3 C: Silent Half

Breakfast was a sullen meal until Elektra uncharacteristically gasped suddenly, and instructed the display screen, "Replay the notification about the prince of Eks Corp!"

Her daughters froze with their utensils loaded with food, held halfway between their dishes and their mouths. Even Rafaela couldn't help gazing at Elektra with the same incredulous expression that her two stepsisters wore.

"Present the full article," Elektra commanded as she reread the headline.

The pretty scenery that usually occupied most of the display vanished and a society news report filled the screen, with additional related links dancing along the edges. 'Heir of Eks Corp challenges his future Queen to step forward: Every girl in the System might have a chance to win the hand of Prince Brendan. The royal Eks Corp family is allowing the future king to break away from traditional compatibility match making systems, and use himself as the prize in an old fashioned space race.'

The article went on to list the actual restrictions on the participants, which Rafaela noted critically did not even come close to including every girl in the solar system. It was still rather shocking news though, even if the single occupant controlled craft would mostly limit the participants to the upper echelon, and the age range was tightly restricted to only Rep5 through Rep7. Even the article admitted that there were additional restrictions in the official notice released by Eks Corp.

Their system had not automatically downloaded that notice, and Elektra's expression grew pinched as the screen notified her that the request would take approximately half an hour to fulfill.

Doris and Louise were both incredibly excited by the news, and their words overlapped as they told their mother, "We are both qualified to participate!"

"All three of us are, except for that little detail about having three different solo ships," Rafaela added dryly. She didn't point out that she actually had a ship that could be used, if it could be repaired.

She honestly expected Elektra to insist that Louise was too young, even though she had celebrated her Rep5 already. You could get married that young with your guardian's permission, but most people waited until they had reached their own majority at Rep6, the repdigit celebration six hundred and sixty-six million, six hundred and sixty-six thousand, and six hundred and sixty-six seconds after their first breath. Doris was very close to her Rep6, but Rafaela was still in between, with over a full PiYear (31415926 seconds, roughly equivalent to an old Earth year) to go.

Rafaela was startled when Elektra glanced at her and frowned, but agreed, "Yes, one of you might have a real chance to be the next Queen." She told her daughters, "Your current studies will be suspended as of now, and you will start working on practical navigation skills together." Her gaze focused on Rafaela and she added, "I'll expect you to help them learn everything that you know until we can get a professional out here to tutor them."

Doris and Louise turned to look at Rafaela with nearly robotic synchronization and their expressions phased through incredulous disbelief until they froze like mirror images of almost comical disgust. "The station system can teach them the basics just as well or better than I could," Rafaela pointed out calmly.

"It was not a suggestion," Elektra replied icily.

Both girls turned toward their mother before their synchronized movement fell apart and Doris waved her hands in the air and protested, "For once I think you should listen to Cinderella!"

"Doris is right mother!" Louise chimed in. "Let the computer teach us! What would SHE know about navigation and piloting!?"

Elektra replied rather sharply, "Rafaela isn't a double L like the two of you, and her father is," she hesitated a moment and her expression grew even colder as she added, "or was, one of the best in the system. He was also the heir to the head of the main branch when we were children, and despite the dissolution of their corporation before he reached his majority, he was able to build a small corporation of his own. I am certain that his only daughter has all of the inherited skills of the Donatella family, including those he considered to be the best of his own."

Rafaela could have corrected Elektra's mistaken assumption, and probably should have, but Doris glanced at Rafaela's expression and spoke first, "But her mother was just some unknown Cinder slob. What if she only inherited her mother's M?"

Elektra sighed as she looked at her eldest daughter. "You really must learn to interpret the actions of everyone around you, even insignificant servants if you are going to have a real chance at becoming the Queen of Eks Corp in the future. Both of you. Do you think any of those grubby miners would defer to a little girl who hasn't even reached her majority, if they didn't know she has inherited her father's skills?"

"Some tiny little water transport company that can't even afford to keep a Central corporate headquarters isn't really anything to be proud of," Louise muttered.

"It was merely an unfortunate choice, and not a lack of funds. When you marry you must keep in mind that men are often impractical, stubborn, and must be persuaded slowly. Corso could have arranged matters better, but he had already given his authorization for the lease I requested, so when everything is sorted out we won't have to continue living in isolation out here," Elektra assured her daughters.

There were so many things wrong with the words of both Elektra and her daughters that Rafaela couldn't even speak. Her father was one of the most practical and least stubborn people in the solar system. SkyWater was a very small corporation, but it was rated in the top one hundred, and there were no servants on SkyWater station.

And Rafaela had neither inherited her father's M in her 24th pair of chromosomes, nor gotten the double L of her stepsisters. But her mother hadn't been some unknown from the Cinder Sector either, she had been a true unknown. Gabriella Cardozo Donatella had been a beyonder.

Like a real fairytale, Corso Donatella had found his future wife asleep in a suspended hibernation state within the Cinder Sector. His sleeping beauty hadn't been trapped in a tower of thorns, instead she had been stranded within a damaged ship of nearly archaic design. Fortunately both Gabriella Cordozo and Corso Donatella had found a shared archaic language in their memory libraries, and things had gone well from the beginning.

Beyonders weren't completely unheard of, but they usually came on heavily loaded ships from the closest systems, and were expected and tracked for decades before their arrival. Gabriella hadn't even known about the light net of automated scouts that was gradually expanding human territory. She had been alone on an old fashioned manned scout ship. The King of Eks Corp himself had granted permission for the Cinder Sector beacon that had sent back the first information about their solar system on her ship's frequency, and which continued to send many technological improvements back to Gabriella's home system, which was both surprisingly close (relatively speaking) and now properly notated and connected to the light net system with its own beacons.

By their records Gabriella's home system was only a 16th generation settlement, while the system settled by Eks Corp was a 47th generation system. A lower generation number didn't necessarily mean that a system had been settled earlier, since an early generation system might keep sending out new colonies for hundreds or even thousands of PiYears. But even though human expansion wasn't linear, it was rare to have such a large generation gap between near systems.

The extra LM chromosome pair that most humans now carried was old enough that Gabriella had also carried it. Her genetically bi-colored hair hadn't been unheard of either, it was merely considered dreadfully old fashioned. But her M did not fully interface with Corso's L in their daughter, and Rafaela did not seem to have access to any inherited memories, nor the editing function for what would be passed on to her own children, although she could control her reproductive cycles normally, unlike her stepsisters who lacked all M functions.

Since Rafaela was otherwise a healthy and intelligent child, her parents hadn't worried about the genetic variance, and there was merely a small note in her medical record about her unusual M chromosome. It had taken her a long time to realize that when her new stepsisters talked about their impaired memory libraries, they simply meant that they had started with an empty storage system at birth, just like she had.