Hairy Tales 2: Alex Purn, space explorer

Captain Alex Purn gritted her teeth and wrenched the flight control hard to port as soon as the alarm went off.  A rogue wave of solar wind slammed against the hull of her craft, pushing her dangerously close to the rivaling gravity wells of the orbiting moons.  Io's flux tube was straight ahead.  She pulled back, trying to lift away from certain death.  Her ship's ion engines whined as they struggled against the fringe of the moon's pull, finally catapulting free and shooting out and away from Jupiter.

Purn exhaled in relief as her craft shot forward, but a fresh set of warnings soon erupted across her monitors.  Europa was now straight ahead.  Another wave of solar wind battered the tail of the spacecraft and Purn found herself being driven at incredible speed toward the icy moon.  She twisted the throttle and pushed her flight stick as far away from the moon as it would go.  The engines red lined as the moon pulled at her ship, the Geosynchronously Orbiting Transplanetary Habitat and Lander.  The ship itself groaned as the hull struggled to maintain integrity.  Purn grunted, then screamed in effort as she pulled away with every last reserve of strength she had.

At the last moment, the craft shot free, resisting the embrace of Europa.  Alex felt the fuselage itself seem to sigh in relief just as she did.  She slumped back into her flight couch, panting.  The ship glided freely out and away from danger.  Then from the rear of the craft, she heard a loud pop.  Her monitors blazed to life a third time.  One of her ion engines had blown.  Only two remained, and both were well past their red lines trying to compensate.  The captain furiously pounded at her controls, rerouting power and trying to stabilize her other engines.  The system overrode her before she could balance the load, and enacted a shutdown to prevent another engine loss.

"Shit!" she swore, slamming her gloved fists against the darkened screens.  Out her window another celestial body loomed.  The largest and outermost of Jupiter's moons.  Ganymede.  And her craft was coasting through the void, sailing her straight toward it.

She spent the next hour trying to force her system to reboot, but something wasn't working.  Her systems weren't coming back online.  If she didn't get things running soon, she'd crash right into Ganymede.  Manual control from her cockpit wasn't doing the trick.  Reluctantly, Alex, unclipped her harness and pulled herself out into the main cabin area of GOTHL.  She floated through the main quarters, past her bunk and small galley, into another smaller room labeled Systems Control.  She keyed open the hatch and entered the server closet, pulling a thin keyboard and monitor from the rack. 

She began keying the reboot sequence directly into the server cluster.  Lines of code appeared on the screen, indicating the systems were coming back online.  Alex watched with wide eyes as the sequence continued, then suddenly was interrupted by a line of red.  Alex tried to read it, but the systems beeped loudly and the screen went dark.  "What was that?  Something... craft fault?" she said aloud, trying to visualize the red warning line that was clearly the issue.  She pressed the power key again and re-initiated the sequence, intently waiting for the error to repeat.

This time, she caught the entire error code.  "Craft Manager admin fault," she read as the screen winked out before her.  "Oh damn it all!  That freaking babysitter program!"  The Craft Manager had been a semi autonomous program layer added in the latter days of the development of the mission and the ship.  The idea was that in the event the crew were rendered unconscious, that layer would be able to detect and prevent catastrophic failure, going so far as to take control of the systems.  It would even be able to guide the craft back home if need be.  Alex had been against it from the start, calling it HAL9000, but the programmers had insisted that it had no neural net to allow it to learn and grow beyond it's original parameters.  It's frequent bugs though almost drove her to walk away from the mission.  Almost.  The lure of being the first human to step foot on one of Jupiter's moons was, in the end, too amazing to abandon.  She fought the inclusion of the Craft Manager software tooth and nail, but was overruled.  She decided that she'd deactivate it herself post-launch, but the coders had thought of that, and gave the software the ability to reinstall and load itself periodically to check in on the state of the craft.  And here it was, getting in Alex's way exactly as she'd expected.

Alex pulled herself to the bottom of the server rack and drew a secondary keyboard quickly,  A second monitor popped up above it and she began to run the disable command onto the craft manager.  It was a hack she had created herself with the help of one of the coders, who she may or may not have flirted with a little too freely in order to get what she needed from him.  She smirked as she remembered him freeze nervously as she ran a finger down his chest.

ENTER PASSCODE, the screen flashed.  Alex smiled again when she thought of her sarcastic line whenever the Craft Manager was discussed in preflight meetings.  "Mommy knows best," she said aloud as she keyed in the words.

CRAFT MANAGER DISABLED

Alex pulled herself back upward to the original keyboard and reran the reboot sequence.  After a few tantalizing minutes, the ship's engines came back to life.  Alex scrambled back through her ship to the cockpit and strapped in just as her monitors gave her the bad news.  Apparently the first engine's destruction had boosted the speed of the ship, sending it hurtling forward faster than ever.  Ganymede was much larger out Alex's window than it had been when she left.  The giant moon's gravity well had caught her and was pulling her in.  She gunned the engines, trying to skirt the equator and rocket out free, but as she did so, one of her directional rockets was knocked loose by an ice chunk.  She spun the ship around, trying to leverage the rockets on the ship's dorsal side to keep her from crashing.

The ship slowly corkscrewed around as Alex watched the surface of Ganymede grow closer and closer.  The engines were maxed out, the indicators showing her at the maximum strain they could depict.  The reality was probably far worst than that.  She released the throttle a bit to give them a break, and the ship plummeted.  Realizing her mistake, Alex punched the throttle back to max as icy cliffs came into view.  It was too late.  She righted the ship and tried to make her landing as graceful as possible.

The GOTHL skidded onto the ice at fifty times it's regular landing speed.  Pieces of the ship tore loose with a metallic scream, and she felt the icy surface scouring the hull outside.  Slowly, the ship slid to a halt.

Alex pried her fingers from the dead flight stick in shock.  She had just crashed her ship onto the surface of Ganymede.  She was over four AU's from Earth.  Four times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.  Her ship was likely never going to fly again.  She sat still, suddenly feeling more alone than she had in her entire life.

---

Two days later, Alex had inventoried the damage to the ship from the crash.  Amazingly, the hull of the long, sleek craft had not been punctured by the icy surface.  The engines appeared to be operational, even though they wouldn't start.

The hab unit of the craft was damaged, but not a total loss.  With a little work, Alex was able to get it deployed and had made a temporary home within it.  She found that the best way not to go insane was to continue with the mission, which did entail landing on one of Jupiter's moons for extended investigation.  She would do that while she figured out how to get her ship running again.  She set up her thermal wards, which heated the area around her hab unit to about -2 degrees Celsius, or about 28 degrees Fahrenheit.  Stepping away from the thermally warded zone, the temperature dipped quickly back to the normal surface temps, which were about two to three hundred degrees cooler.  Cold enough to kill a human in minutes.

Still, it was enough to allow Alex to test the atmosphere to her bare skin.  On the eighth day, she pulled off her glove while working outside.  The thin air of the moon felt cool, like an early winter day on Earth.  Another thing her sensors discovered was that within the thermal wards, the atmosphere was getting thicker.  The warmer temperature was congealing it, creating an oxygen rich environment that tested as breathable.  Alex took off her helmet and inhaled deeply.  It was invigorating.  She felt her body immediately become energized.  Her vision cleared.  She felt flush with strength and stamina.  Suddenly, she felt like she could accomplish anything.  Even getting her ship off this rock.  Somehow.

She had lost much of her ration stores during the crash.  The remainder of her supplies would only last a few weeks.  If she was going to survive beyond that, she'd need a longer term plan.  She found it quickly though in the softening ice within the thermal wards.  Lichen and moss had begun to grow in the more dense atmosphere.  Alex tested it in her lab and discovered it was nutrient rich and toxin free.  She cleaned and dried a small amount and cautiously took a bite.  It wasn't going to win any taste awards, but it wasn't disgusting by any means.  She found her mood and strength boosted whenever she ate it, and began starting her mornings with it in place of her usual coffee.

By the start of her third week, she began noticing changes to her physiology, likely brought on by the atmosphere and her diet.  Her fingernails had grown thick, and needed to be filed back almost every day.  Pale green flecks were appearing in the irises of her brown eyes.  And her hair, which she had always kept cropped into a no-nonsense brush cut, was getting more unruly by the day.  Frustrated, Alex searched for her grooming kit to buzz down the wild growth, but it was nowhere to be found.  By the end of the first full week on her lichen-rich diet, Alex's hair had grown four full inches.

As Alex stepped out of the meager shower her hab unit offered, she was shocked to feel her hair lying against the bottom of her neck.  It hung down over her ears completely on the sides, and her bangs tickled the tip of her nose.  She went to the mirror in the small head and wiped the steam away.  The person looking back at her was barely recognizable.  Her head was lost beneath this sudden mop of hair.  It hadn't been this long since she was in grade school.  She had never had patience to deal with her boring, medium brown locks and chopped it all off down to nothing one afternoon, sending her mother into fits.  She felt a little bad that she had robbed her mother of the more traditional daughter figure she had wanted, but still had never looked back.

Alex wrestled with her fresh hair, trying to push it out of her eyes and off her ears.  It just kept falling back down no matter how many times she raked it back over her head.  She noticed as she pushed and pulled at it, that the roots were lighter than her ends.  Her hair was lightening up out here.  And it was growing much thicker.  Several shorter sprouts had appeared among the longer lengths.  She sighed.  "That's it.  This is all coming off.  I have to have something handy that'll get rid of all this."

She spent the afternoon rooting through her scavenged items, looking for scissors, saws, razors, box cutters, anything at all.  She roared in frustration as yet another crate turned out to be useless, and her hair fell down over her eyes for the billionth time. Rooting through one final box, she found a brush, and laughed.  "I don't remember packing this," she said to herself, and nearly threw the damned thing out past the thermal wards.  Instead, she tossed it back into the crate, kicked the crate back into stowage and tried her best to go about her day.

A week later, her hair spilled out over her shoulders, and the color went from chocolate brown at the ends to golden amber in the middle, to a pure flaxen blonde at the roots.  It had grown incredibly thick, too.  Alex had clumsily fashioned it into a crude braid to keep it out of the way, although it was crooked and sloppy.  She found that bunning it was impossible.  The hair was so clean and young, it constantly slid free and fell down.  Braiding hair had never been a skill Alex had needed to cultivate, but it looked now like she'd have plenty of time to practice.  "Well mom," she sighted into the mirror at the fetching young lady with golden hair spilling down over her shoulders, "I hope you're happy."  Alex then leaned in a little closer and studied her eyes.  The green flecks in her irises were overtaking the brown.  Her eyes were turning a bright, vivid green.

Alex spent the next few weeks focusing on getting her ship spaceworthy by any means possible.  She ran diagnostics on the engines and flight controls after some patch work on both.  She was even able to rebuild the blown third engine, although she couldn't yet test its functionality.  The solar panels were collecting plenty of energy.  The one system that was non salvageable was her Nav.  In deep space, navigation was critical.  One small miscalculation could send you hurtling into the void without enough energy to correct your course.  And Alex's nav was thoroughly shot.  The sensors had been mashed beyond repair during the crash, and the nav program had corrupted itself trying to accommodate for the bizarre readings coming back from the compromised sensors.

As she studied a damaged sensor, her flashlight in her teeth, she felt her hair slither down over her shoulder, hanging down in front of her like a third arm.  She sighed and leaned back, pushing it out of her way and rebraiding it.  As her fingers weaved the soft tendrils, her attention wandered a bit from it's normal laser focus.  She lost herself in the moment; the soft velvety feel of this new hair in her hands, it's warmth and weight on her shoulders and back; the soothing tug against her scalp.  Her mind unclenched itself from the greater task of escaping Ganymede and for the first time since she crashed, she felt mild pleasure simply being where she was, doing what she was doing.  She sighed again, and a smile crept across her lips.

She tugged at her thick braid, now wider at the base than her upper arm, and an idea dawned on her.  The sensors needed to be re-secured to take proper readings.  She needed a thick, strong rope-like material to do that.  Her eyes drifted down to the braid in her hands.  It was soft and frankly beautiful.  And strong.  Her hair!  She ran back to the damaged sensor and held her long hair out from the tip to the broken mooring.  It was just long enough!

She ran back to her hab and dug through the chamber again, looking for anything that would cut hair.  She found a pair of bandage scissors in her first aid kid and swore at herself for not thinking to look there a month ago.  She ran to the mirror and admired the braid.  It was even and lovely, down to each plump knot.  She was getting good at braiding her hair, she realized.  The heavy soft rope of it fell over one shoulder, hanging down to the bottom of her rib cage.  It was about twenty inches long, from scalp to tip.  She pulled the thick appendage taut and brought the scissors up to her head.  Then she paused, seeing the green eyed blonde beauty staring back and her.  She stroked the long, soft braid and reveled at how it felt.  Then she had the first impractical thought in her life.  "Maybe I can find something else to use instead," she said out loud, setting down the scissors.  She realized she felt immediately relieved as she did so.

What is wrong with me?  Alex thought.  Am I really going to abandon making progress on repairing my ship just because I like how my hair feels??  She sat down in frustration.  Another thought dawned on her.  If she'd found those medical scissors a month ago, her hair would never have gotten this long, and she'd never have had the thought about securing the nav sensor.  She was closer now because her hair had gotten longer.  She absently unbraided her golden tinted locks and fanned them out around her.  Then she looked down at her hair-blanketed chest and had another odd thought.  What if there's another larger problem waiting for me that having even longer hair might solve?  Best to find another solution for the sensors and keep this ace in the hole for later.  She ignored the logical part of her mind that could see the flaws in her though process and grabbed the brush she had out of storage.  She let her mind wander as she brushed her long hair out for the first time in fifteen years.

As she happily felt the bristles pull through and smooth her locks, Alex realized that her hair-based fix would never have worked.  The heat of the friction of liftoff would have incinerated it instantly.  Her nav system would have gone haywire before she cleared Ganymede's gravity well, and she'd have died trying to manually steer her ship back to an impossible-to-find Earth.  Not cutting her hair had saved her life. 

That evening, she found a titanium rod and welded it into place, properly securing her nav sensor.  She went to bed long haired and content.

Progress continued slowly but steadily over the next month.  Alex's hair now fell in a loose braid that was as thick as her neck at the base.  The ends, still the original brown of her pre-Ganymede hair, now fell over her bottom, stopping just at the top of her legs.  Brushing and braiding it had become a daily routine that gave her time to think freely about the hurtles she faced from a comfortable distance.  Her elaborate braid designs were becoming artistic creations unto themselves.  Each braid seemed like an essay in creative thinking, and each seemed to offer insight into how to overcome the task at hand.  It was as if her subconscious was speaking to her through those woven folds.

Things went on like this until one of her thermal wards shorted out.  The temperature outside Alex's hab dropped dangerously low almost immediately.  Within three hours, Alex was looking for something to burn to create a fire she could keep warm next to.  As she scoured her inventory for anything wooden or paper, she found an old wooden folding chair.  But it wouldn't light without kindling.  As she turned around looking for anything that might catch fire easily, her braid whapped against her bottom over and over, like an insistent child.

It dawned on her that hair was flammable.  And at it's current length and thickness, she had just about enough to heat the wood long enough to catch fire.  From there she would be warm enough to think of something longer term.

She went back to the mirror and unbraided her hair, again lifting the scissors.  It's not a haircut, she told herself.  I'm harvesting kindling.  Her long pale-blonde locks draped beautifully down over her chest, back, hips and pelvis.  The first thing she noticed was how warm her body became beneath her unbound hair.  Her shivering slowed, and she felt insulated.  She set the scissors down again.  Let me just think this through, she told herself, giving her mane another stay of execution.  She sat down, again chastising herself.  Was she going to freeze to death just to keep her hair long?  As she fought with herself, her body continued to warm beneath the heavy lush drapes of her long shining tresses.

And then she realized that lighting an open fire in a highly oxygenated atmosphere like this would cause a massive explosion.  Enough to destroy her ship.  Enough to kill her.  If I had found those scissors and kept my hair short from the beginning, I would never have figured out how to fix the Nav sensor.  And I would never have stayed warm enough to think through the idea of lighting a fire.  Once again, not cutting my hair has saved my life.

Beneath the soft yellow and gold shawl of her hair, Alex opened the access panel to the shorted out thermal ward and re examined the fried wiring.  With a heavy dose of patience and plenty of soldering, she was able to fix the short and get the ward back up and running again, stabilizing the temperature around her hab.

Over the next three months, Alex was able to get her ship almost fully repaired, and made several important discoveries about Ganymede.  Her marooning had been salvaged more or less into a successful mission.  Humans could survive here if need be.  It would make a fine colony and waypoint for further exploration of the stars.

As Alex continued her work from within her lofty prison, her hair continued to grow longer.  She had long abandoned any notion of cutting it.  It was her good luck charm, her indulgence and her tether to her sanity.  The added strands caught up to the rest, giving her braid a uniform thickness from her head all the way to the ground where it now playfully bounced and bumped behind her heels as she went about her business.  She unbraided her golden blonde locks nightly and brushed them out as she reviewed her activities and planned ahead.  Loosened, her locks poured like liquid gold down over her body, massively enriched by her diet and the high oxygen atmosphere.

She would miss seeing it grow so beautiful and long, she realized, when she finally did escape.  She hoped that she'd at least be able to maintain the profusion of growth she how had, once she was back on Earth's now semi-toxic atmosphere.

One of the last parts of her ship, and the most difficult to repair, were her long range coms systems.  Contact with mission control had been slow and agonizing due to the sheer distance between Alex and her home planet even when it was working.  Now that she'd repaired it though, she found a thrilled ground team that had written her off as dead six months ago.

They collaborated on how to get Alex back to Earth with the Nav system so hopelessly corrupted.  "Captain Purn, why not manually engage the Craft Manager program?" her screen scrolled slowly one day.  "We built in an autopilot astro-nav into her code for just this reason."

Alex shuddered.  Not that wretched thing again.  She protested, citing how that program had gotten her stranded in the first place.  The team backed off for another month while they hypothesized about other solutions.  As the days and weeks wore on, they all slowly came to realize there was no other viable option.  She couldn't possibly stay conscious long enough to manually pilot the GOTHL back to Earth.  It would require years of nonstop flying.

Alex was not happy.  She deeply distrusted that software.  And she wasn't sure her deactivation hack would work on it twice.  If that thing went haywire again, she might not be able to wrest control back.  Then again, the point was moot.  That program was her only possible way to get back to Earth.  Even so, she struggled to bring the program back online.  Nothing seemed to work.

Alex climbed through the open hatch into the main cabin of the GOTHL craft.  As she did, her golden locks, which now trailed along the ground behind her for over a foot, flooded across the deck of the ship.  Almost immediately, she heard the haunting chime of the craft manager software booting to life.  A shiver ran down her spine, even as her excitement grew at the increasing prospect of making it home.  Something just wasn't right about that software...

"Contaminant detected," an electronic voice spoke over the ships comms.  "Hygiene breach detected as the cause," it continued. devoid of emotion.  "Commander Purn, please comply with regulation grooming."

"Regulation grooming?" Alex repeated.  "What the hell does that mean?"

"Commander Purn, please comply with regulation grooming.  Contamination via exo-planetary bacteria detected.  Non-regulation grooming identified as the carrier."

"Carrier?"  Alex spun on her heels, looking for whatever it was the stupid broken program might be referring to.  She caught a glance of herself in the mirror of the head.  Her cascading golden waves fell mightily down her suit, crashing across the deck.  "Oh," she said, suddenly realizing.  "It's my hair.  I suppose I am pretty far from regulation grooming standards.  I bet the lichen in my diet that's been causing all this hair to grow is what she's detecting."  Anger suddenly welled up in her.  "But I mean really??  Weeks of trying to bring her back online and now she comes to life just to bitch about my hair??"

"Just be happy she's back online.  Now you can come home.  And hey," the text from Earth command scrolled back to her across the screen that evening, "that's one more time your hair's gotten you out of a jam."  She had confessed her burgeoning love affair with her super long locks to the team.  They were astounded by the growth at first, but the control team's psychologists immediately advised that no one push her to part with something that was centering her so well through such a stressful ordeal.  "Now you can retire that mane undefeated," the scroll continued.

"Retire???  What the hell does that mean??!" Alex shouted at the screen, then typed an only slightly more suitably paraphrase into the keypad.

"We've been holding this back considering how important it is to you," the screen scrolled back silently.  "But you're going to need to cut back your hair before you fly home.  It's a major fire hazard, which alone is enough.  But consider it catching on something, wrapping up in machinery, strangling around your neck or blinding you, or even tripping you up at a critical moment.  You can't have all that risk with you onboard.  I'm sorry, Captain."

Alex read the screen in disbelief.  "No," she said quietly.  She looked at her reflection in the windscreen.  Her hair blanketed her softly.  It was so beautiful now.  It was a miracle.  "No," she repeated firmly as she typed her response.  "I'm not cutting it."

"There's one more thing.  The craft manager has identified it as a contaminant.  It won't initiate a launch, especially to Earth, with any of it aboard the ship."

"So, what, I have to shave my whole head now?"  Alex felt tears spring to her eyes.  She couldn't.  She just couldn't.  Not after all she'd been through.

"Yes."

Alex ran to her hab and switched on the shower.  She scoured every scrap of skin, and shampooed and lathered every inch of her lengthy mane with incredible care.  She put it into a towel and headed back to the ship.  "Maybe if it's fully cleaned, she'll realize it's me."

"Contaminant detected," came the disinterested electronic voice the moment her hair touched the deck.

"Shit!" Alex swore.  She stormed off the ship, the tears coming fast now.  Not her hair.  Come on!  She flopped onto the rock she often fell to when she had to noodle over a big problem.  She watched her beloved locks, now so lush that even braided tightly, the knots easily overwhelmed her slender neck, spill out over the ground.  Her hair had saved her so many times in so many big and little ways.  She couldn't cut it.  She pulled out her brush and tended to the shining lengths, running the bristles through the thick strands slowly, enjoying the feeling.

Her mind cleared again as she went about her favorite activity one last time.  This hair, she was sure, was the only reason she'd made it this far.  Without it, she'd have given up or died by now.  It was as essential and vital to her now as her heart and lungs.  She had to protect it as it had her.

The next morning, Captain Purn stepped out of her hab unit in full spacewalking gear.  Every inch of her was enclosed within her suit.  Her helmet formed a solid bubble.  Her cowl covered her head within, concealing her hair.  This has to work.

Within the suit, trailing down her back, looped several times around her waist, was her thick sunny braid, still firmly rooted onto her scalp.  It was incredibly bulky, but the suit was loose, and so it fit.  All she had to do was initiate launch, clear Ganymede's gravity and set the autopilot.  Then she could seal herself in the hibernation chamber until the ship was ready to re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

Was she being ridiculous?  No, the ridiculous thing was demanding a girl with seven feet of the most splendid, thick soft hair ever witnessed sacrifice it all just to comply with a rigid, faulty program's protocols.

She sat down at the flight couch and began pre-launch flight checks.  Everything was in order, or at least operational.  It was time.  She felt an odd pang of sadness as her craft lifted off the ground.  Ganymede had become her home for so many long months.  Would she be able to adjust to Earth's heavier gravity?  Would she miss her lichen diet, and all the benefits it had granted her?  Maybe someday I'll come back. 

A tear pricked her eye.  Pure sentimentality.  This moon had been her prison, locking her away from everything she loved.  Or had it?  What she loved was the cosmic expanse, the vast possibilities that lie past humanity's consciousness.  It had been rocky, sure, but she had been able to live out a lifelong dream.  She had sailed the solar system and been the first of her kind to set foot upon a celestial body.  She now knew that Ganymede's air was breathable, her water potable, and her flora edible.  There'd be a colony there soon enough thanks to her.

The ship lurched violently as it crossed Ganymede's own polar jet stream.  Alex wrenched the control as hard as she could to keep on course.  The moon fought her one last time, it's gravity begging her to come back, to stay, to become a true Ganymedian.  She set her teeth and pushed the throttle, holding the flight stick in place as it tried to shake free.  Her suit twisted as she wrestled with the controls and a small, worn section, frayed from damage it had taken during the crash, tore open.  Just a tiny section.

A few agonizing hours later and Alex was free, tacking against the solar winds back toward Earth.  She keyed in the string of code she'd need to execute to hand over the ship's controls to the Craft Manager, and hesitated for a moment.  Then she hit enter.  The ship stabilized and changed course almost instantly. 

CRAFT MANAGER PROTOCOL INITIATED.  EXECUTING COMMAND: WITHOUT LADDER OR STAIR

Alex chuckled at the odd protocol title.  Those software engineers were definitely a different breed.  She yawned, stood up and headed back to her hibernation chamber.  As she pulled herself through the cabin, she had to remember how to move in zero gravity again, and bounced haplessly off a few pieces of equipment.  Eventually she pulled herself through the doorway into the chamber, sliding against the side of it.  That worn section with it's tiny tear just happened to be where she made contact.  The golden threads of her massive braid peeked out from her suit's small breach. 

Alex didn't notice as a small light next to the server changed from blue to red.  She was too delirious from the G's of liftoff.  She clambered into her hibernation bed, pulled down the cover, and went to sleep.  A smile crept across her face as she entered a hibernation so deep, her body would cease to age during the stasis.  She was going home.

Back in the cockpit, a dark screen blinked back to life.  CONTAMINANT DETECTED.  CRAFT MANAGER PROTOCOL INITIATED - COLLECT AND DISPOSE OF CONTAMINANT.  EXECUTING COMMAND: WICKED CHILD