John Ringo;Julie Cochrane by Sister Time

Author:Sister Time
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Female assassins, Space Opera, Fiction, Science Fiction, Human-alien encounters, Adventure, Life on other planets, Sisters, Military, General
ISBN: 9781416555902
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2008-12-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The family quarters for the Indowy-raised humans were a series of small, low rooms. The Michelle O'Neal family suite had walls in shades of mint and peach. The parents' sleeping room and the living room opened directly on the corridor. Behind those two rooms lay the nurseries. A central corridor contained the long washroom that served the family. All the rooms were very small. That, at least, was the allocation of the human living space its Indowy planners had intended. In reality, the parents had tri-sected their room by hanging curtains from tracks in the ceiling. On each side wall, and along the back wall, a set of bunk beds, closely stacked, provided a bunk for each of the six adults in the group. Hooks at the head of each bed held a change of robe and two night-robes apiece. A small, six-layer chest of drawers held underclothes and a memento or two for each parent.

The children's rooms had the same furnishings as the parents' room, except that the beds were slightly shorter and wider. There were more drawers, the plan being that two children would be in each bed, at capacity. The children past their first apprenticeship would, of course, live in unmated social groupings. After some trial and error, the Indowy had learned that the humans they encountered in Fleet had been wise to suggest adolescent human social groupings be segregated by breeding biology. Their males and females exhibited social and mating behaviors that were unstable and intense when housed together in the juvenile stages prior to group assignment and bonding.

The Michelle O'Neal family, as with most of the human families on Adenast, quietly deviated from their green mentors' plans and used clan privacy traditions to avoid discussing it outside the family. For one thing, the O'Neal adults were three couples, not a homogeneous group. Since Derrick's death, Michelle had slept in the room with her own two children and Bill and Mary's oldest daughter. Their toddler, and Tom and Lisa's three, slept in the other children's room.

In the parents' room, the other two couples had four bunks, but most nights only occupied two. Tom and Lisa's two-month-old slept in Michelle's old bunk.

Nooks and crannies all over the apartment—under chairs, in the small spaces under the beds—held prepackaged food so that the family didn't have to go to the mess hall for meals. It was the same stuff, anyway. In the sitting room, larger chairs for each adult and small ones for each child stood grouped around each other or the thinned-down holotank on one wall. On another wall, a spice rack displayed some of the family's wealth. The human sections of the agricultural planets didn't run to growing traditional herbs and spices. Most human families would buy a little pepper and hot sauce. More frequently, some locally brewed hooch. Michelle had paid to ship a fifty-spice rack up from Earth. Shipped and paid for legitimately. Refilled legitimately, for awhile. Sometimes the refills were even legitimately bought and shipped now.

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