Free The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One by James Wilks

table to grab the child’s nose, and she buried her face in her hands, giggling. “Anyway, the captain decided to stop to pick it up. We had to stop really fast; that’s why we had to be heavy for so long. Do you remember what I taught you about being heavy and thrust?”
    Gwen’s voice took on the aspect of one reciting an important historical document. “The greater the ac-cellery-ation or de-celery-ation, the greater the effects of gravity.”
    “Deceleration. Very good. And do you know what that means?”
    Gwen screwed up her face and raised her shoulders and hands up in the air in a histrionic shrug.
    Charis smiled and rolled her eyes a bit. “It means that the faster we have to start or stop, the heavier you get.”
    “I knew that. I knew it all along,” Gwen asserted, looking quite sincere.
    “Mmm. So once we stopped, Dinah went out in a UteV to get it. The valuable thing, I mean. It was a satellite.” Gwen blanched a slightly paler shade of pale, but she didn’t say anything. Charis knew her daughter was a little bit afraid of the chief engineer. They had tried to teach her to hide it out of politeness when she encountered the woman, but it had been a struggle. “Unfortunately, another ship wanted the satellite too, and we had to race them to it.”
    “They wanted to steal it?”
    “Yes they did.”
    Gwen processed this, then asked, “Was it theirs?”
    “Nope.”
    “Was it ours?” The questions were coming fast now.
    “Well, it’s ours now. It wasn’t really anybody’s at that point.”
    “So it never belonged to anybody before us?”
    Charis grappled with the question for a moment. “Well, it belonged to a company who made it once, and they put it up in space around Earth, but then it floated away.”
    “It didn’t want to be in space?”
    Charis despaired for a moment that her daughter would ever run out of questions, but then reminded herself that apathy, that most constant of teenaged traits, was probably only a few years away. Not for the first time, she resolved to appreciate her daughter’s inquisitiveness while it lasted. “The satellite doesn’t want anything. It’s just some computers and metal. Computers aren’t alive, so they don’t want anything. It was broken, so it drifted away or maybe it got knocked away by another satellite or an asteroid or something. There’s this thing called the ‘green line’ around Earth. It’s an imaginary line that we pretend exists around the planet.”
    “I bet you can find that line on your mastrogration charts, right mom?” Gwen interjected, her eyes widening.
    “Astrogation, yes I can. Very good!” She beamed. “You actually know what your mommy does for a living.” Gwen’s smile was so wide that nearly all of her teeth showed. “Anyway, anything that drifts past the green line is fair game.” When no look of recognition showed on the small girl’s face, she added, “It belongs to anyone who gets it. Finders keepers.”
    “Finders keepers,” Gwen echoed. “And we found it?”
    “Yes we did. But not everyone follows those rules. A bad ship called the Doris Day came along and tried to take it from us, even though we were first. So we had to wrestle them for it a little, and that meant we had to move all round.” She shook and rotated her head and shoulders to illustrate her point to her daughter. “They were tough, but we beat ‘em in the end.”
    “Cool,” Gwen said, her interest waning. “Who’s Doris Day?”
    “You know, baby,” Charis looked at her and shook her head. “I have no idea.”
     
                  A little while later, as Charis was reading from her surface and Gwen was lying prone on the floor, reading a book on her own version of the same, the door opened and John walked in. Charis looked up in surprise and said, “Hey. I thought you were in the ReC until dinner?” Once they had gotten under way to Mars again, the captain had given everyone who had been on duty during their