Scents of Sense

All You Can Eat was a small, yet round the clock active supply station at a point convenient in space to many. Its projected location in the Zeta void had been carefully selected long before any of its construction had been undertaken. It was not at the intersection of any major inter spacial routes, but it was conveniently close enough to many such intersections in a large portion of empty space where there were no sources of supply for several days travel even for the fastest of military vessels. Some considered it amusing and some considered it ironic that it was just because such a vast volume of space was totally empty and therefore easy and safe to navigate that it had so many frequently used routes across it. It was so empty that even pirates considered it to be totally useless. None had recognised the potential of establishing a supply station there. Sick of the stifling bureaucracy that had just about made new business ventures doomed to failure before they even started, and even sicker of the lack of opportunity to advance in the company she worked for Juno Kim Shield Ledger had been seeking a new home from where she could start a business of her own. Her husband Darri Kane Shield Ledger had watched her pacing up and down in their small apartment one day. She was angry and frustrated, and he knew that being reasonable with her wouldn’t calm her down. Only something that gave her hope would do that, so in desperation he’d said, “If you don’t like the idea of living on any of the hundreds of planets and terraformed asteroids you’ve looked into, and I know you thought little better of the closed environments you investigated, why don’t you go all the way and look into the possibilities of space stations?” She’d calmed and restarted her investigations on the Datablock. Several hours later after researching a couple of thousand space stations she’d discovered that they were all either corporate holdings where there were no business opportunities, or they were military establishments with no civilian residents other than those who worked for the military in administrative capacities.

Darri had only partially jokingly said, “If you wish to build your own you’ll need to find share holders to assist you to finance it won’t you?” To his surprise she’d taken him seriously and searched for folk seeking medium to large scale private investment opportunities. She’d contacted all thirty-odd and eleven of them had expressed serious interest. In a discussion concerning where to place a supply station for best business opportunity and least interference from outside territorial powers one of her new partners had said that her brother was an asteroid miner working with a couple of dozen others on their own ship. She explained that they always complained when the had to cross the Zeta void because depending upon their exact route it could take anything up to three weeks of mind numbing boredom. They were all thinking about the idea and during a conference call were accessing the Data block when Daimal had told them that she’d discovered the previous evening that none had ever laid claim to sovereignty over the void, because there was nothing there to lay claim to.

Demish, who had some grounding in inter galactic law had stated, “All we would have to do is to lay and connect the first couple of pieces of the station and post our claim to sovereignty over the entire void and then we would be the ones making the laws there. That being the case we shall need a police force of some kind. That would make me nervous because they’d have a lot of authority and that would be open to abuse. The police here sell the law to the highest bidder. I, well all of us, wish to live somewhere better than where we currently live. The local authorities here are no better than the police and the politicians who run the planet. It’s a very old question I know, but who watches the watchers and how do we ensure they don’t become corrupt?” There was a long silence as all recognised the truth of Demish’s words. Demish was asked if she had any solutions. “If we put the credits up we should have a major say in how things work. We could be the permanent members on a management committee that coopts others as required. Darri is a security officer, he could be the chief of police and a permanent member of the management committee. I suggest we all think about this before we meet again.”

Later as Juno looked at him Darri realised that his frequent past complaints about the inefficiencies and corruption in the security company that employed him had finally caught up with him. Juno had told him, “It’s work you understand and enjoy, Love, and I know you’ve any number of colleagues who feel the same way that you do. Just employ them and any other Margites who fit the bill. We Margites are possibly the biggest and strongest species in the known universe, so eminently suitable for the work. Folk don’t like police officers, so call yourselves peacekeepers or something else rather than police. If we get rid of any trouble makers as soon as we realise what they are that should make the work easier, after all it’s a success if you don’t have to do anything isn’t it?” There were naturally enough complications, not just with Darri’s security staff, many of which consultation with the military considerably eased. However, despite complications and numerous set backs the Zeta void supply station as it was initially known as was open for business within eighteen months, though it took nearly eight years to complete.

Once the investors had posted their claim to sovereignty over the void the squeals of anguish from the corporations echoed around the entire galaxy. What had really hurt them had been their lack of foresight. They’d overlooked what they now realised would in all probability amount to be a huge business opportunity. An opportunity to squeeze even more credits from all who plied space. When news of the agreements the station’s investors had come to with the military became public knowledge their envy due to their greed tasted like bile in their mouths. For decades the military had been dealing with them less and less by the year and they had put it down to the military having made a decision to do more for itself. That they had suddenly made major deals with a newcomer in space trade and ignore them felt like a major wound. The pirates saw the new station as a major opportunity, but they had overlooked two things. First the presence of the military vessels around the station whose crews were being fed by the station cooks, and second the void was under the station’s jurisdiction and station law already stated clearly the penalty for piracy was obliteration. The military were more than happy to oblige, and it had rapidly become widely known that piracy was not a good occupation in the Zeta void.

Eventually the Zeta void station became known to all who plied the heavens for whatever reasons simply as the Ayce station, and it was pronounced ace. As Juno had discovered most of such stations were either corporately owned, in which case the administrative language used on the station was whatever the owning corporation used at their headquarters which could theoretically be anywhere in the known universe, or military establishments, where the administrative language used was USL in all cases. Whatever their native tongue, most members of the military spoke USL even amongst themselves for platoons deliberately comprised mixed species to take advantage of the specific physiologies and skill sets of the different species. Even in logistics and other administration offices mixed species personnel working together was the norm and though not mandated it was encouraged. Centuries ago, USL, Universal Standard Language, had been an artificially constructed language created to make inter galactic trade and diplomatic communication easier. The military had rapidly adopted it as the naval standard because it made integration of the many species it embraced so much easier. That had been so successful that it had not taken long before it was universally used throughout the entire military.

USL had originally been based upon the major languages spoken by space farers at the time. In theory USL had been proportionately based upon the number of beings who spoke each of those languages. The Percian language was spoken, by law, by all across the entire Percian empire, hence it was spoken by more folk than any other single language. In practice USL grammar was simplified Percian. Percian had recognised six different genders, and the complex system of declining its gendered nouns had been done away with in USL. The USL vocabulary had been taken proportionately from amongst the dozen or so other languages in widest use. Since then the vast Percian empire had disappeared due to it falling apart under the weight its own overwhelming bureaucracy. Eventually the empire had fractured into the dozens of smaller, independent, sovereign territories that had been conquered by the Percians in some cases millennia before. To assert their independence they had all chosen to revert to their original languages and the Percian language had all but gone the way of the empire too. As a result of widespread technology sharing more species achieved FTL travel and USL had picked up loan words from hundreds of languages. Advances in technology had created thousands of new words and naturally enough the grammar had evolved too, mostly that had involved the elimination of irregular verbs and the simplification of verb conjugation. USL as currently spoken was very different from how it had been originally spoken, and bit by bit over time it was still evolving to keep pace with the needs of those it served.

Ayce was independently owned having been financed and initially built by just eleven private investors, though quite soon afterwards they’d been joined by four others, and as such it had been declared to be a sovereign territory encompassing the entire Zeta void. The administrative language used on the station had been USL right from its conception as a mere idea. The station was a tremendously busy place, for not only was it situated conveniently for many military routes its sophisticated, powerful, state of the art communication facilities were such that nowhere in the inhabited universe was beyond its reach, whereas most civilian ships could only reach to the few galaxies that surrounded their whereabouts at the time. The military found it a convenient place to drop matériel off for collection by other supply convoys which made it an important distribution centre for military logistics. Too, it had a moderate detachment of military personnel based there acting as quartermasters and the marines aboard the vessels docking there served as peacekeepers for the immediate and vast neighbourhood of space that was universally considered to be under the sovereignty of the station, mostly because there was nothing else other than a passing comet from time to time that existed within that space, so none else had ever been bothered to post notification of a claim to it.

That the station had a working agreement with the military that they could use significant portions of the space for training exercises was a mutual convenience. That the station used USL as its native language made it the military’s most convenient non military way stations to use. The military did not use corporate stations and there were few private stations, all were a long way from Ayce and all used languages that few others spoke. Too, it had long been the case that all military recruits had to be fluent in USL within four hundred days of joining. The military ran courses at boot camp, as well as any number of less formal mechanisms to enable the few recruits who did not speak USL when they enlisted to learn the language rapidly. The language test at the end of boot camp was pretty basic, but it did ensure that all in the military could communicate verbally in USL even if their ability with the written language was somewhat rudimentary. Failure of the test meant a recruit automatically started the entire boot camp process all over again. Three failures meant being ejected from the military, however, no enlisted had ever failed more than once, and those failures had been few and far between. Officers had to undergo a more rigorous language familiarisation at all training academies and were expected to be fluent in at least five languages in common usage as well as USL, and be able to manage in at least ten more, though many were similar.

The station management, essentially Juno Kim Shield Ledger the station manager who was its chief accountant and a major shareholder, provided the military with the accommodations they required at cost in return for whatever protection the station and its environs required. It was considered to be yet another mutually rewarding arrangement, and though there were few pirates and other criminals operating in the area those that did rear their heads were considered to provide the marines with excellent opportunities to keep their skills honed. That there were few such opportunities was not so much because the presence of the military base deterred them, but because the area was subject to the sovereign laws of the station, and right from the moment of its conception, long before its first prefabricated sections had been assembled, those who had planned not just the building of the station and what its projected activities would need in the way of facilities but how it would operate and manage itself and its economy too had always taken a hard line regarding such criminality.

It had always been known that the station management had not been prepared to force its residents and customers to pay for the prosecution and subsequent incarceration of pirates and their like via any kind of taxation be it howsoever indirect, so the law was simple, in Ayce space obliteration was the penalty for acts of piracy and similar crimes to defraud and deprive station residents and clientele of their rightful property. The law in most other parts of the universe preferred to put criminals in front of a court, which was costly, and often such criminals evaded justice due to clever legal teams, but there was no evading even a not so near miss from a target seeking sub atomic disintegrator beam, or a quantal fragmentation device. That made the marines who crewed the naval ships of the station’s military base very happy, for it was much safer for them to obliterate a pirate ship from a considerable distance than to have to approach, lock onto the buccaneer vessel and then to conduct a board and storm exercise to take pirates into custody, all whilst being shot at.

Besides, they all enjoyed seeing what they considered to be proper justice at work, for all but the most recently enlisted had seen far too many bodies of dead parents slumped over their dead children that they’d died trying to shield. The general opinion of the marines was that summary obliteration was too good for pirates and their like. Military personnel of all species and all ranks often quoted an expression that was suspected to be older than FTL, ‘It is not enough for justice to be done. It must be seen to be done,’ which was why all such engagements were fully recorded and released to the media. The pirates who’d considered taking hostages to have been a good way to avoid their vessels being disintegrated by the first naval ship on the scene had learnt the hard way that they had not thought the matter through properly, for after being boarded and subdued those still alive, regardless of their injuries, had been interviewed by the Ayce military base commander, Commodore Sally Fleet Naan Battle.

Sally Fleet a highly decorated naval officer who’d originally worked her way up through the ranks as a marine, was entirely in agreement with the Ayce legislation concerning the criminals of space. She’d told the assembled pirates, “Let me be quite clear about your future, you are going to die, all of you. All you have left to do is decide the manner of your deaths. If you tell me what I wish to know I shall grant you a quick and painless death. If you make things difficult you will be summarily executed by whatever means is most convenient to my marines, be that knife, sidearm or the vacuum of space. If you refuse to talk I intend to allow the mothers of the youngsters you brutalised and tortured for months deal with you. They have promised me that they will not kill you till I tell them that I have all the information I require to wipe out all your colleagues and their bases. It’s entirely up to you, and lest you be concerned regarding the legality of my actions, we are currently in Ayce space and under their legislation. Here you are already dead.

“In the next room is His Honour Dire n Dread Good Law the chief Justice of the Peace for this territory and he has assured me that he will ensure all done complies with Ayce law. Too, the other side of that observation panel are a couple of dozen eager mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers of the young you hurt. Amongst them are medics, engineers, cooks and a few retired military personnel, and some who just wish to be creative. I believe some are sharpening the devices that they intend to dismember you with, though some have said they are going to see how they perform with dull cutting edges. The prisoners were all interviewed privately away from their colleagues. Those who started talking immediately were given the quick and painless deaths they had been promised. Others were left to the marines. However, most eventually died painfully, very slowly, at the hands of the children’s female relatives. The pirate bases were obliterated to give a long period of relative peace, although of course such peace is never permanent. The hostage taking stopped after the second video detailing all had been released to the media.

When interviewed for comment, Juno Kim Shield Ledger had said, “Ayce will not tolerate such inimical activity in its sovereign territory and its philosophical guideline, our legal system if you like, is that any such criminals should be given no opportunity to repeat their offences. Ever. Though I had no children hurt by the criminals, as a mother I truly appreciate the feelings of those mothers who extracted the necessary information concerning the whereabouts of the pirate bases. Commodore Naan Battle too is a mother and as you are aware she has already publicly expressed her gratitude to the women who obtained the required information. Those of us who’ve seen the dead younglings, cubs and children with their dead parents on top of them as a result of trying to shield them from the activities of the scum of space are resolved to do what we can to avoid having to see such again. We know that we can’t prevent that over all space, but we can and we will prevent it in the portion of space that we control.

“We have pirate vessel engine signatures on record passed to us by authorities from many far flung parts of the universe. If any of those vessels enter our space we shall obliterate them with no warning. Likewise we have numerous identification records of various types on record for tens of thousands of individual criminals who will be executed on sight or AI recognition within our sovereign territory. We make no apologies for protecting our citizens and our customers in the part of space where by inter galactic recognition we are the law and as such can be and should be held morally responsible for the safety of all.” When asked by a ‘bleeding heart’ reporter notorious for criticising Ayce’s hard line on piracy and presenting some pirates in a better light than they deserved if she were prepared to execute captured pirates who’d surrendered herself she’d replied, “Certainly. I’ll start right now with you as one of their paid advocates in Ayce sovereign territory if you like, though I’d prefer that you died at the hands of some our womenfolk who’ve had children suffer at the hands of the scum you are trying to make out to be respectable citizens. I suggest you ship out immediately before I change my mind. Don’t return, for our system now recognises you as in the pockets of criminals and as such a criminal yourself. Sergeant, have her escorted to her ship, please.”

Over the last decade or so the Ayce station’s stance regards the creation of a prosperous and peaceful station environment had been spreading to other regions of space, for Juno had given a series of lectures over the Datablock concerning the successful running of a space station from a business point of view, and the wealth generated by the Ayce station was such that it could not be ignored. In a couple of those lectures Juno had gone on the offensive against space criminals by repeatedly saying that piracy was bad for business because it ate into profits. Most inter galactic corporations were pretty callous concerning the deaths of ordinary folk, but they were equally hard nosed when it came to something eating into their profits. That was forcing pirates to consider carefully where they chose to operate. In turn the increase in piracy in areas with less punitive legal codes was forcing the powers that be in those areas to reconsider their stance on how they dealt with piracy, and slowly but surely their attitudes were hardening.

The scuttlebutt was that a number of corporations were spinning off their stations to independent companies in order to be able to attempt to negotiate some sort of arrangements with the military similar to the ones Ayce had with them. In reality those supposedly independent companies were wholly owned, indirectly controlled subsidiaries of their parent corporations, so in effect nothing had changed. As it stood the military simply would not deal with any of the corporations. The military had long memories and their relationships with all of the large galactic corporations could be described as tepid indifference at best and at worst they were outright hostile towards them regarding them as the poorly disguised respectable face of super criminals. It was suspected by many senior military figures that many so called pirates were actually an enforcement arm of some of the corporations, for it had long been known that after a pirate raid on numerous settlements, the empty planet, asteroid or space station had inevitably been taken over by one or other of the corporations.

Centuries ago a number of corporations that had manufactured weapons, everything from small arms and their projectiles or charges to dreadnoughts, had deliberately squeezed the military for more credits at a time when there were significant numbers of military engagements ongoing in numerous parts of the universe and in order to meet their obligations the military had to have their armaments requirements met. At the time the military had paid the credits demanded, but it had all come back to bite the corporations in the arse when peace had been established, for the military had created their own armaments industry by building arms factories and shipyards on newly discovered worlds and asteroids that became military bases subject to very tight security and eventually they had ceased to deal with corporate weapons suppliers. As a result, those aspects of the corporations’ businesses had simply ceased to exist costing them trillions of credits and a huge loss of credibility. They were also left with huge manufacturing facilities for goods that none were buying which cost them even more. The few who’d tried to sell into the black market, rogue planets, pirates and the like had had their production facilities levelled to the ground by means that were never established. The military maintained they knew nothing about such events. They weren’t believed, but they were respected for what most considered to be actions that made the universe a much safer place.

Too, the military had become very choosy about whom they traded and had dealings with. Ironically Ayce had become the model that the corporations aspired to emulate, for the Ayce administrators freely admitted without disclosing any actual numbers that they made a small fortune from their business dealings with the military, but it was considered by those in the know unlikely that the corporations would succeed because their driving force was profits for their shareholders whereas that of Ayce was having a good life in a pleasant environment shared with pleasant neighbours without the restricting bureaucracies that controlled the lives of others; bureaucracies that many were coming to realise had been created by the corporations to control folk in order to maximise corporate profits. Few in the corporate world were aware that Ayce’s arrangement with the military to provide docking and accommodations for the base personnel at cost had been the final clause in the negotiations that had enabled the station to be constructed. The same clause had also made direct attack of the fledgeling station by pirates impossible right from the beginning.

However, as Juno had said at a meeting of station senior managers, “Even were the corporations to be aware of that it would make no difference to their actions because their cost benefit analyses of acting like us would not shew as positive enough in the time scales that their shareholders insist upon receiving their dividends in. Which is why we are unaffected by the current economic downturn whereas it’s playing havoc with their share holders’ dividends. They’ll recover of course, but only to go repeatedly through the boom and bust cycles that are an inherent part of the short term profits model that all their businesses are based upon. It is the long term nature of our business model that makes us so robust in the face of fluctuations in inter galactic trade. That we are willing and able to assist our suppliers and customers to ride over those fluctuations puts us in a very strong position when we require some assistance from them, for they are willing to provide it, whereas none will give a cent more than they have to under any conditions to any of the corporations. Our dealings with the military provide a perfect example of that symbiotic relationship.”

What stuck in the throats of the corporations was that none of them had ever had any business dealings with Ayce who’d refused all their approaches in very terse, if not to say coarse, terms. Even the materials from which the station had been constructed and the construction workers had been negotiated for with small independent companies. That Ayce refused to even consider any negotiations with the corporations they considered an affront to their dignity. Their threats to boycott any who worked for or dealt with Ayce were laught at because as none of the threatened was reluctant to make clear to any who asked, under no circumstances were they willing to have dealings with the corporations either. The corporations had calculated that the profit margins Ayce enjoyed were several times what they’d ever managed to achieve. Worse, to them at least, the return on capital that Ayce had consistently seemed to enjoy had made their best activities seem crude by comparison.

They were all desperate to obtain a slice of what they considered to be the cake of huge profits available from Ayce. What really upset their economic analysts was the paucity of information available to them upon which base an attempted buy out of the station, for being a sovereign territory Ayce was under no obligation to submit its books to any higher power and it didn’t, for there was no such higher power. The corporations were unaware that such a buy out was impossible, for there were no outside share holders. All fifteen of the share holders lived on the station and had no intention of living anywhere else. Too, the details of the station’s financial structure were such that a capital reserve was permanently available to buy out all the share holders should they wish to sell, and they were obliged to sell to the remaining share holders, they could not sell to anyone else. The dearth of economic data available was in Juno’s words, “No worse a situation than that of the corporations who have to submit their books and so do, but there isn’t anything in them that tells anyone what they are doing, and even were there to be so they own the inspectors of taxes in fee simple so it would all be ignored.”

However, in spite of the station providing the military with accommodations and services at cost, the military personnel of the base provided a substantial financial input into the station’s economy during their down time, for their thinking was, ‘Why spend credits going elsewhere when such a good time can be had locally?’ The Lonely Spacer, which was the largest bar on the station where snacks and drink for all known species were available, was a peculiarly organised institution owned and indirectly run by the station itself. Most of the folk who worked there were not employees, they were self employed and more like franchise holders than anything else. Many were individual bar keepers who imported specialised beverages from their home worlds and had them synthesised by tiny one product machines purchased from the station’s engineers. Some, often family members, worked as small organisations, especially those who cooked ethnic foods usually from their home worlds. Others imported various plant and animal derivatives with consciousness altering properties and sold the synthesised versions out of small booths with somewhere to lie down at the back. They paid for the space they used.

Others who provided personal comfort services, women, men and many others too, paid rent on the chambers they used in their professional capacities. Those who provided excitement from their gambling activities paid for the space they required. The games were as fair as any such anywhere are, and were constantly monitored by AI systems. The penalties for running crooked games, selling inferior or adulterated drink, food, or drugs and other unscrupulous activities which for the comfort providers included not having up to date medical certificates was simple; all assets were frozen and confiscated and the guilty were shipped out on the first available vessel, be it a commercial ore carrier or a passenger vessel. It was a good system, the franchise holders made a good living by providing high quality goods and services at affordable prices and as Juno had frequently said, “I have no intention of ever becoming the custodian of any one else’s morality and as long as their activities harm none it’s none of my business, and running the Lonely Spacer this way means I don’t get accused of running a whorehouse in a drug den or a speak easy, and I prefer that it all goes on under the watchful eyes of Darri, his security personnel and their AIs.” The profits from The Lonely Spacer had helped enormously in the early days when due to the station’s huge construction debts credits had been tight for the station administration.

What made Ayce known to all space farers as much more than an independent station with a significant military base where safety was assured, was the variety and quality of the food and beverages available there. Battle hardened Tilgary naval fleet crew putting in for supply had been known to weep at the taste of the krellweed noodles with minced jev meatballs and sharp, salty ocean sauce, that they swore were just like their clan ancestresses had made when they were cubs back on Tilgar dreaming of entering the local naval academy for their training as space warriors. Crusty, old, human, Scots, naval fleet engineers became positively friendly after a few glasses of the malt whisky produced by the food and drink synthesisers of Ayce. Certainly most impressive to beings of every species that plied the heavens, both civilian and military, was the coffee. Since humans had joined the inter galactic community nothing had spread faster than the essential nature of coffee to all. It was perhaps hard to see why, for it was an extract from partially burnt plant material, it had no narcotic effects upon any species, and in no way could it truly be said to be necessary to survival, yet it had become so. There were many truly dreadful beverages synthesised and sold as coffee all over inhabited space, but that produced on Ayce was a truly superior beverage that satisfied the physical and emotional well being of every race known in space.

There were many reasons why the food and drink on Ayce were so well thought of, the most significant to rank and file, civilian, space crew and enlisted military personnel alike was perhaps the reason behind its name, for all meals in the central refectory, run and operated by the station itself, cost a standard price of a credit and a half and all were literally All You Can Eat. The refectory provided much enjoyed, quality food and was so convenient that the military base had never bothered to have a mess hall on the station. The number of marines and other staff was known and as it changed the station administration was informed. Military personnel in uniform just turned up to eat and for those not known to the refectory staff who were dressed in civilian attire production of their military ID ensured that they were fed. The military paid the station for the meals on a monthly basis. Juno Kim Shield Ledger, the enormous reptilian accountant who’d been the chair of the station’s management committee since the idea of building a station had been conceived and had also been the station manageress since Ayce had been commissioned, had always said that for every crew of Naggery asteroid miners that arrived to eat the best part of fifty kilos of food apiece at each and every meal there was a crew of Flitter explorers and mapmakers who wouldn’t eat fifty kilos amongst them in a week.

Juno was easy to deal with and hence a popular figure, for all folk who had trading operations on the station made a decent living there without having to work too hard. All problems and complaints she took seriously and always had them resolved amicably even if neither party got all of what they wanted. As supply stations went it was a very peaceful place to be, for unlike on many corporate supply stations none of the traders had to expend inordinate amounts of credits on security which enabled them to keep their prices low and hence their profits high. Quite separate from the resident deployed military, who were always willing to pour cold water on any overly rowdy behaviour in bars or elsewhere, for which favour many of the bar keepers were more than happy to provide them with a round of free drinks from time to time, Juno had a security force of around a thousand of her own species, the Margites, at her disposal. Margites were all colossally built, warm blooded reptiles, with a minimum height of twelve feet tall. They were heavily scaled, very strong, equally fast, and knives and small arms of whatever sort just bounced off their scales.

They were a peaceable species who preferred having nothing to do except point lost visitors in the right direction and make sure that lost children were reunited with their parents. Yes they were very good at fighting if it came to it, but they preferred to patrol the station chatting with folk they had taken the trouble to get to know well and got along with. In the main their presence alone ensured that they didn’t have to be involved in any fighting. The security team members were well trained in peaceful conflict resolution by Juno herself. In the rare event of a disturbance in the local space patrolled by the Ayce military post marines on behalf of the station the Margites were always welcome to accompany the navy to deal with matters. The marine peacekeepers had good relationships with the Margites, many of them were friends who spent leisure time together and who drank together. The Margites were all welcomed by the range officers, and competitive shooting was a favourite way to determine who picked up the dinner bill that evening. Many a peacekeeper was invited by a Margite to spend the day with his or her family. In return whenever possible the peacekeepers invited the Margites along into space for a bit of fun, which was what they referred to obliterating pirates as. All of which was approved of by the military senior officers, for there was nowhere else where the military of all ranks got on as well with not just the civilian authorities but the populace who inhabited the station too. All in all it made for a unique and peaceful life for everyone most of the time and all had access to extra help when they could use it.

Not only were pirates operating in the area a very infrequent problem, they did not put in at the station for legitimate supply reasons either, probably because if their ship were known as a pirate vessel it would have been obliterated long before it got anywhere near the station. If any of the crew were known as criminals they would have been executed on arrival by the Margites on duty at the arrivals gate. A marine sergeant had once explained to a freshly rotated in colleague at the bar of the Mariner’s Arms, a medium sized, popular drinking establishment favoured by single NCOs because though the ladies and other comfort workers were somewhat more expensive than those at The Lonely Spacer where the lower ranks tended to drink they were even more delightful, “I don’t mind a good fire fight every now and again because it breaks up the monotony and it keeps you sharp, but not when I just want to go out for a quiet drink with a few of the boys and girls. Ayce is a nice quiet place with peaceable and friendly folk who live here and the Margite security make sure it stays that way, and if we happen to knock the odd nuisance or two out cold to sleep it off in the brig they are grateful we saved them the trouble.

“As for pirates, even if we don’t blast the hell spawned bastards to meet their makers out in space, the Margites all believe its better to prevent a problem rather than have to fix it later. Any that turn up at arrivals that are known criminals get to be dead faster than you can blink, and the truth is the Margites don’t need weapons. The scum that aren’t actually known to be scum don’t come to Ayce because they don’t like the idea of being grabbed in a bar by a Margite whose idea of fun is to squeeze them hard enough to make their hair bleed. The only time I can recall that happening the CCTV footage of it was released to the media within the hour. Tell you they’re fun people. Juno the station manageress is a Margite and her old man Darri, who at over five meters tall is the biggest damned Margite I’ve ever laid eyes on, runs the security team, so even if a couple of pirates do get squeezed like toothpaste tubes by overly enthusiastic security out for a drink on their off duty time they only get told to do it more quietly next time so as not to upset the paying visitors. I like them, they’re my kind of people. You got lucky, Son, this is a nice quiet deployment, you’ll enjoy yourself here. Now I can see a lady over there who clearly wants me to take her for a spin on the dance floor, so I’d be obliged if you looked after my drink for a while.”

The few rowdies the Margite security had to deal with who were considered to be violent beyond redemption were DNA tagged and recorded, put aboard their ships and told not to return or they would be spending decades of solitary confinement in the station’s brig on short rations, that is if they weren’t handed over to the military to deal with in a somewhat more permanent manner by spacing them on the grounds that that was a cheaper option for the Ayce economy. If such were ships’ crew rather than solitary miners their superior officers were politely informed that should they fail to control the activities of such crew members in the future their vessel would not be welcome to dock at the Ayce station. That dire threat usually resulted in such crew being beached(1) on the next suitable planet. Those who merely became boisterously physical as a result of indulging in a drop too much after over long in space were sobered up in the brig before being released after a caution regarding repeat offences by Her Honour Ruth n Peace Good Law the tiny insectoid station Justice of the Peace who dealt with all cases involving criminal law. Her honour changed the first part of her name every time she moulted her exoskeleton and thus changed her gender when she became His Honour Dire n Dread Good Law. In truth the Margite security officers had little to do and boredom drove them to assist in loading and unloading cargo. Most of them chose to rotate with other less peaceful stations periodically to maintain their skills. The military regarded a deployed rotation to Ayce as an alternative form of R&R with just enough duty to prevent boredom creeping in.

The high quality of the food and drink on Ayce was in large part due to a twenty-nine year old human, one Daniel McCade, widely known in Ayce style as Dan Dan Mech Mac, and his team of environmental engineers who amongst other things programmed and maintained the food and drink synthesisers. All the bigger synthesisers on Ayce were different from synthesisers anywhere else. They were far more sophisticated devices than mere synthesisers. Daniel was a genius who bought in high quality, off the shelf synthesisers from a small, independent, bulk manufacturer, for that was far cheaper than building them from scratch, but then they were heavily modified by himself in his private workshop such that they were able to analyse raw materials, create programs to synthesise them and then activate the programs to synthesise such materials. A standard synthesiser could only synthesise what it was programmed to produce, which meant its output was only as good as the programme code it was supplied with. Daniel’s synthesisers could analyse an exotic food, beverage or drug and then recreate it in any quantity required, and the code of the synthesisers was encrypted in such a way as to self destruct if someone tried to hack it.

A second reason was forty year old Amelia Chen, also human, known as Cookie Amelia Wokk Chen and her team of insanely talented food gymnasts who could be seen at the rear of the serving counters manipulating the huge shallow metal cooking vessels referred to as wokks gyrating, leaping, sliding and dodging in a dozen other ways between flames going on two if not three feet high flicking huge shovelfuls of food high into the air allowing the food to fall back to whence it came but turned over to cook on the other side. Watching the cooks at work was considered to be first class cabaret entertainment, for Ayce was the only station in the universe that even the most travelled had heard of that allowed naked flames to be used for anything other than welding by engineers, and that only under the most stringent of conditions with fire prevention and extinction hovering close by. From time to time huge clouds of vaporised oil would spontaneously explode as fireballs high over the cooking food much to the amazement of the diners waiting for their food. They never tired of watching the pyrotechnics and that the Cookies were completely indifferent to the explosions was considered to be just part of the shew. The food never seemed to take more than a minute or two to prepare and it was amazing to all how fast a queue of dozens could be served with what seemed to be a tiny number of cooks and servers.

Daniel maintained that the main oil he produced for Amelia’s staff to cook with was a superior quality lubricating oil whose molecular structure originated in flower seeds from the human home world Earth, which he cheerfully admitted he’d never been within a million parsecs of. The food produced by Amelia’s team of staff was so well thought of that they cooked huge quantities for other kitchen staff to prepare as vacuum packed Meals Ready for Eating, a significant improvement on the MRE of centuries before prepared for deployed military staff. The hold load tonnages of such boxed food that was purchased by merchant vessels was way in excess of what the vessels’ crews could eat in several lifetimes. It was purchased as a tradable commodity, for the Ayce logo, the letters AYCE inside a skeletal station with stars in the background, on every such item was recognised everywhere by everyone and such was the premium price Ayce foods and beverages commanded that numerous fakes had existed for a while.

Lately, before credits were exchanged the goods were tested by tasting items chosen at random, and the fakes were disappearing rapidly. The value of Ayce food products was such that a great deal of effort was put into the secrecy with such foods were loaded and shipped, for a merchant vessel loaded with such was a prime target for pirates once it had left Ayce sovereign territory. It wasn’t uncommon for deaths to be the result of criminals trying to sell fake Ayce branded goods, especially coffee. It was widely known that law enforcement officers everywhere tended to shrug their shoulders at such deaths refusing to investigate, and even when apprehended such killers only ever received a slap on the wrist, for as was becoming a widely used phrase, ‘Cops appreciate a good coffee too.’ Juno had negotiated an arrangement for such merchantmen to be escorted by military vessels to their destination in exchange for shipments of MREs for military vessel crews. The merchantmen paid for the service in various raw materials required by the stations maintenance personnel. When Commodore Naan Battle had been approached by chief quartermaster Elek Bosun Weapon Store concerning the deal she’d laughed and said, “Fine we’ve too many ships and their crews been loafing round here for too long. Send one that’s been here over long with a bored crew. Just make sure a supply of coffee for me is threwn in and then do what you think is best for the troops. You’re the best to negotiate it because you know what we need and what it’s worth to us.”

“Mrs Shield Ledger already threw your coffee in as part of the deal, Ma’am,” Elek had replied with a smile. “That lady doesn’t leave anything to chance and thinks it all through in advance, and she’s as straight as a die. All of which makes her easy to deal with. I’ll have the paperwork dealt with in a couple of days because they want the first merchantman escorted out early next week some time. Now I’ve your consent we’ll load the food later this afternoon. I’m thinking it’ll probably be best to load it all directly into the ships’ stores, rather than the base’s central store. Even loading some onto every ship on the docks it’ll be a bit tight and some will doubtless be stored in places that are contra naval regs, but that’s a problem the crews can eat their way out of in what I imagine will be short order. I’ll inform the captain of the Far Flight that her ship and crew will need to be ready for departure in four or five days. She’ll be glad to go and certainly won’t complain if she is loaded with a month’s galley supplies from here. I’ll ask the synthesiser engineers what they’d appreciate bringing back in the way of viable, edible samples from Eredaius Four, and ask her to have her crew deal with that, and then everyone will be happy.”

“Excellent, Bosun. I’m sure you know exactly what needs to be done, and no doubt with all this going on you’ll be far to busy to record any minor issues that strictly would be contra naval regs.”

“Aye, Ma’am. As you say.”

“Carry on.”

Unlike Her Honour Ruth n Peace Good Law the station Justice of the Peace who dealt with criminal matters, Her Honour Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick, the station judge dealt with all matters of civil law, which involved registering and legalising all births, deaths and marriages, all licences to do with trade and hundreds of similar minutiae that made life possible on stations like Ayce. She was a member of the hermaphroditic, mammalian, serpentine Boanth species who were always referred to as female due to their three pairs of prominent breasts, and she worked closely with Juno her friend of many decades. Gellianna and Gennialla Florri Damm Air Wind were a pair of orphaned, identical, female twins of the winged, mammalian Draconairi species who’d lost their extremely wealthy parents a couple of years before when their ship, the Precious Ore Shovel, that was on its way to Ayce to deliver a cargo of precious metal ores vital for numerous industrial processes, was attacked by pirates a few hours out from the station. The military from the station had responded immediately to the signal for aid and had blown the pirates and their ships into their component atoms and rescued the girls, but it had been too late for their parents. The two murdered ore miners were both highly qualified astro geologists who over the years had supplied a significant proportion of the rare and vital metal ores required by any number of industrial processes.

The matters of the girls, the ship and its cargo had firmly landed in the lap of Her Honour Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick. The girls had been taken aboard a military hospital ship to be checked over thoroughly at the first opportunity whilst hurried communications had taken place to provide them with the care of a family as soon as they docked at Ayce. What was now the young girls’ ship was towed in by the military to be docked at Ayce under close military guard till such time as Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick decided what should be done with it and more importantly its cargo. The Draconairi funerals were expedited as discreetly as possible in order to upset the girls as little as possible. The judge after lengthy consultation regarding such Draconairi laws and precedents as applied to the matter ruled that, as the Draconairi asteroid miners had intended, the cargo should be auctioned openly on the intergalactic market. Ayce was one of their usual access points to communications facilities capable of reaching such markets and they’d already itemised and registered their cargo with the metal traders at the station.

The military had been more than pleased to have provided the necessary ships and personnel to deal with the pirates, tow the stricken Precious Ore Shovel into dock and provide the guarding services required for the priceless cargo. There was little for most of the military to do on Ayce and the relief from boredom the troops experienced enabled senior officers to relax a little, for dealing with a few thousand bored, highly trained killers could be problematic. Many industrialists as well as the military were vastly relieved to hear of the coming auction, for though no process required huge amounts of any particular metal all such catalysts were in short supply and needed urgently, and the idea that the cargo could be tied up subject to lengthy court proceedings and unavailable till they were concluded had been a nightmare most had feared but few had wished to consider for over long. The girls hadn’t wanted to retain the Precious Ore Shovel, but there had been little interest shewn in the ship, for it was a luxury space yacht fitted out as an asteroid miner. It had been home to the girls’ family and as such was far too expensive to be considered by asteroid miners who were in the main a pretty rough bunch and lived accordingly. The astro geology department of the University of Wellep Seven had initially expressed mild interest, but ultimately purchased it to fit out as a mobile laboratory and home for final year post graduate students whilst doing the practical work for their theses.

The judge ruled that the proceeds of the sales should be invested in iron clad trust funds for the girls and had announced that she would scrutinise very closely any who claimed guardianship of the girls and trusteeship of the funds. None of the claimants had claims that stood up to her scrutiny, and after Ruth n Peace Good Law had gaoled several of them for various periods of time, the three worst of them for five years each for fraud, identity theft, conspiracy to defraud two minors as well as numerous lesser charges the claimants vanished into the woodwork. Ultimately Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick had ruled all claimants to be ineligible, for even the genuine blood relatives had never met the girls who had no desire to meet them due to what their parents had said about them. All proceedings that had taken place in open court had of course been reported by the media and the scrupulous integrity of the Ayce courts, particularly its integrity with regard to the well being of legal minors and the disposition it had made of the assets of those minors, did Ayce’s residents no harm at all.

During Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick’s private talks with the young adolescents they’d told her they were happy living on Ayce because their foster parents were kind and loved them and they had lots of fun with their foster siblings. They’d admitted to arguing with their foster siblings, but agreed no more than they squabbled with each other. They enjoyed going to the station school where they had lots of friends which they said was far more fun than the distance school they had been enrolled with before on the Precious Ore Shovel. Living on Ayce they said was much more exciting than out in the void on a small ship seeking yet another asteroid belt, for there was far more to see and to do. As a result, much to the girls’ relief, Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick decreed that the girls were wards of Ayce and without court sanction could not leave the station. Furthermore she ruled that she would have Juno Kim Shield Ledger manage the trust accounts till such time as the girls became of age or became vested of their assets, which she explained to an interested media meant when the girls reached the age of twenty-five standard galactic years or they married if that occurred first.

The girl’s had probably been the equivalent of eight year old humans when they arrived at Ayce, and other than their wings and a golden translucence to their skin indeed they had looked very like a pair of little human girls. What had been overlooked, if indeed any had been aware of it, was how quickly young Draconairi matured and much more to the point the effects that maturation had on the young Draconairi involved, and in turn the devastating effects that had on the young of not just Draconairi of the opposite sex but on the young of many other mammalian species of the opposite sex too. The girls had only been on the Ayce for a matter of a half a year or so when their chests had started to blossom and their hips to widen. Within a few weeks they’d become devastating attractive young women who exuded an irresistible sex appeal. If that had been all then it would have been manageable, but as Li Li Den Guilder their foster mother had said, “That is only a matter of some suitable lingerie and age appropriate clothes, merely a few credits. Fortunately we have four persons on the station who provide bespoke tailoring services, so at least I have managed to have the girls dressed with appropriate discretion for their age, though at the rate they are growing they’ll need a complete new set of clothes every two or three months.”

Silvi had smiled and replied, “Yes I know. Ayce is the only place I know of other than back on Boanth where I can walk in to be measured when So So Needle Sharp opens her shop first thing in the morning and have a custom made lingerie set including a bra delivered mid afternoon. I can have a gown or a sari available in even less time. Which is excellent if I need something special for a party or an event that evening that has been sprung on me at short notice. Even Juno manages to have same day service here for something special for an event, though I dare say in her case they’ll have to put several seamstresses on to producing a party frock for her. I’ve always wished that I could be as feminine looking as her. I’m convinced it’s to do with our mind sets rather than the way we look. I’m sensuously lithe like all Boanth and we all have three times as much in the way of mammalian attributes than virtually all other mammals. On the other hand Juno is four metres tall with an armoured and scaled reptilian surface, it seems rude to refer to her having a hide.

“She’s built like a ground force invasion tank, and being reptilian she has virtually no obviously female attributes other than her phenomenal hip movements when she walks and her somewhat softer facial features visible, softer that is compared with a male Margite, though most folk wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.” She chuckled, “Mind it’s obvious Darri can. However, and here’s the injustice of it all, even at going on two hundred years old she still presents as one of the most devastatingly attractive looking women I have ever met. Mind I am grateful I don’t have her nail polish bill. Those talons of hers must use half a litre at a time and that stuff’s not cheap. Too, I reckon she must get through gallons of scale polish, but it does make her look good. It’s insane the expense we females put ourselves through to look good, and it’s all just vanity isn’t it?” She sighed and added, “The universe does have a twisted sense of humour and no sense of justice at all. However, if dressing the girls becomes at all onerous in terms of credits I suggest you have a word with Juno and she’ll have their trust funds pick up the invoices. Don’t concern yourself about that for there’re millions there and they make more in interest than most folk earn.”

However, rather more than a year later when the girls were well into puberty, referred to by the Draconairi as coming into their first season of attraction, they produced a pheromone only noticeable by its effect on young males, young males of not just the Draconairi but of numerous other mammalian species too and that had proven to be a nightmare. It had been discovered that young Draconairi males produced a pheromone with equivalent effects on young mammalian females, but as Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick had said to her friend Juno, “That whilst interesting does not help me decide what to do right now, for as Li Li and Gin Fix their foster parents have reluctantly admitted the girls cannot live in the same dwelling as their three boys any more, for whilst their boys are well behaved and honourable the pheromone turns their brains off and renders them incapable of any thought or reason other than that provided by their testosterone fuelled sex drives.

They are all big and strong enough to force the girls and the effect of the pheromone coupled with their testosterone would ensure that they did so at every opportunity which with three of them would subject the girls to constant gang rape virtually twenty-four seven. Living in the same dwelling would provide far too many such opportunities, constant opportunities, and a single opportunity is one more than too many. Too, the girls are no longer completely in control of their behaviour and whilst they admit to being frightened of the idea of mating because they are as of yet too small to engage in such activity without being physically damaged by it, they also say that under some circumstances they would find it impossible to resist, for ovulation occurs every two or three days during their season of attraction, and that destroys any vestige of free will they had before it occurs. Too, pregnancy is guaranteed within forty-eight hours of ovulation which means they are effectively fertile for the entire ten days, and they are definitely not sufficiently developed for pregnancy.”

Draconairi were rare in the part of the galaxy that Ayce inhabited, so little was known about them by anyone. However, a considerable amount of information was available online from the Datablock. Meanwhile the girls were living with an elderly couple in the remote part of the station that served the station’s infirmary unit and elderly persons needing the medical facilities close by whilst they awaited a ship to return home. It was a totally unsatisfactory situation that could not work for long, for the girls were clearly not happy to be out of what they referred to as proper contact with their school friends, and it was obvious to Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick that their urges were negatively affecting their behaviour. Silvi Anna was researching the matter round the clock, and had discovered that the girls were now probably fifteen or sixteen in human equivalent age and in a matter of three or four months they would be fully adult and capable of a safe pregnancy. For some reason unknown to her all medical information throughout the universe used human norms as its yardstick for all species.

The girls’ pheromones would surge in effect over the next few days to a peak then die down rapidly to nearly nil for six or so weeks at which point they would surge again to much greater effect. She understood ten days of chaos followed by fifty of calm was normal and the pheromones would increase in potency and effect with each cycle till full maturity was reached. Too, although currently not quite adult, by the end of this cycle, certainly by the beginning of the next, a mere matter of two months, there would be nowhere on Ayce that would be unaffected, for no air recycler could remove the pheromones, though once a Draconairi entered the quiescent phase of their cycle their pheromones naturally broke down rapidly within twenty-four hours. One of the articles she’d read informed her that the vegetation on Draconaire powerfully absorbed the pheromones which were also rapidly broken down by a wide spectrum of ultra violet radiation, and she was hoping that such vegetation as grew in the biodomes would serve the same purpose as the station’s air was cycled through it. When she’d asked the engineers they’d informed her that there was virtually no ultra violet of any frequency in the station’s illumination.

The idea of allowing the girls to live with Li Li and Gin Fix Den Guilder and their family for six and a half weeks at a time and then incarcerating them somewhere for a week and a half to then return to live with the Den Guilders seemed barbaric and not entirely safe to Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick, for it was unlikely that the girls would agree to it and even if they did their urges may well force them to change their minds and seek male company. The complications of two Draconairi teenage pregnancies with a father or fathers of one or possibly two different species who would be unwilling to support them on the grounds that their pheromones had coerced him or them into impregnating them was something the girls could well do without and she was honest enough to admit to herself so could she, for the legal implications would be horrendous, though she had started researching the matter in case all went belly up. She’d discovered the way the Draconairi handled the matter was by marrying at onset of puberty, for other than sexually young Draconairi were seemingly mature enough in all other ways at that age for marriage and most young couples lived with the parents of one of them for several years.

The emotional intimacy of marriage completely controlled the pheromone effects such that they were no longer noticeable to any other than the spouse and they no longer drove either of the couple into sexual acts at least one of them was not quite ready for the consequences of. A young Draconairi couple could easily control their desires till they were physically developed enough for mating and the female was ready for pregnancy. Which, Silvi Anna thought, was fine when there were other Draconairi around, but none on Ayce had ever met a Draconairi other than the girls and occasionally their parents. The judge hadn’t managed to find any information concerning the safety of mating and pregnancy for a young Draconairi female married to a non Draconairi male. She’d considered the possibility of finding the girls Draconairi mates, whilst a council of perfection, to be an impossibility, though she’d had her huge network of contacts, including the military, working on the matter for several days.

The girls living semi isolated in a sub community of the elderly infirm was equivalent to gaoling them, but the girls would not be safe if they continued going to school nor indeed anywhere else within the reach of young males. It was only with the willing assistance of the military garrison commander, Commodore Sally Fleet Naan Battle, she’d been able to provide the girls with round the clock protection from young males using troops of sufficient age to be unaffected by the pheromones. She considered the only viable long term option was to find the girls mates or at least a mate, for such marriages were commonplace amongst the twin dominated population of the Draconairi where twins married to twins in a marriage of four was the most common arrangement. She considered that the only viable option in the short term would be to find a foster parent or parents of such an age as to be immune to the pheromones who either lived in a remote part of the station or was prepared to move to such a remote part. Effectively that reduced down to one of the station’s engineers a small number of who lived in outlying parts of the station so as to be close to their workshops. The rest tended to live nearer to the central hub so as to be close to what ever it was that they maintained and those would be of no help what so ever.

She’d considered the girls being fostered by a non mammalian individual or family whose species were unaffected by the pheromones, but as far as she could discover they all lived near the station hub where thousand of young mammalians males lived too. She’d considered the girls being fostered by one of the spacers who operated their own ships, most were asteroid miners and any number of them were solitary elderly males. She’d also considered that possibly a younger female spacer would be a better choice. However, she didn’t like that as a solution as it would take them off the station against her initial order which she’d decreed for very good reasons, notably to protect them from any who would try to kidnap then in order to ransom them for their trust moneys, and in any case the girls had refused to live the life of wandering ship dwellers again. If she could find an older engineer most of the time the girls could continue attending the station school in person and when wisdom dictated it they could attend their classes remotely over the station distance education system which had been created for children in the infirmary or at home but too ill to attend school in person. With a heavy sigh, she’d closed down the Datablock articles concerning Draconairi biology and reproductive matters and opened the much smaller files on the station system listing station personnel.

She’d outlined the problem and its possible solutions in an instant message to all forty-two engineers of the nine different species, all mammalian, who lived in relatively isolated parts of the station and whom she thought she had even the remotest chance of success with and had thirty-five rejections within twenty minutes and a further three within a few hours. Three of the remaining four eventually messaged back wishing to know what they would be paid for the service, which left Daniel McCade. Daniel was a human and a highly intelligent and equally highly qualified and experienced environmental systems engineer held in great respect by all who worked on or even visited Ayce. Known as Dan Dan Mech Mac, he was the food and beverage synthesiser king of the universe. Unlike most station residents, for whom Ayce was a temporary residence for their deployment, whether they be civilian or military, for Daniel the station was his permanent residence, and he lived out in the boon docks amidst the biodomes where the fresh plant vegetable materials grew and the rare sources of genuine meat were to be found walking, flying and swimming in their well protected environments. The animals had become a source of wonder to the children of the station, and their teachers found the domes where they were to be found excellent places in which to conduct some of their lessons. The threat of cancelling an ecology or a biology lesson in the biodomes ensured instant good behaviour in pupils of all ages and species.

A decade ago when more than half a decade from adulthood, which was set at twenty-five under Ayce legislation, Daniel had set up the first tiny biodome as a combined fresh vegetable food and air purifying project growing several varieties of unrelated plants from a dozen different worlds that were all referred to on the kitchens’ menus as kail. The kails had been an instant success from their first introduction, for few synthesised foods had much texture and some of the kails not only were highly textured they had to be seriously chewed. The kails were so successful that they had attracted the highly acclaimed cook Cookie Amelia Wokk Chen to the station’s kitchens and eventually any number of cooks of her ethnicity, all of who rapidly became known by equally Ayce type names which typically involved a minimum of four elements, often using a repeated element, or even two. Ethnically, even by themselves, the cooks were referred to as Cookies and they all claimed to have originated from the California area of Earth, even if it were a goodly few generations back.

Though not all cooks were Cookies the Cookies all worked as cooks. The Cookies claimed it was what they had all always done and it wasn’t known whether they were entirely joking when they claimed cooking was in their DNA. Virtually all of the Cookies were nomadic working their way around the universe on first one ship then another, often stopping to work on a planet, asteroid or a station for a while before signing on to cook on a ship again for a while. Referred to by many as Space Gypsies, most had no place they considered to be home, few ever sojourned for any length of time anywhere and mostly they travelled light, living out of a military duffle bag or two. They travelled so light that they did not take their cooking implements with them when they left a kitchen or galley somewhere. Every engineer in the universe knew how to make their wokks from sixteen or eighteen gauge [1·519 or 1·214mm] sheet steel and their shovel like cooking implements too. Too, the wire whisk like brushes they used that they referred to as bamboos for some unknown reason could be produced by engineering apprentices in minutes from a coil of spring steel wire.

The Cookie females didn’t consider pregnancy a valid reason to change their lifestyle and any number of them had given birth in a kitchen or a galley during a shift which process rarely took them away from their work for more than an hour or two. Many travelled as family groups with their elderly and their offspring who were considered to be apprentices from the moment they took their first breath. Even their elderly infirm kept on the move one way or another till their passing. A traditional Cookie funeral was an emergency pod stript of all its life support and other expensive refinements launched into a nearby star. As far as was known no Cookie had ever been military personnel, but many had cooked on military vessels or at military bases where they were always welcomed by even the upper tier officers because a Cookie in the galley meant a contented crew or base personnel. Like medics Cookies were regarded as sacrosanct of body, they were non combatants who would feed any and all regardless of which side they fought on and any who harmed any of them would be summarily executed and none would object or consider that to be unreasonable.

Fresh foods of any sort were universally known to be rare to the point of being totally unavailable on stations and ships for they had neither the staff with appropriate expertise nor were prepared to make available the space in which to grow them. It had been the fresh kails that had brought the Cookies to Ayce. It had been the presence of an ever expanding variety of fresh vegetables and the incredible number of herbs and spices from across the entire universe growing there that had kept them there. Passionate concerning their craft, the Cookies were creative and imaginative cooks with knowledge of possibly thousands of different cuisines, and from the cradle to the grave they spent their entire lives learning more concerning their craft. Even on long established planets it was rare for them to find somewhere that gave them the opportunities for their creative talents to run riot in the way that Ayce did. Once Daniel had managed, totally against all known conventions, if not actually against any known legislation, to obtain a small group of the flying bat like pollinators from Rigel Seven that had rapidly become a sustainable, self perpetuating, population that had enabled a small variety of fresh fruits to be produced all year round. The pollinators were known as avians because their real name was so difficult for most to pronounce and so only known to those with a professional interest in them. The rabbit like rodents from Australis Three known as hoppers that bred almost uncontrollably kept the understory plants under control so that weeding was not required meant genuine meat became available via Daniel’s environmental engineering staff.

Fresh meat and fruit were usually terrifyingly expensive in space, but they were available at Ayce from time to time and harvesting the meat to keep the hopper population under control was easily accomplished by simply turning the artificial gravity off for a few minutes. After such a cull the genuine hopper meat and a synthesised version, which though it had the taste didn’t have the texture of the real thing, were used to prepare a dish in twenty gallon cooking vessels that the Cookies called rabbit stew. The stew was served containing any number of cubed vegetables, again some genuine, but it was believed most came courtesy of Daniel’s engineer’s synthesisers, though it was hard to tell. A side dish of a huge crusty loaf made from synth flour that tasted delicious spread with something semi solid derived from synthesised seed oils made a meal that spacers who’d been lucky enough to be on the station at the time talked about for months if not years. That the stew contained hopper bones was seen not as an inconvenience but as a sign of genuine quality and of the Cookies integrity, for they had claimed that the stew contained genuine meat and the bones evidenced that. At a credit and a half for a meal it was regarded as a gift from the gods who watched over all hard working spacers. After such a meal it was usual for spacers to let their belts out a hole if not two before disappearing to their bar of choice to aid their meal to digest with what they considered to be a well deserved glass or ten of whatever their preferred beverage happened to be.

With time both meat and fruit became more available and eventually within the economic reach of the station’s working personnel to prepare at home, even if they were only special event menu items. With even more time the Cookies had the mechanical engineers fabricate from sheet steel devices the Cookies referred to as barbecue cookers. The cookers used synthesised cubes of fragrant wood as fuel and the spatchcocked carcasses of the hoppers were cooked in and above the naked flames of the burning wood. As they cooked the meat took up the flavour of the fragrant wood. Eventually, other meats, fish and vegetables were cooked that way too. The Cookies for some reason referred to the process as BBQ and the food as BBQed. To describe BBQed food as a success was a huge understatement. For many years only a small portion of such food was ever available and it was regarded as an appetiser to a more substantial meal. However, eventually as Ayce expanded in size, and the space set aside for growing and raising food increased too, full BBQ meals became available, eventually even the Naggery, who typically could eat fifty kilos at a meal, could be accommodated, but that was to be many years into the future, by which time much larger meat animals were bred, raised and harvested on the station.

That first tiny dome under which Daniel had grown the kails had long been replaced by a much larger dome, which had in turn been replaced by an even larger one a year and a half afterwards. The most recently constructed massive biodomes contained huge ecosystems that were based around large areas of relatively shallow water and their ecosystems were still under development. The first system was up and running and the second even larger one was still under construction. The first one contained portions where like a beach the water shallowed out to nothing. The deepest parts of the waters were a only couple of metres deep, though there was not much that was that deep. Most of the water was between forty and a hundred and twenty centimetres deep. Given the known volume of water that had been used to fill the four separate waters and then dividing that by the also known surface area produced an answer indicating that the average water depth was approximately a hundred and two centimetres.

The water grew vast quantities of much appreciated edible vegetable materials of an incredible variety, leaves, flowers, stems, roots, turions, bulbs and corms, including the delightfully crunchy delicately flavoured water nuts of four different varieties. Most significantly the water supported fish. Fish that Daniel had had imported with help from the Cookies, totally illegally according to Universal Concordat legislation, though Ayce law had nothing to say on the matter. The illegality apparently had been exporting them from their home worlds and transporting them through portions of space subject to Universal Concordat regulations. However, the reality of personal debts owed and repaid paid no heed to any law when someone’s honour and reputation were at stake, and debts and favours owed to Daniel were regarded by the Cookies and their colleagues aboard the numerous vessels involved in the shipping of the living material as of far more significance than mere Concordat bureaucratic pedantry, and all he needed was a sample of someone’s favourite intoxicant in order to produce however many litres of it the trade required. Just being able to say, “I was given it by Dan Dan Mech Mac for a favour I did him,” was instant kudos. There weren’t many who were aware that it was no more problematic for the Cookies to have something transported on military vessels than merchantmen and private vessels. The military was aware of the situation and ignored it for even fleet admirals knew eventually they’d be repaid with better food of a wider variety, and in the military that was something that more than mattered.

Initially Daniel had designed and set up the first water dome at the request of the Cookies who had contacts over all known space and small packages were transported for them entirely free of charge including on military vessels. Transport may have taken a while, but packages kept moving nearer to their destinations over time and eventually arrived, even if they had eventually travelled several times the distance between their origin and their destination. In return Daniel provided the Cookies with free access to the station’s communication system. The ability to contact their often far flung and widely separated families without a few minutes of conversation to catch up on births, deaths and marriages costing them half a month’s salary meant all of them would automatically move the cosmos itself in order to facilitate whatever favours he requested, usually live propagable samples of vegetables and fruit, though more recently fauna of various kinds too. The Cookies’ contacts had provided most of the water plants and the fish too. The brightly coloured koi carp were introduced at barely a centimetre long but grew slowly up to over a metre. The carp came from a terraformed world in one of the local galaxies, though rumour said that centuries ago they had originated on Earth, but many things were said to have their origins on the home worlds of numerous space faring races and most of such tales were considered to be the inter galactic versions of urban myths. Again like meat, fish was terrifyingly expensive, but it was available.

Gradually it became known on the station that whilst of little interest to the Cookies as food sources the smallest of the water plants, the tiny floaters that covered water surfaces and the teeming microscopic life that lived in the water, were responsible for a large proportion of what had been the almost miraculous improvement in the quality of the station’s atmosphere. Both could be seen to be subject to the slow almost random eddying currents near the waters’ edges and the larger movements caused by the fish and even more by the action of the large volume low velocity circulating pumps that enabled gas exchange between the water and the air above it as they caused thin films of water to cascade over the surfaces that formed the rills and water features. Too, there were numerous small fountains that enabled gas exchange. Like the powerful LED lights that enabled the chlorophylls of the plants to photosynthesise absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, the round the clock movement of the water was powered by the radiation absorbed by the same collectors that powered the entire station.

The entire inter connected system produced large volumes of clean fresh oxygen in delightfully pure air. According to the station’s medical psych personnel the almost silent sounds of the moving water cascading over the small rills and waterfalls and of the water falling back to whence it came after fountaining up into the air resulted in a general calming of station personnel resulting in fewer bar fights and even less requirement for counselling, especially amongst personnel who weren’t really suitable for station life and were nearing the end of what had become an increasingly stressful and endless seeming deployment only undertaken for the large amount of credits involved. Other than spacers who’d regularly visited Ayce, few at the time were aware that Daniel had been nurturing plants of all sorts since early childhood, certainly he’d admitted in an unguarded moment before he signed up with the station school. He’d learnt how to propagate plants using all sorts of techniques, some relatively sophisticated, but most were variations of simple division or even more simply by planting seeds.

Daniel’s unknown first plant had been something he’d found in a pile of discarded mixed rubbish that a spacer had dropped into one of the recycling bins. Virtually leafless, it was in a small pot and had intrigued him, so he took it home and looked it up on the Datablock. A picture identified it as one of a class of plants referred to as Spacers’ Spices, a group of small plants with pungent tastes that spacers kept in pots and clipped small quantities off to put some taste into their otherwise bland meals. With time and care it had regenerated and the Datablock had taught him how to take cuttings. Initially he’d asked spacers for any plants they had that were unwanted. Most such were tiny powerful tasting plants that the spacers had considered to have produced as much as they were able to. Since they weren’t expensive and were not too difficult to obtain, at that point they usually threw them away and obtained a fresh supply. They were more than happy to put a smile on the usually silent young boy’s face by giving him what to them was just rubbish. Daniel grew the plants in small containers he’d salvaged from the recycling bins that he’d placed under conveniently situated lights.

Daniel had been born on Ayce in his parents dwelling with no help from any of the station’s medical personnel, so his birth hadn’t been recorded. His parents hadn’t bothered to register his birth because they hadn’t planned on staying at the station for long. They had never had much time for their usually silent son whom they’d never understood and had considered him to be seriously mentally limited. That Daniel had never been interested in playing with other children and preferred to play with tools and machine parts rather than toys seemed to be peculiar behaviour to them. Because they were ashamed of Daniel they lived in an isolated area of the station near to the air scrubbers which they maintained. They had no neighbours, and till the day that they left it was rare that anyone had ever laid eyes upon their naturally secretive son, despite his frequent forays into the densely populated sections of the station, for he had the gift of fading into the background becoming nigh on invisible. When he was four his parents shipped aboard an asteroid miner. They’d intended to take him with them, but aware of their intentions he’d disappeared. They’d shrugged their shoulders and left without him, for the chances were he’d have ended up being spaced by the crew of an asteroid miner for being considered to be a waste of air, but by then he’d no need of them, nor indeed need of any adult. By the age of five he’d stripped down and rebuilt his first broken domestic synthesiser that he’d found in an engineering recycling bin and he’d learnt how to programme it.

Six months later after much experimentation and some scrounging, and theft, of parts from the engineering workshops and their stores he’d added his first somewhat crude analyser to the synthesiser, which now worked faster and more accurately that it had done when it had been new. He’d long been eating better than every one else on the station. Too, his attitude to credits had become unique, for what ever his initial sample cost him was now irrelevant for he could analyse it and then synthesise as much more of it as he wanted for virtually zero cost. Fortune had smiled upon him when he’d discovered the discarded coffee drinker in the station’s repair bay down in the station’s docking ports. It had some coffee left in the base and had been left by an asteroid miner who’d docked at the station to sell some ore, for some ship’s repairs and to take on board food and water. He’d recently worked one of the inner systems and it was on one of the few human dominated worlds where he’d obtained his supply of what he’d been told were genuine, locally grown Arabica coffee beans.

The vendor had offered him a selection of various degrees of roasted beans saying that he preferred the dark heavy roast. To convince him the vendor had brewed him a drinker of coffee to sample. Impressed by the taste, the spacer had gone with the vendor’s choice and for what was a genuinely good price he’d walked away with a twenty-five kilo sack of dark roast beans and a small grinder. The smell of the coffee had caught Daniel’s attention, so he’d taken the drinker. It had been a good coffee to start with but with some inspired programming on Daniel’s part and a goodly amount of luck he’d produced the product that ultimately would make his name a byword across the universe. Not even a year later Daniel was widely known to the folk who plied the space lanes as the young boy on Ayce who was always willing to trade small jars of his highly prized coffee concentrate produced by his personal synthesiser for new plant species. He was also synthesising for spacers who provided a sample their choice of whatever beverage or drug they chose at what were considered to be very reasonable rates, even better rates if some new flora samples were to be part of the deal. It was a peculiar line of work they were in, mostly legal but it also involved some smuggling which was legal in some jurisdictions yet not in others, so they all understood Daniel’s desire to remain out of the sight and awareness of officialdom. As a result how to contact him remained a closely guarded secret passed on only to those in their line of work.

Daniel’s existence had first come to the notice of the station administration AI at the age of four when he’d logged on to the school claiming to be eight. He had no known history before that and had no recorded parents nor other relatives which was in no way unusual for station children, so it wasn’t a flag to the system requiring attention. The address he’d provided the school AI with was someone else’s and it had been naturally enough assumed that he lived with guardians. That was in no way unusual for children living on stations, for working in space though lucrative was dangerous, and the station had more than would be expected on a planet of its share of orphans. Even more station children had parents who worked out in space and left their children on stations in the care of relatives or friends. Daniel had always appeared to be clean, well fed and well dressed, and looked like a thriving well cared for child, and other than his singular reluctance to engage in conversation concerning anything other than his school work, at which he excelled, he was just a normal station kid with a selection of the issues that many of the children had.

When a teacher discovered that he’d moved from his recorded previous address in the central hub out to the far end of one of the station’s arms it was assumed as a result of his terse comment, ‘Mum’s back,’ that at least one of his parents had returned from space to work on the environmental air scrubbers situated there, though he’d deliberately planted that idea in her head by careful manipulation of the truth and the AI database. He’d hacked the AI system to provide parents’ evening information and long before the system had become aware of any irregularities according to the records he’d become old enough for nobody to wish to be accused of invading his privacy. He’d left school early and it was on record that he’d entered for and won engineering scholarships to study with prestigious remote study schools. His remarkable academic achievements were known by the system, so once he’d started putting his name to work he’d done, it was known to have been undertaken by a first class environmental engineer and hence essentially ignored which suited him fine.

Daniel had never officially been taken on as an employee by the station and he’d never asked for official consent to do anything, he merely kept working, filling in and submitting maintenance logs and putting in requisitions for bigger and better equipment, tools and materials, which given his qualifications Juno’s staff had assumed was from an officially employed engineer due to the technical nature of the work he’d logged as having done and the items he’d ordered. That equipment he’d maintained functioned without further maintenance requirements for a long time consolidated his reputation as a first class engineer. When a staff member working in payroll noticed his salary hadn’t been paid one month she’d corrected the matter immediately rather than risk him putting in an official complaint and her being held responsible. It hadn’t occurred to her look into his previous salary records. Since him being paid as a highly qualified environmental engineer was in accord with him working as an environmental engineer doing remarkable work everything was in line with what all expected to be the situation and it went unnoticed due to its ordinariness. He did the work and he was paid for doing it, so what was there to find noteworthy in that? Since the food he’d been supplying the kitchens, both fresh and synthesised, was so well thought of and he’d been saving the station ever increasing amounts of credits in food imports Juno had authorised the requisitions without scrutinising them too closely, for clearly it was in the station’s interests that she do so.

Some of the engineers that Daniel worked with from time to time on atmospheric purity matters preferred to work with him on the kind of complex, interesting projects that involved the interaction of environmental and engineering systems that he undertook rather than on their usual purely engineering projects. Since all enjoyed eating better food even their ex department chiefs overlooked the matter, and as the engineers gradually became less available for other tasks the chiefs simply took on replacements and the matter rapidly became history. When Daniel had acquired his fourth co worker it had been noted by HR that there were now five environmental engineers essentially maintaining the station’s air quality and producing superior quality food from the biodome vegetables and by remarkable programming of the synthesisers, all of which was now gradually being seen to be of ever increasing importance. A senior HR worker had asked who headed up that department. That she had just created the environmental engineering department by simply asking the question went unnoticed. She was concerned that there didn’t appear to be anyone who was responsible for any departmental issues and so they had nobody to contact in the case of emergency, nor anyone to represent the department at senior level meetings involving station well being. None knew the answer, but it was known that Daniel had been doing it for a lot longer than the others and he was the one who’d been signing the requisitions, so he was officially recorded and paid as the chief engineer of the group.

Usually an extremely expensive bulk sewage tanker was required to empty the station’s effluent tanks at thirty to forty day intervals, though due to increasing station population the intervals were becoming noticeably shorter and concern had been expressed at the station’s management committee level regarding the increasing costs. The tankers took the raw sewage for processing on an agricultural world three galaxies away where it was used as fertilises to boost grain harvest yields. It was only when Juno had been made aware by her staff that the station hadn’t had to pay for a bulk tanker for over six months that she’d had the matter looked into. Initially her staff had trouble understanding what had been happening, for the records shewed that the effluent tanks had been running at more or less half full oscillating somewhere between one third and two thirds full, with no effluent tankered away when they’d have expected to have needed six if not seven tankers since the last one had emptied their tanks. Further more there had been no obvious cost to the effluent tank’s operation. Deeper enquiry that took over a fortnight revealed what had been happening. Just over a year before Juno had authorised a requisition submitted for a huge synthesiser, so large it had been shipped in half a dozen separate pieces in order for it to be taken from the station’s unloading dock to the one of the engineering arms of the station where it was to be assembled for operation. At the time given the quantities of high quality food the station was then supplying itself with rather than buying in Juno had considered the purchase to be eminently reasonable and desirable.

Juno managed the station using essentially a hands off approach. She was fussy about whom she employed as senior managers but once a new hire had demonstrated competence and dedication she left them alone to manage their departments and staff as they considered best. It was an approach that worked, it endeared her to her staff and minimised her workload. As a result, the bits and pieces that were also on the synthesiser requisition form she’d scarcely looked at considering them to be just standard engineering spares from their usual suppliers of such things, beyond the understanding of an accountant and that Daniel knew what he was doing. It turned out that the bits and pieces were to modify the off the shelf synthesiser such that it could use bulk raw sewage as feed stock to produce a range of fertilisers for the plants of the biodomes. Many months passed before anyone in Juno’s administration staff connected the saving in effluent removal bulk tankerage costs and the total cessation of invoices arriving charging for potable water supplies. Some of the extra bits and pieces that had been ordered on the synthesiser requisition had been a large ion exchange system and a huge vacuum distillation setup, both required for the large scale ultra purification of potable water.

The grove of tropical rain forest in biodome twenty-two that originated on New Brazil which was out in Antares somewhere in the Scorpius group had emergents which were now over a hundred and fifty metres tall, still growing, yet mature enough to fruit. That they had reached such heights was due to the reduced local gravity in the grove against which they had to lift water to their uppermost leaves and branches. They grew to similar heights on New Brazil and the local gravity in the grove had been adjusted to ten percent less than in their native habitat so as to assist their growth. Most varieties produced thousands of fruits of all sorts of colours and colouration patterns of between half a kilo and a kilo and a half [1 to 3 pounds]. There was one variety that produced much fewer vaguely pear shaped, bright yellow fruits of colossal proportions that weighed over a hundred kilos each. A harvester had had to be specially designed for such fruits, but none regretted the necessity. The fruits ranged from soft, succulent, melon like fruit that were mostly water to those that were nut like in composition, all were extremely tasty to most species that visited Ayce. The tropical rain forest ecosystem had species that had been chosen because they were productive and in fruit all the year round, too many bore edible leaves, and it was one of the most spectacular successes of the environmental engineers.

To thrive trees of that size required considerable feeding in a wholly artificial environment like a space station dome, especially in the early days when the system was still settling down and wasn’t yet sustainable without assistance, for as of then not enough time had passed for the micro organisms to build up any significant depth of soil. The roots of the huge trees formed a vast plate like platform for the trees to stand on for depth was not available to them. The stability of the trees was ensured by their root systems all binding together to form one enormous stand. With no wind to stress their root systems the trees grew taller, straighter and were far more productive than their cousins back on New Brazil. As leaves and branches died and fell only the largest which impeded access for maintenance were chipped. The chips along with the dropped leaves and smaller branches were left on the forest floor to eventually produce more soil as a result of the saprophytic bacteria and fungi. Most of the saprophytes were microscopic with insignificant fruiting bodies, but there were several species of saprophytic fungi at work decaying the fallen leaves and branches that produced large, tasty, edible fruiting bodies, and from time to time the Cookies made good use of them.

Ayce had become a not quite completely self sustaining eco system within Daniel’s very incomplete as yet lifetime, almost over night in environmental terms, and it had kept improving in performance thereafter as the various sub components of its eco systems gained in maturity and complexity. Daniel’s processes had rapidly become hugely successful, for all enjoyed fresh food and the air quality throughout the station had become sparkling within a few months, far better than it had ever been. It was like breathing air on a planet where the eco system was based on oxygen and water cycles, and nothing like breathing the air on any other station which invariably tasted metallic and smelt like an engineering workshop. Too, the atmosphere on Ayce was running at a constant twenty-one to twenty-two percent oxygen whereas most stations at best managed fifteen percent, often as low as ten percent which made physical work for manual workers of many species demanding to the point where their best was a serious reduction in output from what they could do with an adequate oxygen supply and air devoid of pollutants.

It was a surprise to most who lived on the station when the large number of plants appeared scattered throughout the station, usually they were tucked in corners and other out of the way places. The plants were of several different species, though all had an abundance of furry or hairy looking leaves. Too, all were in the middle of locked cages such that the plants could not be touched. The cages were all tightly chained to the floor or nearby walls The news bulletins had announced that the plants were an integral component of the station’s combined air purification and oxygen generation system and tampering with them was a crime punishable by banishment. In addition it had been announced the plants were caged to protect persons walking nearby from touching them, for the hairs on the leaves on all of them exuded sticky substances that needed solvents to wash them off that would give most species a nasty skin or scale burn that was extremely painful for anything up to a month.

No person of limited cognitive abilities had ever come to live or work on Ayce, but a small number had been born on the station. It had never been considered to banish them for Ayce was their home and they were residents not criminals. Unfortunately what work could be provided to give them some self respect and self esteem all knew was make work that had no need of being done or could have been done better by AI controlled bots. It was a surprise when they were all redeployed to water the new plants, which was anything but make work. Welded to the cages around the plants was a filler tube that took water to the plants’ roots. A jug of appropriate volume was filled from the tank mounted on an anti grav sled and emptied into the filler tube at five day intervals. It was work the water gang enjoyed and they took it in turns to pour the water. After a couple of watering cycles it was realised that there were not quite enough plants to keep all the water gangs occupied for a five day week. Rather than reduce their hours which would have offended them more plants were deployed till the work required matched the work force hours available. The station’s medical psych personnel were delighted.

Almost imperceptibly, if one didn’t consult the actual atmospheric composition readings, the slow cycling of the entire atmosphere of the station via the green plants of the biodomes and the more localised improvements due to the caged plants had created a station atmosphere so clean that asthma and other lung and breathing disorders were a thing of the past for medical personnel to deal with. Biodome twenty-two had become a popular picnicking place for families with children and was well visited by young couples seeking quiet and privacy. That had been noticed and facilities for picnicking had been provided. Too, subtle planting scheme rearrangements had provided the privacy that encouraged couples to wish to spend time in there. All of which was good for attracting visitors with credits to spend. It wasn’t cynicism on behalf of the station management, for as Juno repeatedly said, “Ayce is a business. It has to be successful or none of us have a home and the visitors have nowhere to visit. Like any good business we have determined what it is that our customers wish to spend their credits on, and we work hard to provide whatever they wish to buy. If we make a business decision that we choose to supply some of what they enjoy free of charge, essentially we are writing the costs of those things down to what the corporate businesses would call the marketing budget. That is not cynicism, it is us doing our job properly.”

The recently constructed, suspended, transparent, aerial walk ways that meandered through the various levels of the tropical rain forest in biodome twenty-two were well visited, and the highest level walkway through the tops of the emergents enabled walkers to watch the avians at their pollination work, and occasionally, if a walker were lucky enough, to pick a fruit too. For it deliberately wasn’t forbidden, and Juno had said, “Chalk that up to the marketing budget too.” The several kilometres of walkways were integrated into a colossal water movement system consisting of four huge transparent ponds, or perhaps small lakes would be a better description. The lakes were separated vertically by approximately fifty metres, each one being filled by over flow from the one above it. They entire system had been designed with several functions in mind. The waters and the ‘banks’ next to the waters were home to a wide variety of edible plant species that cleaned the air and put oxygen into it as they photosynthesised.

Too, there were huge numbers of rafts that housed edible plants that elsewhere were usually considered to require soil to grow in. The roots of the raft plants extracted all the nutrients they required from the water. It had proven to be a particularly successful growing method with diverse varieties of root crops that originated from all over the universe. The plants growing on the floating rafts and those on the lake banks with some of their roots in the water took hydroponic cultivation to its limits. The water itself acted as a gas exchange medium giving up oxygen dissolved from that produced by the plants that lived in and under the water in exchange for carbon dioxide and other undesirable gases to be found in the air as a result of the various industrial processes undertaken on the station, and of course the exhalations of the folk on the station at the time. Too, the fountains and the flowing water removed particulates from the air. The gases and the particulates were all taken up by plants and converted to innocuous plant material. In addition the water housed numerous varieties of fauna, some micro fauna which larger fauna fed upon, and some of which were edible by station residents, though not all were at a stage ready for harvesting and it was not planned to harvest some of them at all.

Jon Jon Le Bleu Le Bleu, one of Daniel’s team had said early in the contemplative planning stage, “Dan Dan, it’s an amazing concept, and from a structural engineering point of view it’s all eminently doable. The access walkways can be used as structural members to help stiffen the entire structure. Even the cascades structure and the turbine pipe will add significant rigidity to the whole thing. Those folk who suggested putting hand rails down the sides of the walkways so the visitors can enjoy the experience dreamed up a damned good idea. That’s another attraction to bring in credits and the hand rails can be made structural too. However, you’re talking about each water being somewhere between a hundred metres square and a hundred and twenty metres square and averaging a metre deep, give or take. Even taking the smaller size which is ten thousand cubic metres or ten thousand tonnes [10,000,000Kg, 2,240,000 pounds] of water. The larger size gives nearly half as much again. Given localised gravity control, which the trees appreciate, and what we know about structural members from the station’s construction supporting the weight of even twice the larger size would be no problem at all. However, four of them means we need forty thousand cubic metres of water which is forty million litres, possibly going on sixty million. At the current cost of water out here that’s enough credits to make your eyes water enough to fill one of the lakes.”

Daniel shook his head and said smiling, “No, Jon Jon, the water will be transported to us free of charge and then we’ll be paid to take it.” There were puzzled looks at that and he’d explained by asking a question. “What will happen if we put it out that for the next twelve months we’ll empty ships’ effluent tanks free of charge? Ships’ effluent is over ninety-five percent water. Every million litres of effluent contains a bit less than fifty thousand litres of dry material to be converted into fertilisers we can make good use of. The other nine hundred and fifty-odd thousand litres is water. Problem solved. If we take too much we can always sell the ultra purified water at less than standard rates to ships putting in for supply. Thinking about it we may no longer need to charge to take effluent, and that will bring more trade for us. I reckon if we take effluent as a free service it’ll take us a matter of a few months to fill the system, certainly it’ll be done in well less than a year. I can’t see it happening for many a year, but if we ever reach the point where we can’t use all the fertilisers there are plenty of planets and asteroids being terraformed in the local galaxies that would be more than willing to buy it. After all we don’t have to turn a profit on it, just break even. The grain planet that took our bulk sewage from the tankers would take it, and it’s a hell of a sight less trouble and costly to transport fifty thousand litres of solid fertiliser than a million litres of effluent. We could trade it as a direct swap for grain. Too, it’s just occurred to me that that is a hell of a water reserve in case of dire emergency.”

Vast quantities of water were continually pumped up to level with the tops of the emergents to fill the uppermost lake, and the walkway crossed over the water with its upper surface above the water by no more than a millimetre. By design occasionally a few millimetres of water washed over the walkway which produced squeals of delight from children. The shellfish that inhabited the lake were filter feeders and removed small organisms both flora and fauna and organic detritus too from the water thus maintaining its clarity. Most of such originated from the plants that lived in and around the waters mostly around and in the lower lakes. Currently none of the shellfish were larger than ten centimetres [4 inches] across but with time they would reach somewhere between a metre and twelve hundred millimetres [3-4 feet] across. In the possible event of the shellfish being too effective as they grew and removing too much of the microscopic life from the water it was planned to effect a by pass filter system such that rather than as at present where all the water was pumped up to feed the shellfish lake, an adjustable proportion of it would be pumped up into the shellfish lake and the rest deluged directly to the lake below.

The shellfish were spectacularly attractive. Daniel had been told that the Cookies who’d collected them had spent an entire weekend collecting the brightest and most beautiful looking ones of around twenty-five millimetres in size. They were a bivalve, though they shared no ancestry with any Earth bivalve, originating somewhere in the outer reaches of the Orion arm. They had grown rapidly once established in the lake and were still doing so. They would not, the Cookies said they’d been told, be sexually mature for two or three years, so it would probably be five or six years before any could be harvested as a sustainable meat resource. In appearance they were like a huge, rainbow coloured scallop and they simultaneously swam and fed by rapidly opening and closing their shells which propelled them in the direction of the hinge that connected their shell halves. They swam in shoals and hundreds could be seen from very close range some almost gliding their way under one’s feet on the walkway and others to its sides.

The overflow from the emergents level lake was a torrent of water in free fall for fifty metres [165 feet] before landing on what appeared to be a glass island which caused the water to spray back up into the air before falling to feed the lake whose transparent bottom was just over the heads of the walkers on the walkway immediately below it. After its spectacular fifty metre fall, the locally reduced gravity made the water spray much farther back up into the air than expected. Its return to the lake initially almost as a mist that gradually coalesced into water as it fell was even more impressive than one would have expected for under the reduced gravity it seemed to take forever to return to the lake. That was all at the rain forest canopy layer level and advice from experts was being sought as regards further increases in bio complexity for the layer. Especially it was desired to establish fauna of some description that could eventually be harvested for meat. It was desired to acquire animals that did not move too quickly, not to facilitate harvesting them, but to enhance visitor enjoyment.

On the walkway under the lake it made no difference as to what could be seen whether the walker was a member of a diminutive species, the smallest known averaged maybe sixty centimetres [2 feet] tall as an adult, whilst the tallest would be around five metres [16½ feet], for the walkway was very wide under the lake and the base of the lake across the walkway sloped to accommodate appropriate head room for all to watch the denizens above them which were a bottom dwelling catfish of some kind from a recently settled multi species inhabited world that was known to reach five metres in length, though currently the largest in the lake was not yet a metre [3 feet] long. The lake also was home to what looked like a surface swimming flatfish that swam up from maybe a foot down to break the surface and launch themselves into the air after the constant trickle of flakes of dried food that had been synthesised to mimic the flies the creatures lived on in their natural environment. The cold blooded creatures weren’t fish, but were referred to as flying fish just to provide the visitors and the children with something to call them.

A walkway a metre above the water provided a view of the flying fish and small portions of the feed flakes were provided for children to feed them with. The walkway passed by the centre of the lake where there was a small island that was somewhere to house a small natural stone looking building that contained a host of electronic equipment that controlled the lighting and regulated the pumps. It also controlled the fish feed flake trickler. The island was surrounded by dense growths of what appeared to be cattail reeds, or at least the stems and leaves did. The fruiting body at the top of the stems looked to be of similar colour and texture as a cattail but was a ten centimetre [4 inch] spherical object rather than a cylindrical object. The reeds provided a considerable quantity of edible vegetable material. As a result of the descending water torrent the air was moist to the point where it was like walking through rain clouds high up in mountains, and condensing water ran off the walkway to drain into the lake fifty metres below.

From the catfish lake again the water overflowed, but not as a free falling torrent this time. This time the water flowed as a series of gentle cascades over what was essentially a huge series of waterfalls that had been constructed from transparent materials delivering their water to yet another lake with far less force than the torrent into the lake that fed them. The lake fed by the cascades was at the rain forest’s understory layer level and the illumination had been arranged to imitate dappled sun and shade. Another walkway travelled across the centre of the lake enabling walkers to see the huge multi coloured carp under their feet and just to the walkway side, though there was a short spur that took one behind the cascades and enabled one to see through the rapidly descending water. Once the carp had been removed from their previously much smaller home to the aerial lake and fed more they’d rapidly grown and one or two were above a metre [40 inches] in length which it was presumed was their ultimate size.

Several species of water plants shared the lake with the carp and they seemed to have struck a natural balance with the carp, for the carp constantly browsed on the plants upon which treatment the plants seemed to thrive, presumably Daniel considered due to the nutrients derived from the fish manure. Despite their size the carp were a gentle species that would delicately take feed from between the walkers’ fingers and children of all species loved them. At the edges of the lake and growing on the ‘banks’ were large numbers of shrubs and bushes from all over the universe. All had been selected for their utility as food crops though one species of bush provided leaves that when steeped in boiling water produced a beverage said to be remarkably like Terran tea. The Cookies referred to the beverage as chah and said the name like the beverage originated from their original homeland, China, before they went to California. They had many tales of when they lived in California, but few remained of when their ancestors had lived in China.

The outfall from the carp lake fell through a pipe turning a turbine generator that powered the lights, many of which were under water, that enabled the walkers to see the denizens of the lakes in great detail. The inhabitants of the lowest lake, which was down on the rain forest floor layer level, were neither fin fish nor shell fish, for they were not fish at all. They were over a dozen species of what were referred to as amphibians. They came from many sources over the universe, many travelling to Ayce as tiny immature larvae, and could be said to encompass frogs, toads, newts and salamanders, though most were not related to any of those. The only one known to be from Earth, many generations back, was the axolotl and all were currently fifty or so centimetres long. There appeared to be four different axolotls, black, pure white with pink eyes, pink with dark eyes and very pale with black eyes. However, all were said to be the same species and they would inter breed, time alone would tell.

All of the amphibians were big, some were two and a half metres [6½ feet] long. Even the smallest of the creatures were maybe thirty centimetres in every direction. They were frog or toad like creatures that originated from somewhere in or around Coma Berenices, that in spite of having eyes that were no bigger than the head of a pin were said to be able to see in nearly total darkness. They’d all been selected for their edibility and visibility for visitors. They were relatively slow moving and most were almost stationary when eating. None preyed on any of the others and all were happy to be fed a diet of mixed synth meat from the synthesisers and some vegetable material from both the synthesisers and the dome grown vegetable materials. Many of the amphibian like creatures were brightly coloured and though all were edible there was no intention as yet to harvest them for meat, for they brought visitors with credits to spend. Nowhere else could be found such a collection of creatures all in one place.

Construction had begun on another such lakes and walkways arrangement, though significantly larger, in biodome dome forty-two, itself still under construction. The entire biodome was going to be home to the lakes and walkways arrangement and for maximum structural integrity all had to be built together. The trees, vines, lianas, shrubs and bushes had been on their way to Ayce for months though some of the more primitive non flowering plants for the floor and the understory were not available yet, but plant hunters were out looking for them. Much to the delight of the environmental engineers a good variety of so called air plans and others that grew on trees had not long since been boxed up and had started their journey to what would be their new home. One of the places where the Cookies’ plant hunters had sourced most of the emergents, the canopy trees and much else had tropical forests with a soft swampy forest floor. There were many plants that lived in and around natural ponds and the plant hunters were still working to provide a comprehensive collection including tanks of pond water complete with all the small and microscopic life that entailed. The Cookies were trying to arrange for a particularly rapid transport for the water and pond life.

Daniel had put the word out amongst the Cookies that he would appreciate some Beluga sturgeon which were now widely distributed across many galaxies, though unfortunately none were anywhere near to Ayce. He’d received a message back that a tank of probably ten thousand fingerlings was on its way to him, but it could take as long as five years for them to arrive. Their transport was being negotiated and orchestrated on the run by someone who understood the creatures and was managing their environment and feeding carefully so they didn’t grow too quickly in transit and outgrow the tank. He subsequently was informed it would probably be eighteen months rather than five years due to a very helpful captain of a military heavy cruiser, and if possible it would be appreciated if a kilo of best coffee could be provided. The Cookies would ensure it reached him as quickly as possible. Daniel handed the coffee and a copy of the message over to a Cookie on a light cruiser in for supply that afternoon. “Should reach him in three or four months, Dan Dan,” he’d been told.

The original message had also said if the fish handler could obtain work on Ayce the Cookies would be grateful as they owed the woman a favour and she’d expressed interest in living there. Daniel had replied, “That’s no problem at all. It’s the least I can do. I’ll be more than happy to employ her as an animal or fish keeper environmentalist if she likes the idea. I’m seriously short of folk seeking work of that kind.” Even if he hadn’t have been short of such folk he’d have offered her a job to repay his debts. Daniel had wished to acquire the Beluga sturgeon in order to harvest the universally known luxury product caviar. It was several centuries since it had been discovered how to naturally harvest the fabulous product without in any way harming the fish. Had that not been the case he would have had no interest in the sturgeon. He had no problem producing foie gras via his synthesisers but had always said that had the only source been geese as the product was produced centuries ago he would have refused to be involved.

Ayce was hardly a tourist resort, but solitary spacers and those who travelled with their families admitted that it was worth going out of their way to supply there rather than a station nearer to where they were at the time, for there weren’t many supply stations where one could take a holiday. Captains of larger vessels with substantial crew numbers, both civilian and military, admitted that it was worth travelling considerable distances out of their way to supply there and to stay for a couple of weeks longer than strictly necessary due to what they considered to be the vast improvement in crew morale. Teams seemed to get along better after a couple of weeks at Ayce, and even crew couples married to each other seemed to do so too. Daniel’s team of environmental engineers routinely hooked up all ships’ atmospheres to the biodomes’ as part of the service thus taking their stale, endlessly reprocessed and chemically scrubbed metallic tasting air and giving the ships a free air exchange that was complete with enhanced oxygen levels within twenty-four hours. Many of the ships regarded that as worth spending a fortune on and yet it cost nothing. Daniel’s view was, “It costs us nothing, but the goodwill and favours we can call upon in return are beyond price.”

Too the cost of emptying ships’ effluent tanks at Ayce was far cheaper than doing so anywhere else, for whilst not free of charge, as Daniel had suggested at one point, it was a service provided at cost. It had been decided to pass on costs, not because it was necessary, but because anything that was free rapidly became taken for granted which would lead to poor relationships with no respect. Daniel maintained that folk didn’t take advantage of what they had to pay for. All of which eventually put credits in the pockets of traders based at Ayce and improved the finances of the station itself. From Daniel’s point of view taking the ships’ effluent was something Ayce was paid for twice, once the direct price in credits for selling the ultra purified water, the price of which at around seventy-five percent of the going rate at most supply stations was a major attraction to all ships of whatever size whether civilian or military, and the second time was its value as fertiliser which his engineers turned into vegetables to feed station personnel and sold at very reasonable prices to vessels calling in for supply. Some was sold fresh but a lot more was sold processed and vacuum packed as MREs. Daniel had explained to his staff. “A major benefit of us growing our own vegetable matter is what we can grow we can analyse and then synthesise. Since the taste of all vegetables changes as they grow from seedling to maturity we can sample a new vegetable at all stages of growth for analysis and then synthesise any or all of the vegetable tastes as is appropriate.”

Daniel had written it all up as a series of papers in The Universal Engineer, which was published on the Datablock and read by engineers of all descriptions across all known space, rather than in a botany journal, and all of his projects had rapidly become standard targets in all stations, closed habitats and some of the largest military vessels too with hopes to complete them over the next decade. Much of his food synthesiser work was freely available, but most of his best work he kept to himself, including naturally enough his analyser designs and coffee synthesiser programming. Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick had never met Daniel and had only co responded with him via the station’s communication system. She understood he was said to be reclusive, he didn’t drink, he didn’t socialise and as far as any knew he’d never bothered with females, males, or any other. Seemingly he spent most of his time, both on and off the station work clock, with machines and the organisms of his eco systems.

Daniel was known to have said that he didn’t work for the station, it was his life and he lived on it and for it, for it was what he enjoyed doing. Too, he was rarely to be found at home and even more rarely answered his communication unit. Few other than his immediate team of engineers knew how to contact him quickly and they knew better than to let any else know. Juno had told her, “Daniel doesn’t work on Ayce, he’s an integral part of it, so as such I just leave him alone. On the rare occasions when we interact he contacts me or rarer still comes to talk to me to tell me what he is doing or going to do and why. I don’t worry about what he is planning on spending and I doubt if he would know because for sure he won’t have taken the time to find out. I don’t bother because however much it is it will be nothing compared with the credits he has already put into the station’s economy, which pales into insignificance compared with what his future projects, that is the ones I know about, will put into it.”

Daniel’s return message to the judge was terse and she received it just after breakfast. ‘I’ve done my homework on the Draconairi girls. I’ll take them in, foster them, even adopt them, whatever they choose, but it’s got to be their choice. Not mine. Not yours. Theirs, and they have to say it to my face, both of them. I live in the biodomes and I have no intention of moving to live anywhere else, so if they come to live with me it’ll have to be out here. I’ll be in biodome sixteen all day and most of the evening. If they’re interested send them down and we’ll talk about it.’ Which was apparently more words on anything other than engineering topics than he usually went through in a month. Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick went to talk to the girls. She shewed them her message that she’d sent to the forty-two engineers and explained she’d sent it to engineers because they tended to be reclusive which would be good for their safety. She was honest and told them about the responses. Most folk, she said, were just not interested and some she explained had said they’d look after them but were only interested in what they would be paid for doing so. There was, she said, only one person, a human male, who’d expressed interest in caring for them as his children.

“He’s a very reclusive person whom I have never met and he lives somewhere in the biodomes. Ayce is not a deployment for him. It is his permanent home. The records shew him as having gone to school here from the age of eight, though there are rumours that he lied about his age and was only just turned four. Anyway, however old he was by that time he was fluent and literate in the dozen or more most common languages in this part of the universe. He has lived here ever since. His extensive education was all distance learning undertaken with major inter galactically recognised engineering schools, the best available, from here, and it was all done on full scholarships. He may even have been born here, no one knows, for the records weren’t too well kept in those days and he won’t talk about his life. He has turned down out of hand all offers of work elsewhere, some of it for fabulous salaries, for he says there is work enough and more for him here which is where he enjoys living. Most of his salary remains untouched in his account with the station accountants. His name is Daniel McCade and he works particularly with food synthesisers, atmospheric cleaners and the plants and animals in the biodomes.”

The girls had looked at each other with tears in their eyes when told about the lack of responses, but when Daniel’s name was mentioned they looked at each other with excitement on their faces and said together, “Dan Dan Mech Mac‽”

“You know him?”

“Everyone at school knows him! He never says much, but he’s really nice. On a school trip last year he let our entire class feed the fish and they took food from between our fingers. He shewed us how to program the synthesisers for Bellarin mint and chocolate chip ice cream as a present for our first birthday on Ayce. He said he’ll look after us? Like a dad? And keep us safe from the boys?”

Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick shewed the girls his message and watched the looks on their faces change from excitement to awe as they nodded. One of them, to her embarrassment Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick had never learnt to tell them apart, asked, “When can we go? Now?”

The other asked, “May we go on our own? Please?”

“I see no reason why not, but I insist on a member of security escorting you as far as biodome sixteen. You’ll be safe once there. I’ll tell security to escort you back if you need to return, just contact them if necessary, and let me know within a few days what is happening please.”

The girls waited for their escort who was amused as, despite her height, she had to take long strides to keep up with them as they hurried off leaving the administrative area behind them. Any number of young males dogged the group’s tracks as they walked through the busy central hub section of the station which was essentially a retail area, but they didn’t approach because the massive Margite security woman was intimidating. Some of the younger boys fell away as they left the retail area behind them, but a few more older boys joined the others as they entered the residential arm. The boys stayed with them as they walked through the industrial area before finally reaching the biodomes area. Dome sixteen was somewhere in the middle of the forty-odd domes. The Margite keyed the security panel with her palm print that opened the door to the biodome and allowed the girls to enter. Once the massive security air lock door had relocked behind the girls she smiled at the disappointed young males and left to resume her patrol through the retail business area.

It was to be five days before Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick was contacted by Gennialla, “We are being looked after by Dan Dan. We don’t wish to be fostered or adopted. We are very happy. The food here is exceptional. Thank you, Your Honour.”

Two days later Gellianna messaged, “He can’t be as old as you said, for he wasn’t old enough to resist us, and we don’t wish to resist him because he smells heavenly, so we wish to marry Dan Dan. When we asked him he said yes. We have attached the forms all duly signed by all three of us, so please register them. From our point of view a downside is that he insists that we continue going to school, but we know at least he can tell us apart! Unlike nearly everyone else! Just for us he swapped a jar of his own coffee with a spacer he knows from Bellaria for a Bellarin mint plant. The leaves are tastier than sweeties [candies] to eat. We’d no idea that grown up bedtime was so much fun when you’re married. You should try it.” Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick’s very surprised first thought was ‘That didn’t take them long, did it‽’ Her second thought was, ‘At least that’s a permanent solution to that problem.’ Silvi, who been married for over a century, smiled at Gellianna’s last remark as it brought back wonderful memories of when she and Clari Ssha Pen Marri Stick had been newly weds and had spent half a year trying it at every opportunity before the imperative cooled a little. As a result a year and a half later they’d both given birth to their first litters. They subsequently came to believe their initial mating urges were a consequence of their nesting drives for offspring.

A month later Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick received a message from Daniel, “My wives are both thrilled to be expecting and we went to see Sarah Calm Sure Hands who said all is well and she wishes to see them at monthly intervals unless they have any concerns when she will see them immediately. Regards their trust funds, we neither need nor want the money. When the children are born we all want it to be transferred into funds for them. I know legally I am now their trustee, so I have a legal right to access their funds, but it’s much more interesting just being their husband. I’ve advised the girls to ask Juno to continue to manage the funds on their behalfs. I’ve told the girls that she will obviously wish to hear that from them as well as from me and that you will prefer you have that in writing too, so I’ll ask Juno to prepare an official notification for us all to sign. We trust Juno, so she can decide what a reasonable fee should be for managing the trusts, and whilst she’s at it she can deal with my account too. It’ll all get out eventually, so may be it’s best to put out a media release now. If you don’t mind I’ll leave that to you. We have applied to Juno for a much bigger dwelling in Biodome eighteen because it’s the quietest and most private dome because it’s not open to the public. It’s where all our research is done, so we need the security. We wish a dwelling big enough for a family because we all intend to live here and my wives have said they wish at least four children each. I can’t resist them so so be it.”

Silvi Anna Pen Marri Stick thought that over the years she’d seen and heard it all, but she was surprised when Juno Kim Shield Ledger said to her a few days later, “The girls have quit most of their courses at the station school to study environmental engineering degrees with Alpha Academics distance learning school, though they are still taking the station school’s language courses, and the USL scientific paper writing course, mostly I suspect for the social interactions with their peers now that they feel safe since the boys ignore them due to the pheromones having faded to a level such that only Daniel is aware of them. I find it amusing that after Daniel rewrote a large part of Alpha’s most recent undergraduate environmental engineering syllabus he became a part time senior lecturer with them. He’s been doing it for two or three years now. Which means the girls are married to the best course tutor available and live, study and work in what must surely be the largest fully studied and documented environmental engineering project in the universe.

“There are larger complexes of biodomes elsewhere, but none of them are subject to the rigour of academic scrutiny and documented in such detail the way ours is, and as far as I am aware none are as integrated into their environment’s air recycling facilities nor into their environment’s sewage management system, though I’ve heard that numerous corporate complexes are looking into such matters, mainly I suspect because it saves a fortune rather than out of any consideration of employee welfare. Once Alpha realised the girls were married to Daniel all course fees were waived which is hardly surprising. All three of them are truly happy and say they have no need of their millions of credits, and we are all extremely lucky they wish to live here. Till they graduate I am paying them as senior interns because despite being pregnant they spend all their spare time working in the biodomes. They didn’t want the money but I told them they needed some to buy things for their children which they hadn’t considered and found exciting. A big dwelling in the biodomes is nothing to pay to ensure such as they remain here is it? The girls say that flying whilst heavily pregnant is exhausting but Sarah Calm Sure Hands, their xeno medi obgyn, says by flying to school in the morning and back home again in the afternoon they are doing enough to count as appropriate exercise without over doing things given their conditions.”

Juno shrugged and added, “Things could have been a lot worse, Silvi. We could have lost the best coffee synthesiser engineer in the entire universe if he’d gone on the run, and then this place would have been hell to keep calm. Darri jokes that the coffee is doing the job of five hundred security staff. To be honest I’m extremely grateful to those Draconairi pheromones. Darri had been saying for a while that given the way the population of this place is increasing we’ll be adding extra arms to the station soon if not an entire new outer ring as well, which will more than triple the station’s size, so he wasn’t in the least surprised when the idea was tabled. He’s sent home to Marga for some more folk interested in security work. There’ll be any number wishful to leave for the same reasons Darri and I left, but I suspect relatively few will be interested in security work here because there is not usually enough happening, which is exactly how he likes it. He said an extra couple of hundred wouldn’t go amiss even if all they do is direct lost spacers to where they wish to go. And there’re more than enough credits in the security kitty to cover the cost.” The judge nodded in agreement, for she had a huge respect for her friend Juno who rarely misinterpreted events, and Darri Kane Shield Ledger, Juno’s husband and the head of the station’s security, though a cautious man was exceedingly good at his job. If he believed they needed more security then it was certain that they did, and she’d rather by far that they were on the station too early than too late. The cost was irrelevant.

Smiling Silvi filled their coffee drinkers and they both smiled as they drank the truly remarkable beverage. “I’ve been told by Daniel he advised the girls to ask you to set your own fee for managing their trusts.”

“Yes and he wants me to manage his account too, but I asked instead for permission to invest some of the trust credits and his account in the station itself. It will be an excellent long term investment for them and provide the station with some much needed short term liquidity especially when the enlargements to the station begin in six months, the exact date of commencement has yet to be agreed with the constructors, but the planners need to come to several decisions before that can happen. Daniel and his family told me that I could do what I considered best with their credits and just to pay his salary straight into the station, which effectively means just not paying him, leaving the money where it is and writing a couple of ledger entries.”

“Some will say that is over generous of you giving up your fee as fund manager. Too, if the return is initially low some will see that as you taking advantage of them, on the other hand if it is initially high those same folk will say you are shewing them undue favouritism, Juno.”

“I know, but if I just leave the credits in typical slow growth but safe in the short term trust fund investments and don’t do something better for them in terms of long term growth I’ll be accused of poor fund management. No matter what I do someone will accuse me of something just because they’ve nothing better to do, so I’ll put out a statement before I do anything which will cut some of the ground out from underneath their feet. My answer to any and all accusations will be based on the same facts. I see it as a long term investment for the girls as per their instructions to do the best for them that I can, and as for generosity, no, it’s just me acting in my long term interest too. For like them I’m not on deployment. We live here, it’s our home, it’s where we reared our children and it’s where we shall retire. Anything that is in the interests of Ayce is in our interests too. Given what Darri believes concerning the growth of Ayce as a community I’m seriously thinking of making some shares in the station available to staff who have made their homes here.

“Maybe I’ll offer to pay their bonuses in shares, especially in the expansion of the station, but I’m only interested in folk who see Ayce as home because I don’t want the place owned nor controlled by outsiders, so if shareholders move away they’ll have to sell their shares back and I could make it so they can only use them to vote with here in person. No proxy votes. I’ve not got it all sorted out in my head, but I’ve not really put a great deal of thought into it yet. Ayce was set up and paid for by those of us who wanted a place to live free of the petty bureaucrats who made our lives hell where we lived before, yet didn’t want to spend our entire lives living on board a ship not much bigger than a flying coffin. We all sank everything we owned into it and it was very slow and hard work in the beginning. None of us will risk the station becoming like the places we left.” Silvi though not one of the initial investors had joined the group just a year later and like them had sunk her entire fortune into the venture. For many years the investors had continued to work hard for no more than board and lodging, and it was only in the last few decades that their investment and hard work had begun to pay off. Now it was paying handsomely and looked likely to make them all very wealthy. Thoughtfully she just nodded in agreement.

Juno continued, “The construction engineering architects are drawing up several different versions of the expansion of the station. All end with the same result but the various station additions are built in different orders over different time frames. I’m favouring just going for the whole lot in one go making as much of the new construction usable as soon as possible. It’ll be tight for credits but the military say they are interested in a lot more both in terms of accommodation for marines and docking facilities for ships. They know what’s in the wind and are prepared to assist financially in return for various deals in the future, all of which are eminently reasonable, but unfortunately neither we nor they have enough information to proceed as yet. However, we are both satisfied with declarations of intent, for we’ve never had problems dealing with each other in the past. The first construction will be the temporary extension to the refectory which is to be constructed alongside the existing refectory from prefabricated sections. We need that in place so as to be able to feed the huge numbers of construction workers as soon as they arrive. Once the Cookies say the new refectory is satisfactory the extension will be taken down and the sections reused elsewhere.

“Daniel says we can afford to offer all ships emptying of effluent tanks at cost for ever and will be able to make good use of the fertilisers for years, but he wishes to negotiate a special reduction in price to the military for water. He’s discussing it with their senior quartermaster, Elek Bosun Weapon Store, at the moment, but they agree nothing can be finalised till there is more information available. The military are happy to wait and just pay the current price till things become clearer. The ordering of the construction is being discussed with the military so as to be able to feed all their personnel taking part in their exercises which will take place a couple of months after the expansion of the station begins. They’ve shake down manœuvres taking place with all their recently commissioned vessels including the new flagship as well as the usual war games exercises. That means possibly twice as many personnel as usual. The Cookies are calling for more of their kin to assist in preparing the MREs that will be required so as not to short any of our usual customers. They are also asking for volunteers to cook on the military vessels for the duration of the exercises. I’m told that hundreds of them are already making their way here mostly on military vessels, but as usual they’ll work their passage, not that any could keep them out of a galley. Some of the military vessels are going to act as temporary MRE storage pantries and delivery ships till the exercises are over. That’s not fully organised yet but there won’t be any issues, and in any case that’s down to the military, not us.

“Once the construction gets under way the current plan is to rehome all the offices and production facilities as well as all the personnel that occupy everything around the biodomes such that the entire arm and the ones on each side of it are allocated to more biodomes. With the extra personnel we’ll need the food, and we’re selling more to vessels in for supply every month that goes by. The station planners, the military planners and our environmental engineering team are brainstorming things at the moment. The latest innovation is the military are discussing the details of resiting one of their medium size weapons production sites to here. It’ll be staffed by anything from two thousand to maybe seven thousand of their personnel, but they’ll need feeding and will spend credits here. Darri and I are both in favour of the idea and it’s just a question of the military deciding how they wish to handle their security. Though he’s not been told anything officially Darri has heard whispers that sharp practice by one of the corporations has pissed the military off again and they’re reacting by dealing with us because we deal straight.

They all say another month and they’ll have thrashed out enough of the outline for the construction teams to make a start, and the weapons production machines are already being dismantled from their previous site and crated up ready for transport to here. If need be the military say the entire lot could be netted and slung between two of the station’s arms with a twenty-four seven guard detail on the stuff. I’m okay with that. There’s no cost to it and I’ve said we’ll even feed their guards out there if it suits. Commodore Naan Battle has said that she’s asking for more fighter craft to act as security for the increased military presence here and the weapons production site too. She also added that she’s recently heard whispers that with going on for sixty million litres of potable water here we’ve become a very desirable target for organised pirate gangs and in her mind that means the corporate crooks are behind it. As a result she’s now talking with her superiors about enlarging the naval presence here with a few extra heavy cruisers, a considerable number of light cruisers and a couple of hundred extra fighters. The military high ups are coming to the view that with the station being near enough in the centre of the Zeta void vessels here are strategically positioned to head off into any direction where there’s trouble, and whilst they’re here there’s no over extension of their supply chain.

“Changing the subject, what I find most interesting is the responses we’re getting to the aerial walkways which started as just something that would provide easy accesses to maintain the lakes which were just fancy ways to increase gas exchange to clean the atmosphere. Daniel naturally enough saw the water as places to host sources of protein both vegetable and animal. The tourist aspect developed almost by accident, but it’s attracting folk to visit here rather than going to nearer stations, and wealthy folk are bringing their children from considerable distances and making extended stays, some as long as their children’s entire long school holiday which can be as long as eight weeks. Now he has the staff who suggested and installed the hand rails in order that the tourists could use the walkways dedicated to developing the tourism angle on everything his team does. Too, the station school is now running environmental awareness classes focussing in particular upon the station’s environment and how we can develop it further with a view to attracting more visitors and bringing credits to benefit all of us.

“Those classes were initially aimed at the station’s older kids. I know it sounds almost ridiculous, but some of the visitor kids want to attend some of the environment classes as part of their holiday. I told the school to just go with it for free and if they needed any more staff or funding to just hire the staff and to let me know about the funding required and I’d deal with it. A number of the older station children are intending to take up part time jobs with Daniel’s staff and study appropriate degree courses part time after they leave school. Alpha Academics has expressed interest in providing the courses of study in a flexible way such the the students can study around their employment requirements. It means that the remote classes will have to have a higher proportion of AI monitored content rather than tutor interaction content, so as to be able to provide the flexibility, but all involved are convinced that it can be made to work even if it takes the students a little longer to graduate. Daniel is already working on some of the practical coursework content. Alpha want to purchase rights to use whatever he develops and he’s told that’ll be fine and he told me to just put it into his money in the station.”

The war games exercises were a huge success from the military’s point of view. The newly commissioned ships’ shake down exercises had done what they were supposed to do which was to expose any thing that needed altering in any way be that ship’s equipment or command structures. From Ayce’s point of view it had served to streamline the supply operations in a way that improved things for the cooking staff all the way through to the loading staff who worked in the stations docking area. Relationships between the military and the station management which had always been excellent improved even further. The on line questionnaire that the Cookies had had the station administration provide for every member of the military personnel who wished to express their opinions on the MREs had provided the Cookies with feedback the quality of which they’d never had before and they’d subsequently altered the proportions of what they provided to suit each vessel. That the military had made it mandatory for all personnel to fill in had probably not been necessary, but it was to be mandatory during every such set of exercises in the future. When merchantmen personnel had asked to be able to express an opinion too the questionnaire had been opened to all civilian vessel personnel.

It was usual for Draconairi women to give birth to identical twins and Daniel’s wives ran true to form despite his human DNA. The ultra sound scans indicated all four babies were female. When the babies, all girls as predicted, were born their pictures were posted on the Ayce network. Like their father they had blonde hair and blue eyes and like their mothers they had wings and were maturing very rapidly. Juno sighed as she realised that what Silvi had considered to have been a permanent solution to the problem of the girls’ pheromones had just deferred the problems, for the complexities she could see arising over the next decade or so were if anything even worse, but she was certain even if it took her to the edge of a nervous breakdown all would resolve itself well. Somehow‽ In the meanwhile she would speak with the one of the construction crew bosses with a view to putting something into place that would prevent four flying infants from being able to escape unnoticed from the station crèche which would also require extra surveillance cameras both in and around it.

The babies’ mothers had given notice that they intended to nurse their infants, so at least making up formula and bottle feeding flying babies they would have to catch first wasn’t going to be an issue for the crèche staff. Sarah Calm Sure Hands had told Juno that the crèche staff had been extremely grateful that the babies’ mothers were planning to deal with their feeding themselves. One totally unforeseen benefit of the girls’ pregnancies had been Daniel asking how the infants of other species were fed at the crèche. The complexities of making up formula breast milk for numerous different species which had widely different nutritional requirements had astonished him. “That’s ridiculous and far too much work that the crèche staff don’t need to be doing. Just provide one of my laboratory staff with samples of fresh mothers’ milk, or better I’ll send a couple of the lab staff, women would be be a more sensitive choice, down to the crèche to get the samples and explain what they’ll need and when. Too, for the non mammalian species if my staff are provided with samples of whatever it is that the youngsters need it’ll be no more difficult for the synthesisers to provide that than it will be for them to provide milk.

“Breast milk changes in composition as infants grow so we’ll need samples weekly from birth for maybe a month, then at monthly intervals for a year or so. I’m no expert but the lab women will know what they need and when in order to provide the best possible care for the infants. I’ll order in an extra synthesizer or better two and when I fit them with the analyser modifications I’ll program them as dedicated for the crèche. If I deliberately don’t enable them to produce anything else no one will try to borrow one pleading some kind of emergency. The analysis and programming will only need doing once for each species. All the crèche staff will then have to do is enter the species and the infants age and the synthesiser will do the rest.” For once it really had been that simple. Daniel wrote it up as a paper and published it as open source copyright free material available to any to use but not to profit from doing so. The paper was published in all the usual environmental engineering journals and Universal Mother & Offspring, the xeno medi obgyn journal too.

Daniel had been astonished by his wives breasts which had ballooned within forty-eight hours of giving birth. Their sylph like figures had returned to what they had been with no evidence of stretch marks due to pregnancy, but their baby bumps seemed to have moved uphill by about a foot and a half before dividing in two. Gellianna said, “It’s normal and once the babies are weaned everything will return to how it was. Till, that is of course, you provide us with our boys.”

Gennialla added, “Mum told us that this was what happens. She was very elegant and slender, but she said she looked like a flying ore cart when she was pregnant with us and she’d had to lean backwards in reduced gravity to stay upright when she was nursing us.”

Daniel said, “You sounded very certain that you will have boys next time. I can’t guarantee that.”

Gellianna replied, “No you can’t, but we can. We wanted girls this time, so we had girls. The sex of a pair of babies is determined by the nature of the fertilising sperm and there are always plenty of them of both sexes to choose from. Once in an emotionally stable relationship Draconairi females can choose a prime quality one of which ever sex they wish just by thinking about it. We can even choose not to choose at all and not become pregnant. Next time we want boys. After that we’ll take a break whilst we consider when and if we wish any more.”

Daniel shook his head in wonder, and asked, “Does Sarah know that you can control the sex of your offspring and now you are married even whether or not fertilisation occurs?” Sarah Calm Sure Hands was the chief xeno medi obgyn on the station. Typically for a member of the mammalian Torvax species she had phenomenal senses with eyes that could see well beyond the spectrum available to humans, and most other species too, in very low levels of illumination. Her hearing extended in both directions beyond the typical frequency range for humans and others too, again even when sound levels were so low others considered the environment to be totally silent. At almost four feet [1·2m] she was tall for a Torvax, who tended to average three feet six [1·05m] and she had the typical, huge eyes and funnel shaped, dirigible ears that were almost as large as her head. She also had four arms which all had hands with six fingers and an opposable thumb at each side of the fingers. She also had a phenomenal sense of smell which like all of her species in the health care businesses she used as a very powerful diagnostic aid.

Gellianna replied, “She didn’t, but she does now. I was surprised that she didn’t. It’s easily available information. I came across it on Galactopaedia when I was looking up how soon after giving birth we would be fertile again. About eight weeks, a full cycle, it said, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep practising till then. Whoops, I hear trouble. Time to change nappies and feed the babies, Sister. Daniel will prepare coffee please?”

Juno and Darri had been asked by Commodore Naan Battle to attend what had been described as a working lunch with several senior military figures normally resident on Ayce for at least half the time. Darri had heard various whispers concerning recent events the military had been involved in and had told Juno that several of the station’s senior engineers of various specialities had been invited to attend too. However, the purpose of the meeting was a shock when it had been revealed. Commodore Naan Battle had started the ball rolling by asking, “Doubtless you’ll all have heard of the pirate station we took over last month?” There were nods of agreement, but nobody said anything. “It’s a large facility, probably ten times as large as Ayce, originally constructed for the Pegasus Corporation. When they went bankrupt their assets were auctioned off, and at the time we believed that the station had been bought by one of the other major corporations, which we still believe it may have been. It’s entirely possible that the pirates who put up the purchase credits were all employees of one of the corporations. The banking records don’t help. They shew the credits as having been put up by half a dozen pirate warlords for lack of a better term. That would have been about ten years ago.

“For us taking it over was a difficult operation. Our usual tactics of obliteration used hereabouts weren’t possible for two reasons. One it was illegal there at the time, though to be honest that wouldn’t have bothered us overmuch because Fleet Admiral George Penshaw who is in command of the fifth fleet to which we belong had said, “If we make a mistake we can always apologise afterwards. Only the gutter press who are in the pockets of the corporations which probably means in those of the pirates too will be over bothered because every civilian who lives within a good many parsecs of the station has lived a life of sheer hell since the pirates took the place over.” We only decided to take the station over because the activities of the pirates were so widespread in the sector and they had the station to run to every time they had a sniff of any of our ships in the area. The fact is that any semblance of rule of law had broken down. However, the second reason was far more significant to us. There was a huge population of women and kids living on the station. Sure their men and fathers deserved obliteration, but they didn’t. They were strictly non combatants and I don’t know of a marine willing to do that sort of killing, or of an officer willing to order them to do so. All my troops would cheerfully make them all widows and orphans, but harm them no.

“So it had to be a carefully planned board and storm exercise. The planning and weapons development for the operation took over two years. We had a couple of thousand heavy ships surrounding the station, and thousands more farther out in case any pirate ships managed to escape the station docks. They had orders to obliterate any escaping vessels and if there were any women and kids aboard we’d have to live with it. All our nearer vessels were loaded with long range armour piecing torpedos that had been developed especially for the job. The torpedos were loaded with some kind of knock down compound that the boffins guaranteed us would keep every species known out of it for a minimum of six hours with no long term effects. They also contained some sort of stuff that made the air look like it was full of dense smoke that was impossible to see through. The marines wore some special goggles that enabled them to see through the smoke in case not all the pirates were out cold. There was some kind of fancy bit of engineering tacked on the the back of the torpedos that sealed their entry hole once they were through the station hull preventing loss of atmosphere and the smoke too.

We sailed up to the maximum possible distance that the torpedos were operational at. After taking some direct hits from the station which did us no damage at all we put thousands of rounds into it from every direction. That station had more holes in it than that special cheese the Cookies make that they say originated in a place on Earth called Switzerland. We all expected the adage that even the best laid plans start to unravel the moment contact is made with the enemy to operate. However, much to everyone’s surprise, for once it all did exactly what it said on the tin. We took ten thousand or so pirates off the station and sent them all to meet their makers before they woke up. Unfortunately for us the warlords who apparently put up the money all managed to take their own lives before the knock down took effect. We’d very much like to know how they did that because it denied us any information about any links with the corporations they may have had. To comply with the law the pirates were dealt with in space where it was completely legal. I believe they are now assisting an agricultural world in desperate need of nutrients for their crops.

“We had engineers patching the holes we put into the station within a matter of hours and they’d finished inside three days. After hauling off the pirates we were left with three thousand virtually naked women of a dozen and a half species and maybe ten thousand totally naked kids to deal with. Before we’d boarded we’d expected dealing with the non combatants would be a nightmare, but none of the women had gone there of their own volition, they’d all been kidnapped, passed around to be used as sex slaves and subject to forced heavy manual labour. The medics said that all the women and kids had been subject to what must have been continual physical abuse for years, and all were suffering from serious long term malnutrition. The psychs had discovered that the death rate amongst the women and kids had been horrendous and the pirates had gone raiding to replace the casualties every week. We emptied out our galley stores to feed them and our clothing stores to clothe them. They were pathetically grateful for BDUs that were far to big for their emaciated conditions. We sent for just about everything you can think of. It wasn’t good, but at least we were regarded as liberators, not as murderers who’d widowed them and orphaned their kids.

“Currently we’ve spaced in ship loads of medics and all the stuff they need and teachers with all the stuff they need. The Cookies have called up for reinforcements that we are shipping in from wherever they are. All of which is fine as interim measures. The non combatant are safe, warm, well fed and decently covered if not clothed. The kids will soon be in school and their mothers are receiving as much psych help as we can provide. The fact is we, that is the military at the most senior level, don’t want to get involved in running what is essentially a civilian station and is unsuitable to become a purely military establishment. It’s not what we’re here for, and to be honest it’s not something we’d be any good at. Too, we don’t wish to learn because we’ve got better things to be doing. Admiral Penshaw has made his views on the matter absolutely clear to me and put me in charge of cleaning up what he described as this god awful mess. He asked me for my opinions on the matter. He listened to me carefully and after a few minutes for thought he said that I was truly thinking out of the box and to just get on with it. It landed on my desk because of the relationships I have managed to establish over the years with the management of Ayce station.

“Which is why you have been invited here. The bottom line is I propose to give the Pegasus station to the Ayce management and its shareholders. For more or less the same terms that we deal with you at Ayce you can have it. You’d run it as a business the same way you run Ayce and as long as your laws are the same there as here we’ll be happy about that. Especially the laws concerning piracy. The sovereign territory will be larger than Ayce’s and we’ll be more than happy to keep it criminal free. There are bound to be a few ships crewed by unsavoury types that need obliterating left over in the area. Rats that dived down the nearest set of sewers when they got word we’d arrived, and the more of them we exterminate the better off we’ll all be. We’d want to house a much bigger base on it than at Ayce, and probably a weapons factory too, missiles and torpedos this time rather than small arms. Presuming you accept we’ll likely be offering you the same deal several times with other stations we got our eyes on cleaning the bad guys out of in the next twenty years. All I want right now is an agreement in principle and to give your experts time to think it all over and to decide what you need from us and a rough time scale as to when you’ll need it.”

Juno looked around at the station’s managerial team and the other experts for a minute and replied, “Yes. You’ve an agreement in principle. Some of my best personnel I know won’t even consider moving from Ayce. It’s their permanent home. I know none of them will have a problem providing staff and advice. Can you spare me say a week before we meet again to discuss matters. Say a working lunch here again?”

Commodore Naan Battle nodded her head and said, “There’s no rush, Take as long as you like, but I would like at least your representative in place there as soon as possible for the women and children to have a head of civilian government to relate to. We aren’t the same. We wear uniforms and I’m not prepared to tell my personnel to function without their sidearms and whatever else they normally carry. The trouble is that makes them similar in at least one respect to the scum who were always armed too. If you,” she looked at Darri, “could provide some of your security that I believe would alleviate some of that problem. Can I leave all that with you and your staff Mrs Shield Ledger, Mr Shield Ledger?”

Juno looked at Darri then nodded her head towards the Commodore saying, “That we can have organised by tomorrow if you can provide transport?”

The Commodore nodded and said, “I have a light cruiser going there after lunch loaded with a hold full of MREs they can travel on. The only other thing before were finish this excellent lunch is a new name for the place. I’d prefer Pegasus station to be a thing of the past. I could live with Ayce 2 if that’s acceptable to you?”

“Fine. Another glass of this excellent rosé, Commodore?”

Much later that evening as Juno and Darri were preparing for bed, Darri said, “Are we going to end up as a corporation, Juno?”

“Probably, but not one like any of the others. The way this is going I can’t help but wonder if the days of corporate control are numbered. Because it seems to me that is what the military are seeking. I don’t believe for a second that they can’t run stations or even planets, it’s just a matter of taking on more staff, appropriately qualified staff and there plenty of them around. Too, they already run an enormous number of both. I know all that they already run are purely military establishments but the skills involved aren’t that different. I think they don’t wish to risk being seen as in any way like a corporation. At the moment they are well thought of and they don’t wish anything to jeopardise that.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, Love, but I suspect you are correct. I kind of like the idea of being married to Juno Kim Shield Ledger CEO of Ayce Corporate Enterprises.”

1. Beached, an archaic term still in use that refers back to the days of sailing ships when unruly crew were literally dropped off on the beach the next time land fall was sighted.