The Skeleton Crew 1 (Patreon)

@Holly Hindle asked what life would be like on an actual skeleton crew. Good question!

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Lata sprawled in the dirt, tail out straight and her fingers woven behind her head. Her blue eyes stared up at countless trays of plants that hung from chains. The agriculture decks were capable of growing enough crops to feed a crew of ten thousand, but with only five hundred souls remaining on board, most of the fruits and vegetables went uneaten, left to rot and form a thicker layer of soil atop the once-clean aluminum deck.

Even if they didn’t want all of the food, the crew needed every single plant that the deck could produce, simply because they were the only means left for scrubbing carbon out of their air. The air on this deck was pretty good—nearly the same oxygen mix as their home world—but on much of the ship, the CO2 levels were lethally high.

A cub leaned over the older geroo, blocking her view.

“Well, hello, Timii,” Lata said, her ears smiling wide. “How did school go today? How was the math test?”

The cub frowned and took a seat in the dirt. “Cruddy,” she muttered.

“Aw, no!” Lata groaned. “We practiced your multiplication tables for so long. We did the flash cards—”

“The test had lots of division questions,” said the cub, her dark ears in a scowl.

Lata opened her muzzle to say something but misplaced the thought entirely when an even smaller cub tackled her, landing on Lata’s broad stomach. She laughed and scooped him up, slipping her fingers into his armpits. Laying on her back, she lifted him up in the air, holding him at arm’s length from her face. “Look at you, you little cutie!” she cooed at him.

She wasn’t sure of the cub’s name. Osh-a? Noli? Mothers did name their male offspring, but the other adults tended to put little effort into learning their names. Mostly, they left the males to run wild. They didn’t have to go to school, were almost never scolded for being bratty, and every adult heaped as much affection on them as the little cubs would take. In effect, they lived their short lives in a nearly feral existence.

The cub mewled in distress, swinging his chubby arms, so Lata set his paws back down on the ground. He smacked her arm with a meaty little fist. “No, don’t hit,” she scolded him, but he was already hopping away, looking for someone else to terrorize.

“It’s not fair,” Timii growled.

“What’s not?”

“That we have to study and go to school and stuff,” she whined. Then she gestured in the direction that the cub had run. “But they don’t.”

“No,” Lata agreed, “it’s not fair.”

Then, spying a familiar shape, Lata sat up and kissed the cub’s cheek before hurrying off. “We’re gonna practice long division tonight, okay hon?”

“Do we have to?” Timii moaned.

Over her shoulder, Lata called, “It’ll be fun. I promise!” Then, she jogged to catch up and slipped in beside a golden geroo who was looking for ripe fruit to pick. “Meri! So good to see you. I wanted to ask how much wine we have set aside.”

“Wine?” Meri asked in surprise. “Oh, not sure. Maybe eighty or ninety liters? Why?”

Lata’s ears grinned wide. “I had a revelation today!”

Meri set down her half-full bag of fruit. “A revelation about wine?”

“No, silly!” Lata laughed. “I had a revelation about us, about the ship, about our situation. The wine is to celebrate!”

“Celebrate?” Meri gasped. “Celebrate what?”

Lata grabbed the golden geroo by the shoulders and spun her around. “Our freedom, of course!” she laughed. “The commissioner doesn’t come here anymore, doesn’t boss us around—”

“Because the air is toxic on most of the ship,” Meri completed for her.

“And he never calls us up and orders us around—” Lata added.

“Because the gate is malfunctioning so hard that radio messages won’t pass through it reliably.”

“And so, we can go wherever we want without anyone telling us otherwise—”

Meri covered her eyes in frustration. “The engines are barely online as it is. We’re crawling through space.” She stared at her friend a moment, as if trying to discern whether this was a joke. “It’s going to take generations before we’ll arrive at the next system.”

“But that doesn’t matter. Don’t you see?”

The golden geroo scowled. “No, I guess I don’t. What’s your point?”

“My point is that we’ve worked ourselves into a corner. We all want to be free, but don’t even realize that we’re there.”

“Oh, Lata,” Meri said, taking a moment to cup the older geroo’s cheek with her palm, “this isn’t freedom. This is a crisis. No free society has to sacrifice their male cubs to reduce the ship’s bio load once they’re old enough to help restock the archive of semen samples.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” said Lata. “Historically, free societies have always had to make sacrifices. Back on Medieval Gerootec, generals marched armies of conscripts without proper military training into battle to defend against invaders. Most of them were essentially sacrificed because the kingdoms feared being conquered more than they feared losing lives. Freedom doesn’t mean idyllic, doesn’t mean a utopia. It just means we’re … free.”

Meri sighed and shook her head. “Even if the krakun aren’t telling us what to do, they’re still holding a knife to our throats. That’s not freedom,” she said. “Sure, our sister gate over Krakuntec is online now. After a hundred years, they’ve probably forgotten we’re even on the other side of it, but what if they shut the gate off? Everything goes down, and we all freeze to death!”

“Yes, that would be horrible, but that doesn’t change anything,” Lata said with a grin. “Think back to Medieval Gerootec… What if a huge comet was on a collision course with the planet? It’s not like they could do anything about it with iron age tech. They’d be just as helpless as we are now. But that doesn’t change that they lived free.”

“Died free.”

“I suppose,” said Lata, “but everyone is walking around in a gloom. And sure, there’s lots of stuff that we’re not satisfied with—and we’re trying to fix it—but maybe what we need is a fresh perspective. Maybe what we need is to look at our situation in a new way. We should celebrate what we have, not just mourn what we’ve lost!”

“By drinking up the wine stocks?” Meri looked unconvinced.

“Yes, exactly!” said Lata, her ears grinning wide.

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gIrJ0OaW432Kxg8egkiC_Nx5T1n5nICZsXIVs3e3u2s/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?