The Marilona

Every kid gets bored, right?

You grow up in a place, and no matter how amazing and wondrous it really is, there's a part of you that just doesn't care, doesn't appreciate the subtlety or the charm or whatever it is that someone who had never been there before could find in a heartbeat. Everything can become common if you let it, and when you're a teenager you're likely as not to just sit back, shut your eyes, and let the wonderful become mundane.

I did.

I grew up on the Grid. Not in the proverbial, pre-Expansion sense of being "On The Grid," but in the sense that I was born and raised a twelfth-generation hydrogen farmer on the single largest thing humanity has ever built. That Grid. The Jovian Grid.

Nine thousand rings, half on the y-axis, half on the x-axis, each four hundred and fifty thousand kilometers in circumference, holding themselves in place, depending completely on each other to keep themselves from plunging into the roiling storm of Jupiter itself. It started as two rings, built five hundred years ago by two thousand lunatics who decided that the Belt mines were too cozy and too comfortable or something, so they built themselves a Loop and Whipped to Jupiter.

I grew up on the insane, utterly massive brain-child of some of the most skilled and antisocial engineers that have ever lived. Living proof that a solid annoyance with most other living beings, a mastery of physics and math, and graceful, intense genetic manipulation can lead to some truly awe-inspiring things.

From a distance, it looked like a tumbling series of delicate wires wrapping gently around the whole of the planet. Thousands of strands with countless wisps of fiber trailing off and caressing the surface; a dancing, twirling arrangement of supremely coordinated and deceptively strong mechanisms and machines. Habs and parkland and industrial columns were spliced into lifts and tubes and a sparkling, glowing dance of activity that could inspire legend and steal the breath from your lungs with its beauty and complexity.

And I didn't give a shit.

I left when I was eighteen, having worked the farms since I was twelve, saving every red cred. I Whipped to the Belt, and from there to Home System. I spent three days watching the Moon get bigger and bigger in smaller and smaller increments as we decelerated enough that we could rejoin one of the receiving Loops and shuttle to Armstrong City.

From there I caught a Drop to Earth, and lived out the last of my savings in Chicago, where my ancestors' ancestors had come from something like a thousand years before. It was like an insane, booze and drug-fueled Rumspringa a thousand years removed from the last one performed in the original context. I met girls, drank a lot, smoked and snorted everything I could get my hands on, and rebuilt the brain cells with an hour or two in a StemPod once or twice a week.

Then the money ran out, and real life ran back in. I needed a job, and I needed one fast.

There aren't a whole lot of things that a Jovian kid is actually qualified to do, as it turned out. Luckily for me, the Fleet can find a job for damn near anybody.

Even there, I had two options: Fuel Collection Specialist, or Offship Maneuvers.

I didn't fancy traveling almost six hundred million kilometers just to do the same job I'd left behind, so Offship Maneuvers it was.

Turns out Jovians are damned near perfect for Offship. Remember when I talked about genetic manipulation? Well, Jovians are the product of rather a lot of it. We had to be, or we would never get anything done. Or have survived at all, for that matter.

We were altered to not only survive but thrive in Jupiter's insane gravity, able to function in three gees like we're going for a stroll in the park. Our tissue is interwoven with an organic fiber that lets us work and play under that kind of stress forever if need be, our organs reinforced with the same stuff. We reprogrammed our cardiovascular systems to adjust and keep an even, steady flow going in any amount of gravity from zero to twenty gees, and could maintain consciousness and more or less clear thought up to thirty without a suit.

Decompression is a big worry in habs that hang outside any atmosphere, so we took away that concern. Our core temperature won't start to drop until things get down around negative one eighty Celsius, and that organic fiber reinforces our skin and works in conjunction with our physiology to cause it to constrict slightly and provide back pressure in the event of slight or total decompression. All we need to survive in vacuum is a source of breathable air. We even have a nictitating membrane that keeps our eyes from doing anything annoying like changing shape and blinding us or exploding out of our skulls. Thanks to our skin and our lovely organs, we can hold our breath for anywhere from fifteen to ninety minutes, depending on how much energy we expend.

When I said I wasn't qualified for much in the Fleet, it wasn't because Jovians are stupid. We have the same brain power that everybody else does. We just don't fit in things designed for the average person.

See, all that engineering and genetic wizardry wouldn't mean shit if we didn't have the strength to move around. Jovians tend to be big. Damn big by comparison to most, as I learned very quickly upon leaving.

So, when you're 2.2 meters and you weigh two hundred and fifty-five kilograms by Earth standard gravity, you don't really fit into a fighter or have space to work in a lab or on a bridge or in the bowels of a shipboard propulsion system. You can move through the passageways and not squish people passing you against the bulkheads, but only just.

Offship is the modern equivalent of being a grunt. Combat in space is done the old fashioned and dirty way. Loading a ship up with weaponry that won't send it flying off course or spinning crazily along is expensive as hell, and expending propulsion to force it to handle and adjust to weaponry that would do so is impractical as hell, so fights between ships in space consist of two ships pulling up alongside each other (or slamming into each other), cutting holes in one another, and pouring people who are trained to fight in zero gee through the holes.

I know what you're thinking. Gravity on ships is totally a thing. We have that. And you're right. We DO have that. But, we make that by spinning parts of the ships in opposite directions. On civilian ships, this is usually a series of tori of various diameters depending on the size of the ship. On Fleet ships and pirate vessels, the spinning parts tend to be much smaller and a lot more dense, with large parts of the ships fixed and without gravity. That's because locking two spinning bits of different ships together will, generally speaking, tear one or both ships apart. That's bad.

So, most shipboard combat takes place in the non-spinning, gravity-free parts of ships. You can probably figure out for yourself why being a giant with no fear of decompression comes in kind of handy in that situation.

I served eighty years with the Fleet, patrolling everywhere from Earth to Neptune, hunting pirates and settling conflicts between colonies. As careers go, it was a good one, and I retired at the rank of Master Chief.

These days, people only die of old age if they WANT to, so being in my late nineties made me still a kid by most standards, and I looked no different than I had when I joined up with the subtle exception of the few scars I had elected to keep as reminders of enemies who had earned my respect.

The retirement package for Fleet is decent. At ten years, you get enough per month to live out the rest of your days on the Belt in a small but decent apartment. At twenty, you can retire comfortably in Armstrong City. At thirty, you get a stipend that will let you buy a place on Earth if you want, or shoot yourself all over the system as an eternal tourist if you want, or do just about anything else you decide to do.

I decided to go home.

Not forever. I didn't have any desire to take hydrogen farming back up, and Jovians don't look too kindly on permanent residents that don't DO anything.

But, I hadn't seen my family or my schoolmates in eighty years, and I had grown an appreciation for the beauty and complex, insane wonder of my home through years of describing it to men and women who sometimes made it back to their own homes and sometimes didn't.

I rented a cabin on an economy class Pusher, the Marilona, and burned for home. Pushers are the slowest way to get around, and the cheapest. They burn at four gees for fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the trip under no thrust, moving fast enough to hit the Ring in about nine months, with half of that being deceleration. They're big, slow, and usually carry people moving to the Ring to start a new life. They come with, in descending order of comfort, small cabins, tiny bunks, and large communal racks. There are exercise tori, rec areas, mine even had a small theater that played the same ten movies over and over on a continuous loop.

The crew was made up of mostly Lifers, people who had been born on the ship, or, at least, a very similar ship. Like most specialized groups of humanity, they had some genetic modifications of their own. They tended to be tall and thin, some of them close to my height, but invariably a hundred and eighty kilos or more lighter. Pushers are all about conserving power and fuel, so most of the crew areas ran either dark or damn close to it, saving the power for silly things like extra lights for the passengers. Because of that, they tended toward alabaster skin, big eyes, and hair that was dyed a variety of colors. Passengers didn't actually see many of them, instead, we were mostly left to our own devices.

For the first two weeks, I managed to mostly avoid being seen. I stuck to my cabin, my food delivered to my doorstep by a crew member that I never saw, leaving only to use one of the free exercise tori in the middle of the sleep cycles, hoping not to run into anyone. It was the exercise tori that gave me away.

I knew they would.

The tori are clever things, designed small enough that their increased spin won't throw off the rest of the ship, providing fully adjustable gravity with enough equipment to keep anybody in shape and fight off muscle and bone loss for those who actually had to worry about that. Most people set it for a full gee, some fitness buffs go for one and a half or two. I set mine to six, and go as hard as I can for a couple of hours like I never left the Fleet.

Somebody was bound to notice.

One night, in the middle of my workout, the torus slowed and then stopped, the lights kicked off, and I sat patiently in the dark, waiting for things to start back up or for someone to come check what could have been a malfunction. The oxygen didn't stop flowing, and I could hear the steady thrum made by the hundreds of ship systems all running smoothly at the same time, so I wasn't worried. About two minutes later, the lights came back on and the torus cycled back up to six gees. I brushed it off.

The next night, I ran into a crew member on my way to the exercise tori for the first time.

To get from my cabin to the exercise tori, I had to "ascend" a ramp leading toward the center or the "spoked wheel" design of the thing that gradually steepened as the gravity lessened and became a non-issue until it was a smooth passageway with no features other than evenly spaced hand and toe-holds. Once I hit what served as the "axle" I could turn either left toward the stern and the other passenger tori and recreation areas , or right toward the exercise tori and crew areas closer to the bow. I met her fifteen meters after my practiced right turn.

She looked young, but could've been a hundred, just like everybody who has regular access to a StemPod. She was a Lifer, and not first generation. She'd been born on a ship like this, or THIS ship to people whose grandparents had probably been born on ships, too. She was a little over two meters, long and thin like lifers always are, but graceful. I would've guessed her at about sixty, maybe sixty-five kilos. Her eyes were bigger than mine, bright, deep blue almond-shaped pools set in an elfin face, somehow angular and soft all at once. A small, upturned nose sat delicately above pale, full lips that opened in a gasp, those big eyes flying wide when she saw me and staying that way as we glided closer, set to pass each other.

I nodded politely as I glided past, not really caring that she was staring. She probably didn't see many people who weren't crew, and I would've bet a month's pension that she'd never even seen a Jovian from a distance.

"It was you," she blurted as we slid past each other. I stopped myself with one of the handholds.

"What was me?" I asked, my voice polite. I didn't really mind the delay. The exercise tori would still be there.

"The torus. The one set to six. I thought it was malfunctioning," she said, her words coming out in a sort of distracted rush as she openly looked over every inch of me. It's a lot to take in.

I watched her start at my hair, a shaggy version of the centuries old Fleet-style cut, dark brown but still far lighter than her own, and move on to my eyes, brown to her blue. She traced the outline of my jaw, wide and square underneath my short cropped beard, then dropped to my shoulders, fully three times as wide as probably anybody she knew on the crew, about twice as wide as most humans, and heavily muscled thanks to my Jovian genes. Her eyes moved on, tracing the muscles of my chest, the ridges of my midsection, darting back to follow the shape of my arms, widening as she realized that my arm was thicker than her elfin torso. She took in my hands, with fingers as long as hers, but far, far thicker and heavier, my thumb about the same thickness as her wrist. I saw fleeting curiosity that she quickly hid as her eyes crossed the bulge just below my waist and moved on to my legs, which must have looked like stubby tree trunks to a girl used to the lanky limbs of ship lifers.

"Maybe I'M the one who should be saying, 'It was you,'" I replied with a smile. I took the opportunity to return the favor, looking her over as I spoke.

She was dressed in a pretty standard shipsuit, which is basically the same as the workout gear I'd selected other than the fact that mine ended at wrists and ankles and hers had about ten little pouches sewn on at various intervals and a couple of loops and clips all occupied with diagnostic tools, comms, and whatever the hell else it is that technicians have to carry around. Other than the pockets, it was skin tight, dark grey to my own suit's deep, faded red, designed to compress and add back pressure in the event of decompression (redundantly, I might add: ship lifers are just as modified for decompression as Jovians)and padded just enough and in just the right areas to provide a bit of modesty. The suit was a sort of high-tech, super tight onesie, complete with feet and hands that were form-fitting enough that it had individual toes and fingers down to the outline of the nails.

Her long, inhumanly lithe form was shockingly graceful, completely and utterly at home and comfortable in zero gravity. She floated without the slightest unease, her long black hair tied back and braided through with something stiff enough to keep it from floating around and getting in her way save for a couple of long strands that hovered and gently waved with her little head movements in front of her face. Her skin was porcelain white, pale enough that I could see faint, delicate blue veins even in the "nighttime" dim light of the passageway if I looked closely at her long, slender neck.

She was incredibly beautiful.

I realized, way too late, that she had said something and I had missed it in my rather-more-intense-than-I'd-fucking-planned inspection of her body, and that my missing it and not responding had pulled her out of her own distracted inspection of MY body. Basically, I was busted.

I looked up, seeing her big blue eyes shining with amusement, her lips twitching up in a little smirk.

"I'm sorry," I said, a smile pulling at my own mouth. "I got a little lost there for a second. What did you say?"

"I asked if you actually DO anything in that torus, or if you just walk around in the insane gravity and try not to pass out," she said, probably a little more sassily than she had the first time. I don't know. I'd been distracted.

"Well, it wouldn't really be exercise if all I did was walk around," I said, shooting her sass right back at her.

"Can I watch?" she blurted out, a little color floating up into her cheeks as she said it.

"You want to watch me get sweaty?" I asked, figuring that either she wouldn't mind a little flirting, or that she'd be offended and I wouldn't ever see her again. I knew which I preferred, but wouldn't have been overly upset with the other.

The color on her cheeks deepened, and her lips parted in a half gasp, half smile. She didn't back down, though. She made eye contact and did the zero gravity equivalent of a hip-cock instead.

"Yes," she said, no waver and no hesitation, her eyes steady and a little flirty on mine.

"Alright then," I said, and pushed off down the passageway.

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Two minutes later, we were standing in the center exercise torus. I'd pushed off hard, and sped myself along with tugs and kicks the whole way, coming in fast enough that stopping myself would've looked almost violent to someone watching me do it. I had spent the last eighty years on a ship, moving around in zero gravity, and I guess part of me just wanted to show off a little for a pretty girl. Most people would've been left far behind, not strong or practiced enough to keep up.

She made it look effortless, and stopped with a lot more grace than I did, catching herself on a handhold and turning the jolt of a stop into a quick, fluid backflip that gave me a lovely, brief view of her surprisingly muscular backside. I got busted again, and was punished with a bright, happy smile.

Agony.

"You sure you want to be in here for this?" I was a little worried. I knew she was good for fifteen minutes of four gee acceleration, but two hours of six gravities is a whole different ball of wax.

"We do cargo runs between passenger hauls. Hard burn for three hours at seven-point-five. I won't be moving around, but I'll be fine." She made herself a little couch up against the bulkhead as she spoke and got comfortable, making sure all the pressure points and bendy parts were well supported.

"Alright," I said, and started cycling up the torus.

I spent an hour on weights before switching to cardio, running flat out for twenty minutes before halving my speed and jogging for ten, then flat out again for twenty, then a ten minute cool-down before finally stopping. She watched me the whole time, content to stare, unable or unwilling to expend the energy to so much as lift a finger. I looked over at her at one point during my run and she winked at me. I damn near tripped.

"I got tired just watching that," she said, pulling herself off her makeshift couch while the torus was still around three or three and a half.

"I won't lie, I didn't expect you to make it through the whole thing," I said.

"Oh, really? Why's that?" There was a playful challenge in her voice, daring me to say I didn't think she was strong enough.

"I figured you would get bored just sitting there watching," I answered truthfully. I hadn't doubted she would be physically capable of it after she'd told me about the cargo hauls.

"Well," she said, popping the hatch on the torus and gliding out ahead of me, "nobody EVER moves around when we do the cargo burns. So this was kind of like seeing a unicorn or an angel or something. Wouldn't YOU watch one for a couple hours if you had the chance?"