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.
I give up trying to reach the floor and pull my feet up onto the blow-up armchair. The shift tips me sideways into one marshmallowy arm, which groans. "Krüger? What's your report for the day?"
He stays slumped back on the couch. "I checked the low-gravity anemometers, but they're fine. That was most likely another atmospheric anomaly yesterday, but we haven't had enough of them yet to start building a comprehensive dataset. When are we going to start doing field missions?"
"Soon." So the wind blips aren't an error. My heart sinks, but I keep my face neutral. "Anything else?"
"That's it."
"Liu?"
She tugs her braid. "Dea and I finished reworking the broken oxygen mask. The melting-bucket works fine now, and it's pulling the oxygen right from the water, not the air. And it fills the reserve tank when we turn it on. Now we just have to test it outside."
There it is. I've been waiting for weeks for this to drop. "No."
She blinks, like I slapped her. "Chief, it works. We can have a spare on hand; we only have to run it on a person for—"
"And that is why I'm saying no. Under no circumstances will you test this on a living, breathing person under my watch."
Her eyes flash as she sits up. "Why? You said you wanted another working mask after this one broke. Now we might have one. Why can't we test it? The atmosphere outside isn't toxic; we know that already. If we can just—"
"No." In spite of myself, my pulse has quickened, exerting a faint pressure on the backs of my eyes. Stay calm, Alex. The room seems to have sharpened and blurred at the same time. "An extra mask is not worth letting someone endanger themself just to test some contraption that worked in the lab. We have rules here for a reason, and that reason is safety. This violates both unnecessary trips outside and putting anyone in known danger for a trivial reason, which are two of the most fundamental rules I have in place here."
"Trivial?" Liu's voice rises. "Chief, it's an oxygen mask! We've been one short for weeks! Sure, maybe it's not needed right now, but what if another breaks? What if we have to evacuate the Pod? We won't have enough for all of us, then. Do you count that in 'safety'?"
"If everyone follows the rules, we won't ever find ourselves in that situation."
"You can't predict that!"
There's a ringing in my head now, half-muting Liu's voice. I fight to keep my breathing level. Liu starts to list off "accidents" that could happen, all of them dangerous, and all of them preventable. I have Kwon scan the ground ahead and around us for cracks six times a day. I have my watch set to give me an alarm when conditions outside hint at inclement weather, so we can move to higher ground. I had Kwon make sure the Pod could keep running even if it got buried, with all its external equipment destroyed.
I've fought for safety features people said were overkill. Equipment the Hub didn't want to spare a larger shuttle to ship. I've done everything to ensure those "accidents" don't happen to us, and that we can survive them if they do. Every rule I have in place supports that. I won't have another trainee's death on my hands.
Liu stops for breath.
"My answer is still no," I say.
"Is this just another excuse to keep me from going outside?"
It's my turn to blink. That's it? After all the conversations we've been through, that's what she's thinking? Yes, it's another way to keep her in the Pod. This is her first time so much as stepping into a spacesuit on a planet that isn't Lumiuk, Dara's home base and as safe as a sidewalk. I did this professionally for sixteen years.
But this is clearly something Liu has been stewing about for a while. She's fixed me with a hurt, searing look, fingers digging into the arm of the couch. "You told me you would help me get up to speed in the field. You said I was valuable on this mission, and that you'd make sure I had the chance to gain the experience I didn't have. What happened to that? You've been saying 'soon' for over two months, but the farthest you've ever let me go is around to the garage and back—supervised. How am I supposed to even learn to stay safe if all I ever do is sit inside and listen to you talk about safety?"
The ringing in my head intensifies. I was so, so stupid to promise that. I didn't know what Mahaha would be like. Not truly. I got caught up in the fantasy of being able to teach someone again, and forgot what happens when I'm put in charge but let down my guard. I didn't know, firsthand, how many ways Mahaha could kill us.
It's killed before. If I could have shut down this mission completely, I would have, but the only thing within my power was to come along. Now I'm the only thing keeping another death off this moon's tally chart, and that scares me more than the moon itself.
Liu's still going. "I was supposed to come along to help Tobias in the field and get a taste for exoplanetary research, and you know how I feel right now? Useless. Tobias checks the instruments, Tobias and you drop the probes and pick them up when they fail, and I sit here twiddling my thumbs, and look at data I don't even have an outdoor perspective to compare to. Doesn't that defeat the whole point? Did we come all the way here just to waste our time?"
My hand is gripping the edge of the chair arm so hard, my fingers have turned white up to the second knuckles. I have to force my words between gritted teeth. "I was not put in charge of this team to let you take reckless risks."
"I'm not asking to do anything reckless! I'm asking you to give me a chance! One chance! I don't care if you come on all the excursions; that's your job, and we'll be safer for it. But Tobias has been doing this kind of thing for ten years and you barely even let him go anywhere. Isn't that a bit excessive?"
"I agree with Lingmei," says Krüger. "I understand the safety concern, but there's always going to be some level of danger here, and we need to learn to work with it, not just lock it away."
This is spinning out of control. I see them crushed under ice blocks, frozen in the snow, fallen into crevices—
"If we sanitize the whole mission and don't take any risks at all—"
—lost in a storm, out of my reach the moment I let my guard down, dead before I can reach them again—
"—how can we expect to gain anything, either?"
"This conversation is over," I say.
Liu jumps up. "Did you even listen to us?!"
"This conversation is over!" I bellow, and she goes silent, stunned. "Meeting dismissed," I say, and stride out of the room before either of them find their voices again.
Kwon catches up to me in the hallway. "Alex—"
"Don't start on me." I stand rigid, fists balled at my sides. "The last time I took that kind of risk on a group, six people died. I'm not going through that again."
Kwon wilts. "Alex..." After a long pause, she touches my arm, like I'll erupt again if handled too roughly. "That was... you know there was nothing you could do about that."
I give a short, harsh laugh. "That's what everyone likes to say, isn't it? But there was. I let them go. I was responsible for them, and I failed miserably the moment I made that decision. I take risks, and people die."
"That is a disservice to all the people who would have died without you. And a disservice to yourself. You have the skills to look after them. And the last time you took a risk, two hundred and eight people survived."
"That was a fluke."
"Alex—"
"Gallegos." I finally manage to wrestle down the quivering feeling inside of me. I shut it away where it belongs and take a step back from Kwon. "Captain Gallegos. I appreciate your concerns, but I've made these rules for a reason, and I expect you not to challenge them. I'm just doing my job."
Her hand falls from my arm as I brush past her to my room and shut the door.