Gas Miner 1 (Patreon)

Got an idea for an interesting HC setting. Not sure where the story will go, but here's an opening chapter:

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Oril stood from the couch and shouted into the kitchen, “I got it, hon.” But he stopped dead in his tracks when he opened the front door. It wasn’t a relative, a friend, or even one of his neighbors. In fact, he’d never spoken to the one-eyed geroo before in his life.

“C-captain?” Oril gasped. “What are you doing here?”

Captain Ateri smiled. Despite the eyepatch, the captain could be very smooth and personable when he tried. “Good evening, Oril. May I come in?”

“Uh-uh-uh, of course!” shouted the old geroo. He stepped quickly out of the way and gestured at his humble living room.

“Who was at the door?” asked Oril’s mate, though she too faltered when she saw the captain in her front room.

“And you must be Cheni,” the captain said, touching her paw. “Do the two of you have a few minutes to discuss a … rather sensitive matter?”

“Oh, um, of course!” said Oril. He pulled out a seat at the dinner table. “Please.”

“Can I get you something to drink?” asked his mate. “Some tea?”

“Water would be fine, thanks,” said Ateri.

“I just made the tea,” clucked the elderly geroo. “It’s still hot.”

“Well, if it’s no bother, some tea would be nice.” The captain took a seat and waited for the couple to join him. He sipped at the tea and warmed his paws around the small cup.

“So, Captain, what can we—”

“There’s several sorts of secrets,” interrupted the captain. “You realize that don’t you Oril?”

“Oh, uh,” gasped the old engineer. His brain scrambled for what could be wrong. Did he tell someone something he shouldn’t have? If so, he had no idea what that could have been. “I suppose—”

“For example,” Ateri said, setting down the cup, “if I were to ask you to sneak aboard the commissioner’s shuttle and plant a listening device … obviously, that sort of mission would have to be kept secret.”

“Well, of course,” gasped Oril—not that he’d ever done anything like that! Was he supposed to have? Did he forget to bug the shuttle? He certainly would have remembered a crazy order like that!

“But then there’s other sorts of secrets,” said Ateri. “Things that aren’t so much secret as we just don’t want them discussed, things that anyone could figure out for themselves if they really set their mind to it, but no one ever seems to bother, and we’d rather they didn’t if at all possible.”

Oril passed a worried look to his mate and back to the captain. She was doing the same. Now he was truly worried. Had he shared a secret that he didn’t even realize was a secret? “Uh…” He shook his head.

“For example, suppose the court executed a murderer.”

“A murderer?” squeaked Oril and his mate, simultaneously.

“Yes, suppose we executed a murderer,” said the captain, taking another sip of tea. “His birth token would go back in the lottery, some Happy Couple would win it, and their sweet, little cub would be a reincarnation of a murderer—presuming you believe that sort of thing.”

“I suppose—”

“Like I said,”—the captain gave the two an easy smile—“anyone could figure that sort of thing out, if they tried, but we’d really appreciate it if they could treat that thought as a secret. I like to think of these as ‘little’ secrets.”

“Captain?” Oril asked. “What in the hells is going on here? I’ve never been so confused in my life.”

“Oril!” scolded his mate, but he held up a paw, begging her patience.

“No, I’m serious!” he said. “Over the last several days, I’ve been subjected to so many tests: a physical, an eye exam, memory tests, mental acuity tests. My supervisor has even watched me work and scored my effectiveness. Why does anyone care if I’m in good shape at this point?”

“Oril!” she begged again.

“No!” he said, banging a fist on the table. “And now a visit from the captain himself? Did I spill one of your secrets? I really didn’t mean—”

“No!” yarped Ateri as he sat back in his seat. “Quite the opposite, actually. I’d like to share one of my little secrets with you. If you both could treat it as a big secret, that is, if you could keep it a secret for the rest of your days.”

Oril threw up his paws and shook his head. “That’s not much to ask of me,” he said. Tomorrow would be his sixtieth birthday, his Going Away, his last day. “Cheni’s still got two years left. Could you keep the captain’s secret after I’m gone?”

Her ears were low and solemn. She didn’t like talking about death, but that was something every geroo in their late fifties had to contemplate. She nodded once in silence.

Ateri waited a long moment and then he too nodded his head. “Very well, my little secret is that not every geroo takes a big orange pill on their sixtieth.”

“What?” gasped the older couple in unison.

“Oh, the mass majority have to,” Ateri said, “but every now and then, there’s a geroo such as you, Oril, who is still in great shape, who has a skill that the company needs…”

Oril stared at the captain, his jaw hanging wide. He looked over at his mate and she looked as flabbergasted as he. “Sir? Are you saying that I could—?”

“Before you get all excited,” Ateri interrupted, “let me assure you, this is not a dream come true. As much as I wish it—not just for you but for every geroo aboard a gate ship—there is absolutely nothing that I could do to let you go on living your normal life after tomorrow.”

Ateri tapped his claws against the glass teacup and frowned. “I’m sorry about that, but tomorrow you will have your Going Away. You will say your farewells to your family, your friends, your mate, and they will never see you again. But you don’t have to actually die.”

“I don’t?” Oril’s lips moved, but there was no actual sound.

Ateri shook his head. “At the end of your Going Away, instead of taking your pill, we can say that you need to visit with one last friend who had to work and couldn’t break away for the party. Then we take you to the shuttle bay and transfer you to another ship. It doesn’t happen often, but it won’t be the first time someone’s skipped out after their Going Away.”

“But Cheni—” whispered the old engineer.

Ateri shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I have only one transfer, and it’s got your name on it. You can take it if you like, or you can go ahead with your Going Away as originally planned, but staying together isn’t an option I can offer you.”

Oril set his paws atop the table to try and keep them from shaking. He loved the idea of not dying, but leaving Cheni? How could he?

She reached over and set her paw on top of his. It was a comforting weight and warmth. Soon, he was squeezing both her paws in his and they were staring into each other’s eyes for a long silent moment.

Eventually, he looked back to the captain. “But where would I go?”

“Well,” explained the captain, “gate ships aren’t the only geroo ships in the fleet. You see, each gate ship has ten thousand crew aboard it because the krakun determined that’s how many it takes to keep our DNA from going ‘stale’.”

“Stale?” asked Cheni.

Ateri shrugged. “I’m certain there’s a technical term for it but imagine if there were only a hundred geroo on board. After only a few generations, everyone would be cousins. After that, there’d be inbreeding and genetic deformities. It wouldn’t be sustainable. There’s just not enough genetic diversity to keep a crew vibrant unless you have at least ten thousand crew.”

“And how many are aboard this ship I’d be transferring to?” Oril asked.

“Twenty-five—at the moment,” said Captain Ateri. “Although, I understand that one of them is doing quite poorly. When she dies, the crew will be back down to twenty-five if you take her place.”

The couple said nothing, so the captain added, “A crew that small, there’s no lottery at all, no breeding. Fresh crew are pulled from other ships—like I’m asking you to do—so there’s no option for starting a new family.”

Oril chuckled and Cheni smirked. “I’m a little old for that!” he laughed.

“I just want to be clear,” said Ateri. “If you’re not ready to ‘retire’ just yet, you can go on working. You can make new friends … even take a new mate if you were ready for that, but until another new crewman transfers on to replace someone else, you’ll be the youngest there, at sixty.”

Oril nodded, his ears low and solemn. “But I’d get more years.”

“You would,” said Ateri.

“How many?”

“Hard to say.” Ateri rolled his cup between his paws. “As I understand it, there’s no doctor on board. You could get unlucky, get sick and die in a week. Or maybe you’d live another forty or fifty years? There’s just no predicting.”

“Forty or fifty…?” gasped Oril.

“Perhaps?” said Ateri. He pushed back his chair and rose. “You’re in good shape. There’s no big orange pills on that ship, so it’s anyone’s guess how long you’d get.”

“And my job?” the engineer asked, standing too.

“Same sort of thing you do now,” the captain said. “Fix things when they break, try to keep them from breaking in the first place—though it’ll be a lot less structured. With only a couple dozen geroo, everyone probably does anything that needs doing, whether it’s supposed to be their job or not. Think you can do that?”

“I can,” said Oril. “I mean, I could. Do I still get a choice about this?”

“You do,” Ateri said as he walked to the door. “Talk it over with your mate. I’ll have an administrator call you in an hour to find out if he should bring a big orange pill to your Going Away or not.”

Then the captain turned back to Oril’s mate and smiled wide. He touched her paw before leaving. “And thank you for your hospitality. The tea was delicious.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13FfWs7kXUBQO4Rj9dVj-XOuI4rYOmEMV8byjXfAI6K4/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?