Blaring alarms rang down the hall, and the Captain could hear frantic scrabbling from the crew quarters. Screwdriver still in hand, she tore down the corridor as the sounds got louder and shriller.

The rec room seemed to be the source of the cacophony. Stupid, stupid. Not a day passed when she didn’t regret giving the crew a space for “rest and relaxation,” and especially not so close to one of the tertiary airlocks. But there was no avoiding it. After all, if a crew was kept happy and occupied, there was less chance of mutinous thoughts.

And mutiny was a subject never far from the Captain’s mind.

“What have you done now?” She growled. The crew shrank back. As they should. She saw the problem immediately. Some idiot, some no-brained fool, had jammed the airlock door, so that it was stuck half-open like a giant’s maw frozen in a yawn. They couldn’t get through to remove the blockage without losing all their oxygen.

She took stock of the situation and immediately saw a solution. They could use the manual release switch to force the door shut. That would cause such an abrupt ascent of the hatch that the blockage would be sucked into the vacuum and she could go back to what she had been doing before she was interrupted by this colossal blunder.

She strode over to the switch and gave it a good hard yank. One of the crew should really have done this already - what were they thinking? (The Captain naturally assumed they were thinking mutinous thoughts. After all, since her elevation to the position she had experienced no less than seventeen mutinies and considered herself to be rightfully cautious.) As the blaring alarms shut off, she could hear the tiny voice in the back of her mind that she always tried to ignore. “This is your fault. You should’ve taught them better.”

Scowling, she stalked out, the crew’s faces still frozen in fear as their eyes tracked her like startled prey.

* * *

“What were you thinking?” Selena asked once the captain had left. They were watching two of the other crew members boxing now, and they were even enough that it should go on for a while. “How could you have possibly thrown those into the airlock?”

She could have added more questions - “Why did you throw them at all?” and “Don’t you understand that your gloves are generally not for throwing?” or “How did you become so bad at boxing - it obviously took special training?” However, Selena was a taciturn person and felt that the questions she had asked were the most necessary. She was loath to keep talking longer than she had to.

“Just bad luck, I suppose,” Elio replied with his typical lethargic smile. It was more than luck. Selena had never met anyone with less coordination than Elio in her life. Even in normal gravity, he made walking seem like an arduous task, all flailing limbs. On the space station at only three-quarters gravity, his wobbly-baby-giraffe gait was only exacerbated, which was why he tended to spend as much time as possible in this position - sprawled on a couch with his limbs pointing in whatever directions they were in when he fell there. He also tended to complain - at length - as he was doing now.

“Well, as I’ve lost my gloves, I suppose I’d better go,” he said in his default tone - extremely casual (normal casual never seemed good enough for Elio). Selena privately suspected that he was happy to get away from the boxing matches - after all, she had been pulverising him. Awkwardly, he clambered to his feet. (Selena herself was actually perfectly capable of walking and a great many other feats besides - running, jumping, climbing, all kinds.) “It’s rather annoying how far away the prison is from the rec room, though. I have to walk through the crew quarters, the mess hall, the galley, a whole heap of storage areas-”

“Two.”

“-the infirmary… all to get to my bed!”

Selena rolled her eyes. “If only you were sleeping in the crew quarters like the rest of us instead of in the holding cells like an idiot.”

Elio grinned. Since the Captain had been promoted, he had single-handedly planned and enacted fifteen mutinies, as well as the one where he had roped half the crew into joining him. None of them were ever very successful, but it drove the Captain to distraction and she had exiled him to a holding cell. Selena didn’t understand it, but while Elio was bothering someone else, he wasn’t bothering her.

He was right about the walk from the rec room to the holding cells though. Selena had assisted with the space station’s design, and she was very proud of it. However, they had not accounted for crew members sleeping in the prison cells when they placed them almost completely opposite the rec room in the ring-shaped space station. That was approximately… she did the calculations at lightning speed… 140 metres away. So… not as bad as Elio seemed to think.

She had been about to tell him such when he noticed the gleam in her eyes and increased his pace out the door. Calculations danced in Selena’s head every waking moment, and most sleeping ones. For example, now she was thinking about the speed the centrifuge had to spin at to keep the station at ¾ Earth’s gravity (14.112 rotations per hour) and how to put this into a formula, given what she knew about the length of the thick connecting spokes which connected the station proper to the centrifuge’s engines, and the gravity of the Earth (the formula was (0.00392 x 50^2)/9.8).

It was yet another way she and Elio differed - try talking to him about even the simplest mathematical concept (like trigonometry) and he would claim a ‘maths headache’ and make his exit.

Selena watched him wobble away, uncoordinated even despite the navy blue pressure suit which helped the astronauts walk despite the strange vertigo caused by moving in a centrifuge. She liked those pressure suits - they also helped to prevent bone loss and muscular atrophy caused by the low-gravity conditions. And they had a shiny mission logo on the shoulder.

She watched as the boxing match finished and she was once again called upon to give a crewmate a thrashing. Life was good.

* * *

FEATURES OF THE SPACE STATION
These features have been listed in an anticlockwise order:
- Primary airlock and space dock, used for storing the space vehicles and contains their entry and exit point. This airlock can also attach to one of the mothership’s hatches. (“Why is it called the mothership? It’s a space station.” - Selena)
- Storage area 01, which mainly contains mechanical equipment and tools for repairing damaged spacecraft.
- Holding cells, used for any hostiles the crew might encounter as well as mutinous crew members. Also includes secondary airlock 01. (“Because you never know when those blasted mutineers might need a little more convincing.” - Captain)
- Storage area 02, which mainly contains medical supplies.
- Infirmary, where injured crew members are treated, which contains some very sophisticated equipment.
- Mess hall, where the crew eats and galley, where food is prepared.
- Storage area 03, where food supplies are stored.
- Crew quarters, where the crew members sleep. Each one has their own small room for sleeping along with storing their personal effects. The bathrooms are also in this area.
- Captain’s quarters, which are exactly the same as the rest of the crew’s quarters. However, the Captain insisted that she be given her own space. (“I took this promotion so I wouldn’t have to sleep with you idiots.” - Captain)
- Recreation room, where the crew can engage in teambuilding activities as well as enough physical exercise to keep them healthy. (“Too much exercise, if you ask me.” - Elio) It also includes the tertiary airlock, which is very small and mainly used for waste disposal.
- Storage area 04, which contains supplies pertaining to the rec room and keeping the crew amused.
- Observation deck, where the crew can observe extraterrestrial phenomena. It contains two state-of-the-art telescopes and is constructed out of translucent material on four sides.
- Storage area 05, which contains scientific equipment for use on the observation deck or in the lab.
- Laboratory, which is used for testing samples and other scientific procedures and is fully stocked with advanced scientific tools.

* * *

Author’s Note: I tried my best to design the spaceship in a realistic manner, and my calculations and design make sense to me. Please don’t get mad if I’ve overlooked something - centrifuges are not exactly something I spend a lot of my time thinking about, but I did my best. Thanks!