White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Three

Krüger is remarkably calm when I break the news about the delayed delivery shuttle. The last time he learned he might have to survive without his imitation coffee for an unknown length of time, he clutched his mug like a dying man for days, and nearly hissed when Kwon came to take it away for washing.

His response this time hints at a stash hidden somewhere in his room, but a hoard large enough to tide him through the foreseeable future is bordering on a health guideline violation. We—by which I mean I—don't allow food in rooms in order to guard against mold, and while defining imitation coffee powder as a food is a questionable endeavor, that's not the point.

Krüger sets his mug on the now-clean coffee table and stretches back against the couch. "Are we good on supplies until the thing arrives, at least? If they let us starve, I'm siccing the press on them when we get back."

"If they fail entirely on this delivery, we have twelve weeks of food in storage, and a rationing plan that will stretch those for sixteen. If we scale up the greenhouse, we can already survive the full five months until we are back in orbital communications range. It would not be comfortable, but it would suffice."

Krüger's eyebrows shoot up. "Wow. They told me you were paranoid, but that is honestly impressive."

I press my fingers to my temples. "I am not paranoid. I am aware of how the Hub operates, and of what happened to the last mission that tried to land here. And might I remind you, I was hired to keep this research trip of yours both alive and safe. It's my job to have a contingency plan."

"What about medical supplies?" says Liu. She and Kwon have found a tenuous balance at either end of the other couch, which bulges between them, tipped in favour of Kwon's heavier build. Kwon and Krüger are technically the only two who can share a couch without one being subjected to bodily continental drift, but he's a lanky meter-eighty-eight and tends to sprawl. Liu, then, gets stuck drifting more often than not, as we established within two days of arriving that the only feasible seat for me is the remaining armchair.

"All our medical, mechanical, and food-production supplies came in with us on the landing shipment," I say.

"That's why it cost so much," says Krüger under his breath.

"Not a fraction as much as the Mahaha Rescue did."

That shuts him up. This moon has always had a reputation for breaking probes and sniping satellites. The first and only team to stage an on-the-ground research operation came ill-prepared, and wound up buried under three meters of rapidly thickening ice within two weeks of arrival. The search-and-rescue operation required to retrieve them remains the most expensive in Hub history.

Not all of them made it out alive.

Even with Mahaha's feral glacial tectonics, that mission's station—this Pod—didn't resurface for nearly a decade. The first thing we did when we reoccupied it was attach skis to its underside and make sure we had a vehicle that could pull it around at our will.

Liu fiddles with the tip of her silky black braid, frowning. With her game attitude and upbeat grin, she makes a bright addition to the team, and a brilliant one besides. Fresh out of a degree in astrophysics and planetary meteorology that would lay your average army major low, she's following in Krüger's footsteps. She's the next up-and-coming prodigy of the Dara Research Institute, a tight-knit, relatively new research group with an already-daunting list of achievements to its name.

I have to give Dara's head scientist points for headhunting me when she decided to launch this mission, but I do wonder if she thought through sending along someone who's never been on a field mission, let alone one so remote. Krüger at least has been to more planets and moons than I've owned hats. Aggravating as he is, he knows what he's doing.