"How am I supposed to teach the youth the ways of science if I'm not allowed to do any science in their presence?!" Shen Wei grumbled as he walked in. "It's not like going down on a planet will kill them! Damn stationers."
Zhao Yunlan kindly referained from saying that anyone going down on the planet they were orbiting in Shen Wei's company would immediately get killed by the locals in the hopes that it'd mean their Messiah got over his ideas about kindness and improving the universe and brought his little brother back down to be tortured. He put his viewscreen down. "Oh? You wanted to teach Li Qian how to gather microbes?"
"I heard that one of the worlds of the Xingfan system has intriguing bacteria," Shen Wei said. "They're terraforming the one in the habitable zone, but the next one out is Earth-sized and has an oxidizing atmosphere, meaning that it has a biosphere. Xingfan Ding is outside the habitable zone, but it has copious amounts of volcanism, meaning that it'll have pockets of warmth that will host Earthlike conditions, in addition to even hotter regions. All of this would be nothing new, but the preliminary spectral readings from Xingfan Ding show interesting nitrogen compounds that might be prelude to the presence of raw material for better nitrogen-fixing bacteria."
"I know you wouldn't want to travel anywhere without a reason," Zhao Yunlan said. He leaned back on the couch to stare at the ceiling paper. It was now showing a starry scene with Sol Yi, Bing, and Ding – Venus, Earth, and Mars, as Shen Wei would call them – in real color. "But remember, things where the air isn't held in by a lid are existentially terrifying to us agoraphobic stationers."
Shen Wei sighed. "I know." He was likely recalling Zhao Yunlan's first reaction to stepping planetside. "I'll make dinner."
"I'll finish writing up these cases," Zhao Yunlan promised.
He was the part of customs dealing with trade to the planet and tracking down illegal activities. He'd occasionally catch someone smuggling; today's total had been three people. They hadn't been anything major – a single banana, in one case, but unsterilized – so filling in the file would be tedious but easy.
Zhao Yunlan had made it to his post without meeting anyone from Dixing. He'd been aware that the Messiah, Envoy, whatever, of the transhumanist cult that resided on Dixing had made his way to Dragon Station, but hadn't paid any attention to that – that was his father's job – until said Messiah had turned up and requested Zhao Yunlan's help in going down to the surface and rescuing his twin brother from religion-motivated daily torture. It had been one hell of a first date, even if Zhao Yunlan's reaction to the vast open spaces of the planet had been to vomit all over Shen Wei's shoes.
He pressed his palm to the viewscreen so the circuitry within him could verify his identity and sent the reports to the Minister of Transit, Gao Jingfeng. None of his subordinates had contacted him, either, so he could relax a while in Shen Wei and Ye Zun's company.
Shen Wei had peeled some tangerines and was now scraping off the pith from the peel. Stationers tended towards waste not, want not as well, but in some respects it was very obvious Shen Wei had been raised in a subsistence farming community.
Well, they'd had cryochambers, so perhaps they'd also had farm machinery. The Great Leader had recruited people – primarily women – into his cult of personality, so that once he'd set off for his faraway world with his newly genetically modified followers, he had a harem of women to serve him hand and foot, in addition to the regular followers in their heterosexual dyad couplings. From what Zhao Yunlan had gathered from Shen Wei's explanations, one of those follower couples – Shen Jinggu and Qu Niao – had had a daughter, Shen Gengqu, who'd been taken into the Great Leader's harem. There she'd given birth to twins for whom the genetic modifications had taken exceptionally well.
The Great Leader had apparently already picked his heir, so he declared that the twins were special: two souls, all the goodness of which had gone into one and all the evil of which had gone into the other. The designated good twin was told he'd be the Messiah and the evil twin kept alive but tortured regularly to symbolize the community's commitment to dispelling the evil from their hearts. The torture, of course, had not been symbolic at all.
At some point, after ongoing friction with everyone else who shared DNA with Ye Zun, the Great Leader had declared that the Messiah and the sacrificial vessel should appear when they were needed, i.e. not at present, and stuffed them into cryosleep. Ye Zun had probably acquired his gray hair here, as some failure of the cryopreservation process.
Centuries had passed. Finally, civilization had come to the place Shen Wei and Ye Zun called Tianci and the rest of their people Tiantang, and named the system Dixing and placed Dragon Station in orbit around Dixing Bing. The locals had decided this was a calamity worth awakening the Messiah over; Shen Wei had taken the chance to escape and go back to free his brother.
That had happened three years ago. Zhao Yunlan had been reprimanded, but no-one could really fault him, and his father sat on the station's Board of Directors, so he kept his posting. Shen Wei defended his PhD thesis and Ye Zun was granted refugee status and therapy appointments.
"What's for dinner?" Ye Zun asked as he shuffled from the small office/bedroom to the kitchen/living room.
"Tangerine beef," Shen Wei said. "The first batches of the new formula for synthetic beef muscle were ready, so we should try it."
"Sounds good," Ye Zun said and flopped onto the couch next to Zhao Yunlan.
Zhao Yunlan knew the drill – he pulled Ye Zun closer and cuddled him. Due to his powers and healing factor, all the scars were emotional. "How was therapy?"
"It's boring," Ye Zun groused. "Can I get a real job?"
Shen Wei sighed where he was caramelizing the tangerine peels. "What if your colleagues would be mean to you?"
"I'm not made of soap bubbles," Ye Zun complained, but curled up tighter in Zhao Yunlan's arms.
"Have you figured out anything new to do with your powers?" Zhao Yunlan asked.
"I figured out how to manifest tentacles," Ye Zun proudly declared. "Want to see?"
"Of course."
Ye Zun turned inward for a moment. His dark energy snaked out of him before coagulating into a bunch of mostly-opaque tentacles that sprouted from his back.
"May I touch?" Zhao Yunlan asked.
"Please." Ye Zun sent one to poke at Zhao Yunlan's stubble. It felt solid enough.
"Dinner is almost ready," Shen Wei said. "Please wait until after we've eaten before having any tentacular fun."
"It's okay, we'll wait for you," Zhao Yunlan reassured him and patted Ye Zun's tentacles. Ye Zun purred.
The tangerine beef was excellent, though Zhao Yunlan had never tasted actual dead animal flesh and thus couldn't join Shen Wei and Ye Zun in their debate over whether this lab strain was more or less true to life. He could, however, participate just as well as Shen Wei and Ye Zun in the post-dinner tentacle fun.
Zhao Yunlan fell asleep naked, sweaty, and sated. Ye Zun was curled up in his arms and Shen Wei had tangled their legs together.
He'd dreamt dreams involving Shen Wei before – sexy dreams, dreams of giving comforting words to a young Shen Wei, those pointless dreams where they all got up and ate breakfast – as well as the sort of odd ones that ran on complete dream logic of wormholes being made of worms and rogue ones running around the station on centipede-like feet. Tonight, though, he found himself in a space where the background looked like the plasma clouds stock effect of image processors.
In the space with him was a teenage Shen Wei. "Hello?" he hesitantly said. "I wasn't sure this would work."
"Shen Wei! Of course it'd work if it was you trying it." Zhao Yunlan quickly glanced down. Good, he was wearing clothes. While puberty had definitely come to town for this Shen Wei, he was a bit young for Zhao Yunlan's comfort.
Shen Wei blushed and ducked his head. "I- remember your words. Thank you for the encouragement."
"You- All of that, it was us actually communicating?"
"Yes?" Shen Wei blinked with wide, young eyes, and Zhao Yunlan's world rearranged itself with the revelation that his power fantasies of being able to reassure a young Shen Wei on the future being an improvement had all been actual fact rather than vaguely comforting bedtime story.
Zhao Yunlan shook his head in befuddlement. "Did ... you try this for any reason in particular?"
Shen Wei's gaze fell. "My brother." He swallowed. "The Great Leader says that our community's prosperity and our people's morality depends on my brother suffering, since all of the sins are concentrated into him, and his suffering purges the darkness from our community. But they were fine for the years before we were born, and now they want to place us in frozen sleep, so they'll be fine without him suffering during that as well."
"They don't need him to suffer," Zhao Yunlan quietly said.
"I-" Shen Wei blinked hard and clenched his hands at his sides. "Why?"
"I don't know why they do it. I'm sorry." Zhao Yunlan waited a beat for Shen Wei to regain some of his control. "But you can get him free."
Shen Wei's head snapped up. "How?"
"After you're thawed out, there'll be a space station in orbit around this planet-"
"Shapers or mechanists?" Shen Wei immediately asked.
The question had been very relevant in the era the Great Leader's colony left the Solar System. After the wave of cultists, the next ones out had been the moderates; the Solar System had been inherited by the extremists on both sides, waging wars against each other over whether the proper route to transhumanism was genomic alterations or mechanical upgrades. "Mechanists, but chill," Zhao Yunlan said. "I can't help you get up there, but when you do, ask for Zhao Yunlan. I can help you get your brother out." He'd have promised it anyway, but having already completed the task gave him a nice confidence boost.
Shen Wei beamed. "Thank you. I'll-"
Zhao Yunlan opened his eyes. He was in his bedroom, lying on a wide mattress on the floor, with Shen Wei – the adult one – and Ye Zun sleeping calmly in the same heap.
He sighed. Shen Wei had ended up fine. Zhao Yunlan could ask him in the morning.
Shen Wei was first out of bed, as usual, and used the tentacle powers he'd copied from Ye Zun to speed up his tofu pudding making. Zhao Yunlan sat on the couch and tapped the table to make it settle down to coffee table heights. "Shen Wei?"
"Hm?"
"When you were young, did you ever use your powers to contact me in the future?"
"So you had the dream this late," Shen Wei said. "I ... copied my mother's skill. First I had vague impressions, then the one dream where you told me your name. I lost my concentration, though, and couldn't reestablish contact afterwards."
Zhao Yunlan nodded. "It took you years to get to me after coming to Dragon Station."
Shen Wei placed the pudding in three bowls. "Have you ever tried finding absolutely anything on this blasted thing without implants?" he asked as he placed the three bowls – one in each hand and the third in his tentacles – on the table. "Make it an eating table, please," he said as he went to wake up his brother.
Today's pudding flavor was ginger and syrup. Zhao Yunlan touched the table to reconfigure it into the eating configuration, then dug in. Shen Wei might have the sort of job where schedules didn't really matter, but Zhao Yunlan had a shift to turn up to.
Shen Wei dragged his grumbling, sleepy brother to the couch. "Didi. Eat."
"Feed me," Ye Zun whined.
As always, Shen Wei assented with a sigh. He propped Ye Zun in his arms and started spooning tofu into his mouth. The both of them had their dark energy tentacles out for extra cuddles; Zhao Yunlan was amused at the tentacular clinginess.
He finished his food and placed the bowl on the table with a clink. "I'll put the desk out. Anything else?"
"No," Ye Zun said between bites of tofu. He leaned up to kiss Shen Wei on the mouth, and-
Okay, if Zhao Yunlan stayed here to watch all his tentacle twincest fantasies play out, he'd definitely be late for work. He went back to the bedroom to make the chair and desk protrude out of the wall and floor again, placed Shen Wei's external ID card on the corner of the desk, made his clothing turn into the customs uniform, and determinedly walked past his hot twin lovers making out and into the wider world of Dragon Station.
The first shift commute foot traffic was waxing. Zhao Yunlan walked past the walls full of sensors that responded to the cybernetics in his body. If he wished, he could have average traffic patterns the moment the desire crossed his mind.
All of that, of course, depended on one having the necessary cybernetics. While Zhao Yunlan wasn't genetically identical to a wild-type human, whatever additional alterations had been done to Shen Wei and Ye Zun had made their bodies reject the cybernetic implants. No matter how small, the device would be expelled within hours. Dragon Station was a wonderful web of information they were forever disconnected from. They both had external ID cards for opening doors, but a large number of things everyone else in society took for granted – changing the furniture, accessing the datanets, downloading new clothing patterns, signing contracts – had to be arranged through alternative means. In some cases, it wasn't worth the effort. Shen Wei vented his frustrations by arguing with the Regent down planetside via post; Ye Zun would find some way of his own once the thrill of not being tortured daily had worn off. Both of them could probably do with a break from station life.
Zhao Yunlan hopped onto a spoke elevator that brought him to the null-gee rotational axis, then took a transport to the very end of Dragon Station, where he relieved the previous shift. He spent his workday flitting about in regions of varying pseudogravity and thinking.
When he returned home, Ye Zun was sitting on the couch with his viewscreen. "Hi, lovely," he greeted Ye Zun.
"Hi," Ye Zun said and patted the couch next to him. Zhao Yunlan, of course, took up the invitation and took upon himself to make the couch cozier.
"Reading something cool?" Zhao Yunlan asked as he dug his fingertips into Ye Zun's hair and stroked.
Ye Zun leaned on him like he wanted to merge into him and rubbed himself against Zhao Yunlan. "Mm. There's this web series set on Earth, where a young disfavored general is sent to find the lost son of the Emperor..."
Zhao Yunlan listened to Ye Zun talk about the book. It sounded like a rollicking tale of adventure – invaded cities, long wars, political plots – though with a happily ever after and an adorable love story between the disfavored general and lost prince. Zhao Yunlan's chief enjoyment was of Ye Zun's voice.
The door beeped and Shen Wei came with the day's groceries. Scallions, as usual, and probably mushrooms as well.
"Hey, Doctor Shen, I notice that Dixing Bing's poles haven't been visited yet," Zhao Yunlan said. "Do you think they'd have interesting bacteria for you?"
Shen Wei stared at him consideringly. "What makes you ask?"
Zhao Yunlan shrugged as best he could with a Ye Zun on top of him. "I could get you a flight slot. There are a few free ones in the next ten days."
"The terraforming process would've killed off most of a potential native biosphere," Shen Wei slowly said, "but if we bore deep enough into the ice... Thank you, Chief Zhao; when is the next launch window?"
The next window was in eight days' time. Shen Wei happily packed in all manner of things – thermal compensation clothes, a bunch of food, vast quantities of scientific equipment the use of which Zhao Yunlan had no idea about, Ye Zun – in the university's seldom-used lander shuttle. His student, Li Qian, had a good head on her shoulders and wasn't prone to acting out stupidly, even if she could be a bit timid. Any required piloting would be easy, too, so Zhao Yunlan had no qualms telling her to download the piloting software and log a few hours in simulations before making her the backup pilot.
Shen Wei was running a final checklist of the cargo while Zhao Yunlan ran through the pre-flight checklist. The final item on his checklist, of course, was that the passengers be strapped in, so he had to wait for Shen Wei to be done as well.
As they waited for the launch slot, Zhao Yunlan descended into the piloting mindspace. He wasn't that good at having bodies not his own, but-
The universe blossomed before him. Like his eyes saw the visible in front of him and his ears heard the pressure waves of air, he saw with the myriad eyes of the shuttle, from little cameras that responded to photons of energies from 1.6 to 3.2 electron volts like his eyes to sensors that saw far beyond what the human eye could – infrared sensors within, to track heat of passengers and engine components, microwave sensors without for communications, more data than his kind had evolved to handle.
He breathed in and out with his flesh body in its titanium extension. Remember, Mechanist, that you are just a fleshbag for now, Zhao Yunlan thought and pulled his consciousness back the barest hint.
Dragon Station's central AI told him it wasn't his turn to go yet, so he had to content himself with finding all the shuttle's voluntary muscles and poking a bit. He should probably be paying some attention to his flesh vessel, but being embodied in a space ship – even if it wasn't actually hyperspace-capable – was too effort-consuming.
Go, Dragon Station told him, and took control of his titanium body. It led him and his cargo out from the hangar to the series of air locks keeping the station's fragile contents away from vacuum's callous hand.
Then they were let loose. Zhao Yunlan stretched into his metal body as if waking after a long sleep and flipped himself onto a landing trajectory. Equatorial landings were the easiest, but they were going to the pole today, so he duly increased his inclination until they were at a half-pi angle to the equatorial plane, then set up a braking burn to bring periapsis down, down to the polar continent.
Dixing Bing's atmosphere hit him. He had been built for this task, he thought, as the plasma sheath enveloped him and burned his bottom. It was unpleasant, but did not hurt – yet.
Then they'd shed enough momentum that their trajectory turned smooth. The stratosphere didn't have much weather at all, but then the tropopause hit and they were under the influence of weather. Temperatures were cold, as they had been higher up, and the sun bright above them. He saw cold and bright snowdust flit in the crisp air's eddies.
The air was thick enough that he could use the atmospheric jets. He used those to guide them down to a slightly rattling landing. After a moment to confirm that nothing broke, he withdrew from the shuttle back into his carbon-water body.
"Gnhhh," he attempted speech, then fumbled with his – fingers, fingers they were called – to release himself from his webbing and promptly retched on the floor.
"Are you all right?" Li Qian asked.
"I failed the piloting aptitudes," Zhao Yunlan said. "This is why." He flexed his fingers and tried to adjust to only seeing in one direction at a time.
Shen Wei and Ye Zun had gotten out of their webbing as well. Shen Wei had taken it upon himself to go check on their cargo, but Ye Zun had been deputized to take care of Zhao Yunlan. He had an arm around Zhao Yunlan's shoulders and was also intently watching how the floor slowly absorbed the vomit.
"Li Qian? Come help unpack," Shen Wei said from the back. Zhao Yunlan heard her pad over.
Zhao Yunlan stayed there for a while longer, breathing and returning to himself as Shen Wei and Li Qian opened up the cargo containers. They had three days here under the unsetting sun of polar summer, and Shen Wei was determined to make the most of it.
"Thanks," Zhao Yunlan said and sat up. He swallowed. The need was entirely psychosomatic; the variety of machines augmenting his bloodstream had gone through and cleared out anything related to nauseation.
Ye Zun kept a hold of him. "Can I go outside?"
"Put your thermal overwear on first, and don't freeze."
Ye Zun hopped up, demanded a pair of overalls from Shen Wei, and immediately ran for the airlock. Zhao Yunlan was concerned for half a second before reassuring himself that if the manual method worked for letting their precious air out, it would work for letting people in.
"Aren't we supposed to check the air first?" Li Qian asked, stationer-horrified. "What if it's not breathable?"
"He was born on this planet. I'm pretty sure he can breathe it," Zhao Yunlan said. He keyed into some visual cameras outside that revealed Ye Zun doing cartwheels under the vast sky. Not hypothermic yet.
"While the Great Leader did receive a discount of some sort, it wasn't due to the air quality," Shen Wei said as he arranged sample tube things into a rack next to the airlock.
Zhao Yunlan pinged the ship's computer. "Lack of large natural satellite, perhaps? Over the long term, Dixing Bing's axial tilt will oscillate from nothing to half pi and back, leading to an unstable climate. There are other things as well, like a comparative lack of metals, but that would be less of a problem for a spacefaring civilization."
"I doubt he intended to set up a spacefaring civilization," Shen Wei replied. "From what I know and have heard, he was a competent enough Shaper geneticist who wished to roleplay one of those Emperors of the old days before spaceflight or the technological liberation of the masses."
"Technological liberation?" Li Qian asked.
"We have machines to launder our clothes and grow our crops. If the spider-bots didn't exist, someone would have to do all that manual labor. To achieve leisure, the drudgework of existence must be outsourced to someone else. In the society I grew up in, the Great Leader and some of his sons had leisure time due to their exploitation of the labor of others. In spacefaring societies, the privilege of leisure has been extended to all due to the boring necessities being outsourced to machines."
"It sounds like you think there's a machine revolution coming," Li Qian hesitantly said. Poor thing; she'd likely never encountered her supervisor's more purposefully edgy opinions before.
"Are your kind not turning yourselves into machines, Mechanist?" Shen Wei's smile had an unsettling edge. Then he snorted, and the picture of a storybook Shaper villain fell off his features. "No. The people of Tianci have managed centuries without overthrowing their series of Regents waiting for the Great Leader's return. The original settlers gave up their lives of leisure to go till the fields. The human heart is hard to fathom and the mind prone to akrasia."
"Oh." Li Qian blinked, trying to wrap her head around the information.
Shen Wei smiled, the picture of a kind supervisor this time. "Come, let's go take some samples. Yunlan, if you'd come?"
Zhao Yunlan jerked. "Sure!"
The four of them spent the day putzing about on the snow and ice. Zhao Yunlan found the exposure unnerving – compared to the hills and forests and buildings they'd gone by when rescuing Ye Zun, the utter flatness offered no shelter and left him even more ill at ease, though the thermal overlayer was similar enough to a spacesuit that it brought him some comfort. Li Qian was kept too busy to panic by all the science she was doing.
By what Zhao Yunlan's implants said was late afternoon, he and Ye Zun had been roped into carrying around the ice cores and scrapings as well. Apparently Shen Wei's idea was that if he'd go deep enough, he'd get to strata that predated the terraforming ramjets.
Towards rotational evening, the sun went on an investigative trip towards the horizon. At this time of year, it would turn back with a resounding meh; in a quarter orbital period or so, it would run circles around the horizon and then go hide behind it for half a year. Living in a circumpolar region meant intriguing things had to be considered, but Zhao Yunlan was glad of the constant cycle of Dragon Station.
Their journey had been in some sort of loop Shen Wei had drawn on the map on his viewscreen, so by the time they were hungry, they weren't that far from the shuttle anymore. They traipsed back in and shed their thermal overlayers. Shen Wei and Li Qian stowed away the samples and some of the scientific equipment while Zhao Yunlan and Ye Zun were left heating up the vacuum-packed shelf-stable expedition meals.
"How is it?" Zhao Yunlan asked when Shen Wei and Li Qian came back from the cargo hold.
"The sampling was successful," Shen Wei said. "Further analysis will require a lab."
When he sat down to eat, Ye Zun sat down right next to him and leaned. "The vegetables are soggy," he complained.
"The shuttle doesn't have a kitchen, so we have to do with prepacked meals," Shen Wei explained, then kissed Ye Zun between his scrunched-up eyebrows. "I'll make your favorite foods when we go back up."
Do all the downstairs Shaper cultists act like that with their siblings? Li Qian wired over.
Wiring him to gossip about others in their presence was rude and very teenage drama, but in this case it was perhaps for the better that she didn't voice the question out loud. I wouldn't consider those two typical members of their society.
Ye Zun twisted around to kiss Shen Wei on the lips. "Thank you, gege."
"Eat your food before it gets cold," Shen Wei reprimanded him, but pulled him closer to him.
...did they accidentally edit out the incest taboo?
Like I said, I wouldn't consider those two type samples for anything. Zhao Yunlan fished out the last piece of broccoli from his plastic bag and fed it to the recycling chute, then placed his bamboo chopsticks in the wash drawer. He rose and closed his eyes to stretch himself out.
When he opened them, he wasn't in the shuttle anymore.
"Sh," someone very quietly shushed him.
Zhao Yunlan turned around and saw a woman sitting on a lumpy cushion. She was perhaps his age, with thick eyebrows and red lips on a vaguely familiar face. Her hair was gathered in a thick plait that ran down her back. The room was small and a bit gloomy, with just a bed, a dresser, and some floor space. Her clothes looked coarse-textured and were almost certainly dumb like the room – there were several hallmarks of smart fabrics and housing, and this didn't hit any of them.
She pointed at another cushion. He sat on it.
"What year were you born, Earth reckoning?" she asked.
He hadn't expected that. "I'm twenty-eight."
"I know you're from the future; I want to know how far," she hissed.
Well, this was interesting. He gave her the year.
She nodded thoughtfully. "Yes. That would-" She counted something silently. "Dragon Station is in some contact with the colony of Tianci. They might appear to be fully agrarian technophobes, but they do have cryosuspension chambers. In them, they've stored two teenage boys-"
"-and you want me to rescue the younger one from the constant torture they're putting him through," Zhao Yunlan said.
"-and ... what?"
"Been there, done that, have the set of twins relaxing at home to prove it," Zhao Yunlan said with a shrug. "Shen Gengqu, I presume?"
She collapsed in a fit of silent laughter. She pointed a shaking finger at him. "Do you know how long it took me to find someone from the right century? And now you tell me you've already done what I wanted to ask you to?"
He could only shrug. "How could I not help?"
Her paroxysms subsided and she sighed. "Not many would – but you're not one of us." She shook her head. "I need to do some things before I can leave, but take this so I can find you again in the time stream," she hurriedly said before digging something out from the dresser. "My mother brought it with her from Mars."
She handed him a necklace with an amber pendant and some silver detailing. Touching it made a buzzing sensation travel up Zhao Yunlan's arms. "Do I need to be on the planet, or can you find us on the station?"
"Were you on the planet when I called you over?"
"Yeah. Polar expedition with Shen Wei and Ye Zun."
She mouthed her sons' names. "So they call themselves that now," she said under her breath. "Take it with you to the future, and I will find you," she instructed him. "Return to the surface for a bit if you can, but I should be able to come to you."
"Sure," Zhao Yunlan promised. He'd have to fill in even more bullshit paperwork, but, well, it'd probably make Shen Wei and Ye Zun happier to-
With a great jolt, he found himself back in the shuttle, necklace still in his hands.
"Zhao Yunlan!" Shen Wei shouted in relief – he'd been gone for more than an instant, then – and stopped just before he would have thrown himself into Zhao Yunlan's arms. "What is that?"
"It's overflowing with dark energy," Ye Zun said. He unfurled a single tentacle to poke at the necklace, severely weirding out Li Qian. "I don't think you should be holding it."
Zhao Yunlan very happily relinquished it to Ye Zun. "I think I met your mother? She said she'd spent lots of time searching for people from the right era and when she heard you were both alive and well, gave that to me so she could find us in the time stream again."
"That's-" Shen Wei gently took the necklace from Ye Zun. "I remember this. Mom wore it occasionally."
"I never saw it," Ye Zun grumped. Shen Wei sent out his tentacles to hug his brother while his flesh hands held the necklace.
"I don't know how your mother's power works, or whether she can transport herself to the station, but we're here for another day, and maybe we could come down again after Sol Invictus?" Zhao Yunlan suggested.
Shen Wei swirled dark energy in a palm as he twisted it. "There's some navigational inaccuracy and overlap limitations, but ... she should be able to arrive starting in a few hours."
Ye Zun made a pleased sound and curled up around Shen Wei, dark energy tentacles and flesh arms both. "What a nice customs officer you found us," he purred. "Should we reward him before Mommy arrives?"
Sorry, Zhao Yunlan wired Li Qian. At least the shuttle had some enclosed sleeping spaces they could take themselves off to.
Have fun, she replied. "I'll download satellite data and see if we need to make any changes to tomorrow's route," she said, and disappeared to the cargo hold.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, Shen Wei extracted one tentacle from where it was encircling Ye Zun and hooked it in Zhao Yunlan's collar. "If you'd come enjoy yourself?"
Zhao Yunlan did.