Excerpt: Brainstorm

Esrange Station was the closest thing to a home that Angie Sun knew, and from the moment the freighter engine moved into the power-down cycle, she leaned into her harness, pressing her face against the viewing port to catch a glimpse of the familiar silver spokes. In the opposite berth, Angie's mum caught a few more minutes of sleep, perfectly comfortable in the orange webbing that kept her immobile while the ship made the step-by-step deceleration to docking speed. Angie's fingers twitched – she wished she'd been allowed to stay in the cockpit for the jump out of light speed, but her mother didn't know the pilot well. Now that the new stellar energy farms were online it seemed that everyone was starting up a freight or transport business, and every second trip they took was with a stranger. Angie wondered what her dad would have to say about that. She hugged herself a little tighter – his last message said he was on schedule to meet up with them at Esrange.

Outside the viewing port, the lean needles of red and silver resolved themselves into points of light; they'd dropped out of light speed and very smoothly too, Angie thought with approval. Her mother was still asleep, and that meant that the pilot had calculated the inertial exchange so carefully that not even Angie's wary mother felt a shudder. She hunched into her harness; it wasn't long before she could sign up for her own apprenticeship, and though it would be years before she was piloting a ship like this, it would be so good to be finally contributing to the flight and not a passenger.

When the silver rings and spokes of Esrange came into view, Angie poked her mother with one toe. "Mum, we're coming into dock."

Leah Sun's eyes were open before Angie had finished speaking, and she flipped open the terminal screen set in the wall beside her head. "Did you get any sleep at all, kiddo?" Data spooled down the screen: status reports on environment, structural stability, docking ETA. She reached across to curl a lock of Angie's hair around one finger. "I know you're excited to be coming back here, but you're going to be all over the place once we're back into a diurnal schedule."

Angie shrugged. "We're on Esrange for a month, my brain will figure it out." She waited until her mum had unclipped her own harness before she released the clasp on her own – a long instilled habit that comes from growing up on ships and stations. You don't make a move until your parents allow it; a strict code but necessary for survival. Angie had been raised on cautionary tales about negligent parents or disobedient children, and those stories never had happy endings.

Leah smiled as she unzipped the strapping on their gear. "Space baby. You have no internal clock."

"Space baby, never saw a sunrise," Angie sang happily at her mum. It was an old song, one that Angie had picked up around her dad when she was young, and she hummed the melody as she gathered her bags, remembering the sound of the steel pans and the taste of the rum that her father let her steal from his glass.

Leah pulled Angie into a sudden hug. "When did you grow up so big, anyway?"

Angie blinked and hugged her mother back. "All the time, right under your nose, Mum." She planted a kiss on her mum's head. "But don't worry, I'm not all going anywhere. Dad won't let me apprentice until I'm sixteen. That's years off." But only two years, she thought, and that will go fast.

"Good." Leah squeezed her around the middle. "I don't think I'm ready to let you go just yet."