By Amanda
Checkpoint number two. Mindy was sitting next to me on the bridge, busy sending the logs through the comm link while I was explaining the presence of an undocumented child aboard my vessel to a doc officer who’d decided a bio scan was in order.
“…I told you, she was a stowaway.”
“Why didn’t you report her at the previous checkpoint?” He asked me for the third time.
“Because I didn’t find her until after I was through.”
“That is inaccurate Captain, we found the child prior to entering the first checkpoint,” Mindy corrected. I tapped the mute key on the comm.
“I know this Mindy. I am ordering you not to answer any questions about the girl until further notice. Nothing Mindy, except her name.” The Betty nodded her understanding and I unmuted the comm.
“We’ll be taking her in to custody.” The doc officer finally announced.
My heart froze. That was the last thing I’d wanted to hear. Technically he was allowed to take her, but because she was on my ship, etiquette dictated that I could decide what to do with her between the moment of finding her and when I reached my final destination. What made me most nervous was I hadn’t made any entry in the logs about her. It was my hope that he would not take the time to go through my logs as carefully as he’d gone through everything else.
“Please, Officer Miles, come aboard and let’s discuss this.”
“Federation law is very specific,” he shot back at me. There was a pause, a long pause. “Prepare to be boarded,” he finally said.
I was not normally relieved when dock officers boarded my ship, but in this case, I felt it gave me some hope of keeping the little girl. Either way though, I could see that I would be in this docking bay for quite some time to come.
Twenty minutes passed before the doc officer appeared at the airlock portal. I tapped the soft key on the console and the door released with a loud hiss. The officer stepped onto the ship. “Permission to board, Captain?” It was not a request. Federation law provided that I had no choice but to let him on.
“Of course,” I answered with a polite smile.
“Doc officer James Miles.” He offered his hand and I shook it.
“Captain Melchovic.”
“Well captain, you asked me here so I assume you’re going to plead for me to leave the girl in your care?” I nodded my head. “Federation Law says she’s a prisoner, and due to her age, she’ll be returned to her family.”
“If you’d talk to her, you’d see that she doesn’t want to go back.”
“Look, I know the rule of thumb so to speak, on stowaways. Most captains either put them out an airlock or work them as slave labor until they get where they’re going. I don’t want either happening to a kid.” The officer said in a less firm tone.
“Neither would I. I’m going to take her to Europa and we’ll get her back to her mother from there.” I tried to assure him.
There was a long pause as he seemed to contemplate his options. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let the girl decide what she wants, but either way we have to contact her family to let them know she’s all right.”
“Thank you,” I gasped. Relieved that he wasn’t being a hard-ass about the situation.
“Get her and meet me back here. We need to go into the dock and sign some paper work.”
I hurried up to Star’s room, then ushered her back down to the airlock, a fifteen-minute trek even with me rushing the girl. When we finally got back down to the airlock, we found Officer Miles sitting down, smoking a cigarette. I didn’t mind very much that he was, I simply found it rude that he didn’t bother to ask.
The officer dropped his cigarette on the floor and crushed it with his heavy boot. He then smiled at Star and took her hand, leading her to the airlock. I tried to follow but he stopped me. He then closed the door and began talking to Star. I knew what he was asking her. Had I hurt her, had I raped her, had I forced her to work and so on. I wondered to myself about the rape. We had not slept together since our picnic, and Star had grown a bit distant. I wondered if perhaps I’d gone too far too fast.
After what seemed like an eternity, they both entered the ship again. Officer Miles did not seem happy but Star was smiling.
“Well, I don’t approve of the relationship the two of you have, but since you’re not breaking any laws there’s really nothing much for me to say. Thus we’re going to go put in a call to her mother.”
We walked through the airlock and down a long hall before coming to an office. The dock officer gestured to a pair of chairs in front of the desk before taking his own seat. He tapped the pad in front of the computer console then opened the top drawer of his desk and withdrew a PIC scanner. He leaned across the desk and scanned first my PIC, then Star’s. A moment later he was placing an ultrawave call to Mars.
I wondered what time it would be back on Star’s home planet. It didn’t matter though because her mother answered.
“Hello I am Federation Dock Officer James Miles. We have your daughter here with us. Apparently she stowed away aboard a ship and is now about three quarters of the way from Mars to Europa.”
“They didn’t put the little bitch out an airlock?” I heard a gruff, sleepy voice come back across the connection.
“Ma’am we need to know when you’d like to have her shipped back?”
‘Shipped back!’ I thought to myself. He had said he would let me keep her until Europa if she wanted—if she wanted. I wondered if she had told him she didn’t want to stay with me.
“I don’t want to go back!” Star shouted, sending a wave of relief through me.
“And I don’t want her,” came the woman’s reply, having heard her daughter. “Let her slave away on a ship, maybe then she’ll appreciate what I did for her.”
The dock officer looked upset. He was silent for several moments. “Ma’am I cannot take custody of her without your authorization. I am sending a document through to you now, please review it then put your print on it.” He finally said. He tapped the soft keys on the pad and several silent, agonizing moments passed before the computer chimed, signaling an incoming file.
“There, she’s your problem now.” The woman abruptly closed the connection.
“Well, what a lovely lady,” the officer scoffed. “She has deferred temporary custody to the Federal Transit Authority, and since I am the officer in charge, I am willing to turn over that custody to you. Star seems happy on your ship and has told me that she wants to stay with you. But this is only temporary custody. You have ninety standard days to file for full custody or she will be sent back to her mother.” The officer pulled a tablet from his desk, tapped a few lit softkeys and presented it to me. I read over the document it was displaying before pressing my thumb against the interface pad.
“She’s all legal now?” I asked.
“You have to enroll her in school, provide for her, basically for the next ninety days she’s the same as your own kid. I’m leaving the pad with you, the print has been recorded. It will provide the information you need to file for permanent custody. I don’t suspect you’ll have any trouble getting it.” He looked at Star, “I’m sorry kid, you really got a bad deal when it came to moms.”
“I have Kirstin now, I don’t care about her anymore,” Star said with a smile.
We walked slowly back to the ship and closed the airlock. I felt good, very good. Star really did want to stay, and now, at least for a little while, I didn’t have to do anything shady or illegal to keep her.
We made our way up to the bridge and called over the comm for clearance from Officer Miles to get under way. He cleared us immediately and within a half hour we were heading in to open space.
I walked Star down to the galley and called over the intercom for Mindy to join us. I also asked our engineer, but I knew he wouldn’t come.
“Captain, I will prepare the evening meal,” Mindy said as she stepped in to the galley.
“Grilled cheese and tomato soup,” I told her. “So, Star—you’re really sure you want to stay with me then?”
“Uh huh,” she mumbled.
“You know you’ll have to go to school now, right?” She nodded her head. We’ll get you enrolled tomorrow morning. “You know I only have you like this for a little while. We’ll have to actually get a federal court order for me to keep you forever.”
“I know. I heard. I was sitting right there, remember?” She sounded annoyed, and rightly so. I was treating her like she wasn’t the bright little girl she was.
“Sorry.”
We sat quietly waiting for Mindy to finish cooking. When she finally served the meal Star tore into the food like she hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Star,” I said, trying to get her attention. “You know, we haven’t been spending much time together since our picnic. Did what we did, well did it bother you?” I asked.
“No,” she crammed the sandwich in to her mouth.
“You’re sure?” I said. She nodded her head.
“I was embarrassed. You saw me naked,” she said around her food.
“Oh.” I tried to sound matter of fact. “Well, it’s okay, you know. I mean, you saw me naked too. Besides, you shouldn’t be ashamed of your body.”
“I know, I’m just shy,” she said, eyes on her plate.
Jupiter is huge. You really can’t appreciate how big it is until you see it looming before you while you’re still four days out. It’s massive, taking up three quarters of the forward view port. By the time we were within standard radio range of Europa, it would be all you could see out the port. I reached over and tapped the operations softkey, then slid the powerlevel indicator for the forward magnetic deflector all the way to full. The deflectors normally ran about one third power, enough to deflect normal cosmic radiation around the ship, but Jupiter radiated at a much higher level. By the time we reached Europa we would be operating the shield at one hundred twenty percent of maximum.
I set up the automatic monitor to keep raising the shield level as rads increased, overriding it and allowing it to exceed the design limit. The shields would hold like this indefinitely, as long as there was fuel to turn the engine, but in all truth, I really needed to upgrade my mag deflectors. It was on the to-do list and now with the kid on board it seemed to be gaining in priority. Maybe I would accept the twenty four to thirty six hour delay and do the upgrade while I was in port.
Time to think about it later, I had four days before I’d arrive at the Europa docks. It would be another two waiting to get loaded and if I was lucky I might be able to get the shield updated during that time.
One day out, I switched from ultra wave to standard radio and began a search on the local network for someone that could upgrade my shields. It took me an hour to find someone that could do it while I was docked.
From the bridge I went to Star’s room and asked her to come along with me while I inspected the cargo. I thought it would be nice to spend some time with the girl but I also wanted her to help clean up the mess she had made in the living quarters before I found her.
The cargo hold was fifteen hundred feet deep, nearly one half mile long and another twelve hundred feet wide. It would take more than just a moment to get down to the living quarters which took up less than a standard city block. My ship was not very big however, not until one attempted to maneuver in Europa station. My ship was a Vigo class cruiser, the largest type allowed in the docks. Anything larger had to orbit above Europa and ferry passengers and smaller goods via shuttle.
Large cargo could be docked the old fashioned way. Not a major problem really, until it came to refueling the nuclear engines, or hydrogen cells. While in the docks, the docking apparatus included fuel lines. Refueling was automatic. For the really big stuff, ships as large as thirteen miles by eight miles wide by three deep, the fuel had to be ferried out and it was costly. The nuclear fuel tanks on the big ships were often larger than my whole ship. A break for us smaller haulers, since it made cargo deliveries to one of the Terran System’s oldest ports far too expensive for the large vessles. About the only Jupiter class or larger ships that ever went to Europa were passenger liners.
There was always talk of expanding the upper levels of the Europa ports to accommodate the largest vessles but as yet, no docs had been printed. Honestly it was not in the large hauler’s interest to work within the Terran system. Short runs to Mercury, Mars, Earth or Neptune and Uranus simply did not yield high enough profit to be worth taking. The large haulers were designed for intersystem travel and that was what they were best at. Sixty person crews, luxury accommodations, bettys for each person. It all cost the same amount whether the ship took the fifteen day jump to Century Station, or the fifteen day trip to Uranus. Even the fuel cost was similar since the slipstream did not require the engines to burn once it was entered.
“Quite a mess you made here, sweetie,” I said as we stepped into the room she had spent the earliest part of the trip in. “Well, let’s get to work. I lose pay if these things aren’t perfect when I deliver them.” That wasn’t exactly true. There was no damage to the unit, it was just wrappers and such. It would fall under normal cleaning.
“I’m sorry,” Star said, looking ashamed.
“It’s okay, angel. We’ll just clean it up and no one will ever know.”
We got to work. There wasn’t much to do. We were finished within twenty minutes and headed back up to the bridge. “How do you like classes?” I asked her while we rode the lift. I was lucky, most smaller ships did not have lift systems that could move throughout most of the ship. Mine did. It had been a passenger vessel so such minor conveniences could be expected.
*****
Europa—originally it was established as a research station in the later part of the twenty first century. They bored into the ice, eight miles to the ocean below. The world, at the time just Earth, hoped to find smart little fish swimming around, communicating and using some kind of technology. No such luck. There were however thermal vents at the bottom of the sea around which whole ecosystems had developed. Europa had life, under intense pressure and heat.
Europa Station, as the ports and main hub were most often referred to, had many things. Two shopping malls, hundreds of bars and Betty houses, repair shops, drugs, and a zoo. The zoo featured animals from Earth mostly, but there was a section dedicated to those creatures found under the ice of the little Jovian moon we now orbited. There was also a museum with thousands of exhibits. Star and I were headed this direction. We would muse as the little crab-like animals, jelly fish and squid-like creatures from Europa, and then I would take her to see the extra-terrestrial fossils—skeletal remains found under the Martian surface. They were strange animals. Mostly six legged for those rare ones that moved on land, or odd little snake-like fish creatures I suppose most like eels. It seemed evolution had not had much time to get the fish out of the sea.
We had the time to see all of it. Our cargo had shipped out early on another transport, and we would have to wait an extra two days, four total, in port for another load to be ferried to the station from the planet below. Pissed does not cover the emotion I felt when Europa Ice and Water informed me that my pre-arranged load was gone. I felt a little better when they agreed to pay a six hundred cred per day penalty for having me sit.
The better part of the day was spent with Star and I starring wide eyed at all the strange creatures. Animals from Earth that existed nowhere else in the solar system except this zoo. Animals from Europa crawling around the high pressure tanks. We saw mummies from ancient Earth and fossils from Mars. We even spent an hour taking a virtual tour of the city of Los Angeles as it was in the mid-twenty-first century before it was inundated by the sea during an tectonic shift, and Tokyo, the Japanese city wiped out by an early twenty second century tidal wave. Hundreds of thousands of artifacts adorned a cavernous one square-mile room. There simply wasn’t enough time in a single day to see everything the Zoo and Museum had to offer.
We rode a transport from the zoo back to the ship. Once aboard I walked with Star to her room. There at the door I paused. I didn’t want the day to end, even though I was exhausted from all the walking. I knelt down and looked her in the eyes. “Did you have fun?” I asked. She nodded furiously. With a smile I leaned in and kissed her. She kissed back, her lips parted and her little tongue awaiting mine.
“Can we do it again?” she asked me.
“Of course angel.” I stood and walked with her in to her quarters. The lights automatically came on when the door opened and the room was brightly illuminated. “Computer, lights to half,” I said. The computer chimed, indicated that it had understood the command. The lights dimmed. “Think you won’t be so shy now?” I asked. Star smiled up at me.
We made our way to a sofa that stood in the middle of the front room of her quarters. She had left the video system on. I tapped the softkey on the viewer’s interface pad and it shut off.
I sat down on the sofa and pulled her backward into my lap, wrapping my arms around her waist. “I sure have wanted to hold you like this for a long time now,” I told her.
“I like it,” she told me.
I turned her around on my lap and we began kissing—softly—gently. I loved the feel of her soft little lips against my own. I unzipped her jumpsuit—the only item of clothing she owned—and slid it from her shoulders. I made a mental note that we would go shopping first thing in the morning for her.
Star seemed less shy, less embarrassed. I don’t know if it was that I’d already seen her, that she felt more comfortable with me, or if the lower light made her feel better, but she did not make me strip before she could be coaxed out of her clothing.
Once I had her undressed I went to remove my own clothes but she pushed my hands away and began fumbling with my zippers. I took a little longer when all I wanted to do was hold her naked body against my own, but it was worth it to feel her warmth pressed against my skin.
I caressed her entire body. I gently pinched her nipples, kissed them, lapped at them. I rubbed my hands over her back, her bottom and hips. I loved the way this little girl felt. She was softer than any lover I’d ever had. She felt so lovely, so delicate I could hardly contain myself.
Finally I eased my hand between her legs and began to massage her clit. She closed her eyes and let her head fall against my shoulder as I rubbed my fingers over her clit and slid them inside of her wanting sex. She was wet. I wanted to pulled my fingers from her vulva and lap her honey from them, but I continued to rub her, continued to stimulate her, to make her moan and huff.
Little Star gripped my arm tightly and pulled herself against me. She moaned, whined and squealed as an orgasm ripped through her little body.
When it was over Star fell back against the arms of the sofa and dozed. She was too tired to go on, the day had been too much for her. I ached to feel her touch but I didn’t have the hart to wake her.
I slid my hand into my panties as I looked down at her sleeping face. I ran my fingers over my clit and slipped them into myself. I was soaked, my fingers were instantly wet as were my underwear.
I rubbed myself, wanting to draw it out as I looked down on my beautiful little lover but I was already on the verge of climax. My orgasm washed over me like a tidal wave, sending waves of pleasure throughout my body. I trembled and convulsed with each wave.
Finally spent, I slipped in behind my darling Star and draped my arm over her waist. “I love you, little angel,” I whispered as I drifted into sleep.
The End
An enjoyable story, with a “happy ending” [sorry, couldn’t resist that] and my first sci-fi leslita story! Can I have another one, please?
Even without the sex part a lovely sci-fi story, I love stories based on deep space travel and set on board a star ship, and I love stories that have a happy ending. Be nice to have a sequel, to find out what happens next as Star grows up and she becomes part of the crew.