<div style="text-align: center"><span style="font-size: 15px"><b>Kohlberg Station<br/>
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</div></div><br/><hr class="bbc-hr bbc-hr--3"/><br/><br/>From her viewpoint the world below, a water rich planet smack in the middle of the so called Goldilocks Zone, spun in slow, off kilter circles around the meters wide porthole.  In truth the station to which the St. Anne was anchored was in geosynchronous orbit with the planet, Dixon's Reach, and the illusion of movement lay in how Iona was floating in the compartment.  Of course she'd turned off the gravity plates upon entry, she always preferred microgravity to anything else, and had stretched out across the porthole, floating a mere fingertips reach above it.  Air from the vent caught her legs like a sail and spun Iona in a minutes long circle as she gazed down at the blue jewel below.<br/><br/>Were she to turn over, and if there had been a corresponding porthole, she'd have seen the vaguely organic, beetle like form of Kohlberg Station.  They'd been moored for over a week and docking fees were steadily running up as the St. Anne unloaded her cargo; sheep of all things.  Not run around and crap everywhere sheep, fluffy panicked balls of almost brainless baaing, but fetal sheep.  A brainless futures speculator had cornered the market on vat grown and packaged fetal sheep, or so he'd thought.  When the bottom had fallen out of the market and he was fleeced and sheared as finely as any of his four-legged investments, Iona had picked them up for pennies on the dollar.<br/><br/>Problem was, how to package them and transport them.  Each fetus lay within a green tinted transparent pouch filled with amniotic fluid, a spiderweb of umbilicus running into them and hooked up to a port in the side of the bag to which life support was attached.  Since they'd been stored in zero-g, and moved into bulk containers in a tangle of connections in the same condition, they hadn't required any special thought beyond 'How many can we get in here?'.  Now though, being transported down into the gravity well of a planet bereft of a space elevator, her crew had been...<br/><br/>Well, they'd been herding them for lack of a better word.  Save for a single watchstander left on board, usually the doctor or cook, all hands including herself had spent days EVA, opening a container, unhooking the pulsing, squirming bags of almost full term baby sheep - were they called lambs? - and floating them to another crew member beside a hastily constructed acceleration rack that Serena and Dr. Khan had devised.  There, safely cradled and connected to life support, the creatures were shuttled down to the surface to the warehouse for storage and imminent birthing, ready to add themselves to the planet's commerce for meat, wool, and possibly a bit of cuteness.<br/><br/>They were a monumental pain in the ass and a big hit in the ledger.  Iona thought they'd break even, maybe even clear some profit, but every moment they were moored the fees kept mounting.  She didn't dare push the crew any harder, they'd been working doubles and only her refusal to compromise safety any further by allowing 'phetamine fueled triples kept them from working any harder.<br/><br/>Another dozen circles and she'd seen the last container opened and little green packages begin to float across to the ship's boat.  Iona extended her arms and her fingertips walked across the portal, enough friction to start her body moving until she brought her feet down and frog kicked herself over to the hatch.  On the other side of it gravity, well half g anyway, returned and she rose from the crouch she'd landed in to walk along the passageway to the bridge.<br/><br/>"My ship," she said to Dr. Khan.  A formality, really, since the Doctor wasn't really qualified to do more than stand an emergency at dock watch.<br/><br/>A swipe connected her personal comm to the bridge's more powerful unit and she opened the All Hands channel.  "The moment the last one is clear stuff that cabling back into the container and close it up.  I'll get us permission to cast off and settle outside the station nav limit.  Annie," that was the ship's boat, "rendezvous with us there."<br/><br/>She cut off and switched to port control, negotiation their release and payment of docking fees, then waited another tense ten minutes until the St. Anne was able to cast off.  Smoothly, turning down on her heel like a tubby ballerina, the St. Anne pitched about and began a slow, barely 5 meters per second, departure from the station that increased as the distance grew.  A quarter of an hour would see them at the edge of station control, some thousand kilometers out.  Well, out and up.  A higher orbit but also in "front" of the station's movement.<br/><br/>"i know you're tired.  Lord knows I know you're sweaty and your suits smell like someone else's socks," she joked across the All Hands channel, "but I'm proud of the work you've put in.  We finished a full two hours before I thought we would and only let a few of those fluffballs get out of our hands.  Guess it's going to be raining sheep for a day or two."  They'd burn up of course, and the animals would already be dead and frozen in their plastic pouches before then.  Space didn't care and didn't forgive.<br/><br/>"Everyone gets a fourty-eight," she said, allowing her crew a liberty of two standard days.  It also gave her more time to sort out their cargo for the next leg of the voyage.  Picking up the impromptu sheep for sale had meant they'd set off without a next destination in mind.  It wasn't necessarily good business, well not sensible business, but it was an opportune bit of business and while her parents wouldn't approve it wasn't their ship, was it?<br/><br/>Well, okay, twenty-five percent of the profits for the next couple of years were but she was Master and Captain of the St. Anne and she made the decisions.<br/><br/>"You can hit the station, the planet - supposed to be some pretty ice caves towards the poles with little sleeping grottoes, or the beaches, red volcanic sand at the equator, or the main city...whatever the hell it's name is.  Probably Dixon's Landing, they're an unimaginative lot.  Or you can stay aboard and just doss down in your bunks.  But if you're late you better pray to Jesu," she automatically crossed herself, "or your ass is mine if I don't just leave you."<br/><br/>"Someone bring me back some spring water with a little taste.  St. Anne out."<br/><br/>They'd tarry here a full two days.  Iona knew she'd go over to the station, on business at least, but had no idea where the rest of the crew would end up.  Some of them, most of them to be honest, sometimes found stations or planets too hot for their liking.  Not as in Celsius hot, but hot as in law man hot or underworld hot.  Iona frowned a bit, not liking either, but then so long as she had them signed on as her crew their troubles were her troubles.<br/><br/>The St. Anne stuck together, no matter what.