Not Just Another Order, by M. K. Dreysen

For this week's free story, let's step forward... a few decades? A century, perhaps?

I don't know what might happen between now and then. Not in any big picture way. But I suspect that certain jobs will still need to be done. Food will still yet need to be grown. Sewers will still need to be repaired. Scientists will still scratch their heads when something new crosses their desks.

And the person you're about to meet, Serendipity Oh? She will very much always manage to find that the world has its way of making sure that she's paying attention...

Not Just Another Order by M. K. Dreysen

Serendipity Oh had a lot of things on her mind. Trajectory adjustments, and the things that went with them, because piloting the ship was the constant.

Supplier issues, because there were always supplier issues. Filters come in all shapes and sizes, and if anything was as certain as the tides, it was that she'd get to the Outer Reaches, reach for the activated carbon cartridge, and it would be the wrong damned one. Or the material would have settled on launch, or the manufacturer would have cheaped out on materials while still using the same lot numbers or or or...

But that was constant, too, dealing with suppliers. She changed out air scrubbers, water and process systems filters, from one end of the solar system to the other. But Serendipity had been doing this for a while, she'd built up a few defenses, a few buffers, against that kind of thing. A headache, in other words, but she copied her accountants on the email and warned Theta Filters and Scrubbers they'd be getting a chargeback against their next invoice.

The real morning headache, the next crisis, the one that chapped her ass and made her wonder if she was the last sane person in the solar system, or maybe the first one to glimpse the joys of the new insanity, was the email from the plant manager she was getting ready to drop in on.

"Sorry to bother you with this at the last minute, Serendipity, but we've got the MRN inspectors crawling all over us. We're not locked out of the plant, but you are. It'll be two, three weeks maybe before we can let outside personnel past the gates."

MRN being the Martian food and drug safety regime, and the plant, Omaverd Pharmaceuticals, being the orbital station the Martian government held fifty-one percent of. The one that made high-grade foodstuffs and drugs, the kind that required freefall to get right, in the case of the drugs at least.

The foods they made were a little bit of lagniappe. High-dollar stuff with that "Made in Orbit" label that means so much to the right kind of foodie.

Didn't matter which, Serendipity knew, drug or food they needed clean, they needed documentation, and most of all they needed a manufacturer who knew what they were doing. So, inspectors. Even for the government-owned plant.

Maybe especially, Serendipity figured, if the Economist was correct. What with the lawsuits over pricing between the Martian government and their minority owner, a Japanese conglomerate grown out of the Nissan organization. Serendipity figured that the Martians had a little more interest in prying open the books than they usually did.

And it's not like anyone was going to hide the plant from them. Not with it blinking down on them twenty-four and a bit hours a day.

And, it's not like this should have mattered to Serendipity. Except for the part where she had to kill three weeks, and even then there was no guaranteeing she'd get into the plant. She had half a dozen other clients, she could juggle a week out of the schedule, but then what? Sit in orbit, or Phobos Station, twiddling her thumbs, for two weeks, or maybe six or eight or...

She was two days out. Time enough to send an email to an old friend. "Bill, hey it's Sere, when's the last time you got shut out of a plant?"

Sere didn't expect a quick reply. Bill had retired a couple years back. He was sitting in Nova Scotia, if the calendar was right, surf-casting his days away and riding out August until he could head back to Monterrey ahead of the cold weather. If she was lucky, he'd see the email before dinner, and she'd get a reply in twelve hours or so.

She killed the time reconfiguring her schedule for the rest of the Mars trip. Deimos Water and Waste Transport, her biggest single order this trip, they had eighty-five haulers in their fleet and every one of them a case of different filters. DWWT, at least, also had their own staff capable of changing the filters. So that was a one-day, drop and walk behind the robot to the office, pick up lunch from... oh that's Wayne, he likes that deli in the Deimos main habitat. 'Eh,' Serendipity thought, 'At least they do a pretty good rye bread.' Which, all things considered, it could have been worse.

Like her Phobos stop, that was the Ytterbian Heavy Lifters. Trye Lo managed their offices, and she used only three reliable lunch places. Mexican, pizza, and an Indian place. All of them pretty good, Sere admitted, but when you get the same thing on schedule every week... Yep. If Sere delivered to DWWT on, what, Thursday, and Friday dropped in on YHL, she'd for sure get the Indian food. Nice and predictable.

Sere wondered what Trye did on holidays. Her plant was open year-round, no days off because heavy equipment operators always answer the phone.

No matter. The Mars surface operations, a couple of municipal water and wastestream treatment plants, a big warehouse operation closer to the pole, with a bit of prodding her computer spit out a travelling salesman solution that put her back in orbit in two days.

Deliveries all finished in a single Thursday through Sunday run. "Four days, and then I'm waiting for the government to decide just how much they want to torture their own plant manager." Serendipity hadn't planned on a vacation. Except here she was, stuck with one anyway.

Sere was halfway through Saturday's travel hops before Bill got back to her. "Hey, Sere, looks like you got caught up in the Mars-Nissan thing. Too funny. Tough luck. Rumors abound, sounds like Mars is looking to shut down the plant for a good while, just to let the conglomerate know they're playing for keeps. Six months, at least, and I know that's hell on your schedule. I'd bond the drops into a warehouse and get on the road, if I were in your shoes. Best, Bill."

"Shit." If she'd only been delivering, Bill would be right. Place the filters and other deliveries into the bonding warehouse, set out a group of signing authorities, and head on out. No big deal.

Problem was, the orbital plant had a troublesome heavy-metals reclamation unit; they paid the premium it took to get Serendipity to change the filters and membranes, calibrate and troubleshoot and sign off on the state of the machine. The metals were a necessary part of the chemistry, catalysts mostly. But they didn't belong in the product stream. The plant manager and her crew could manage, did manage all of the other filters.

Serendipity worked on a year-long rotation between the inner and outer planets. Basically. Which meant it would be a year at least before she made it back in to overhaul the OP unit. A year that, under the circumstances, she'd have bet good money the Martian government would use as an excuse to de-certify the plant. "Oh, you're out of cert on your heavy metals stream, too bad, let us know when you get it back up and operational. And oh, by the way, if you're out of operation for that long, you'll have to re-certify all of the affected units. From scratch."

Sere weighed her options. Not that she really had any. Twenty or more other plants, at least, on rotation in the outer reaches, twice that on her inner planet cycle, and every one of them with schedules and deadlines and inspections of their own. "Well," she told her autopilot, the only other listener available, "I guess we're down a client."

She fired off an email to Bill, thanking him for passing along the information, "I may not like it, but that doesn't mean I can't use it. Take care, and if you actually catch anything other than another six-pack, send me a picture. Take care, Sere."

Time and deliveries passed, and so Serendipity was one last launch away by Sunday morning. She'd made her last delivery early that morning, then crawled back into her lander, strapped in and made ready to hit the button on the autopilot's pre-programmed route.

He didn't respond to the launch acceptance with an agreeable "Ok, waiting for clearance, make sure you're strapped in and ready to lift!"

Nope. The lifter instead answered her with an entirely unagreeable "Launch clearance delayed. Traffic control has issued an emergency hold on all ten kilometer or higher trajectories in the Martian space. Hold is in place for just under ninety-six hours at this time. Martian Traffic Control sends their regrets, all systems are up and running nominally, the hold was issued at the request of the governmental authorities for unstated purposes."

"Do we have any additional information? Outside of traffic control, I mean?" Might as well ask, at least. Likely, the Martian government had something neat and interesting blowing its tail for the high country. They'd blocked off three, four days, they'd launch a dozen or more different orbital or off-planet missions in that time and make the curious guess which ones were more interesting than the others.

"So far, observational reports from the internet indicate that three launch vehicles are being readied under open viewing conditions, one at each pole launch facility, and the other at Equatorial-Beta, Pad Fourteen. No vehicles have yet launched within the hold window."

"Thanks, Marvin. Let me know if we catch a break."

"Don't forget your remote."

The town was named Agua Dulce. It wasn't old enough yet to have any legends built up around that fact. Just tall tales. Most of the adults still remembered the true origin. That the astronaut who'd been in charge of naming that day had stopped in the little Texas town on her way to the launch pad, for what turned out to be the best chopped-brisket sandwich she'd ever had. The town celebrated this event in a yearly barbecue cook-off. Which was quite a trick, considering the work they had to do to set up for charcoal cooking.

Not to mention the cost of a brisket on Mars these days.

Astronaut idiosyncracies aside, just like the Agua Dulce's scattered over the American West, the Martian version's name had stuck for a simple reason. All that polar ice meant that yes indeedy there was a good clean source of water for the thirsty among us.

Sere had visited AD Water Supply yesterday. Today, she had little better to do than sit in a hotel room, "Oh, honey, we've got plenty of rooms available," and they did. Tourist season, or what passed for it, was usually measured in milliseconds.

The guy sitting at the desk had even cut her a little bit of a deal on the day rate. "Not your fault you're here, we'll just pretend you'd originally made your reservation for five days, not just one." He'd given her a little wink, which Serendipity returned.

She wasn't going to tell the guy's manager anything if he wasn't.

The hotel room had the usual assortment of printed flyers. Visit the local tourist traps, they all proclaimed. Caverns, day hikes in low-pressure suits, ice sculpting. Wineries, which did and didn't make sense, but the grape vines had taken to the enclosed environment well enough so here they were.

Mostly Sere was immune to the advertising. Too many miles, too much else to do. What caught her this time was the pool. The town had taken the time and the money to turn a small section of the underground canal, the ice-melt that paid for everything else, into a town park. Water slides, a pool, they'd stocked the warm-water section with trout and carp for those who wanted to play with lines and rods.

For the longhaul travelers, it was a place to get out for a run under something like real gravity. Or, in Serendipity's case, jump into a real swimming pool for the first time in ages. Mostly she just didn't have time for that. And this one was the real thing, Olympic-length lanes.

Packed with kids getting swim lessons, she found out when she got there. "Summer break," the teenager at the desk informed her. "The next few weeks, we'll be pretty packed. But we keep a few lanes open for adults, you should be good. Five bucks entry fee."

So Sere ponied up the money and dropped in for a workout. Or something resembling one, she told herself in disgust when she stopped at half a mile to suck wind on the side of the pool. "You put in your half hour," she told herself. "Nobody else here cares, get out and go to the library or something."

Sere hauled herself out, disgruntled and happy at the same time, and sat on the edge with her feet in the water. Until she realized the kid sitting on the bleachers behind her was waiting on the lane. She hauled herself to her feet, grabbed towel and slipped on sandals and went back to the locker room.

Then it was off to find a library. Which required she ignore the donut shop sitting right next door.

The day was like that. One place, then another, Sere more or less wandered through it. Lunch, and then back to the library because she wasn't borrowing a book and she wanted to at least finish what she'd started. She gave a little thought to the movie theater, settled for the arcade instead. She passed up the pizza parlor sharing space with the arcade in favor of a seafood place closer to the hotel.

Serendipity was halfway back to the hotel, ready to turn on the TV set and let the gentle noise lull her to sleep before she recognized something odd about her day. And that meant Sere had to add a stop she hadn't otherwise contemplated, a visit to the little hotel bar. Wine, water, and oh thank God, they had a craft beer board. Not more than half a dozen, but she'd been terrified they'd have wine and nothing else.

"That's the way we ran the place for the first couple of years," the bartender told her. "The owners have a winery, so they started out pushing that. Until they realized half or more of their hotel clients were crossing the street." To the bar and grill on the other side of the square, which served a little more variety. "We don't have the full liquor license, just beer and wine, but that seems to do the trick for a lot of the hotel guests."

Sere was just happy she could have a decent beer, at a table to herself, where she could surf the Web on her phone and keep an eye on the window to the square.

That was the key thing. If she wanted to know what had been odd, a little off, about her day, she needed to know at least one thing.

Was the kid's face she'd seen just half an hour ago the same one she'd been seeing off and on all day long? At the pool waiting for a lane, then sitting at the donut shop when she'd come out of the library, at the arcade playing some kind of first-person shooter...

Could be a lot of things. Just more than a thousand people called Agua Dulce a permanent home. There weren't exactly a lot of options, Sere admitted, if you were a teenager with time on your hands. The park, the library, the arcade were going to be pretty much the extent of it for a kid who wasn't tied down to something else for the summer break.

And if there was anyone who'd reason to understand serendipitous timing...

She sipped her beer, paged through news and gossip, and watched for the kid to come by. Which he did.

The hotel, with the little bar Sere bided time in, held down the south side of the underground square at the heart of Agua Dulce. City Hall took up the western block, courts and payments and the jail on the other side of that. North side of the square, here in the evening that was the North Star Bar and Grill, which you had to walk close to if you wanted to smell the fire and listen to the sizzle, given that it vented everything through to the surface. The rest of that block were daytime traders, a mechanic shop on the west end of it and the east end a dry-goods storefront.

The east side of the square held a few offices, whichever lawyer had got here first, the school-board clerk's place, an independent post office. And the only place that an underage kid could hide in, if he didn't want to hang out in the hotel lobby, or join in the crowd of skateboarders waiting for a cop to chase them away from the bandstand taking up the middle of the square.

A comic-book shop.

Sere fought with herself every time she did spend time dirtside, here or Luna. Comic-book shops, just like the antique shop sitting across from the library a couple blocks over, had not just survived the general exodus from Earth's surface, they'd thrived. Everywhere a collector, everywhere more space needed, and the forefront of the expansion could guarantee two things to the shop owners.

Geeks with a little spare cash and nothing to spend it on. And cheap cheap cheap real estate, for the collection that never stopped growing.

Serendipity didn't trade in comics, or the other things. Unlike Bill, and Teddy with her action figure obsession, Zi and Malagra and Dennis... Most of the other traders in the business devoted time and space to the antiques, or the comics or the curios or just about anything else that could take up just that little bit of extra space in the cargo hold.

Sere knew better. Not that she couldn't have made a little extra money, and a lot extra entertainment, by schlepping boxes of comics and games and figures from planet to planet. She could have. Except for the part where she'd lost a couple of years to the comics world, in her college days.

Obsession didn't begin to describe the feeling. The pages between her fingers, the colors and the joy of bagging issue number 47a, not the foil cover the one with the plain brown wrapper...

Sere didn't go in the comics shop for the same reason a reformed drunk doesn't walk by the liquor store. Some things are best avoided, if at all possible.

The kid kept popping in and out of the shop. Go in for a few minutes, scan the boxes for issues he maybe didn't remember, didn't have, stick his head out of the door, go back in and walk the figure shelves, check out the games. And back out to the door.

It was almost enough... No, the kid and his jack-in-the-box imitation was enough. Sere dropped a couple bucks on the tabletop and made her way across the square.

Sere waited 'til she got to the comics shop door before she even considered what she was going to ask the kid. The look in his eyes, somewhere north of fear and south of bravado, didn't help. "Right, just what the hell is going on, kid?"

He tried the "What are you talking about?" routine, but his heart couldn't have been in it. After a couple of failed attempts, the kid motioned to the sidewalk. Sere shrugged and walked back out to the square.

"Care to try it again, from the top?" she asked when he'd followed her out.

"You're Serendipity Oh, right?" he returned. "Trader..."

"Yeah, that's me. What of it?"

"I'm Matt, Yoa Benevolent's son. She's in trouble, and she told me you could help."

Serendipity Oh had many different possibilities in mind, in terms of why in the world anyone would be following her through an accidental sleepover in a Martian hamlet. Robbery, kidnapping, not big risks but it had been a while since she'd paid any attention to Martian politics. It would eventually happen. Something weird with the conglomerates and the planetary government, because again, the politics she didn't pay attention to.

Running into Yoa, or at least her kid, wasn't even in the ballpark. "What happened to Venus?" she asked. "Your mom had ideas, if I remember, she was going to get back to research?"

"Mom always says the Venusian habitats only sound good in theory. Once you have to live in them in reality, even the air tastes like old gym shorts."

Sere knew that feeling. She made her trips to Venus, reluctantly, once a year or so, and if there was any place else in the solar system she spent less time under gravitational influence it was Earth.

She ignored the kid's hand motions, he was trying to get her to start walking wherever it was he needed her to be. "Quit it. Here's as good a place as any to start your story. If I decide you're for real, we'll take a walk, otherwise I'm headed back into that comic shop and see what their game night lineup looks like."

"D&D on the main table, card games on the other four. That's Sunday night."

Sere held back the smile. "Right, so get on with it."

He did his best; by the time he'd gotten halfway through it, Sere knew what she'd be doing for the next couple days. "Oh well," she told herself, "Maybe OP and the Martian government will have their shit straightened out by then."

Actually, when she had a chance to run through the kid's story again, as they walked to his mother's house, Sere had to admit she may have made up her mind when he opened his bid. "You're stuck here because of the launch hold, aren't you?" he'd begun.

And the rest of it made a lot more sense than she'd expected. Which Yoa confirmed when her son dragged Sere into the house.

"I didn't know whether Matt would be able to convince you or not," Yoa told Sere.

"I'm stuck here anyway. If it's your fault, at least I have somebody to cuss for it." Sere gave Yoa a long, hard hug. "What the hell did you get yourself into, lady?"

As it turned out, Yoa had gotten herself into trouble deep enough that Sere and Matt had to break into the polar launch facility that night. "Tell me again why we couldn't do this on orbit?" Sere had asked.

"Because every agency in the local area will spot you," Yoa had replied.

That and, by Serendipity's standards at least, the launch facility was laughably easy to break into.

"How did Mom know you'd be able to do this?" the kid asked her, when they'd made their way into the launch silo, and started work on getting into the capsule.

"Ask me when you're a little older," Sere told him.

"I'm seventeen!" he protested. "That should be..."

"Try again when you're thirty. Fourty, even."

The other big question Sere had swallowed was the reason Matt had to come along. That one was obvious, even if Serendipity didn't like it. And she didn't. But she wasn't the one who'd helped his mom design and fabricate. The circumsolar satellite cluster wasn't just a serious money sink, it was a nested constellation of nanoscale satellites, a light sail, and twenty or so different obervational devices.

None of which Sere carried checkout on. So the kid came along.

Through the gates, "Matt's got clearances, all the way through to the silos. We're T-minus three days as of tonight, so they won't fuel the rocket until day after tomorrow. It's now or never."

"But technically the box is sealed, right?" Sere had pointed out.

"Launch manifest, yes. But they're pretty loose at Polar-1, it's still an experimental facility."

"Why am I being dragged into this?" Sere had asked, at the end. "It sounds like Matt could do this by himself?"

Yoa wasn't involved, for the simple reason that her wheelchair wasn't much use climbing over a rocket. And while the robotic legs she used, when she had to, were many things, they weren't exactly fast on their feet. That and they were as heavy as hell.

Which mattered, since Matt and Serenity had to use a fiberglass ladder to span the distance between the gantry and the rocket's cargo capsule.

"Mom said, since you were here anyway..."

"Since when does she keep tabs on my travels?"

"You have to file your preliminary flight plans six months out," the kid pointed out. "She spotted your name when she made the launch schedule."

And the rest of it was history.

"Now's the part Mom said you were really here for," Matt told her.

They sat, each on a ladder, with the capsule's door waiting for them. And yeah, bypassing the codes on the capsule's sealed door was a good reason for Serendipity to be here.

Well, not just bypassing the codes, she reminded herself. That was hard enough. But the part that made it really tricksy, and the stories behind how she'd learned a trade she didn't admit to except under duress, or the promise of one of Yoa's traveller's brunches tomorrow morning...

She pulled the ship's remote from her pocket. Part cell phone, part tablet, always a connection to the ship. The remote had precisely four different port types. One for power and generic serial bus connections.

One for audio. So Sere slipped the headphones on, at the same time hushing her laughing mind as it wanted to conjure up an image of a bank safe to go along with the action. The headphones fed both ambient and the line signals, giving Sere at least twice as much information as before. And she could, and did, program the handheld to look over her shoulder for her, in case she got caught up in the immediate.

The other two ports were, in one sense, just standard connections for any of a wide variety of electro-mechanical devices. Ohm meters in a thousand different flavors, and the remote itself held control libraries for just about all of them.

The device she connected wasn't listed in the standard software packages she, and half the techs in the spaceways, paid a thousand bucks a month for.

This one was a custom job. As was the software package she'd first written in those lost years of college...

"You'd think, wouldn't you," she murmured to Matt, part of a habit she'd picked up doing the jobs that led to building the first iteration of the little device in her hands, "That, if you wanted to build a real, honest-to-God lock, the kind no one could actually open without the actual verifications, that the first thing you'd demand is that your lock couldn't talk to the outside world."

Matt nodded, a little dubiously, as Sere used the probes on the lockpad, and then on the rest of the door itself. "But what about the alarms?"

"Which is usually the first question they ask," she continued. "What about the alarms, and knowing who's using the door?"

The computer inside the keypad ran things. It checked state, whether the lock was open or not, it logged entries successful and unsuccessful. And here was the key part, Sere reminded herself, the part that made her smile, giggle, made her love the work when she indulged herself.

The little lock phoned home. It connected to the network and said "Hey, boss, all's good here" when all was good. And it said "Hey boss, something's not right" when all was most sincerely not good at all.

"Which means, since we're supposed to be all locked down at the moment, as soon as I put in a key and open the door..."

"They'll know exactly who and when," Sere finished. "But there's one more little tidbit here, that makes it all worthwhile."

And that little tidbit was an accident of, a compendium of, having more than one thing to do. The keypad had its own job to do.

What it didn't have to do was taken any rides. When the launch techs were finished with the fuel cycle, and they unhooked the hoses, checked valves, and did all the little things, then at the very end, the last thing on their checklist, they'd replace the keypad door with a standard vacuum-proof door.

Since the little keypad and its computer and its door in particular weren't made for the rigors of space. They were there to keep access logs while the rocket and its cargo were being worked on, no more no less.

"So what? We can't hide here until after they've replaced the doors."

Serendipity did her best to hide her smile, but failed miserably. Matt was getting frustrated. But, she told herself, he's at that age where a little bit of frustration just might help him learn something. "How much money do you spend on a temporary item?"

"Huh?"

"Right, think of it this way. Except in very unusual, very expensive conditions, the keypad computer doesn't actually 'know' anything about the physical lock mechanism. It doesn't have to. All it needs to know is that its internal circuit, the one that fires the little solenoid, is open or closed."

"The solenoid actually manipulates the lock, right, got it."

"How do you open the solenoid?"

"A magnet?"

"Bingo."

"Um, won't that fire the circuit in the other direction?"

"Remember what I said about how much money you'd spend?" Sere said, right as she completed the proper circuit with her handheld. "They didn't spend the money to get the kind of lock that would know when it had been bypassed."

And right on cue, the lock fired open. "Look," Sere said. And pointed at the screen.

Where the handheld, monitoring the lock, showed that the lock was still busy saying "Hey, boss, all is good here."

"By all means, Matt," Sere continued, waving her hand to the open cargo bay. "Get on with it. We don't want to spend any more time here than we have to." Stray electrons, the wrong dust particle... Serendipity stayed exactly where she was, to make sure there were no accidents while Matt did what he had to.

"Hey, Matt," she called into the bay. "Now that we're here, with all this time on our hands, how about you explain to me just why it is you're replacing the nanocluster's brain? You know, since I'm the one doing all the breaking part of the B&E?"

Her laughter pealed through the room when he just about dropped the new command module he'd brought along to insert into the nanosatellite cluster.

He waited until he'd calmed down enough, working on the actual replacement of the thing's controls and programming, before he answered. "How about you tell me why you'd come along on something like this?"

"You first, kid, it's your gig."

Matt explained, in between applications of the soldering iron and his own handheld device. "Well, Mom's research is expensive," he said. "And she signed up with a government agency to get the satellite cluster launched."

"Story of my life, her life, and a whole shitload of scientists. But you take the King's nickle..."

"Huh?"

"He who pays the piper calls the tune?" she tried. "Them who has, gets?"

"You're not making any sense at all to me, right now," Matt grunted. The racks the nanocluster were stored in were, by design, unwilling to relinquish their cargo. At least not without a little persuasion.

In this case, a rubber hammer and a smattering of curse words.

"Smartass," Sere replied. "Ok, I'll translate: Your mother found out that getting in bed with the Martian government meant she had to run their experiments, their observations, their program, not hers."

"Yep." He was almost done; the physical part was fast, though. Sitting here waiting for all the contuinity checks was going to be the tedious part.

"Matt, that's part of the gig, she had to know that up front." Sere had her own issues with that kind of thing, which is why she was a cosmic delivery servant these days, not a lab monkey.

But when she'd gone out the door, she hadn't done anything to a working piece of equipment. Or, ok, soon to be working piece of equipment, Sere amended in her mind.

"They pulled her off the project," Matt said. "Told her that, since they'd be taking up all of the observation time, she wasn't the right PI for the job. They need someone who's 'more productive', and Mom's approach doesn't put out enough papers to continue justifying the project."

Serendipity let that part of the story hang in the air for a minute. Her handheld was sending up a warning. "Looks like we're about done here, Matt. Fifteen minutes, and that's about the time we need to be out of the lock downstairs, not still fiddling with bits up here."

Matt dove into his work. Continuity or not.

Sere was impressed. He didn't complain about it, Matt just did it. Serendipity made a note of it, she never knew when that kind of attitude might come in handy.

She did have to poke him again, when the handheld's estimate wound down to five minutes. "Time's up, Matt, whatever state it's in now, that's what it'll shoot in."

"Just one more..."

"Nope. Pick up your shit and let's hit the ladder, kid."

He grumbled about it, but he wrapped his wires and packed the soldering iron away.

She had to grab his arm to keep him from sweeping up. "I know, I know, too late. Get out now." She closed the door behind him, released the locks, but left the leads in place until the handheld told her there'd been no new interruptions to the state of the lock computer. "Right, head for the hills, kid."

They'd cleared the rocket bay doors and the security gates for the launch complex before Sere returned to Matt's story. "It's a hell of a thing. 'We're taking all your research time, which means you can't write papers, which means you're fired.' That usually means there's something else going on, Matt."

They sat in a rental car; Sere wanted to give it a half-hour or so, just in case.

Matt shrugged. "I guess so, but Mom doesn't like talking about politics."

Sere could feel Matt's discomfort, from how he twisted in the flyer's seat, to the way he didn't look at her or the launch complex. Instead of commenting on it, she turned the flyer on and pointed its autopilot back home.

Serendipity didn't bring her worries home to Yoa; she left Matt at the rental lot and went straight back to her shuttle. "Nice getting to know you, kid. Tell your mom I'll catch up to her in another decade or so."

She told herself she didn't care what Yoa had gotten herself into. Down deep, she even believed it. Mostly. Serendipity was used to the "Uh-huh" and the "What-if" voices. She'd accumulated time and scars enough. Yoa would call her, or not, she reminded herself. Until then, if it wasn't worth calling, then it wasn't worth spending skull-sweat on.

Serendipity had plenty of her own shit to worry about. Starting with her full inbox, which her co-pilot was happy enough to tell her about as soon as she walked through the door. "Fifty-six messages listed as important, Serendipity, shall I read them to you?"

She knew the computer wasn't sentient; it's a natural language compiler with a well-developed interface.

She knew it, and she still couldn't help herself. "How's a girl supposed to feel, out making the world a better place, working my ass 'til it's hanging down around my knees, and I walk through the door and you hit me with boring shit like this. Can I at least get a milkshake first? How 'bout dinner, if you're going to..."

They bantered and bitched at each other, through the long wait for the Martian launches to go through, and then all the way to orbit. Sere casually requesting things the co-pilot could just about interpret, the ship in turn telling her to "Fuck off and ask again correctly" in bitwise politese. This was the cornerstone of their relationship, that of Serenidipity Oh and the Turbulent Flow.

As expected, most of the traffic noise was accounting from various vendors and clients, and the OP plant manager's more or less constant apologies. "Tell him we've bonded out his filters, he can sign them out whenever he needs them. I'll be back in a year, same time same channel. If he's happy with my services, he knows where to find me."

"Shall I use a variation of previous apology letters?" the Turbulent asked. "Perhaps the one you sent to the Luna Legendary Strutters, when you begged off of their fortnightly celebration?"

Sere grinned; using an apology for not accepting an invitation to a gymnastic meet-and-orgy might be just the sort of thing she'd be most known for. However... "No, do it the right way. Please clean up my language with a standard form, the one we used for that snafu at Lagrange 5 last year will work best, I think." Plant managers again, and the L-5 plant was enough bigger and more profitable that, when the OP computers took the letter apart, they'd be flattered by the comparison.

They'd put together everything but a last load of fresh meat for the freezer when Yoa's call came through. "I wanted to talk to you, for real, before you left," she told Sere.

"I can appreciate that," Sere responded. "Especially since I didn't come back for dinner. Did your equipment make it through launch?"

"It went out just about eight hours before you lifted. Everyone's getting their telemetry and calibration messages back, from what I understand it's clear across the board." Yoa wouldn't admit anything over an open channel. No matter how good Serendipity's encryption was, all it took was a "Customs" inspection the next time she came back into Martian space and anything they discussed would be in the hands of the curious.

What Yoa meant, Sere understood, was that she was getting her signals back from the modified research satellite, and so was the official PI and research team. Both teams would get their work in, and Yoa would get her data piggy-backed in on the government's work.

"Now, Sere, how are we going to balance the books? Especially since you turned down dinner?"

"Yoa, my rule's the same now as it always has been. Just be ready, and someday you'll be the one coming to my help." Not that Serendipity had anything she'd be entangled in, of course. She was clean as the driven slush. Well, except for that one package hiding in the bulkhead. Oh, and there were those accounts in the Venusian muni-bonds, and... Yeah. Yoa, and her other friends, did have occasion to keep eyes out for each other.

"Um, about that. Sere, when are you headed back here?"

"A year and a bit," Sere answered. Unless she had reason otherwise, but catching up with Mars on the backstretch was always a nightmare in lost days on the homestretch. "Why?"

"I wonder if you could take on a first mate? Matt's at a good age, and he's got the right kind of training, I think..."

"She said, patting herself on the back. Oh, lord, Yoa, was this all a job interview?"

"If you want to think of it that way, Serendipity Oh, don't let me stop you. My kid could use a couple years in something like a real job, it'll help point his nose toward the bigger world. I hope."

Serendipity Oh considered how many eons, at least it felt like it, since she'd been in charge of someone else's education. And well-being, and safety because for Christ's sake if she got Yoa's kid hurt...

Serendipity Oh reminded herself that she'd picked this gig, paid off her ship and set herself along the planetary fetch for many reasons, but one of the most important was that she wouldn't have to answer any calls she didn't want to. Serendipity considered these things, rolled them over in her mind. And then she said...

"Well, shit. Ok, Yoa, go ahead and tell the kid to be prepared. I'll be back in one year, more or less. He'd damned well better be ready when I get here."

"Thanks, Sere. We love you, too."

Serendipity smiled, made sure Yoa could see it clearly, and then punched the button on the call. "Let me guess what your opinion of this is," she asked the Flow.

"First mate protocols are well established means of insuring there are no conflicts within the chain of command, Serendipity."

In other words, the Turbulent was telling her, unlike some people he might name, he'd actually done enough research to know how to handle this. And there were well-established means of making sure the kid didn't get the ship, himself, or Sere deep into a world of hurt.

Oh, and pay attention, there's only been something like ten thousand years of recorded human history covering how to work together in tight quarters, Serendipity Oh.

She sighed, stretched, flipped the Flow the bird. "Whatever am I going to do when there's two of you reminding me of the holes in my reasoning?"

"God only knows," the Turbulent Flow answered. "Did I get that right?"

She chuckled on the way to her bunk. "You did good, you did good." Getting the humor, and the timing, they were hard, but when it came together and the ship got the perfect line in, it was all worth it. "Wake me when we clear the local traffic sector."

"Absolutely, captain. Sleep well."