Dropzone

SEVEN: SAND IN THE VASELINE

UNSC Jennifer F. Manning (ITC-2) 

En route Epsilon Eridani e, aka Avalon (199 AU out)

2215 hrs LST

December 12, 2278

"Good morning, Sunshine." Katherine smiled down at Jo from the lip of the master sergeant's MIHU. Salt-and-pepper stubble covered the soldier's scalp. Her leathery face was thin and drawn; but all her unit's indicators blinked green. She regarded Katherine with eyes clear and bright.

"Major," Jo mumbled. "Gaah. Should be a straight black coffee IV instead of this nutrient crap." She raised an arm slightly to indicate the thin tubes running into it.

"You can join me for a cup as soon as Lieutenant Jayaraman clears you to get out of the bathtub." Jayaraman and Zheng were bent over Trevor Macmillan's broken MIHU at the other end of the compartment. Tools and panels were scattered over the deck near the unit; the two men were running diagnostics and trying to figure out what went wrong. "Lieutenant, how much longer for master Sergeant Navarro?"

"I am controlling and monitoring the procedure," Manning's AI said as Jayaraman looked up in undisguised irritation, shook his head, and bent back down over the disassembled capsule. "I will retract the intravenous nutrient and flushing solutions in seven minutes fourteen seconds Major. As her diagnostics show all nominal, she will be free to leave the MIHU deck and follow the mandatory post-MIH nutrition, hydration, and exercise regimes."

"I'm so hungry I could eat my own leg. Either one." Jo's artificial leg had been detached for the trip's hibernation portion. "Eggs and bacon on the menu too?"

"Jayaraman made me eat a big bowl of some tasteless sludge when I came out. I mean, a big one. Your turn in the barrel next."

"Long as there's coffee." The master sergeant rubbed her face with her free hand. It left a trail of moisture from where her hand was resting in the IH fluids still clinging to the bottom of her unit. "You were also the last sight I saw before I went night-night. Seems like only a few minutes ago."

"Over a dozen years, Jo. Depending, of course, on the observer."

"Fucking weird, ain't it?"

"Yeah. But look at it this way. For a couple of fifty year olds, we look pretty darn amazing."

"Closer to sixty for me, young lady." Jo shook her head slightly. "I don't get all that relativity shit. No matter how many times they explain it to me, or how many pretty pictures they use." She was quiet for a while, probably contemplating the of the passage of more than a decade while their crew moved forward into the near future. It seemed like just another interesting interstellar spaceflight tidbit when it was explained to them in training, but the weighty reality of it hit home for Katherine once she started to dig into the backlog of news, e-and-vmail, and mission updates that had followed Manning into interstellar space. "I just know I've been asleep for a god-damned long time," Jo said. "And I'm not any older. Like a Rip Van-fucking Winkle."

"The way I understand it is that our bodies experienced the equivalent of three or four weeks or so of wear and tear in MIH. Years of clock time still passed for us—but not as much as the dozen the people back home experienced."

Neither of them—actually very few of the embarked crew and military platoon—had any connections back on Earth; that was part of the criteria for selection for the mission. Katherine's last surviving close relative, her mother, passed away two years before MacMillan came looking for her on that rock spire in his silly helicopter. Navarro's mother passed just a few months before that. Mission security meant that no one outside of the command chain knew where they were. To anyone who knew them on Earth, every member of Manning's crew had gone off on classified missions and disappeared from the face of the planet.