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“Alex! Pirra! We’re so glad you could make it!” Eileen Shaw said, embracing first her son, then her daughter-in-law.
Davo Shaw stepped up to hug his son next, pounding him on the back hard. Alexander laughed and returned the favor. They almost started tumbling in the low-g from the force.
Pirra was happy to see Alexander so pleased. Sometimes he had issues with his father, but he was still glad to arrive and see them, ultimately.
It was so odd to her. She’d gotten used to it, the human connection to their parents. But it was a strange concept.
Dessei had tight communities, strong bonds within them, but they did not really hold their specific genetic birth parents very closely. There was a certain respect, and one tended to have more interaction with their birth parents more than others. But it was not like human families. They had simply performed a service in their birth, but they were then children of their community, their culture, their island.
The sheer joy humans seemed to take in family had grown from an oddity to something she relished. It was just so pure and . . . well, cute in a way.
“And Pirra,” Davo continued, once he’d broken away from Alexander. “How’d you like that new landing system? Dr. Joy set it up himself!”
Pirra smiled. “It was very impressive,” she said.
To be honest, she didn’t trust homebrew systems.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the scientists and engineers of the odd little commune of Phobos. But, well, she wasn’t about to trust her life to someone’s pet auto-docker. She’d seen too many custom projects that had turned out to be deadly.
Without letting Alexander see (as he had been immensely proud of it as well), Pirra had queried Joy’s system, checked its algorithms and projected flight plan for their rental zoomer, the specs of the equipment, confirmed the inspection tickets, let her system back-trace the supply chains to confirm their credentials, and then had run a few numbers herself.
It had passed muster, and she reluctantly let it take control of their craft. It was all very odd, and she didn’t like that. But it seemed safe enough.
“Oh, Alex, don’t make Pirra carry all that,” Eileen chided her son. “Pirra, give him some of your bags.”
Pirra shifted, a little uncomfortable. Humans had some sexual dimorphism, more than her kind – males had taller crests but that was about it.
Besides that, Eileen had never quite understood that she was stronger than Alexander, but all the same it was kind of sweet.
But most of all, they were in microgravity, barely a thousandth of Earth’s. The bags weighed practically nothing.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve got enhanced muscles.”
“Still, you should have better manners with your beautiful wife,” Eileen said, patting Alexander’s arm in a way that approached but was still not a slap.
“Mom, Pirra’s fine,” Alexander replied, laughing.
“Well, let’s not dawdle here,” Davo said, waving for them all to follow. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do!” He caught Pirra’s eye, grinning, and she felt jubilation glee grow inside her.
She had heard that sometimes human parents did not take well to the spouse of their child. It could even be quite unpleasant for them. But Davo and Eileen seemed to adore her.
Phobos station was a very old design, built hundreds of years ago and later abandoned.
The moon was merely a captured asteroid, and like many such bodies was just a rubble pile held together rather loosely by gravity. The original builders had used an experimental titanium foam to fill in the gaps in the asteroid. It had held, though it was far from stable.
After that, the colonists had built a shallow rotating cylinder, apparently the first attempted on this scale in the Sol system. While it had sort of worked, it had also threatened to shake Phobos apart – and so the whole asteroid had been abandoned.
But about fifty years ago, a group of oddball scientists and artists had imagined bringing new life to the moon. Using modern technologies, they had melted key parts of it together, cooling it afterwards in just two years with modern heat-transfer technologies.
And then they’d moved in, building new labs, new studios, and even revamping the rotation cylinder, adding the housing units in it so they could have nearly Earth-like gravity.
The floors, she thought, were mostly original. The steel plates had faded to a dull gray, trodden by feet over many decades until they had indents.
The walls, though, were murals of color. What she could only call graffiti but knew they locals called art, covered most of the public surfaces.
“How is Phobos Station doing?” Alexander asked.
“Oh, we’ve got supply problems out the wazoo – nothing vital,” Davo replied, snorting. “Don’t worry, we get plenty to eat and all that. But Mars supply ships hate trying to catch this place, so trying to get specialist parts or rare elements can be difficult. And we don’t have a particle collider, so we have to import all those things.”
“Gold is so hard to get,” Eileen added. “Can you believe it? It’s like back in the pre-space days when they used it as money!”
Alexander chuckled. “Yeah, I heard they were batty for it back then.”
“Gold, really?” Pirra asked.
“Oh, yes,” Davo replied. “And not even for practical reasons – they just thought it was pretty.”
They boarded a boxy container that sped them up to match the rotation cylinder. Slowly, they went from floating to standing. When the doors opened, they didn’t have far left to go – only a few hundred people lived on Phobos.
The front door of the Shaw residence was large enough to admit a small vehicle. Their room had once been a supply area for the original station, simply refit into living quarters. Davo loved it, as he could get big equipment in and out.
A drone met them and took their bags as they went in, and Pirra delighted in the squashy chairs that seemed to have no equivalent on the Craton.
Plopping into one, sinking in so deeply that it nearly swallowed her, she leaned back and sighed.
“I love this chair,” she said aloud.
Davo sat down across from her, while Eileen and Alexander headed to the kitchen.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Davo said, grinning. “I got the launcher working.”
Pirra escaped the grasping chair, sitting up. “You lie!”
“It’s true! It’s not pretty. But it works! It’s more of a grenade launcher than a true plasma lobber, but the shells explode on impact! Oh, it’s beautiful.” He grinned. “You have to come see it.”
“Alexander! I’m going to go look at some of the projects your father has been working on,” Pirra called out.
“Have fun blowing stuff up,” he called back.
Davo grinned, and the two scampered back out the door.
Other Terrestrial 