Chapter 16 Stowaway Science #2
“Your papa and I think alike. Don’t tell him I said that, his markings will do the smug thing for a week.”
I make a note on my data pad: Dove and Papa: parallel cognitive frameworks. Compatible methodology. Further evidence of optimal pairing.
The Veridian corridor is beautiful. I press my face against the viewport while Dove runs standard checks, and the stars out here are different from the ones I see from the station — thicker, somehow, clustered in bright ribbons that streak across the dark like the bioluminescent patterns on Papa’s arms when he’s happy.
“That’s the Veridian Arch,” Dove says, leaning over my shoulder to point.
Her hair brushes my cheek — it smells like the ship, like metal and recycled air and the vanilla hand cream she keeps in the cockpit.
“Stellar nursery. All those bright spots? Baby stars. Still forming. Some of them won’t ignite for another million years.
They’re just... gathering energy. Getting ready. ”
“Like seeds,” I say. “In the greenhouse. Before they break through the soil.”
Dove goes quiet for a moment. “Yeah. Exactly like seeds.”
“Baby stars.” I flatten both hands against the viewport glass. My markings are doing so many things. “They’re yellow. Like my markings.”
“Little brighter than your markings. But yeah.” She’s quiet for a moment.
“First time I flew through here, I was twenty-two and scared out of my mind. Borrowed ship, bad nav data, running from my first creditor. I came through the Arch and everything was so bright I thought my instruments were malfunctioning.”
“Were you alone?”
“Completely alone. No AI. No copilot. Not even a decent autopilot.” She leans back in the pilot seat. “That was before Pickles. Before I’d learned that alone isn’t the same as independent.”
“When did you learn the difference?”
She looks at me. The soft look. The one that makes my eyes sting.
“About three weeks into getting stuck on a terraforming station with a grumpy scientist and his terrifyingly perceptive daughter.”
My eyes get hot and blurry. I blink hard.
“Small person,” Pickles says. “Your lacrimal production has increased. I calculate this is an emotional response. For the record, the cabin humidity is within normal parameters.”
“Thanks, Pickles. Very helpful.”
“I am always helpful.”
Dove reaches over and squeezes my hand. Her fingers are warm and calloused from tools and cargo straps, and she holds on for three seconds longer than a normal squeeze. I count.
She shows me everything after that. How the Rolling Pin’s cargo management system tracks weight distribution across the hold.
How to calculate fuel reserves against delivery schedules.
How to read atmospheric entry data for different planet types so you know what your ship is going to do before you hit the mesosphere.
“Every planet tries to kill you differently,” she says, pulling up approach data.
“Gas giants crush you. Ice planets freeze your fuel lines. Desert worlds cook your hull plating. And terraforming planets —” She grins.
“Terraforming planets throw electromagnetic storms at you and then make you fall in love with the station commander.”
“That’s not a standard atmospheric hazard.”
“It should be. Someone should update the manuals.”
She lets me key in a course correction — a real one, three degrees starboard to compensate for a gravity wobble she spotted — and when the nav computer accepts it, she holds up her hand for a high five.
I smack her palm so hard my claws almost extend.
“Careful!” She shakes her hand out, laughing. “I need those fingers for flying.”
“Sorry! Sorry, I got excited —”
“Sweetheart.” She grabs my hand. Folds my claw tips gently against my palm, the way Papa does when he’s teaching me control.
“Never apologize for getting excited about things. Your dad does the same thing when his data comes back good — his claws come out and he has to retract them. It’s a Storm family trait. ”
She called it a Storm family trait. Like she’s part of it. Because she is.
“One more thing,” she says, and kills the cockpit lights.
The viewport fills with the Arch. Gold and white and burning, close enough now that individual stars separate from the ribbon, each one trailing wisps of gas like hair in wind.
The cockpit goes dark except for the console glow and my markings, which pulse in time with my heartbeat — gold against gold, my light matching the nursery’s light.
“Listen,” Dove whispers.
I close my eyes. The Rolling Pin hums around us. And underneath the hum — faint, rhythmic, like breathing — the sound of solar wind against the hull. A soft percussion. The universe tapping its fingers on our ship.
“Every ship sounds different in the Arch,” Dove says. “The Rolling Pin sings. Some ships rattle. Some go quiet. But they all respond. Like the stars are saying hello.”
I open my eyes. The Arch blazes through the viewport, and my reflection glows in the glass — small and teal and bright, surrounded by baby stars.
We comm Papa from the heart of the Arch. Dove angles the camera so the stellar nursery fills the background behind us, and when his face appears, his markings go still — the wonder-pattern, the one he saves for data that changes what he thought he knew.
“Is that the Arch from interior transit?”
“Live from the copilot seat,” Dove says. “Your daughter has atmospheric readings she’d like to present.”
I hold up my sensor and walk him through the data I’ve collected at three points along the corridor. He asks precise questions — about my calibration methodology, the variance between systems, whether I accounted for the Rolling Pin’s own atmospheric output in my measurements.
I accounted for it. His markings blaze.
“This is genuinely publishable data,” he says. “For a junior xenoatmospheric journal, at minimum.”
“Omarion said I should publish my botanical research too. I’m going to be the most published eight-year-old in the sector.”
“You are certainly the most incorrigible eight-year-old in the sector.”
“Eight and three-quarters.”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. The real smile that crinkles his eyes and makes his markings glow steady-warm.
Dove leans into the frame to adjust a console setting, and Papa’s gaze tracks her the way it always does — like she’s the most important variable in any room she enters. His markings flicker brighter.
Time to collect data.
“Papa, your markings are doing the courtship display again.”
He goes still. “I am experiencing minor electromagnetic fluctuation due to —”
“It’s not electromagnetic. Dove leaned forward three centimetres and your bioluminescent output increased by approximately —” I check my data pad — “I don’t have exact numbers because I don’t have Pickles’s biometric scanners, but I’m estimating forty percent based on visual brightness assessment.”
“Thirty-seven percent,” Pickles supplies. “The small person’s visual estimate is commendably close.”
“PICKLES.”
“I am providing scientific accuracy. The small person is conducting research.”
Papa covers his face with one hand. Dove has turned away from the screen, but her shoulders are shaking.
“Also,” I continue, because science waits for no one, “Dove does Lividian nesting behaviours and I don’t think she knows she’s doing it.”
“We talked about this,” Dove says, still not turning around. “The sock thing is organization, not nesting.”
“You sorted his socks by teal gradient. Darkest to lightest. In a drawer you reorganized with dividers you made from spare cargo partitions.” I consult my notes.
“You moved the medkit to a defensive perimeter position on your side of the bed. You rearranged the kitchen so his favourite mug is within arm’s reach of his workstation — that’s resource provisioning for a bonded mate.
You started keeping a backup ration bar in his lab coat pocket, which he has never once asked you to do.
AND —” I scroll down — “you sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door. That’s the protective position in Lividian pair-bonding. You’re guarding him in your sleep.”
Silence.
Dove turns slowly. Her cheeks are extremely pink.
“How do you know which side of the bed I sleep on?”
“Pickles told me.”
“I provided generalized spatial arrangement data,” Pickles says. “In an educational context. The small person’s research methodology required comprehensive environmental data points. I was merely facilitating academic rigour.”
“There is nothing academic about our sleeping arrangements!”
“On the contrary, Captain. The small person is conducting a longitudinal study of cross-species pair-bonding behaviour. Your sleeping position is a relevant data point. As is the ration bar in the lab coat. I have catalogued that particular behaviour as ‘nutritional provisioning with stealth delivery’ — a subcategory of mate-feeding that is, I must say, rather endearing.”
“Pickles.”
Papa has emerged from behind his hand. His markings are blazing — not with embarrassment, though. With the warm-deep pattern. The settling display. The one that means home.
“She’s not wrong,” he says quietly.
Dove looks at him through the screen. The pink fades from her cheeks, replaced by something softer. “About what?”
“Any of it. The mug placement. The sleeping position.” His voice drops into the low harmonics — the ones I can feel in my chest even through a comm link. “You nest, Dove. It’s beautiful. I notice every time you do it.”
Dove’s hand goes to the claiming mark on her shoulder. She touches it the way she does when she’s feeling something big — fingertips against the scar like she’s checking it’s still there.
“You’re not supposed to be romantic right now. You're supposed to be angry about the stowaway.”
“I am angry about the stowaway. I am also deeply in love with a woman who guards me in her sleep.”