Think you're tough? The kind of hyperspace hero who calls a meteor storm "confetti?" I dare you to say "no" to my mother.
My crewmates think she's great, and why shouldn't they? When she figured out how to override our mess configurations, they all got to eat her brownies. But try not calling home every Saturday night and see where that gets you.
There's some horrible irony here I really don't want to explore—my gray comes not from my children but from my mother. If a grandma with a graphing calculator can bust all the algorithms, you wonder why Wormhole Coordinates is a doctoral subject. Mom made sure I wouldn't need to fret that her birthday greetings to me might be delayed by inconveniences like the space-time continuum.
"They haven't made those things in fifty years," Ozorof objected when I told the story.
"Right you are. But she never throws anything out."
"You know," Donovan said one night, sweeping up his winnings, "we should get her to train a whole flock of seniors to run Base Command and free everyone up for field duty. Save us a fortune."
"Keep laughing," I said, totting up what I owed, "but one day I'll tell her how you pick my pocket, and next time you come down with vortex fever, you’ll be sweating it out without any chicken soup."
"Sore loser," he said, but tell me he didn’t blanch.
* * *
I'd done as well by her as anyone mostly out in the field can do. Put her in a tidy little retirement cottage in the Near Orbit, and not one of those maintenance-free synthetic wonderamas either. If I told you how often the moids broke trying to get the yardwork done, you'd understand why I'm always putting in for long haul. If she'd just stop tinkering with them, the warranties wouldn't keep getting invalidated.
But Mom doesn't let sealed circuitry stop her. Last time back on leave, I was letting myself in and nearly fell over the doorsill when I heard my own voice from somewhere inside, plaintively demanding grilled cheese sandwiches. Mom, who saves all my messages, had run a voice simulation program and then audio-looped the housemoid.
"For heck's sake, Ma," I'd protested, rubbing my shin.
"I know you can't call as often as you'd like, sweetheart," she'd said mildly, kissing me as she took my jacket, "and it just feels so good to hear you around the house."
She wasn't one to mix with the burgundy-haired seniors at the Fleet retirement estate across the lake, and with Oon and the kids over in base housing, I'd worried a little bit about her being lonely. But she was keeping her mind nimble.
* * *
We were making a cricket jump through the Outer Band, one of those routine maneuvers that you never even think about, when communications went dead. The ship was already halfway through when we lost the coordinates. Happens so rarely nowadays that only the oldest vessels even bother to book Lighthouse navigating. We were in a sleek new baby already setting new records and wanted to put her through all her paces. You get too cautious, the crew begins to doubt your competence and your guts.
But some idiot had failed to flag us on the Lanekeepers' roster and they'd gone ahead and busted up an asteroid just before we entered the jump.
A couple million tons of fragments, your magnetic points are shot to hell, your gyros have behavioral disorders, and inside the jump, of course, you have no visual. We were all starting to sweat and then the beam locked onto the bridge and the relay came back on.
***
"Next time don't be a smart-ass, and file your request on time," the Lightsman said when we did the report. "And register the third-party transponder, OK?"
Once we'd docked, and passed round the Arcturian brandy to celebrate not being turned into space dust, I called my mother. She stopped me in mid-thanks.
"Oh, sweetheart, you know how it is. I woke up and knew something just wasn't quite right, that's all."
_____________________
An earlier version of this story was published in the May 2012 issue of Flash Fiction Online.
This is precisely what I wanted when you made me crave a rocket scientist story.