Chapter 16

Dinner was a quiet affair. Frida was exhausted from the day’s tests, and was clearly struggling to stay awake long enough to eat. Anita sat across the table, trying to focus on her food and not on the person across the table. She had taken an extra suppressor before dinner, but couldn’t tell if it was working or not; nothing seemed different. The flames had sprung back into life along her arms, and she felt Frida’s presence like the pull of gravity. She put off bed time for as long as she could, but Frida soon insisted on going to sleep. Anita stayed in the kitchen while Frida got ready for bed, but being in a different room didn’t keep her imagination from going into overdrive. She knew Frida would be stripping off the athletic clothing she preferred to wear under the flight suit and changing into thick sleeping clothes. Her mind steamed with images of Frida’s body as she pulled off her shirt and changed into the loose top she slept in, then peeled off her pants and stepped out of them.

Anita gripped the table, not daring to let go even in order to do a little work on the next suit that was taking shape on the table. She closed her eyes and tried to think of something else, but the images wouldn’t come. The flames were raging again, skin screaming to be touched. No. Frida was her scout, it would be inappropriate at best, she told herself fiercely. Not like this.

She waited until she knew Frida must be asleep before daring to enter the bedroom. She quickly changed into her own sleeping clothes without looking at the figure in the bunk across the room. She was so focused on being quiet and keeping her breathing even that she didn’t hear Frida get up and cross the room until she felt a hand on her arm.

She turned to see Frida standing beside her, looking up into her face. “You’re not ok, are you? You’re shaking.” Anita shook her head and backed away, but Frida followed her. “I can’t imagine how lonely it must be here.” Anita sank down onto her bunk, and Frida sat beside her, slipping her arms around Anita’s waist. “It’s ok, I’m here, maybe I can help.” She tightened her embrace, and moved in to nuzzle against Anita’s neck. Anita’s whole body shuddered and she clutched Frida close to her, arms like a steel vise. She pressed her mouth against Frida’s hard, kissing her lips so hard she knew they were both likely to end up with a few bruises.

“Oh, doctor,” Frida whispered as she pulled away for a moment, then moved in for another kiss. But it had broken the moment, and Anita forced herself to break the embrace and move away. “No. No, Frida, I can’t do this. Not as long as I’m in any kind of leadership position over you.”

Frida shrugged. “I’m ok with it. I’ve kinda got a thing for authority figures anyway. It’s sexy.” She reached out to touch Anita’s face, and Anita began to cry tears of anger.

“That’s up to you, then. Our moral math is different. I would never be able to be sure I hadn’t forced you, consciously or not, intentional or not. It’s not something I can do. I’m sorry.”

Frida met her eyes for a few moments, searching for hints that she might soften, then sighed. “Alright. I can’t force you, either. If that’s really how you feel, then it’s not going to work out. I’m sorry for that, I always thought you were really attractive. I’d even considered asking you out once I was on another team.” She smiled, and got back into her own bunk. “Goodnight, doctor.”

Anita pulled the weighted cover over herself, still shaking. Why couldn’t she just have given in? Frida clearly was ok with her being in some kind of power over her, why couldn’t she just accept that for one night? A little bit of comfort couldn’t be so wrong, could it? But she couldn’t shake her discomfort with the idea. Frida might be ok with it, but she was not. She had some level of power over Frida, even in their current situation, and she would never know if that hadn’t affected any kind of sexual encounter. No. She had made the right choice. It was the right choice, and it was terrible.

She rubbed her hands rapidly up and down her arms, trying to simulate human touch enough to quiet the flames, but it didn’t help much. The hormone suppressors had made it impossible to get any kind of satisfaction from touching herself, and she didn’t bother trying. It would only lead to increased frustration, she had discovered. She folded the large weighted blanket in half and stretched out under it. The extra weight helped her sleep, sometimes. Maybe it could help tonight.

The night stretched on and the hours ticked slowly by, but Anita couldn’t drop off into sleep. Her eyes felt dry and hot, and every touch of the blanket and sheets on her skin was torture. All of the sense receptors in her skin had been turned up to eleven, and there was no position where she felt comfortable. I need to sleep in a water bath, she thought, a sensory deprivation chamber. It would be a relief to feel nothing.

When the alarm sounded for the beginning of the day, Anita had not sleep at all, except in fitful moments between hours of painful wakefulness. She pulled herself out of bed; the flames had died out, but her entire body was wracked with pain from the tension of the night. She saw Frida stirring, and hurriedly got into her day clothes and went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

Breakfast was a quiet as dinner had been, though this silence was more from tension than exhaustion. Anita wasn’t sure what to say, and Frida didn’t seem to want to say anything either. After the meal, Frida got into her old flight suit, and Anita helped her check the seals. When everything seemed secure, Anita took a step back.

“I’m sorry I made things awkward,” Frida said, grabbing her helmet and walking to the airlock. “But if you ever change you mind, the offer’s open, ok?” Anita nodded, and tried to smile. Frida stepped through the airlock and was gone.

Anita expelled a breath she hadn’t known she was holding, and let the comfortable silence and isolation settle in. It had happened: she preferred the loneliness to human company now. The isolation was torture, but having someone around was a worse one. The loneliness was like a very cold room, one that chilled you to the bone. Having another person around was like having a heater in one corner, turned up too high. No matter where you were in the room, the heat on your skin became uncomfortable and began to burn. The cold was easier to live with; you just had to add enough layers to survive.

Anita avoided working on the new suit for a few days. There was so much to be done in terms of the data she’d gathered during Frida’s tests. Everything needed to be checked, re-checked, and correlated to other bits of data that had themselves been checked many times over. But it was good to have something new to do, something that didn’t hurt her fingers or exhaust her physically. It was nice to have a strictly intellectual job for a little while.

The suit that currently sat in pieces on the table would be for Sergei, since that was the best fit for the pieces she’d been able to cut from the remaining fabric. The next supply run would need to bring more fabric if they were going to keep on track with the suit production, but that was not her problem at the moment. Tiny tweaks and corrections were programmed into the printing specs for the new electronics on the new suit. Construction could proceed much faster now that she had a working prototype.

Three days after Frida left, a message beeped through the computer system, and Anita sat down to see another video message from Jay. They looked even more worried and tired than last time, but still smiled when they began the message. “Hey, Anita. I hope you’re holding up ok. I know it’s rough out there, but your whole team is so behind you. Every single one of your scouts are doing their best to get you what you need, and they’re getting worried about you. Frida says the tests went well, and she’s so excited about that new suit.”

They looked around, and leaned in to the screen. “Listen, my office is bugged. This is probably my last message from here. I disabled them for a little while and made it look like an accident, but I can’t get away with that for long. But I had to get in touch with you: we found a new satellite. And it’s not Perses.”

What? Anita thought. Who else had the money to put something in orbit and keep it off the main listings? How long had it been there?

“I know you’ve got a million questions, and so do I. We don’t know who it is yet, and we don’t know how long it’s been there. We found it by accident when I was going through some data and stumbled across some anomalies. I’m uploading the orbit info to your system. And because I’m determined to be one hundred percent honest with you, yes, it was passing by on the day you were out testing. It was pretty far off to the south, but we can’t be sure it didn’t catch some hint of your presence. Be really careful for the next few weeks until we can find out more.”

Jay ran their fingers through their hair, throwing the curls into more disarray than usual. “I’m starting to get really tired, Anita. I mean, don’t worry, I’m committed to this all the way. I’ll fight this fight as long as we have to. But it’s exhausting, being on guard every moment, wondering who’s watching, who’s listening, wondering if I’ve let something slip purely by accident. I need to let the bugs come back online or I won’t have an adequate cover story, but I’ll send something else when I can. It might not be video, we’ll see. You hang in there, Anita. We’re going to beat them. Just hang on.”

The screen went dark, and Anita turned it off. Instead of irritation, this time she only felt sorry for her old friend. It would be a very different kind of loneliness, she thought, being surrounded by people and not being able to communicate with them. It’s even a little like my life right now, though there’s a world of difference, too. I’ll have to compare notes with Jay when I can get back to life.

She pulled up the data Jay had sent, and began studying what was known about the satellite that had recently been discovered. It was very clearly of human origin, not just a meteor or asteroid that had been captured by the small moon’s gravity. She wondered how they knew it wasn’t a Perses satellite, but decided to trust Jay’s assessment of the object.

There was no way to know if it had picked up any of her activity on the surface when it passed nearby. All she could do was add it to her schedule of times when she couldn’t be outside in the open, and go on with her life as it currently was. Fear and speculation would only lead to paralysis, and then all would be lost.

The work is the important thing, she told herself. Keep working. Get those suits done. It will go faster now. And then… she paused. And then what? What are we going to do? Nine people against a corporation that has enough money to buy out a large scientific organization? What are we going to accomplish with these damn suits, other than to slow them down a little by keeping the tech out of their hands for a few months?

She slumped against the wall, a wave of hopelessness surging through her. Maybe someone had an idea that would work, but it didn’t seem likely. Maybe she could send a message to Jay with the next scout and find out what the big plan was. Survival was pointless if they didn’t have a plan to survive for.

A knock sounded on the airlock door.