Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

The next morning, Anita forced herself to wake at her usual time and return to her routine. The excitement of the previous day had been much needed, but it had also been draining and it was completely unsustainable. As much as her fingers itched to get back to the printer, she went through her morning stretches, completed a few laps around the base, and fixed a quick breakfast with some of the fresh ingredients Nada had brought, along with some of the jerky for protein. Shower. Stretches.

Finally, she settled down at the table with her tablet and the printer. Nothing in the base would use as the foundation fabric for the suits; she would have to make a note to ask the next scout who dropped by for resupply about that. It wasn’t urgent, but it would help to be able to start constructing the main suits before getting the electronics into them. And she would need to retake the measurements from every scout; that information had been in the same folders as the circuit designs and had been lost with everything else. Suits weren’t the kind of things one could estimate; a fold or crease in the wrong spot could rub or chafe during flight or even walking during the long field excursions, and become painful, inflamed, or infected. No, everything had to fit just right.

Anita returned to the tablet, pulling up her preliminary redesign of the main connection between the suit and wing set. Fortunately, this was the same size and scale on every scout; the size of wings scaled for the mass of the scout, but the weight difference was so small that there was no point to changing the connection for every person.

She put the work down a few hours later, fingers aching. She was beginning to see the outline of the main power conduit on the table in front of her. The design still wasn’t exactly right, but it was closer. She was getting there. It just felt so damn good to create something she could see rather than another abstract design. She could work in her head and on a screen, but Anita had always prefers getting her hands dirty, getting as close as possible to her work in the physical world.

Her back ached, and she stretched, feeling the vertebrae pop. Her stomach growled, and she put a packet of soup in to heat. While she waited, Anita walked the loop of the base again, both to stretch her legs and to dust where needed. Dusting, she had found, not only kept the interior of the base clean, but it also helped her stretch after a long stretch of work. In another few days, she would need to pull out the small vacuum system that would clean the swathes of dust from the floor and prevent them from clogging the air filters, but it could wait a while.

Her schedule called for rest, and Anita dutifully got into her bed, trying to will herself to sleep for an hour or so, but her eyes refused to stay closed. The near-silence of the base was so overwhelming that it was about as conducive to sleep as a pot of espresso at full strength.

Don’t think about sleep, she told herself. That will come on its own; goodness knows I’m tired enough. Think about something else and just let the sleep come. Pretend you’re back at Kerguelen… no, better, put yourself back in your apartment on Mars. Think about it. Reconstruct it. Put yourself in a familiar environment.

She closed her eyes, and pictured her own bedroom, hundreds of millions of miles away, where the sun was close enough to be warm as well as bright. The light would be streaming into her room through the window and skylight, creating warm patches on the carpet and bed. The few plants she could afford would be on the window sill, casting spiky shadows into the patches of light. The carpet was old and worn, but still a deep blue, and soft enough to be comfortable on bare feet.

To the left of her bed would be a light, small but bright. The table also held her tablet and easy access to a charging station. The table on the right usually held a cup of coffee or tea that had gone cold overnight, sometimes up to three mugs at any given time. Her medications would be just beyond the cups. The bed itself would be covered in a dark ochre spread, a color that almost matched the surface of Mars, a color she had always found comforting. It was very puffy and warm, perfect for cold Martian nights and chilly mornings. She knew quite a few people who kept their heaters turned up so they could sleep under sheets, but she preferred the quiet joy of cold air on her face while the rest of her snuggled up under the warmest blanket she could find. This had been the source of several difficult roommate situations during college and afterward.

Anita pulled the thin blankets up to her chin in the bed on Titan and tried to remember more. What was on the walls of her bedroom? Shelves. Storage. Lots of hard drives. Several drives with multiple backups of her favorite books. More with backups of all her work. A few landscapes of Mars painted by local artists: the view looking along Valles Marineris, a rover’s eye view of the top of the Columbia Hills, Bradbury Landing. A little touristy, maybe, but loved them, even if everyone had seen them a million times. They still meant something.

Maybe someday people will visit this base, she thought, sleep beginning to take over. Maybe they’ll preserve it, just as I have it now. Schoolkids tramping through on field trips, not paying attention to any of it. College students carefully taking notes and reading way too much into chance details and missing key elements at the same time, adults snapping photos and seeing the whole thing through a digital lens without ever pausing to experience it for themselves. She smiled as she fell asleep. It’ll never happen, she thought as her dreams began, but wouldn’t it be strange…

The afternoon was slower. The nap had calmed some of her jangled nerves, and she felt better able to cope with the quiet that had settled over the base since Nada left. It would probably be about two weeks before any other scout could be expected, so she should plan for that. Maybe even try to plan for three weeks, so she wouldn’t get antsy as she started to expect someone.

The chin-up bar caught her eye, and a thought began to tug at the back of her mind. She’d been maintaining basic muscle tone, because it was important to be able to go back into the field as soon as possible. But what if she did more? The only thing required now was for her to work on the suit designs, but she couldn’t do that non-stop, and as long as she was exercising anyway, why not amp it up a little? See how strong she could become?

Careful, she thought, as she pulled herself up on the bar. Don’t overdo it. You don’t have a trainer or a spotter. You can’t really afford any injuries out here. She could feel the muscles in her upper arms begin to burn as she pulled herself up repeatedly. She could almost see Emmett Holder’s smug face in front of her, smirking as the sweat ran down her face. “You can’t win against us,” she imagined him saying. “This is counter-productive. There’s no reason to coop yourself up in this lousy little cave with no real equipment. Your work won’t even change if you go back to Kerguelen, except to get easier because you’ll have real tools. Do you really think one little engineer can stop us?”

“Shut. Up.” Anita thought at the phantom, gritting her teeth and pulling her chin over the bar one final time before letting herself drop to the floor. That was harder than she had hoped for, but if she kept at it, it might become easier. She just wanted to be ready. She wasn’t quite sure for what, yet, but she would be ready when she did know.