And then comes the fun part." Marga patted the cube and grinned. "Teaching it to hack stuff."

23/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

The crew of the Tori had assembled in the common room for their daily meeting. The big screen showed the planned flight path and current position of the Tori, as well as a red blob indicating the occupied territory they would have to cross. It was drawing closer.

"It'll take about two days for us to break through." Captain Konrad pushed an update to the screen, and the section through the blob lit up. "We're taking a slight detour to aim for the sparsest region, but scan data for that region was heavily censored." He looked at Isa. "You'll have to pause development on the interface while we're dark; it's quite loud." Isa nodded.

"Can we use the workshop to build a casing?" Marga asked.

"Sure, if you're fine using hand tools." Rip answered. "We'll have to dim the reactor, and the assembler is pretty hungry. Other than that, the buffer is charged. Should tide us over for everything else."

"We can use the engine downtime to check the aft sensors." Bjorn threw a list of sensor logs on the feed. "Marga's agent flagged some readings, so either we have faulty sensors or we're being followed."

Isa felt a knot tighten in her chest.

"Alright. Six hours, then we go dark." The captain unclipped from his seat. He looked at Bjorn. "Prepare the repairs."

24/X

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The crew of the Tori had assembled in the control room and strapped into their seats. The captain went over the projected trajectory and most recent sensor data one last time.

"Our scans match the recon pretty well, minor deviations." Bjorn pushed a view of the space before them with their flight path onto the big screen. Small green clouds showed the differences between expectation and reality. One of the highlights very close to the path turned red. "We might want to scooch over just to be safe, but it costs another day or two."

The captain thought for a moment, then nodded and entered some commands on his console, which made the flight path clear the red cloud by a wider margin. "Alright. Ready." He issued another command, and the engines powered down.

Isa had gotten so used to the permanent, subtle roar of the engines that the subsequent silence felt wrong, as did the absence of that little push of acceleration that had accompanied them since the first burn.

The captain looked at Marga. "Put watchers on the sensors; just mind the power, we have to stay cool." Then he nodded at Rip and Bjorn. "Go deal with the aft sensors; if there's trouble, we need to know."

Rip grinned. "Let's go for a walk."

25/X

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Isa waited next to the airlock while Rip and Bjorn changed into their exosuits. She had brought an assortment of tools from the workshop, neatly collected in quick-change holders. When they finally emerged from the changing room, she flinched. The suits Isa got to see on space stations and corpo shuttles were thin and light, with sleek helmets and slim backpacks, but these were not that. Hard plating covered all surfaces; everything was painted a matte black, which seemed to suck all light out of the room, and the asymmetric, angular helmets with their multiple optics looked like insect heads to her. She suspected that these had more uses than repairing sensors.

"I guess I can't come?" Isa asked.

"Maybe next time." Bjorn's voice sounded eerily hollow through the suit's speakers.

"Gotta get 'ya spacewalk license first." Even with the imposing armor and filtered through electronics Rip's sly humour bled through.

"As requested." She held up the tools.

"Thanks." Rip clipped the holder to their backpack.

Isa watched as they went through the airlock, then switched to the external camera feed. They made their way over the Tori's hull to one of the sensor domes, their movement slow and methodical. Isa held her breath as they opened the dome and began the repairs.

"Nothing wrong." Bjorn's tight voice sounded over the feed.

"Shit." The captains voice combined the curse with a resigned sigh. "Meeting in 10."

26/X

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"Can I shoot it?" Rip asked as they floated into the room, herding half a dozen hot coffee pouches in front of them.

"We don't even know what it is." Marga groaned while fishing for one of the pouches. "Or where exactly. Now that I know it's not glitches, I'm running another analysis, but it's slow since we're on a power diet."

"Can't be that big; otherwise it would be more noticeable, right?" Rip clipped into a seat and launched more coffee at people.

"I would guess it's a recon drone, big sensor package, big comms and they can be launched kinetically." Bjorn sipped his coffee and continued. "But small enough to hide. Maybe we caught it calling home?" He looked at Marga.

"Probably." Marga furrowed her brow. "Then maybe some course corrections. Wait..." She dove into the feed for a minute. "Yeah, it's not a perfect correlation, but some blips roughly match our flight path updates. It probably tries to delay them, but at some point it needs to follow."

"Can we find it through that?" The captain asked.

"I think so, if we could provoke signals." Marga sighed. "But alas, our hands are tied for now."

"Fuck." Isa let her head bump against the headrest. "It's gonna rat us out, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Rip slurped up the rest of their coffee. "Bummer."

27/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Marga had retreated to her room to finish the re-analysis of the sensor backlog and promised to notify the ship feed as soon as she would be done, and while Isa knew that it made no sense, she had passed the door three times in the last hour, hoping for it to open. Her lips felt raw again, and Rip had cut her off from more coffee. She was just about to ask Ada for help when the ping finally came and the crew assembled in the control room.

"So, what we can probably detect are tiny heat spikes when the thing navigates to follow us and weak radio noise when it calls home. The brunt of the signal is directed away from us, but it needs to turn up the power the further we go." Marga pushed the flight path onto the main screen, with an overlay showing sensor events. "Since it tries to stay quiet and we're not changing course until we're through the zone, it might not be a problem after all."

"If no one on the other side decides to ask for an update..." Isa grumbled.

"True." The captain nodded. "But that's out of our hands. Launching a missile would certainly draw attention." He tapped a finger on the table. "Even if it makes a noise and gets found, we have a good headstart."

Bjorn nodded.

"And once we're through, we wiggle a little, pinpoint it, and turn it into debris." Rip grinned and rubbed their hands gleefully.

"Or we hijack it and find out who sent it." Marga said, shaking her head.

"Either way, exciting days ahead." Ada shot Isa a worried look.

28/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa threw the casing she had been working on for the better part of the last day at the workshop's wall, then groaned with frustration as the lack of gravity made her spin away in the opposite direction. Flailing, she grabbed for the workbench, cutting her hand on one of the tools.

She screamed.

Within seconds, Ada appeared in the door carrying a medkit, gliding through the air gracefully as always, which further annoyed Isa, who was now holding on to a vent, the bleeding hand clamped under her arm to prevent blood bubbles from escaping into the room.

"WHERE'S THE DAMAGE?" Ada had to scream to overpower the stream of expletives Isa was producing. She tried to take Isa's hand, who pulled away angrily.

"Don't touch me!" Isa hissed, and Ada paused, lifting her hand. In the meantime, Rip had entered the workshop. In the blink of an eye, they took in the situation and stopped, shooting Ada a questioning glance, which Ada acknowledged with a small nod.

Isa's burst of rage subsided and made way for silent sobs and tears.

"Can I see your hand now?" Ada asked without moving.

"I'm sorry." Isa sobbed and pulled her hand out from under her arm.

"It's OK." Ada sprayed the wound with sealant. "But we need to deal with this." She gave Isa a hard look. "Without drugs."

29/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa was sitting in the infirmary of the Tori, her hand wrapped in bio-gauze. She was staring into nothing, her eyes chasing thoughts somewhere near infinity until Ada spoke to her.

"So what happened?" Ada offered her a pouch of water.

"Couldn't sleep." Isa accepted the pouch and took a sip. "I had to do something, anything, so I went to work on the the casing again." She sighed. "I messed up and it twisted, and when I tried fix that, I fucked it up even more." Her hand clenched around the water pouch. "Now there's no casing, and probably blood in the transmitter."

"There will be enough time to fix all of that." Ada said calmly. "You'll have to get used to waiting. It's part of the whole deep space exploration thing." She smiled softly.

"How do you do it? How do the others do it?" Isa asked.

"Disposition, training, therapy." Ada chuckled. "You cannot compare yourself to the established crew of a spaceship. Not everyone is made out to be cooped up in a metal bubble in the vacuum of space with a bunch of weirdos."

"OK, so disposition is clearly not it." The hint of a smirk played around Isa's mouth. "Now what? Therapy?"

"Something like that." Ada nodded. "We should sit down regularly and talk, and we'll try some training."

"Like, meditation, and resilience training?" Ada raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, no." Ada grinned. "Rip is going to start you on self-defense training."

30/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa made her way to her first self-defense lesson. Gliding along the handrails, she wondered how exactly that would work without gravity.

Rip was already waiting in the ship's small gym, talking to Marga.

"There you are." Rip gave Isa a big smile. "Buckle up." They pointed at a harness which was attached to the floor using several thick, elastic bands. "Can't use the magnets, they use too much power."

"Let's try this." Isa donned the harness, and the bands automatically adjusted until her shoulders, arms, and feet felt a comfortable pressure. Marga and Rip both put on their own devices, forming a small triangle with Isa.

"Alright, warmup first; follow my lead." Rip sank into a squat.

An hour later, Isa lay on the floor wheezing. Rip handed her a towel, and Marga had fetched water for everyone. It took a while until Isa could muster the will to peel out of the harness and drink her water.

"Why did I just do that?" She asked, floating with her eyes closed and the towel wrapped around her head.

"Peer pressure?" Marga offered.

"How are you both so fit?" Isa gestured vaguely at them both.

"I've been training for years." Marga said with a hint of pride in her voice.

"And I got so much tech sewn into me, you really shouldn't use me as a reference." Rip grinned. "It's just you against yourself."

"So, how does all of this help?" Isa opened her eyes. "I'll be too tired not to sleep?"

"Sure, that too." Marga smiled. "Other than that, I can only tell you how it helped me. I feel more in control of my own life. Say some asshole on a station gets weird; I know how to protect myself."

"What if they're teched up, too?" Isa asked.

Marga looked at Isa, then at Rip, pointed a finger gun at their chest, and pulled an invisible trigger, causing Rip to collapse dramatically and float away.

"Tomorrow we start weapons training." Rip announced, still floating.

31/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa awoke sore. Exiting her sleeping bag took ages, and for once she was glad that gravity would not force her to use a lot of muscles. She checked the feed for an update on the Tori's trajectory: another thirty hours in blackout. Slowly, she made her way to the common room, where the rest of the crew were having breakfast. A groan escaped her as she fastened herself to one of the seats.

"Bad?" Ada handed Isa a coffee pouch, caring worry in her voice.

"Bad." Isa groaned and devoured her coffee. "But good bad." She gave Ada a crooked smile.

"Good." Ada smirked and nodded.

"Anything new on our shadow?" Isa looked at Captain Konrad.

"Nothing since we went dark." He shook his head. "Let's hope it stays that way."

"We're closing in on the rocks that made us alter course." Bjorn noted. "Closest we'll get to anything solid for a while."

"Ready for today's training?" Rip asked Isa, rubbing their hands with anticipation.

"If it makes you happy." Isa sighed.

"It really does." Rip answered, their face lighting up.

32/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa followed Rip until they found themselves in a narrow, well-lit corridor in the lower section of the Tori. The short passage ended after a few meters in a porous, black wall, which sloped up towards the ceiling and was covered in small craters.

"We have a shooting range?!?" Isa gaped.

"More like a rangelet." Rip opened a locker in the wall, revealing a selection of guns. "Mostly for function checks." They picked up one of the handguns, which looked like a child's toy in their giant hand. "Ever used one before?"

"No." Isa eyed the thing with suspicion. "I read a little before going to bed."

"Any insights?" Rip removed the magazine from the gun and racked the slide back.

"I guess my main takeaways were: 'Only point the business end at things you don't mind destroying.', and 'Finger off the trigger until you want to use it.'"

"About right." Rip nodded and offered the gun to Isa.

She took it carefully, surprised by the mass. In her own hands, it seemed much larger and much more menacing. She slowly turned it over, pointing at details. "Safety?" Rip nodded. "Magazine release?" Another nod. "Slide release?" An affirmative hum. She concentrated for a second. "No feed link?"

Rip shook their head. "No electronics. Can't break; can't be hacked." They offered the magazine.

33/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa braced herself against a small metal frame and steadied her breath. The gun was pointed down the shooting range, and the muscles in her sore arms tensed with anticipation. With the ear protection, the world seemed eerily quiet, while the sounds of her own body were amplified: the rustling of her breath, blood rushing in her ears, the infinite rhythm of her heartbeat.

She pulled the trigger, and the shot smacked her against the frame with surprising force. The impact of the bullet reverberated through the corridor more as a sensation than a sound.

"So. Violent." She lowered the gun and took a deep breath. For a couple of minutes she said nothing, then offered the gun back to Rip, while meticulously keeping it pointed downrange. "This is not for me."

"Good." Rip nodded and took the gun. "Now we know."

Isa looked over the other weapons in the locker. Some of which were much larger than the handgun. "Humans sure like throwing rocks at each other."

"We do." Rip placed the gun back in its place. "With ever fancier and faster rocks."

"You think whoever built the gates still threw rocks?" Isa pondered.

"I hope not." Rip sighed. "Would be a bad day if humans got their hands on those." They smirked. "And I say that as someone who likes throwing rocks."

An alarm rang through the ship.

34/X

#writing #fiction #smallstories #tootfic #scifi

Isa scrambled up the shaft leading to the Tori's control room, Rip hot on her heels. A barrage of information had flooded the ship's feed, which she couldn't understand. Panicked, she flew through the control room door, only to find the rest of the crew calmly looking at the main screen, which showed the Tori's trajectory as well as a pulsing red orb overlapping one of the few indicated asteroids.

Bjorn caught her before she could smack into the back wall. "Don't panic." He looked at her reassuringly. "We've not been detected."

In the meantime, Rip had taken their seat, looking unusually serious.

Captain Konrad turned around, looking at Isa. "We have received an emergency signal." The main screen zoomed in on the red highlight. "It's weak, but a good signature for a transport reported missing a couple of days before we left."

"That's a trap." Rip said through gritted teeth. "Grab a ship, strip it, lay it out as bait with a bomb strapped to it."

"Would they leave crew on it?" Ada asked.

Rip nodded. "Louder screams make better bait."

"Why would they put it here? There's nothing here!" Isa felt a knot in her throat.

"Not worth investing a lot of time. Whatever's convenient." Rip shrugged. "If it doesn't pan out, pick up the bomb and try again."

"If we call it we're exposed, no matter how focused." Bjorn noted. "There's probably a comms relay on it as well." Rip nodded and grumbled.

"Given the stakes." The captain said. "Should we keep going?"

Rip and Marga raised their hands.

"Or spring the trap?" The captain looked around the table.

Ada and Bjorn raised their hands.

The captain focused on Isa.

Isa took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and nodded. "I couldn't live with myself..."

35/X

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Isa felt the maneuvering thrusters of the Tori light up and spin the ship around.

"Brace yourselves." the captain warned, then the main engines came alive.

A hammer hit Isa into her seat, pushed the air out of her lungs, and made her vision fade. When the pressure finally reduced to let her breathe again, the others were already hard at work.

Ada left the control room, gliding out the door, dancing with the continuing deceleration.

"Scanning." Marga said, eyes closed, immersed in the feed.

Captain Konrad was focused on the main screen showing an asteroid growing at an alarming rate. "Closing in, status?"

"Countermeasures on standby, point defense armed." Rip studied the terminal in front of them. "Got it." An overlay on the screen showed a magnified part of the surface with the remains of a transport ship. "Call 'em."

"Got a response, signature good, two survivors; they're welded in to cargo three." Bjorn reported without taking his eyes from his terminal.

A fiery light blinked into existence elsewhere on the asteroid and headed for the Tori at an incredible speed. Dull rumbling reverberated through the ship, and a series of small flashes covered the path of the light until it vanished in an explosion.

"Missile intercepted." Rip announced. "I doubt there's more."

"Ready?" The captain asked over the ship's comms.

"Ready." Ada answered from somewhere on the ship, followed by a deep thud.

A small shuttle appeared on the main screen and headed for the wreck on the asteroid.

Marga opened her eyes. "Bad news: there was an echo, so the call was definitely bounced." She smiled. "Good news: I made a new friend."

36/X

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