My anxiety about the letter's contents eases almost as soon as I'm actually reading. There's a certain calm to knowing I'm holding something from someone I know better than anyone else in the UIS, no matter what she has to say. I can feel clearly in that moment why paper mail bounced back so fast with the rise of interstellar travel. This is the tangible connection to reality that I've been craving.
My heart is still going fast enough to hurt. I try to ignore it.
I hope this letter finds you, and finds you well. Zuri refuses to tell me what she did to get you on her mission, but I'm inclined to believe it wasn't the most ethical advance given that she told her full research team to keep quiet if I were ever to ask. I hope you're okay.
The letter crinkles in my hands before I realize how hard I'm clenching it. I try to loosen my grip before it creases. God, only one paragraph in and I'm already shaking.
She went asking about me.
You don't have to answer this, and I'm fine with that. If you're not ready to talk to me again yet, that's okay. I know you need space when things happen. And I know you. But I want you to know that I still care about you—a lot—and I wish I was there with you. If nothing else because Zuri is a—
Nobody ever said Yahvi had a clean mouth in private.
—for sending you without a co-leader, or at least a second-in-command. Or not insisting if you turned her down. I don't care what your answer is; I consider a seven-month solo deployment inhumane, and you can't tell me otherwise.
And I know you don't do well alone.
I have to set the letter down. I drag my pillow out of my sleeping bag and hug it, burying my face. Nobody out here in the UIS knows that about me. Nobody. I've been branded a lone wolf more times than I can count, and I've kept it that way as the years have passed without presenting anyone stubborn enough to reach out to me. Anyone as stubborn as the other Aventureros trainee our leader matched me with decades ago, because she had mental health training and he thought we'd get along. I'd spent the last six months shut down after the death of my parents, and had nobody else in the world. In the next three, Yahvi and that same leader probably saved my life.
We did get along. So well, that by the end of that trip, we were sent on our way with a letter asking the organization to keep us together, and recommending us straight into its leadership program. The rest is history. The guarantee of each other's company over the next sixteen years masked the fact that both of us spiral when left to our own devices for too long. Yahvi manages better than I do.
I keep my head down on the pillow. I shouldn't be struggling this much, but I am. As gutting as it would be for her to yell at me on paper, it's almost worse to get the opposite. I'm the one who's kept away for the last nine years. Any normal person would hate me by now. But Yahvi's always taken pride in not being a normal person, and the stubbornness with which she's kept sending letters is only one extension of it.
I can't just ignore the rest of this. I eventually pack away the wave of emotions enough to pull the letter towards me again. Thank god, that was the last of the personal part. I don't think I'd be able to keep reading if there was more.
At least I can tell you you're with two of the best people from Dara, so don't worry about Tobias and Lingmei. Zuri's never gotten either of them in her pocket, and I'd poach them if I could.
So this pair has Yahvi's approval? That's good to know.
Happy one-year anniversary on your Tikokura landing—
Of course she'd remember.
—and merry early Christmas. Happy very-early birthday, too, while I'm at it. They wouldn't let me send anything given the weight limit, but I think your teammates might have beaten me to it anyway. I do have something else for you, though. The article I included here was just written up by the Adgate Research Team this month. It's not published yet, but I know the scientist in charge, and I convinced him to give me an advance copy when I found out what he'd found. I had a hunch you might want to hear about it.
I pick up the printout again. A cold tingle spreads over my body like water through wet clothing at the title of the article. "Evidence of biological control of demighost activity in the Jenu rock moth, Odilius tesca," it reads. All my remaining trepidation about the letter evaporates. I scan quickly to find my spot again.
You're not technically supposed to show that to anyone until it's out in print, but by the time you get this, it should be. I also don't know if Dara is expecting to find demighosts on Mahaha, but James Adgate named it as a candidate for ongoing study given what his team found on Jenu, and they've proven similar in other ways. If you tell Tobias and Lingmei, they can keep an eye out. I feel better with you in charge over there than I would with anyone else, but still... be careful. I know I don't need to tell you that, but I have a bad feeling about Mahaha.
If there was one thing that set Yahvi and I apart among the Aventureros, it was our willingness to trust our instincts. Yahvi especially had an uncanny knack for sensing out a location or situation, and she had no qualms about making and sticking to decisions founded on instinct alone.
I can see where she's coming from on this one. Jenu was one of the first planets colonized after the Great Escape: a desert world, just larger than earth, and eminently habitable. It's no longer the most heavily populated, but it never had serious problems until dust storms started plaguing it some ten years ago. The situation escalated, but nobody realized how bad it could get until this year, when a series of freak strikes cracked the geodesic dome around the largest habitation. Fifty thousand residents were evacuated, to the planet's two other settlements, or off Jenu entirely. I've heard that many are too spooked to move back.
Mahaha has been problematic for as long as it's been known, and this mission is already the longest stretch of time it's been inhabited. But the parallels between it and Jenu are a decade old. When the dust storms first emerged, the Hub commissioned scientists to scour the UIS for any planet or moon that showed similar meteorological patterns. The closest they could find was Mahaha.
The Hub organized the first Mahaha mission, and paid dearly for it. The Mahaha Rescue scared off further research. By the time last year's dust storms hit, most people had forgotten the parallels, or dismissed them as not being worth the risk. Only Zuri and Yahvi thought otherwise. Only Zuri could do anything about it.
On another note, I heard you'll be landing on Lumiuk when you get back, and the interplanetary shuttles don't go anywhere particularly pleasant from here during the June snowstorms. If you need a place to crash, my apartment's big enough for two. You don't have to take me up on that, but the offer's there. It may or may not come with coffee. The real stuff; I found a source. Yes, this is bribery.
Dammit, Yahvi.
You better make it out of there alive. Even if you don't want to see me again. Love you, Alex.
I sit back, too numb to even process those final lines. Her signature is the one she uses for people she actually cares about. It's a subtle detail I noticed over our decade and a half of working together. I read the letter from the top again, but nothing hints that she's angry and hiding it from me. My hand presses down the bottom fold of the letter as I shift, and a final line hidden at the bottom of it catches my desk-lamp light.
p.s. I still have a gap on the team for a competent Head of Operations.
I return to the pillow. That makes six years, then, that she's been running her research group more or less solo. It can't be for lack of candidates; with her reputation, she would have her pick of the best of the best, though I'd question how many would find it easy to work under her. But she made it clear before we parted ways that she didn't approve of my new methods of leading an expedition. She can't think my return to this kind of position on Mahaha is voluntary, either; she said so herself. Why is she still trying to get me on her team?
I set the letter and article back on my desk and drop down on my bed. I feel like I've been through a rock climb and an emotional waterfall, and all I've done is read a piece of paper. Which isn't nothing, granted, but even reading doesn't drain me so fast. At least the anxiety is gone. Exhaustion hits like a wall as I turn over to check the time. It's bedtime anyway. I crawl into my sleeping bag and will the world to disappear and take my problems with it.
By the next day, Liu, Kwon, and Krüger have enough mini-probes to put their final field experiment into motion. I survey the spread in the common room: a dozen diversely shaped gadgets ranging in size from the length of my hand to the length of a dinner plate.
"Not all of them have the same capabilities," says Liu, on the tail end of a crisp and well-organized presentation. "We didn't manage to salvage all the same instruments from the different probes, but each one of these here has at least one sensor that will pick up one of the key signs of whatever wrecked the others."
At the core of it all, her and Krüger's plan is simple. These devices are going to be planted in a broad ring around the Pod, close enough to one another to pick up patterns, but far enough apart that anything that destroys one is unlikely to take out its neighbors, too. All of them will stream their data back to the station. Liu emphasized again in her talk that these were, at this point, disposable. She and Krüger are willing to sacrifice all the salvaged instruments for the sake of this final test.
"Good work," I say. I've heard their safety plan top to bottom, and even Liu is willing to put up with any precautions I choose to take. "Pack them up for travel; we'll head out tomorrow if the weather stays amenable."
Liu tries her utmost to keep from clapping delightedly. Her eyes are dancing. She and Krüger clear the mini-probes in record time and cart them off to do my bidding. I check the data screen on the wall. Conditions outside right now are gorgeous, with nothing to indicate an incoming storm—or inclement weather of any kind. I don't trust my ability to predict weather even an hour in advance on this moon, let alone a day, but Mahaha seems to be in a cooperative mood.
We're all up before sunrise the next morning, and out the door in another hour. The weather is still gorgeous. We plant half the probes by lunchtime, then decide to finish the rest rather than return to the Pod for lunch. It's just as well. We're down to the last two when the wind changes. The sky over the horizon is yellower than it ought to be. I gun the station snowmobile's engine and catch up with Samson.
"This weather won't hold for long," I say. "Find a place to plant the last two."
Krüger and Liu both nod. In minutes, they've found a spot for the second-to-last probe. Liu plants the last one thirty paces away, pointing its camera back towards its sibling. Then we race home. By now, the first snowflakes are falling; by the depth of the clouds, there's a storm on its way. Liu and Krüger shed snow gear like snakeskin the moment we're back inside.
"You did it?" says Kwon.
"Close enough," says Krüger. "Lingmei, you getting the tablet?"
"Already got it!" she calls back from the lab.
We meet up in the common room. I take a couch, then evacuate it seconds before Krüger plunks himself down on its other end. I have no wish to be bounced across the room. I perch on the arm instead.
"Let's hope the storm doesn't bury these before we see something interesting," says Krüger.
"It shouldn't; we've seen the anomaly in storms before." Liu props the tablet up on the coffee table, its screen filled with a familiar ladder of time-series graphs. Krüger's laptop beside it hosts the last probe's video feed: an icy hollow and now-steadily falling snow. The second-to-last probe is a dark blot against the drifts.
"Alright, Mahaha," says Liu. "Show us what you've got."