Chamomile Stars.

My name is Steven or was but it’s now officially Stevie Hyatt…not my last name either and I’m married.

The thing here in fleet it’s not husband or wife not legally instead it’s just spouse or as my wedding bracelet says. “Loving spouse.”

Sammi…My sweet Barbie boy Sammi had made them for us. She went into Hydrotech and she despite the way she seems. (Funny, girly, dippy sometimes.) She’s sharp as a tack. And she’s really driven to get all her dreams for us to come true.

She made them though from gold foil layered and raised? Reverse engraved with “Sammi & Stevie, Hir loving spouse…and the reverse on mine. All somehow sealed seamlessly in the same superglass the ship windows are made from…and a beacon chip in there too.

It was so sweet…Sammi’s HIIV altered like I am and she’s technically intersexed too…she is a girl that came out with male gear but one look and you see and feel girl. She’s lithe and femme but without curves and she’s good with it.

But…I’m the “Guy”… I’m intersexed too but to a different degree and with different parts. I look really femmy as a boy and a jock…I love sports and stuff or did.

Yeah did…

Sometimes being preggers sucks.

Yeah I’m born with both a stick and a goal…and I kind of look like a long haired FTM now with the pregnancy really causing stuff to go haywire in my body with hormones and stuff.

Emotional, uncomfortable…I swear the baby has a jump seat near my lower back and a death grip on my kidneys sometimes. Hard to sleep, I need to pee a lot and at the same time I love it.

Yes as much as it’s strange and people on earth…I miss home.

Dammit I wipe tears from my eyes and pull myself up from the bed and look at Sammi who’s still sleeping.

Even with me preggers our sex is…

I still blush sometimes.

I mean we were intense before and always making out and we still do that but even as I’ve gotten bigger we just adjust to things.

But along with being pregnant so has come the breasts. They’re small sort of a b-cup that looks like it’s less on my frame but at first they hurt coming in and now they are so sensitive.

I’m not sure who likes it more hir or me?

From behind is both of our favorite right now. The way it feels with hir sliding in and out of my vee is awesome but her feeling my pregger boobs and my belly too as she makes love to me…it’s one of my more tender ways we’re together.

But Sammi…I rub at a few bruises. They don’t hurt they itch though.

No she doesn’t beat me but she bites…and…and I like it…it’s never in bad places but they’re love bits…and hickies….yeah I’ve had looks but it’s really obvious that we’re together…that we’ve been together awhile now.

I watch her sleep and smile and try not to get all emotional at watching hir. She has braids now like some of the African and Caribbean people do. Most of us either have our hair really short for convenience or long to conserve body heat. There’s also a sort of trending thing to about body hair these days too. It’s space and even with all our tech and stuff and recycling energy and everything else the ships are usually between nine and fifteen degree centigrade depending on where you are and what you’re doing.

So there are some people like me who can’t do with having body hair…I grow it but I just can’t have it really…I’m like a really…I look like a pretty guy with small boobs and a baby belly…but since I have a vee I’ve never been comfortable with having body hair.

Now some women or more female types have actually embraced not shaving and welcome the excuse not to. Me it’s just this whole thing I’ve always had that I don’t like it on myself. I know it’s something in my head that says no body hair if you have a vagina and I’ve had “discussions” with friends over it but to me it’s just kinda ick.

Sammi is a waxer and she keeps pretty bare except for her braids though when she’s working she ties them up out of the way actually using the braids to do it.

I reach out and grab the netting over our bed and pull myself clear of the bed…we have really minimal gravity in most of the ship when you sit you can sit or lie down but it takes nothing to pull yourself into floating we’re at about one thirtieth of earth’s gravity out here where we’re at and it’s about lunar gravity in the core section of the ship do to the gravity simulators.

I’m not all that versed in the idea but there’s sections and stuff in the core that spin making some kind of pull?

Oh and floating doesn’t last either you can float to the ceiling and you will fall to the decking in a few seconds or more depending on the height.

Doesn’t sound like a lot but actually count out a couple of seconds and really think about how long that is compared to falling in earth gravity.

I keep calling Sammi a she but really Sammi’s male. Like fully functioning and stuff just like the rest of us kinda different.

Well very different actually.

She is male but uses she and in like just the whole everyday kind of stuff she’s really girly and stuff. She likes most of the clothes even though usually she goes with a fleet jumpsuit and these slinky lycra black bike shorts.

I mean well we’re all usually on duty doing stuff so it’s practical but Sammi will wear a skirt and stuff too and when she dresses femme it’s really kind of street culture Asian femme.

And Sammi’s smaller than me, slender and actually kind of lithe too.

So she sort of works but she’s definitely much more the guy in our relationship.

Very take charge, very sexual.

But I actually like them taking charge of things in the relationship. I’ve always been in the whole body image thing because I’m the way that I am shy, shy and more than a little freaked out by it all and even though I did stuff like boxing and weights to “Man up” to myself but my dad and my brother…it never clicked on the inside.

And the first time I met Sammi she was defending me.

Like some boi-girl-knight.

Though she prefers ronin.

No like seriously.

And that so works for me…Sammi is the prettiest guy that I’ve ever seen.

Okay they’re my spouse, father of our child and I might be a bit biased.

Okay…and I’m more than tempted to call in sick for my duty shift and slip into bed and give Sammi a pretty slutty waking up.

I head off to the washroom and use the bathroom since being up seems to either wake the baby sort of or shift them so that there’s pressure on my bladder and I use the bathroom and then I undress and slip into the mister.

No not that.

A mister is a ship shower, it’s a tall closet like shower stall that is part IR sauna and part shower sort of. It gets you to where you’re sweating and then it sprays you with a mist of hot water making steam and then you use the foli which is short for the exfoliator and it uses a mixture of water and a cleansing agent on you as you use it and you sort of let in scrub the bad stuff away like a hand sander but it sucks off the water from you too.

The wash comes out the top end on the bristle pad and the bottom has the vacuum part. There’s still a drain and stuff in the floor but it’s all set up for minimal water use and recycling of things.

Heck on ship you recycle everything pretty much.

I get dressed and that’s a body stocking and then I wear my pregnancy modified cargo pants over it and a hooded ship logo zip front sweat shirt and then my socks and sneakers and I get my knives and I head off to work.

Yep knives.

I’m a cook, actually a chef in training but most of us chefs have our own knives and a kit too with our favored tools and spices and stuff.

In space, space itself is a premium so no one has private cooking quarters and each ship has a mess and before I was into a whole lot of things that I might do but I settled on cooking since well people have to eat and it actually just spoke volumes to me as my pregnancy started kicking my body and my hormones and my feelings into a whole other range.

Cooking helps me do the whole nesting thing.

Breakfast…I go and I take a cube of coffee out from the chiller and I put it into the machine. Coffee is here pretty much instant but we have a machine that uses high pressure water and a sort of heated centrifuge kind of device and it makes a really super blended pot of coffee from the instant coffee.

It’s in cube form too so it’s super densely compressed and needs a machine to sort of render it to where we have a mixture that we can all drink.

But even though I’m not a coffee drinker or ever was I still miss my perk coffee with the beans and all.

I take the tofu out of the tubs and the texture veggie protein and the saitan and start to cook. The saitan is a meat substitute made with wheat gluten and I load it into the hopper for it along with some tofu and the TVP and I start going through the computer with the ratios and stuff that and selecting the grain of the design and I add in a cube of the compressed stock a lot like the coffee cubes and I start printing off ham steaks on the 3-D food printer.

Okay well yes and no…first I add my own bit of code and my own secret mixture. Coconut oil and gelatin and some simple protein beads and a smoke pellet.

I had gotten special permission to try and make smoke…in a lab but I made smoke from some bits of fruitwood that I had bought before leaving the moon. I was hoping that we could replicate the wood itself someday and still do since I still have some of the samples and stuff but I made some very concentrated pellets of pear and apple wood smoke.

Combined with the mini-print program and formula I invented I’m printing out ham steaks complete with a light smoke and synth fat that when I cook it on the flat top actually crisps up like really close to the real thing.

Invention meeting pregnancy cravings is what that was.

I actually enjoy my job and I get along well with the others here as they show up to help feed people though I’m going to admit my food is more popular and I’m secure enough to admit it.

There’s another thing…secure…before something like man enough or woman enough would have been like the common language but here with the mixes of all of us here we’re usually more gender neutral or we’re using other pronouns like Zir, Zan for leaning towards masc/fem and hir/sh’ir is becoming popularized too.

But he, she, they, them are all still used.

It takes a lot of time to pass before we get away of things like that full scale.

Anyways it’s just nice to get to be liked and popular for stuff I’m doing and everything. It’s actually pretty much an amazing feeling when no one treats you like you’re a freak. Though it’s still taking some getting used to having people be all inquiring about my pregnancy.

Asking if they can see…touch my belly…all like natural social stuff but still really strange as we were raised for most of us back on earth.

I head out once I’m done cooking and the clean-up and then the prep for the next meal and I’m doing up soy/coconut/almond cream for the chowder and then I get my jacket and head out while it’s processing.

Okay this part I never get used to and I hope that I never do.

I hit the halls and kick off the floor with more of a flick of my feet than my legs and it takes me over a dozen feet before my next touch and jump. We have lower gravity here and stuff so I get to do stuff like this.

It’s seriously amazing stuff to actually be an astronaut.

Yeah, really. It is what we are actually and a lot of us have sort of forgotten that with the day to day but I haven’t.

The world’s so wonderful really…even though Earth wasn’t and in the end it consumed itself in hatred and bigotry and paranoia.

I stop and look out the window.

Earth…Earth and even the moon is so far off from us right now and it’s such a strange feeling seeing that and knowing that we’re travelling so fast from the acceleration we’ve built up that it would take more than my lifetime in a shuttle or a smaller ship that these fusion ram things we’re in to get back even close to home.

Sigh…

I push off and I keep going and take a pipe down to the deck I need which is the aquiculture level and I enjoy the fall down it’s a drifty sort of thing and it’s highly enjoyable…fun even actually and I pass through the airlocks and I’m hit with the smell.

Aquiculture is a huge level and it’s part of the Aeroponics process but it’s also where we grow our other food sources and staples and that’s fish, shellfish, plankton, and various kelps and other sea life and fresh water life in what we call reef tanks that are really sort of like that and…they smell… fish tanks smell and algae and plankton smells and all of that stuff it’s all icky to me and stuff but it’s really essential and it’s huge, these are huge ships and meant to be that so we colonize Mars as best as we are able to.

Like the plankton tanks alone are the size of an American football field and they are a dozen high and each is a foot deep and they are constantly being grown and fed and harvested.

Actually combined with hydroponic rice and made into rice crisps with then making up the bulk of them you have the most common meal/snack in the fleet.

And I head past then to the chumming engines these are part of the organic matter recyclers that grind/blend things to this soup and stuff and that is passed though the tubes that hold the mollusk chains. We clone shellfish until they are to that point where they connect to something on their own and then we let them grow and feed on their own with like every so many tanks for straight on breeding.

It takes only a few weeks for them to get to edible states and we also breed some for longer times for bigger foods and that’s not counting the other tanks with things like shrimp and prawns and lobster etc. Also since they’ve been growing in low gravity they seem to grow faster too actually that seems to have an effect of a lot of things like plants too…it’s all biology and bio-engineering and over my head I’m just a cook or chef whichever way you want to look at it.

I get to the produce lines and that’s sort of our fish market with all the shellfish for market use or rather shop use and all the fish too with a lot of very small easy to grow fish too like sardine and grunion and smelt and smaller and I start to shop.

I have credits for the kitchen I’m in and some personal ones too and I get mussels and snails and periwinkles and they’re the cheapest and then I get some cherry stone clams and some scallops and a two claws off of a stone crab…they actually re-grow claws so you only ever take one and then you have a steady food source…they even did that in the old days and I’m looking at the prawns when I feel arms circle around me.

I jump and look and it’s Sammi and she grins at me and hugs me a little tighter and her hands stroke my bump.

“I love it when you cook me prawns.”

“You like anything, I didn’t eat as much as you do and I’m the one that’s preggers.”

“I know…” Hir teeth sort of scrape my neck before she kisses there. “You’re so damned beautiful d’ya know that?”

I lean into it and then hir and hir bulge and shiver in a good way. I love hir accent. I mean I’m as plain old American as it gets but my Sammi she’s from England and she talks with that accent which is just plainly sexy and she’s actually from a fairly upper-middle family so she doesn’t come off with all the coarse slangy stuff…Well she can I’ve seen her do it with her people from England and such too and but actually she just usually has that UK gentlewomanly soft and yet clear sexy thing going on.

Things waken and stiffen or start to and at the same time my hearts doing the roll over in my chest because of just all this sort of thinking of hir and how just really lucky I am.

“What are you doing down here aren’t you supposed to be up a couple of levels?”

She nuzzles me. “Yes but everything’s pretty well in hand the water’s clean and flowing and the plants aren’t actually going anywhere you know.”

“So…you decided to wander?”

“Well I saw you pass by the hatch on your drift down here and I just had to see you since I missed you and everything this morning.”

“I appreciate it.”

I reach with my arms and pull hers tighter around me and lean back into hir. I really do mean… “I really mean it Sam.”

I’m biting my lip and she actually turns me around and she looks at me. “Sam?”

(Sniffle.) “Yeah…” I reach out and stroke hir hair and hir face some…looks so much like a girl yet she’s so much more a boy that me like when and where…girly and fun and bouncy but not like femmy and girl and all the stereotypes like that. “Yeah…right now yeah…”

She kisses me long and sweetly and presses together with me but in this sort of dancing sort of way. That’s Sammi…girly and bouncy and femmy so much and yet she’s so honorable and brave and kind and sweet…and I was so much a freak all of my life that I never thought I was dateable much less married to hir.

She smiles and I love hir smile. “Hormones love?” she’s asking softly and that is just.

I nod and she uses her thumbs to wipe the tears from the corners of my eyes. Hir hand s smell amazing like clean fresh dirt overlaid with the smell of fresh green pea shoots. Hir hands smell of the earth and of growing things and of life and I look around the area and bite my lower lip when she does that.

“I love you, you know that?”

“I know, and it’s still amazing to me that you do Stevie.”

“You? You’re the one that defended me and are the one that makes me feel like I’m really someone and not just what I was told all my life.”

“Old life love, our old life and it wasn’t exactly roses for most of us.”

“I know it’s just all of this I never thought that I’d have all of this.”

She kisses me again and this time it’s long and slow and sweet and there’s smiles from some of the others and some of them sort of are doing the same sort of things, kisses and holding hands and stuff.

We’re really focused on doing things that we need to do here in the fleet but the whole old way of not having public displays of affection that’s pretty much gone out the window.

You’d be amazed at just how much a lot of the day to day bullshit about life just sort of gets really small when you have love and that it’s open and you’re not judged or bashed for it.

There’s a whole lot more of because we want to or because we like to in our way of life than because we have too.

Sammi takes my arm and smiles. “Let’s walk and you can tell me what you’re planning on cooking for the menu today up in your caf and what you might want to make at our place too.”

“Okay…that sounds like a plan.” Sammi is not a cook, not really but she’s really supportive and she does have some good ideas sometimes based on what she likes to eat.

And we kind of do that go arm in arm as I get the things for the meals I’m planning out and I head up with them in the lift to hir level and she takes me through the Aeroponics which are part of our gardening section and lets me get some veggies.

Okay I get a few extras and stuff and we stop and we have some lunch that I cook for both of us at one of the work benches…yes hir prawns and I cook them over a torch but I use a catch tray as a shallow walled grill and some vice grips as a handle and some coconut oil to fry them in and I add some hot chili paste to it and some curry and just a squeeze of lemon over it and then I break up some salad veggies and greens and toss them in the tray with the juices and oil and stuff from the spices as the dressing and we feed each other with our fingers.

I’m still getting used to spices and curries the way that she is and other people here so I sweat a little while eating still but it’s still really romantic and fun and sucking the juices off of each other’s fingers and sucking the stuff from the heads and everything and I swear Sammi loves playing all flirty and intimate all the time.

We were both those very not the norm where we lived, we’ve never really had something like this or this powerful emotionally in our lives.

She is a huge factor in me liking me.

I never ever actually liked myself before.

I head back to work taking the smells and the lemon and the leftovers with me and those I’ll use for supper tonight with my grinder and my pressure pot and a few other things and I’ll make a bisque or something and have like rice with it.

But I head back with my shellfish and I start to prep cook with coconut oil for the chowder and then the onions…the peels go into my freezer bin for leftover parts for chicken.

You boil out the yellow paper skin of an onion and it will add color to the broth, that soft and odd textured bit of first layer of the onion boils out flavor and nutrients…heck I even save the shell skin off of garlic cloves because there is flavor…use everything, recycle everything as far as you can before it gets passed onto reclamation services.

The chowder turned out good…onion and all the creamy milk things and me steaming the shellfish and incorporating it into the broth and I have roe from the scallops and that gets sprayed with some liquid smoke and dried and then ground into a seasoning along with lemon pepper seasoned crackers and fried potato skins from the potatoes that go into the chowder and the other shellfish the only ones that don’t get cooked in the broth were the scallops and every bowl got three small ones fried just so.

And yes I too the stuff from our lunch and I ground the bodies and shells into powder and added some more spices and some tomato paste and made a prawn soup with some dehydrated tiny shrimp as a garnish and scooped some rice into our bowls before pouring it over it.

It was a good night too…we went through a course change and there were these very, very large asteroids that we got really close to but not close enough to that we were in danger and we spent the night cuddled together and looking out the window at the salvage/exploring ships that we were sending over and stuff while listening to the coms.

We’ll be keeping pace for a while or more if we find more than what the initial findings were.

Use/re-use everything.

We spend the rest of our semi-awake time making love…I don’t think I could ever go back to the way that I was supposed to be according to my dad and my brother…I like sex…I like being made love to and not having to be the only strong one in our relationship…I love Sammi’s taut lithe, smooth and hard sexy body pressed to me, holding me as hir organ sinks into me and it’s sooo right…so actually natural for me…and then there’s my turn with hir.

Sinking into her depths and making her whine and sexy hiss and yes it took me awhile to get past being preggers and being intimate to Sammi when she needs it. And yes she is on top a lot with that too…but it’s still good, it’s still amazing.

The best thing though is our after time…and hir telling me that she loves it when I hold hir.

*** We’re busy… like the last two months kind of busy with the shifts going to the asteroids and stuff we’ve been super busy. They found elements for steel and there’s a huge vein of copper in another and salt in a smaller one and then two further out that I never seen are dragged right to us because they were dust and dirt covered ice chunks.

No…no alien microbes or viruses and stuff…we checked but it is space water…the particulates like super old and the elements once we’re deeper into the tests and the drilling were so much purer than anything that earth had when we lived there from all the pollution.

It’s distilled and added to our reserves and stuff and I got to hear all about it from Sammi who is so into all of this and everything since it’s hir thing.

So with more people getting to do so much more work in like this huge burst as we space harvest the asteroids I’m busier than ever with feeding people.

And me with my ideas and my 3-d meat synthing and printing my place is pretty popular. It’s nothing like the things we used to have and still do have but the livestock animals on the arks are not for eating…though we are harvesting milk and eggs sometimes but that stuff’s rationed off quite a bit.

But there’s some things that I fake really, really well…TVP and soy used for the base of the print and with it I have dried smoked and salted pork and it’s as tough as a brick and it’s compressed…someone had thought it the best way to sort of still put it away as rations…one of the Russian contingent actually I think but I shave some off and it’s ground and I add it into the mix…salt, actual pork dust but still real pork and the smoke for flavor mostly I think and by the time my mixers in the machine are done I have printed off some really close to real tasting bacon.

The part that nails it home? The smell…with an oiled grill and it getting crispy it smells like bacon.

I’ve had people come and say they’re smelling it two ships away.

And I invented this idea of making the food so it’s kind of cool that people are copying me even and I’m even listed as the person that established 3-d cooking.

I mean it’s not like I’m famous but at the same time…I never really though in my life that recognition would come like in like sort of a professional way.

I’m also writing a blog and a book on on-ship-cooking and stuff.

***….We’re here…Mars orbit.

Two months later than we had scheduled but a lot richer for raw materials we are here and we’re in orbit and to say that there was a party was really understating things. It looks so much different up close and in orbit than it does on the screens.

Actually kind of beautiful and with that and all of the excitement and all of the adrenaline and the fun and celebration…

My water broke…

No amount of tests or reading or even watching birthing videos had me ready for this!

I’m screaming my lungs out and I’m crying and panting and I’m scared and I’m crying.

Yeah crying a lot of crying as it feels like I’m being turned inside out.

Sammi is there and she looks ready to cry as much as I am and she also looks ready to stab someone as well.

This is all so new to all of us and with our strange physiologies and stuff we’re…the medics are all sort of winging it. I have all the parts like biologically speaking and stuff and the medics are talking about my scans and my hips and stuff and we’re waiting…waiting for me to dilate.

I do…I mean it’s happening and it was extremely slow and to not push before I’m ready…it was hard…my body wanted to and my mind was right on board with the doctors and I’m so not ready until it was happening.

And then it was happening!

Sammi holds my hand and she smiles but she cries along with me…screams with me and it’s not because she getting hir hand crushed by me squeezing it so hard my knuckles go white and hir hand reddens ups.

She screaming with me because she loves me…like you do when you’re with someone on a scary carnival ride and you’re being sort of altogether about it.

And in between the pain and the crying from the pain I’m crying because that’s my Sammi…so together and with it even when it’s the last thing that you’d even really expect from hir with how off the wall she is so much of the time.

The pain is unbelievable and it seems to last forever and I’m soaked in sweat from the pain and the effort and Sammi kisses me between it all and stares at me saying.

“You can do this love; you’re so amazing Stevie you can do this…”

Softly and loving.

Feeding me ice chips.

Wiping my face off.

Taking an ice chip and running it over my eyebrows…she doesn’t falter one bit and it’s five hours of all of this and some change…and I feel the baby get free…that ripping my apart and inside out pressure…just suddenly gone.

Then…

Time passes…

And then the sound of a baby crying and I let out this pent up energy and angst that had built up inside in those few seconds like a tsunami…I’m crying and laughing and I do manage to hear.

“Breath sounds are good! heart sounds are good and strong congratulations, you have a healthy baby.”

Yeah until we know, until maybe if they know we’re not really defining the sex and gender stuff yet.

“Dael….Dee aye eee elle…for the spelling please…”

“Dael…nice it has a good ring to it.”

Dael’s crying really loudly and they pass me my child and Sammi’s crying and sniffling and wiping at hir face…she’s actually an ugly crier…just one more thing I love about her.

I’m smiling and watching hir and snuggle Dael close to my chest and not even really checking things out yet…they’re healthy and that’s the biggy…it takes a few moments before they start doing the other stuff…the cleaning up after preggy stuff that’s…well kind of eww but I’m too exhausted to get too freaked out and the medics pass Dael to Sammi and she’s smiling and cooing and I grin and giggle-snicker at hir.

“What’s so funny mommy?”

Mommy…me…I guess so really.

“You.”

“I’m allowed to be a goofy daddy.” She nuzzles Dael. “Yes…yes I ams.”

“Well sure you are given I was just thinking we can double breast feed.”

“Huh?”

I point at her top, and her thins late tee-shirt is wet with her leaking through it.

She looks down and stares and she even olds Dael with one arm as she takes a seat and pokes at a nipple. “Well I’ll be…that’s kind of cool.”

Another reason I love hir so much.

I drift of watching hir and the baby and honestly nothing in the world could be better.

I’m woken up by one of the medics with some tea and some biscuit crackers with some peanut butter. I eat and look at the clock and it’s morning…I try moving and while it hurts I guess things have sort of slid and tightened more or less into the same places.

But it still hurts…But I get up and see Sammi in a porta-hammock in front of the window ad they must have moved us while I was out of it. There’s a little mini-crib baby unit thing beside Sammi and her hand is holding onto it in hir sleep still.

I sip my tea and look out the window at Mars and the stars beyond…the constellations the same but completely different from this perspective.

We’ll be headed down soon to join the other colonists and the people that had arrived before us.

Well be headed down soon to start our lives and a whole new chapter in humanity.

I look at my loves, I’ll have enough strength. More than enough strength.