The Outer Moon (A Sapphic Sci Fi Adventure)

Chapter 7

"Is that all of it?" Pepper asked the sweaty men on the pier. It was a warm spring night, and they'd been working hard for the women. "I don't want you guys working any longer than you need to." It was well past midnight, and their starship was sitting on the dock in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the lights of New York were visible right across the bay.

"No ma'am," he assured her. "That was the last of them." He took a drink of the water that she and Vanessa had given them and nodded politely towards the ship that they'd been loading up. "This thing really goes into space?"

"It does, yeah. But the beds suck, so we need new mattresses." Pepper jerked her thumb at the mattresses that were indeed now stuffed into the spaceship so that there was only one usable bunk room, and the rear of the ship would have to be traversed carefully since there were some leaning up against the bulkheads too. "Thanks again for all the help."

She handed over an envelope with $40k for the four men, who all eagerly split it among themselves. It wasn't bad for a couple hours of work, but they needed to be paid in cash since the US government had just announced economic sanctions on the PASSpace corporation and had warrants out for all the surviving members of the original Uranus trip. They had somehow decided that the deaths of Brody and Anton were classified as suspicious and wanted the crew to all be questioned. Obviously, they were right, at least about Brody, but there was no way they'd ever get anyone to flip on Lena for his death after what he'd done to Pepper and Miles. Everyone knew the decision was because of the influence of the Atlantis prophets, but there was nothing to be done about it. They just had to be sneaky.

Truly, the bigger issue was that it made it harder to get the last of their equipment, as no US companies were allowed to do business with PASSpace anymore. They were sure that European nations would soon follow suit, and potentially more worldwide. Luckily, all of the transactions that they had been doing were under shell companies with different names so that they didn't arouse suspicion at what they were doing, but it still made missions like this a little chancy. Which is why they were making sure the four men loading the mattresses were well compensated. They had got the job done quickly and well, and once they were airborne it wouldn't matter. What could they say, some women in a spaceship bought mattresses? Nothing about that was going to look like they were attacking them or anything. Now, if people started noticing the cargo that was being offloaded in Costa Rica, had then disappeared while never being sold, then things might become clearer. So far, nobody had mentioned that yet though.

"Jason, we have the mattresses." Vanessa and Pepper had been in constant communication with him ever since the sanctions were announced, and Vanessa had to let him know as soon as they were safe once more. "Where is the next stop?"

"You're heading to California. University High School in Los Angeles. You're meeting up with Doctor Ana Navarro and her wife Hermosa Navarro. They run the IVF clinic there, and they've decided to join us immediately. They can stay here on the space station, and we can load all the mattresses into one of the shipping cubes while we wait for word on what Lena and Miles find. I have a feeling that there may be more that we need that we don't know about yet."

"I'm expecting that as well," agreed Pepper. "But I think we have a good start on selecting people, so that part I'm less worried about." Indeed, Jason had a database with all of the people who had qualified and then they'd started to look for the people that seemed like the best fits for the new world. Some of them were easy, because there were certain skills that were must-haves, and only a few people who qualified had them, so they were easy picks. Pepper and Vanessa had then sent the information on the people who they had picked out to Lena and Miles, and they had agreed with them. Lena had evidently given the name of an additional pilot to Jason, and he had started talking to her as well, so that was one less worry. With the three shuttle pilots, and the one that Lena recommended, that should give them enough pilots to get them to their new world.