It had been three weeks and Mars High Orbit still just felt wrong. There wasn’t anything different, orbit was orbit, but something undefinable felt off. Maybe it was the fact that Mars was such an industrial world, not bound by the same rules that made Earth’s various orbital unions so clean and beautiful. Mars orbit was riddled with riffraff trade ships, derelict stations, and various debris that formed a sort of muddy ring around the once red planet.
His name was Baker, and he had another three weeks to wait until Mars was in the right position for him to get back home and he couldn’t wait. Orbiting Mars was like being in one of those month-long winters in cities near Earth’s poles he read about near. He could quite shake the feeling of being cold, no matter how much he fiddled with the environmental controls.
As much as he hated this orbit, he couldn’t go down to Mars to sleep anyhow. Too expensive, too foreign, too scary. His little ship was his home, anyway. It was his womb, his world. 90 meters long by 10 meters wide, split into three even 30 by 10-meter sections. Control and Engineering in the front, Sleep, and Entertainment in the middle, and in the back was Food and Medical as well as Waste.
It was in the aft section that “she” waited.
A few weeks ago his boxy vessel was connected to a half a kilometer chain of cargo freights. Things that couldn’t go through a hyperspace jump and things from people who couldn’t afford one of the big freight companies’ prices. Heavy metals for intricate scientific work, art, even a few tons of pressurized coffee beans. Shipping them all from Earth to Mars got him enough credit for supplies that will last him two years. It also bought her.
She came in a cheap tank. The material was like those big bottles of water he got when he was in flight school. Perfectly smooth, very strong but it gave if you pressed on it. Totally transparent. Lights on the top and bottom, even during night cycle. The red alphanumerics on the lid of the tank that read 96:24. Ninety-six hours to go.
The tank was warm, 38°C which was just a little over his own body temperature. He liked to watch her float, and he leaned against the warm plastic at night. Two weeks ago, it was just a tank full of cloudy liquid. Then a little tadpole-looking bit floating dead center. Then an embryo, a fetus, all the cycles of pre-life. After 100 hours she looked about four or five. She would age faster as it went on, rushing towards her preprogrammed maturity.
Some nights he would wake, and the weight of loneliness would feel like it was crushing him, and he would curl up at the base of the tank and sing the old mining songs he heard his mother sing when he was a child. Corporate hymns that were once religious, when such a thing was allowed, maybe were even older.
It had been years since he’d had a real conversation with someone. He’d been going hard on the trade routes from the mining colonies in the Asteroid Belt where he was born to Mars and to Earth. He had to fly a company ship for a while until about three years ago when he made enough to get his own ship.
It was a hard life out there. He was always waiting. Waiting for the planets to align so he could fly the millions of kilometers between them. It was a hard and lonely life.
At T-10 hours, she looked like she was in her early teens. Her hair floating around her in a little curtain of dark brown. Age was such a malleable thing now. He didn’t want a child, but he didn’t want to wait much longer. At the end of the growth cycle, she would be an adult woman, physically at least.
As the clock ticked down, Baker spent all of his time back there, watching. It wasn’t a thing anymore, it wasn’t a little girl either. She was in her mid-teens now, her breasts forming. The reality of it coming on. Soon she would be there, warm and naked and his.
At 30 minutes, her eyes opened, and she watched him. She had a peaceful smile. She moved her fingers experimentally and stretched as much as she could in the confines of her tank. He touched the tank, and she touched the place where his hand was on the plastic. Her hair floated about, now shoulder length and as long as it would ever grow. She reminded him of a holo he watched as a kid of a mermaid.
What came next was an odd mix of things. It was part birth, part opening a present on Christmas morning and part wedding night. He couldn’t wait for the tank to drain. It was only water at that point anyhow, the amniotic fluid washed away hours before.
He pulled at the bottom of the plastic tank when the clock ticked down to zero. The water spilled out onto the floor of the aft section. It pooled around his feet for a moment before circling down the drain in the center of the room, the manufactured gravity pulling it towards the ship’s center like a tiny black hole.
She came slipping out of the bottom of the tank with the water and Baker knelt to catch her. She turned to face the floor and coughed wetly, spitting water and fluid from her lungs and then she took deep gulps of air.
She clung to him like a wet and frightened cat, shivering and naked. He wiped the hair away from her face, and she stared at him. Her eyes were huge and gray. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. She instinctively held onto him, slipping her bare arms around him and hugging him tightly. He hugged her back.
When they finally parted, she looked into his eyes and smiled. Her smile was so full of joy, and her eyes were shining with curiosity and hope, he had to laugh. And then she kissed him. A soft kiss on his lips, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. She tasted- like nothing he could explain. She tasted like skin after a hot shower. She tasted clean and new and perfect, not like the few encounters as a boy with dirty-faced girls at school on the mining colony.
He didn’t know why, but he felt some dam inside of his chest break. He started to cry against her, and they cradled each other on the wet floor of the ship. He wouldn’t be alone anymore.