Chapter 16: Life Goes Ever on...

We had a pretty decent cargo, heading for a slice of the worlds controlled by the Coriolis Factor, a merchant-trading group with interests in several lower-level worlds. It was a rather benign control, mind you, not necessarily ruthlessly rubbing out any contenders to the throne, but make no mistake, they knew what was going on around their worlds.

They didn’t have any side in the ongoing Merchant House struggle, so that, combined with the generally low traffic the worlds gathered, made it pretty much ideal to do some basic trading and making a living, while staying somewhat close to heading back into the Federation Core worlds if necessary, or getting lost out in the Fringe should things get any more dicey then they already were.

Honestly, we were becoming a family in some ways. The girls hadn’t stopped teasing me with their outfits, casually reporting for a work shift in some slinky nothings every so often, just to get me worked up. Melissa would keep an amused eye on the teasing until she decided I had hit my limit for the day, and then would run them off like a momma wolf telling her cubs to leave the poor man alone. She always received the benefits from their teasing mind, you. While we had held to our barely spoken of agreement of not taking that final step without Mary’s ok, ideally with her joining us, that left a LOT of ground that we were able to cover. Again and again, with each time being great. Even when the girls weren’t teasing me, they would crave hugs and comfort when they did well. Melissa told me it was them seeking reassurance, that they knew they would not be excluded from our growing family, but it never hurt to get positive reinforcement from someone they cared for greatly.

From the tone of her voice, I thought such comfort and reinforcement had been something very lacking from the ways they grew up with in House Katain.

Heyanna did her best, and I think was the only reason the girls had stayed sane in that pit of vipers environment but considering she could have been there one day and gone the next hampered her efforts. I’m sure the girls also wondered now and then if Heyanna was only treating them well because that was her job. They knew Heyanna would not be that type, but probably saw too much of it from their social group not to wonder.

Having the girls around had more effects then just on my libido, mind you. They genuinely loved working on the ship. For solo pilots like I had been, a lot of the work to maintain a ship in top condition was both time-consuming and frankly, easy to put off until “later”.

I once estimated that if I didn’t need to fix something, I would roughly spend two hours a work shift just sitting at the captain’s chair, doing nothing while the ship’s AI piloted the ship to my next destination. That was in an eight-hour work shift, not a full day. Of course, I was a lot busier during in-system times, not to mention supervising loading and unloading cargo, dealing with customs (and customers), getting the latest news updates from across the Federations.

Thanks to the girls attentions in the last four months or so since they came on board, Mary’s Dream ran better then she had in years. At least once during every trip, they would approach me, asking for me to purchase them a new tech-manual, or download them a new skill trainer for the next time we hit port. We had even given the girls opportunities to run their own shifts in “control” of the ship.

They knew if necessary, I was nearby, but after the first couple times where they would page me for every little thing, they grew more confident in their abilities to run the ship. Erene even made a couple minor course changes during a shift while I was asleep when the sensors registered a slight blip. Even though it was likely nothing more than space dust, we all had agreed that a minimum of contact with other ships while we were underway was called for.

The strange thing was despite everything being already set up at my station, they preferred to work at their own station with the controls slaved. They would not sit in the captain’s chair even when it was easier for them to do so. I guess they considered that mine, or perhaps some of it was that they didn’t want to lose time if an emergency happened and I needed to get into the captain’s chair.

Melissa wasn’t as good technically as the younger two girls were, but that was more because they had more impetus to learn, and Melissa herself had been in a position where other people would do it for her. Melissa was competent, mind you, in fact, she was pretty good at wringing the max profit out of a cargo, and more than once caught me from making a mistake in my delivery schedule, pointing out that there was no way that a delivery time demanded by a customer could be reasonable. I had started to put a bit of my profits away for Melissa, Heyanna and the girls, as well as indulging their whims. I had started to feel like Mary’s Dream was theirs as much as the ship was mine. Flying by myself was a bachelor’s dream, but quite frankly, even a bachelor can tire of being the only living person for parsecs.

Most solo-pilots tended to become very anti-social after many years of travelling the spaceways, as lack of social contact and the dangers of solo-piloting preyed on their psyche. I had known one grizzled vet, who accepted full mental connection to his ship, becoming mentally connected to the ship all the time, just because he couldn’t stand the silence of being alone. He literally never left his command couch, having the plumbing installed to take care of those messy biological procedures. Why? Because after having a minor heart attack during a trip it was either that, stop flying, or accept a partner, and he could not accept the other two options. We’re a weird lot. Perhaps having them around was making me a little less weird.

I broached the subject with Melissa, and she advised me that I should turn it into more of an allowance, because to them, working on Mary’s Dream wasn’t a job, so why should they be paid like it was a job? It would actually take a bit of the fun out of the learning they were doing.

Heyanna took care of a lot of the domestic work, adding to the work she was doing in the commissary. As always, meal time was always together time. Heyanna had threatened Daniella with a ladle the one time she was late to dinner (having been working on tuning one of the lasers). “If it’s not important to the ship right that very second, then there’s no reason to skip a meal”. I think it definitely helped with the feeling of comfort we all had at being together. We always had time to discuss the day’s events, or go over something that was bothering us. The girls always slept in the same room as each other, Daniella once said she couldn’t relax and sleep deeply unless her sister was in the next bed over from her, or in with her, on those days their increasingly less infrequent nightmares came to visit. In my case, there still was bad nights, but Melissa had a gift of bringing me out of them before they got into thrashing and screaming.