"Well the oxygen tanks seem unaffected, so that's a relief. Statis chambers are reading normal. It just seems to be the gravity controls that have been... fried."
Elizabeth's voice tailed off. She stared at the screen in front of her with an unimpressed expression. "David... could you please turn the right way up, just for a moment?"
The man on the screen spun effortlessly, so that his grinning face turned the right way up. "Sorry babe," he chuckled. "It just feels incredible to be so weightless, you know?"
Elizabeth's gaze hardened. "No, David," she said flatly. "As a matter of fact I don't."
But as usual her husband wasn't listening. "Hey watch this," he said, letting his legs spin above him so that he was upside down again. From this position, he tore open a pack of protein chips. As they floated upwards he swam through the air from side to side, catching them in his mouth, like some sort of upside-down version of Tetris.
Elizabeth sighed in frustration. Though she and her husband were both the same rank - captains of their own vessels - it had taken her an extra three years of training and fitness tests to reach the same level, purely because she was a woman. And of course, the men had the more advanced ship, with more spacious cabins, better amenities inlcuding a bar and cinema, and several prototype androids to do the manual labour. Elizabeth sighed again. She'd hoped this new colonisation program might mean a new start on a more even keel. But it seemed even in deep space women got the raw end of the deal. The plasma wave and passed through both ships, frying the gravity controls on board each of them. Yet somehow the gravity on the men's ship had been reduced to almost nothing, while on the women's it had been increased dramatically.
So while David was floating around effortlessly, just hauling herself to the comms station had been a workout that had left Elizabeth mildly breathless. Worst of all, the engineers were completely flummoxed, so she the women's crew were facing a full twelve months of intense gravity until they'd arrive at their destiantion, with every movement was a miniature workout.
It didn't help that her husband was rubbing it in so much. Elizabeth watched David catch the final chip in his mouth, to a chorus of cheers from his fellow crew members in the background.
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