While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 2

  A few hours later Kathryn returned to her spacious suite aboard Orbital One; being in command of the station had its perks.  As a research facility and occasional ceremonial meeting place for their three governments, much of the large station remained empty.  In its prime it was a bustling hub of trade, diplomacy, and transport catering to a Solar System of nine billion humans, leaving living and commercial space on it a prized commodity.  The commander’s suite was only equal to those reserved for visiting heads of states.  There were no larger suites, but they were easily three times the space her immediate subordinates would have been allotted back in the day.

  But for the last fifteen years, it had been their home together as they’d grown into a small family.  They had their own little place down on Earth as well as small flats they keep on Haven and Kobol, but these were just places they visited and vacationed, more often lent out to travelling friends and family than used themselves.  Their collective s within their respective organizations combined with Jaren’s family’s wealth afforded them more luxuries than most were able to enjoy.  Over the years though, this station had become their home in a intimate way than they’d expected.

  As she entered the main living area, Kathryn found their daughter Maggie doing what she’d been doing when she’d left, drawing on the living room table in front of the wall screen.  Sometimes she watched scripted shows from the various worlds or ancient ones from the old archives, but today she just had a simulated Martian vista on the screen, programmed to occasionally superimpose wildly improbable animals happening past the scene as though it were a naturalistic observation video.

  She was fourteen years old, and only just.  The kind of parents she had, being an only child, and having few other children to interact with had left her remarkably mature for her age, yet she remained only fourteen.  Since maturing, she’d become more instinctively combative.  Though she’d kept her current rather short cut styled in a deliberately messy way blond with broad and dramatic purple streaks in it long enough for her dark roots to come in, she otherwise seemed to change her hair colour every week.

  “Hey Mom, what’s up?” she casually asked without looking up from her work with obvious boredom.  Being scientists, engineers, and explorers themselves, Kathryn and Jaren had always tacitly hoped that these qualities and interests would rub off on their young one, but that’s not how it she’d turned out.  Maggie was certainly a good student and had a fair aptitude for science, but she’d never seemed to develop their passions, so they resisted pushing her too hard towards it.  They instead tried to encourage her to pursue whatever did interest her, which more and more was her varied artistic pursuits.  They wondered where she got that from, knowing it certainly wasn’t them.

  It became ever clearer as Maggie became her own person that her own hear lay in the arts.  She’ experimented with many forms but had yet to really find her own particular style or medium.  She loved to draw characters more than landscapes and loved consuming all kinds of stories and creating her own.  Lately these interests had been combining into creating comics of a sort, drawing her own characters into stories she constructed as she went.  She’d usually place them in some setting in Earth’s distant past, trying to work out what life would be like for them and what challenges they would face.  It was hard for anyone to be here overwatching an extinct civilization and not develop the same fascination with what it had been like here before the plague.

  Kathryn and Jaren had accepted her differing interests from their own with something of a shrug.  They figured if this was the worst they could expect in rebellion from their daughter, in the grand scheme of things they were getting off fairly light and they appreciated it.  They were more pleased for her to have discovered some interests of her own.  As much as they may have been disappointed at her not sharing their interests, it would have been worse if she’d placated them at the expense of her authenticity.  They’d deliberately tried to guide her towards being her own person and in this respect at least they seemed to have succeeded.

  “Hey sweetie.  We actually had a pretty big day, very exciting.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, now looking up at her mother.  “Did they dig up something interesting down there?”

  “No, actually much bigger than that, we got first light from another rift ship!”

  “Oh?  So… what does that mean?”  Despite herself Kathryn slumped a little inside at the gulf between Maggie’s excitement and her own.

  “It means we have rift access to a whole new star system we’ve never been to before,” she explained, “that no humans have ever been to before.”

  “Oh,” she went to look back down at her drawing, before looking up again at her mother.  “Are there like, aliens there or something?”  Another slump at her suggestion that it was only interesting news if there were.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Kathryn answered.  “Not even cellular life.”

  “Oh.” Maggie answered with obvious disappointment before returning to her drawing, the conversation seemingly over as far as she was concerned.

  “But we…” Kathryn trailed off, her own excitement somewhat sapped.  She gave up with a shrug and a forced smile, resisting the urge to say something passive aggressive.  She’d had to learn to be better about that since Maggie started mirroring it back to her.

  At that moment the door opened and Jaren entered, prompting Maggie to get up and run over to give him a big hug.

  “What am I?  Chop liver?” Kathryn asked her daughter, at which point Maggie released her father and turned to squeeze her mother even harder.  Kathryn gave Jaren a wide-eyed smirk as she slowly shook her head in amused disbelief.  Maggie then released her mother and returned to sitting on her knees in front of the living room coffee table.

  “You get speak to the governments?” Kathryn asked Jaren.

  “I did,” he answered.

  “And?”

  “And they… are actually in agreement with us for once if you can believe it!  That actually kind of threw me.  I thought it would be a lot harder to convince them but as exciting as it may be for us, to them it’s still just a survey mission.  They said we’d earned it if we really wanted the assignment.”

  Kathryn shook her head at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s just… I can remember when you felt exactly the same way before our original Earth expedition.  You didn’t see much more value in pure research and exploration than most Koboli and look at you now.”

  “Well what can I say?” he said with a flash of his enigmatic grin.  “You’ve been a good influence on me,” he said before giving her a kiss.

  “Goes both ways, my love.” she answered, kissing him back.

  “Ew.” Maggie uttered with disgust in response to their kiss.  They chose to ignore it.  Some cracks had developed in their relationship over the years; they both appreciated still being able to be affectionate with each other like this without having gotten to the point of ever having to fake it to keep the peace.

  “So, they recalled New Horizon II” Jaren continued.  “They need a few days to wrap up the surveys they’re conducting, but after that it’ll take them ten days to get here through the rift.”

  “Wow, it is a fast ship isn’t it?  It usually takes longer than that just to transit between the star and one of our worlds.”

  “Um humh, state of the art,” Jaren noted with some pride in his people’s technical prowess.

  “So that’s it?  We’re really going?”  Until now it had just been an idea.  The reality of it was so big by comparison.  There was now so much work to do to prepare.

  “Yup?” he grinned.

  “Going where?” Maggie asked, as usual having heard only every fourth word while absorbed in her own world.

  Her parents came over around the couch and sat down on it on either side, flanking her.

  “That new system I was telling you about,” Kathryn explained.  “We pushed to get the assignment ourselves and Command has agreed.”

  “Why?” her nose wrinkled at the incomprehensibility of their wanting the assignment.

  “For fun!” her mother exclaimed.  “Because it’s the kind of stuff we used to do before we settled down here on the station to help set up and run Earth research.”

  “We needed to stay put for a good long time while raising you,” Jaren added.  “I’d say we’ve quite enjoyed our life during our time here,” he looked at Kathryn and got the approving nod he’d clearly hoped for, “and we certainly intend to come back to-, er,“ he looked back at Kathryn again.  “We do intend to come back here and resume our current positions, don’t we?”

  “Well I certainly do,” she answered.

  “I definitely meant to give them the impression we were,” Jaren clarified, “that we intended for this to just be a temporary reassignment for us.”

  “Ok good, yes.  We do intend to carry on here afterwards,” she explained to Maggie, “but it’ll be exciting to mix things up for a bit, to get back out there and see more of our little corner of the galaxy.”

  “For how long?” Maggie asked.

  Kathryn looked at Jaren and drew a deep breath, briefly letting it puff out her cheeks before blowing the air out in uncertainty.  “What do you say Jaren?  It’s just an initial survey; we’d probably want to spend at least two weeks at each primary body, so… what?  Four or five months total?  Who would you like to stay with during that time sweetie?  Uncle Francis?  Auntie Irvina maybe?  Or Jaren’s parents?”

  Maggie wrinkled her nose and answered with more snark that Kathryn appreciated.  “Mom I’m fourteen.  I don’t need someone to look after me like I’m a baby.”

  “No, of course you’re not,” Kathryn sighed.  “But you’re still not old enough to stay on this station by yourself for months so you have to go somewhere.  You’re going to need to go to Haven or Kobol and I’d be more comfortable if there was someone around keeping an eye on you is all.”

  The girl looked down at her drawings.  “I should go with you then,” she distantly surmised with a shrug.

  Kathryn and Jaren looked at each other with surprise that she’d have any interest in coming on an expedition with them.  “Oh?” she asked.  “We honestly never really even considered it, I mean it’s really not that kind of a ship sweetie.  It’s really not meant for families; it’s a working ship, you know?  It was designed with… military practically.”

  “If I want to tell stories,” she explained without looking up, “I need see and experience things to write about,” she concluded with a shrug.

  Kathryn and Jaren were initially not terribly enthusiastic about the idea of bringing their daughter on such a mission.  Her interest caused them to reconsider though.  It was rare for her to be interested in something like this, and it was ultimately expected to be just another rather uneventful survey mission.  Even if it was just for the sake of her artistic pursuits, they were nonetheless heartened by her sudden interest in research and exploration regardless of its genesis.  It would be nice to spend time that much time with her rather than not see her for so long.  It wouldn’t be long before she’d be off living her own life and they’d hardly ever see her.

  “You do have to realize though Maggie, we’ll be working a lot on this trip, it’s not a pleasure cruise.” Jaren cautiously warned her.  “There won’t be much to do for fun on the ship, and if you come along you’ll be expected to pull your own weight to some degree.  You’ll be assigned tasks and be expected to complete them professionally.  We wouldn’t saddle you with a full workload or anything you couldn’t handle, but that would be the reality, more like a job than a vacation.”

  Kathryn gave him a plaintive look.  She was worried he was going to turn her off the idea, but understood he was pushing a little to gauge how serious she was about the idea.  If she wasn’t dissuaded, Kathryn agreed that the work experience would be great for her.

  “That’s fair,” she answered after a few thoughtful beats.  “Sounds like I’d probably get bored if you didn’t give me work to do.”

  “Well what do you think Kat?” Jaren asked her.  “If she knows what she’d up for and is willing to work, I’m sure I can get special authorization from Command.”  He looked at her pleadingly with wide eyes.

  “You’re sure you want to come work with us instead of hanging out in the city?  You wouldn’t rather catch up with your friends on Haven?  Maybe make some new ones or take more art courses?”  Kathryn wanted to say yes, but she felt obligated to give her daughter every opportunity to consider changing her mind before finally agreeing.  It was a serious commitment to make so quickly, but one she was happy to let her make if she was serious.

  “I’m sure.  You two both always talk about how much fun you had before coming here and having me; I want to see what that’s like.”  She still resisted looking up at them to maintain her teenaged outward indifference at the idea.

  “Well, good enough for me,” Kathryn said, finally letting out some slack on the leash she’d been keeping on her enthusiasm for the idea.