Evan fought back a yawn. When Jason told them they would leave the next morning he didn’t realize he actually meant they would be leaving at three in the morning. He looked over the majestic craft that was supposed to take them halfway across the solar system with a dubious expression. “Are you sure this is the right one?” He asked Jason for the fourth or fifth time. “It’s hideous.”

Jason scowled at him. “It’s practical. Not every type of craft has the luxury of being meticulously crafted from an aesthetic viewpoint. The Scarab class transport shuttle has everything we need for a multi-day trip across a system, with more than enough storage to bring back a large stockpile of fuel. It’s also the only thing in our database right now that can resist Jupiter’s gravitational pull enough to get in range for us to use a scoop.”

“It has eyes.”

“Those are sensor systems!”

“Isn’t that what I just said? It also has bug legs.”

“They’re efficient and highly versatile!”

“It feels like it’s going to eat us, why does the door look like mandibles?”

“Shut up and get on the Scarab!”

Kinzie couldn’t hold it in anymore and started laughing at their back-and-forth banter. “Did you remember to pack some coffee? This is going to be so much fun!”

Evan scowled at her a little. “I had no idea you were a morning person, all of a sudden I feel a bit sick, good thing I’m about to be Giant Bug food. I might give the thing indigestion.”

“Shut up and get on the Scarab!” Jason shouted again.

He shouldered the backpack of necessities he had brought with a shrug and started up the ramp. “Couldn’t you have at least painted it a better color? It looks like a big dung beetle, wait scarabs are dung beetles, aren’t they? Did you really design a ship to look like a big poo pushing beetle?”

Jason was scowling at him. “Not another word!”

The Scarab walked out of the concealed section of Lisa it had been built in, exactly like an insect, something Evan was quick to point out to Jason. Its engines activated and they all marveled at how quiet they were, just a gentle hum and suddenly they were gaining altitude at a remarkable rate. “Out of curiosity, why didn’t we just take Lisa there directly again?”

Kinzie let out an exasperated sigh. “You are just determined to be annoying today aren’t you? You know it was to avoid suspicion from everyone, the Confederation would wonder why we were flying around in a ship not designed for passengers, and the entire world would wonder where our giant corporate headquarters building vanished to. It would also take way more fuel for her to break orbit than it will for this thing, which would have been risky.”

Evan nodded absently. “Oh I’m totally shooting for annoying right now, some crazy masochist decided we needed to leave at an absurdly early hour, and I’m distributing some much-deserved revenge.”

Jason scowled at him. “It’s to keep too many people from noticing us, we can’t really fly off in a spaceship in broad daylight without having to answer a lot of questions we don’t really want to answer right now. Why don’t you just go back to sleep if it bothers you so much? There are two bedrooms for exactly that reason.”

“Because then I would miss the big moment. The first time we venture outside the atmosphere is a pretty big event. Did Beks get up to send us off or did she decide to sleep in? I didn’t see her this ‘morning.’”

“I overslept a bit and got here late, you guys were taking off as I walked in.” Rebekkah’s voice sounded over the intercom on the shuttle. “Pretty good idea you had there Jason, sending me a live feed of the main cabin, it’s almost like I’m right there with you guys!” She sounded chipper and far too awake for Evan’s taste and he groaned a bit.

“We’re almost there guys!” Jason cut in. “Clearing atmo in three, two, one, and congratulations on being the very first private astronauts to ever make it to space without the government finding out about it.”

“Are you sure?” Evan asked. “What if someone else did it and the government didn’t find out? It’s not like they have radars everywhere, just in the important places.” Jason chose to ignore Evan’s prodding this time.

“Bekkah, we don’t have a quantum link, so I’m afraid the feed is going to start lagging pretty quickly now that we’re clear and can really open her up. It should top out around a half-hour delay or so. Better strap in guys, I want to see what she can do.”

“Okay, you guys stay safe out there, I have work to do. Oh, and Jason? Saturn. When you guys get back you’re taking me to Saturn. We can get a second tank on the way, so it isn’t just a leisure trip, but there’s no way I’m letting you guys claim all the firsts. Saturn is mine. I wonder if I can convince that cute little HR director to come with me and keep quiet about it. It would probably be a conflict of interest though, and firing her probably isn’t the best way to score a date is it? Ah, I’m musing out loud, aren’t I? You guys have fun, I should have the first of Evan’s takeovers ready by the time you get back, I’ve already started buying up stock in the ones you picked.”

* * * * *

Space, as it turns out, is phenomenally boring most of the time once you get past the initial awe at being out there, where so very few people had been and your life could be extinguished so easily. Blackness and stars. Beautiful at first, and Evan spent a number of hours snuggled up with Kinzie in the cabin, watching them on the viewscreen. Which was actually just a holo-screen linked to the shuttles external sensors, since Jason wasn’t the kind of lunatic that wanted actual windows in the hull of the ships he designed because they were massive weak points on top of being pointless. A high-resolution screen, or in their case a holoprojector, linked to numerous high fidelity cameras with excellent zoom functions was much better than plate glass and a regular old set of eyeballs.

Still, on the bright side, it didn’t take long at all to reach Jupiter, barely a day and a half at the mind-boggling pace they set, and that was fascinating. Jason was taking as many images as he could manage, at every level of zoom they possessed and retaking any that didn’t meet his exacting standards. “Having fun?” Evan asked as he wandered into the main cabin with a cup of coffee in hand.

“Dude, this is amazing! First off, I found a calm region here that should allow us to harvest what we need nice and easy,” he highlighted a section of Jupiter surprisingly close to the Big Red Spot, “I know, I know, superstorm the size of three Earths, but the math checks out, I was surprised too. Second, we are about to get closer to Jupiter than anything we have ever sent out here! Not to mention our cameras and sensors are decades if not centuries beyond anything NASA has sent this way. We’re going to have so much data to crunch through. I gotta make some friends in NASA or something, just to see them wet themselves when they see this stuff. I mean look at this!”

He pulled up a series of images that looked a lot like sonar returns followed by a much closer up video clip. Evan looked at them closely, then watched in amazement as the clip played. “Are those?”

“Yes! Life! There’s life on Ganymede! This is unbelievable! I noticed some shapes under the ice on a couple of the pings I sent with the sensors that were different every time, so I sent an extended burst to try and cut through the crazy amount of magnetic interference from Jupiter, and there’s some sort of fish there, Evan!” He took a deep breath to calm himself down. “Alright, since you’re up it’s time to get down to business and finish what we came to do, where’s Kinzie?”

“Right here, I was getting some of that coffee. You gotta work out some kind of automated day and night cycle with some of those lights that simulate sunlight, it’s been less than two days and my biological clock is already going haywire, nothing but darkness out there all the time.”

Jason nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I get it, this was a rush job on a model not meant for long term habitation, we can deal with it for a couple days. Buckle in, this next part might get a little bumpy.”

“It wasn’t even bumpy during takeoff, or during your ‘pedal to the metal’ attempt to test just how much acceleration you can get out of this thing. I’d say those inertial dampeners probably got this.” Evan said.

“Jupiter has 2.4 times the gravity of Earth, and its magnetic field is twenty times stronger. That magnetic field is enough to mess with the engines a bit, and it’s going to shake us around some. Well within tolerances, but probably not something you want to be standing around holding a cup of scalding hot coffee through.”

They sat down and strapped in, while Jason sat in the pilot’s seat and started flipping switches and pushing buttons all over. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Evan asked after a little while of this.

“Yeah, screwing with you, I’m no pilot. I’m just here to make sure the computer knows what it needs to do, I put the buttons and switches in for fun on this one, most of them don’t do anything.”

Evan almost choked on his coffee. “Then what are we here for?”

“Moral support?” Jason replied as the shuttle started to shake, slightly at first, but it got worse and worse as they progressed. Then there was the moment when the hull started creaking a bit after they entered the atmosphere. “Definitely need that moral support.”

When they were finally finished, and the shuttle had pulled out far enough for the shaking to stop, a pale-faced Evan had to ask. “So what is this fuel source that we can’t get anywhere else exactly? That was the most terrifying experience of my life, and I would very much like to never repeat it.”

Jason shook his head, looking a little green. “Dunno, it doesn’t have a translation on account of it only being found on gas giants above a certain size. Since we haven’t made it this far out in more than a pretty superficial way we never discovered it.”

“Is it close to anything? Can we just make it at home?”

“Dude, I’m not even going to try, here look.” He pulled up an alien word on the projector and they all stared at it for a minute. “As for making it at home, from what I dug up in the databases it’s been done before, but it took a huge, crazy expensive, and super-advanced lab to produce any.”

“So Lisa runs on alphabet soup.”

“Pretty much.”

“I’m going to call it Evanium.”

“Nope, not doing that.”

“Try and stop me.”

“You wanna go-ow!”

Kinzie smacked them both across the back of the heads. “Boys,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Come on, get this bucket home so we can yell at Lisa and move on with things.”

She sauntered off to the room she had been sharing with Evan. As soon as the door slid shut Evan elbowed Jason. “How many miles up do you think this counts as?”

Jason elbowed him back instead of answering, after which they ended up wrestling for a bit, with every bit of skill and ability you could expect from lifelong nerds that had at most a couple months of casual training in self-defense. After their childish antics were finished they sat there laughing and nursing a few bruises each, then settled into a cheerful discussion about the new game.