Moonshine

“Hey, Mack, what would you have done if you weren’t doing this?”

The captain considers Carter’s question. “If I wasn’t here doing’ this I’d probably’ve gotten shipped out to th’South China Sea.”

“No, no, I mean if you weren’t doing NASA or the Navy, period. What’d you be doing with your life?”

It was ridiculous to stick five of humanity’s best and brightest in a sardine can together, jettison them into space, then abandon them to drift without alcohol. Fortunately, the best and brightest in question are more than capable of figuring out how to synthesize drinkable, minimally-poisonous spirits from freeze-dried fruit substitutes and various other compounds aboard the Endeavor. Technically, setting up a still in the janitorial-cum-recording closet is a colossal waste of their valuable, irreplaceable resources. Technically, once they die of starvation, their corpses are going to drift forever in the void of the galaxy they discovered until their ship catches the orbit of one of the twelve planets there and crashes to a fiery demise. Their priorities are a little different than Mission Control’s. As things stood their liquor was a bare step down in quality from moonshine and tinted a little pink with an acrid taste like paint thinner. Parsons insists upon on calling it moonshine anyway.

Mack blew out a breath. “Oh, well, I’d prob’ly be on Broadway.”

Around the rec room table everyone but Felicity looks shocked.

Mack smiled. “Well, I can carry a tune, in any case. Dunno if I’m still any good. But when I was a kid? I did musical theater from the time I could talk and had a scholarship to Juliard lined up ‘fore my parents died. After that it was better for my sisters if I enlisted. Let me pay for their boarding school so they didn’ hafta deal with foster care and later on their college an’ all that— apparently, Marine Biology requires a Ph.D. so of course Maria had t’spend six months on a research vessel down in Antarctica takin’ cute selfies with th’penguins. She’s th’ good one,” he says fondly.

“Aren’t Miranda and Melanie political dissidents?”

Elizabeth corrected him, “I think it’s Marjorie.”

Felicity, at her end of the table, is smiling into her cup and pointedly saying nothing. She’s known the triplets the entire twenty years she and Mackenzie Ardent have been friends and is one of the few people in the world capable of telling the women apart. They’d been born and grown up uncannily identical, even for multiples, sartorial and body modification choices nonwithstanding.

“Miranda and Margaret,” Mack corrects, “I b’lieve you both hafta take a shot for that one.”

Carter groans and Elizabeth punches the air in triumph. There are no rules to their boozy roundtable but making them up is half the fun.

“Miranda’s a hacker; she’s libel t’grow glowin’ mushrooms if she spends any more time in basements but the way she tells it it’s better’an cancer from breathin’ th’air outside. Margaret’s th’ dissident. She an’ her girlfriend packed up a while back to move to Denmark so they could get married.”

“I can’t believe you never told me that you sing,” Parsons tells him, stuck on the personal betrayal. “We could’ve been singing duets together this whole time.”

“There’s only room for one prima donna on this ship and that’s you,” Carter points at him. “I don’t think the Endeavor’d survive being serenaded by two of us.”

“What’re you talkin’ about? Parsons’s gotta great voice,” Elizabeth protested, “And Mack’s gotta, too, I mean just listen to the man speak! Nah, we should get ‘em both to sing so we can send it home. It’d be good for morale for the whole program.”

Parsons tried to interject— “I wouldn’t go that far—” but the ball had begun its downhill trajectory.

 “It would be great for the program’s vlog ratings,” Carter conceded. “Advertisers would eat it up.”

“Oooh and Mack’s got great stage presence, have you ever seen him give a pep talk? The live performances should definitely have tear-away costume changes,” Elizabeth added.

And Felicity couldn’t resist adding, “NASA fundraisers would make a killing on the virtual photo-ops.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Elizabeth laughed, toasting them all.”

“Do the stars of the show get a say in this or are y’all our new, tyrannical managers?”

“The latter,” Felicity told Mack, grinning.

He sighed in mock resignation, “Well that’s one helluva resume you’re puttin’ together for me: Broadway hopeful to captain to astronaut to exploited musician. Here I was thinking I had a bright future en route to middle age.”

“Your future— what about mine? I’m barely 23 and at this rate, I’m on schedule to crash and burn before I can legally rent a car!”

The crew of the Endeavor stared at that reality together and all of them laughed.