Valentin Valentinovich and his mistress alone were spared from this event, as he made his suite completely autonomous from the ship’s general systems pre-flight. They learned that GAS had put all expedition members into stasis the next morning, when they saw a warning sign “Gas! No exiting!” appear above the hallway entrance and discovered that the door was automatically blocked.
Elina, the mistress of the ship’s director for duration of the expedition, was the first to wake up and wanted to sneak out to her friends to chitchat while her paramour was sleeping, but upon noticing the locked door and the alarming sign above shook Valentin awake.
“Valik, wake up! Someone locked us up, and some gas was released.”
Valentin scratched himself for a long while, unable to understand what this dumb broad wanted from him, and when the situation finally dawned on him, he hailed GAS.
“Listen, GAS, what is going on there?” he asked the on-board computer, yawning.
“Good morning, my master,” that was the ironic name that GAS had given to him, knowing that he liked it, “ To prevent the crew from screwing around all over the place, for economical purposes I have put them into stasis and supplied their air with the proper nutrients until we arrive to our destination. I hope after two to three years of some healthy sleep they all will wake up safe and sound.”
“Good God,” grumbled Valentin in response and thought to himself, “It was smart of me to disconnect my cabin from the general support system and make it autonomous. Otherwise, I would have been lying passed out somewhere with others, and who knows if I would have woken up in three years.”
“Well then, you better serve breakfast for two here in the bedroom. But next time before you do anything like that, let me know in advance. OK?”
“Yes, my master!” replied GAS joyfully and hung up.
The service board robots showed up a half-hour later, rolling food into the flight director’s sealed module chamber and passed his meal to him on a serving tray.
Valentin hungrily began eating and, mouth full of food, asked his girlfriend.
“And you, Elya, why aren’t you eating?”
“For some reason, I’m not hungry, sweetie. You eat,” she replied, stroking him on his slowly balding head.
Valentin Valentinovich was quite an ugly little man – short, fat, balding, with large, protruding, moist lips and bulging watery eyes. He always walked bowlegged, hunched over, and smacking his lips all the time, licking off saliva – in fact he resembled a toad. But despite his repulsive looks, Elya agreed to live with him right after she had got a job on the ship, because of his wealth and status, but also because she was two months pregnant by her last lover – a handsome, but very poor boyfriend. Elya tricked the medical board when applying for a job on this flight, not thinking that she would be away that long. She wanted to live with Valentin, provide him with sexual favors for as much money as possible, and come back to her beloved toy boy as a rich girlfriend. That the flight would take several years, not weeks, as she had originally thought, Elya learned only after blastoff from Valik. So she decided to announce that her unborn baby’s father was “the little toad” – the name she called him in private – just waiting for the right opportunity to do that. And any premature labor in the future could be blamed on the unbearable space conditions. This ploy would allow her to solidify her position on the ship as a chief hostess and let her do nothing for the whole duration of the flight, and then see what the future would hold. Elina’s morning sickness had started early: she was nauseous and craved something salty all the time, but she did her best to hide from “the little toad” for at least a couple of weeks. The fact that GAS had put the crew into sleep was to Elya’s advantage. The only problem was to being forced to tolerate the constant company of the slobbery “little toad”. Before, she was able to escape every day to the guards, but now they were gone too, and she felt nauseous, nauseous, and nauseous incessantly.
