Chapter Text
“Chief Engineer Grandma?” Meade said sweetly, ducking her head into the room. “Would you please tell Buster to stay out of my garden? He may think he’s clever, but he’s killing my broccoli. I’d tell him myself, but he obviously doesn’t listen to me.”
Hazel looked across the chessboard at Lowell. “Best do as she says, Junior,” she commented.
“But she’s wrong about the salinity gradients-” he protested.
“Grandmother dearest,” Meade said, her hands on her hips. “Why does everyone aboard this ship assume I am incapable of doing math?”
“Beats me,” Hazel said. “I tutored you myself; you can handle a differential with the best of ‘em.”
“I checked the gradients!” Lowell insisted. “Your feeds are too low, they are.”
Meade glared at him. “And what you’re missing, like I told you, is that the H670 units don’t filter as efficiently as they’re specced to. You get extra salt left in the solutions, and you have to compensate.”
Lowell shook his head. “The solutions I made should work.”
Hazel shook her head back at him. “Irrelevant,” she said. “First, your sister is Hydroponics Master aboard this ship this haul, so what she says goes. And if you don’t like it, then I can talk to the Cap’n about it. I happen to know that he has some draconian ideas about insubordination. Second, you’re killing the broccoli, and I like broccoli. Third, we’ve been hauling aboard this boat for better’n two years, and the garden’s been your sister’s baby the entire time. What makes you think she doesn’t know how to handle it?”
“Fine,” Lowell said, sullenly.
Meade gave him the stinkeye. “I’m going to go make lunch,” she said. “I was going to harvest some of the broccoli today, but I’m going to have to nurse that back to health before we can eat it.”
Then she launched herself out of the room. Really, being able to properly stalk out of a room was the only thing Meade missed about gravity at this point. She was far more comfortable out of gravity than in it. She twisted, caught a handhold with her foot, and pushed off for the hydroponics section. The garden was an island of green-and-growing in the middle of the Stone. It was pretty much Meade’s favorite place aboard ship- not least because Castor and Pollux avoided it so thoroughly. Not that Meade didn’t like her brothers. But still; a girl wanted a little peace and quiet now and again.
She harvested a salad’s worth of lettuce, taking care to adjust the nutrient flow. She’d give the chambers a day to recharge, and then she’d replant. The nice thing about lettuce was that it grew so fast- seed to harvest in a little under three weeks, if she was careful with her temps. The broad leaves also had good CO2 exchange. She picked a cucumber as well, and a couple tomatoes. Then, with a cheery wave for her plants, she sailed off toward the galley.
Mother still did most of the cooking for dinner, but Meade typically did both breakfast and lunch these days. It had taken a while for her to get the hang of zero-g cooking (well, cooking at all, if she was honest), but now she suspected she’d flub it if she had to cook under gravity. She hooked her feet into the handholds near the prep station and clipped her bag to the wall. Then she fished out the cucumber and wrangled it, the knife, and a cutting bag onto the sticky strip on the counter. She carefully rendered the cucumber into pieces- which was harder than it sounded. The bits always wanted to fly off anywhere but where she wanted them to go. She had enough experience by now, though, to be able to twitch them into the right bag and keep them there.
The tomato was even trickier; it was too juicy. Trying to leave it in pieces was a sure-fire way to spend her afternoon chasing globs of tomato seed around the galley. Usually, she cut off the ends and then baked it in a bag in the oven until it was all pulp and liquid. Then she added the salad dressing powder until she had a good paste, and then she put the torn-up lettuce and chopped-up cucumber straight into the bag.
Once she had the salad together, she started on the easy part of the meal. She added water to a package of pasta noodles and put that and a can of sauce to bake. She marked both items off the stores list and checked to see whether they could spare some garlic bread as well.
“Salad again?” Pollux complained, flying into the galley. Which was a sign that she was running late; the twins were always on time for meals.
“I can always put you on galley duty for a few days if you think you can do better,” Roger Stone commented, drifting in behind him with Castor at his heels.
Half a loaf, Meade decided, and pulled it out of the freezer. She sliced the loaf, rewrapped the rest, put it away, and logged it. “Thank you, Captain Daddy,” she said, smiling. “But I think Mother and I would rather you kept the twins away from the galley.”
“The rest of us would appreciate it, too,” Hazel commented, hooking in to her place at the table.
“They’ve got no faith in our abilities, Grandpa,” Pollux said, with a wounded air.
“It’s unfair to us, is what it is,” Castor replied.
“We were mess cooks in Scouts, after all. We can sling hash if we want to.”
“And it’s not as though cooking is five-space math.”
“Well,” Meade allowed, “I suppose I could let you take breakfast for a while if you’re that set on it.” She put on her best long-suffering face.
“That’s an excellent idea. I’ll update the duty roster,” Roger Stone said. “You can swap dishes for cooking with the twins for a week; we’ll see if they poison us. And Meade can take over as co-pilot when we course-correct around Ganymede, while we’re at it.”
“What?” all three Stone children chorused, surprised. Meade had been back-up, but she'd never actually been at the controls of the ship before.
Their father remained cool in the face of popular disapproval. “You boys should learn to be competent cooks; it’s a survival skill that everyone should know. And Meade, Hazel says that you rate as a pilot. “Even if you don’t intend to take up the profession, you should have the experience. Don’t worry; Hazel and I will back you up.” He paused. “But you two hooligans won’t,” he said, firmly. “You’ve both proved you can jockey a ship; now you’re going to let your sister try.”
“Yessir,” the twins answered, a little dubiously.
At that point, Dr. Stone appeared with their least child in tow, and that was the end of the conversation. Meade applied herself to finishing lunch- squeezing the sauce into the packet with the now-cooked pasta, spooning the portions into the eating cups, clipping the cups for bread and salad and pasta into the family’s trays. Then she passed the trays out to the table, where Lowell had already clipped the silverware and the napkins into place. Once the food was together, the family hooked themselves in to eat. Captain Stone insisted on keeping an orderly table, even in zero-gravity- no floating around the galley during mealtimes.
Once the meal had started, they were all quiet for a little while, concentrating on getting food into their mouths. Meade maneuvered a sauce-covered noodle onto her fork. She cleared her throat. “If I’m going to be on piloting duty, can Buster take over hydroponics? Just for a few days,” she added, hastily.
Hazel raised an eyebrow. “I thought you wanted him to stay out of the garden,” she commented.
Meade shrugged and swallowed her pasta. “Well, I don’t want him going off his own specs. But I guess if he’s interested in the garden, maybe he should start learning to take care of it, too.”
“He’s awfully young still,” Roger Stone said.
“I’m old enough!” the topic of conversation protested.
“Besides, that broccoli is going to need a lot of work,” Meade pointed out. “Buster almost killed it; he should fix it. Maybe that’ll teach him to listen to me about salinity gradients.”
“Sounds fair to me,” Castor put in.
“No one asked you,” Hazel told him. “Captain? It’s your boat. What do you think?”
“If my Hydroponics Master recommends him, then I suppose we can let Buster take over for a few days,” Roger Stone allowed. “Provided his mother agrees.”
“I think it’s time that Lowell took on more responsibility around the ship,” Dr. Stone said, digging into her salad.
“All right. Anyone else want to swap jobs while we’re at it?” Roger Stone asked. “Got an itch to be a doctor, Hazel?”
“I did my stint wiping noses and bandaging scrapes when you were little,” Hazel said, grinning. “I’ll leave it to Edith for the time being.”
“Good. Then the new duty roster will start tomorrow, god help us. Try not to poison us, boys.” He unhooked and passed his tray into the dirty-dishes net. “Lunch was excellent, Meade.”
Meade smiled. “Thank you, Daddy!”
She was still smiling as she flew out of the galley.