After another hour, the Captain put me on galley duty, and I made sandwiches and coffee for everyone. Mango slices and lettuce on sweetbread. Greenradish mustard on the side in case anyone wanted extra tang. Fizzy limonade to drink. There were no complaints from anyone. It was the same menu we’d have had at Summerland Station. Breakfast at the caf is usually fruit and cereal. Lunch is salad and noodles and assorted cooked veggies, and almost always a lot of rice and beans. Dinner is the heavy protein, tank-grown meat, potatoes, more rice and beans, and always more veggies. Sometimes lunch and dinner are swapped, depending on the work load and the energy and diet requirements. Variety is still limited. We’re not up to what Mom calls Luna Standard menu, but nobody’s starving. We’re installing new tanks this year, so we’re close to getting there. If we don’t have another Big Break-In. It’s all about work and patience and service. That’s what Mom says. She says it almost every day. I think she says it to remind herself more than remind anyone else.
Some people don’t like having to do service chores. They think it’s demeaning to wait on other people, but I like it. I’m not good at talking to people, so service gives me something to do. I’m a good listener, even when people think I’m not listening or when they think I don’t understand, so I know stuff, a lot of stuff, sometimes a lot more than I’m supposed to know. I know what a lot of people think about a lot of other people, and sometimes that can be really useful. That is, if I can figure it out. Sometimes it takes a while, a week, a month, or maybe even a year. And some stuff never makes sense. Not to me, anyway. Not even with the noise.
The noise is good for a lot of things, but there are some things it can’t do.
* * *
—
The scenery changes fast on Hella. And there are a lot of things that require hands-on and eyes-on. We could send bots outside the fences, but we can’t replace them as fast as we would lose them, so we have to keep our maps up-to-date.
There’s this general feeling in the Hella Colony that we’ll never conquer the planet if we hide behind the fences of Summerland Station. So we have to go out ourselves, smell the air and taste the world. We have to feel the dirt between our fingers. If we are ever going to make this planet ours, we have to give up our fear of it and get into a genuinely courageous relationship. That’s what Captain Skyler says.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be foolish about it. Captain Skyler doesn’t take chances. After the Big Break-In, he set up a lot of very strict security procedures that everyone has to follow. While most of the records of his missions are publicly available, some are not. The reasons vary. Mom says it’s because there’s a lot of stuff that would be embarrassing or painful to others. So those files are locked for twenty years or more. You have to have special clearance to view them, and you have to promise not to tell what you’ve seen. Mom has had access to some of the stuff about the Big Break-In, because that’s when my dad was killed. But she won’t talk about it. Not to me anyway.
After lunch, Captain Skyler put me on weather watch. We had a mild storm front moving in from high in the northeast, but it was still a week away. If it got here at all. Probably not. It was too early for tornadoes anyway. But just the same, Hella could be unpredictable. Hellacious has a whole other meaning here.
We arrived at First Marker at 1430. We were now officially on the savannah. We paused for twenty minutes to calibrate, upload, download, synchronize, and all the other stuff you do at First Marker. It’s also the first bathroom break. Not that you have to wait if you really have to go, it’s just that there are procedures and rules about keeping every position crewed and green, so it’s one more thing we have to manage. Timing. It’s about timing.
There’s also an experimental plot at First Marker. A few years ago, they cleared a couple of acres, burned it free of local life, then seeded it with various Terran species. Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, grapes, and even a few citrus trees. There are a dozen cameras and a couple of little-bots watching the plot, but from time to time, Ag Lab asks a team to bring back samples for testing. And tasting—after irradiation, of course. Mostly the Earth plants behave in the wild the same way they do in the greenhouses. They get taller. Outside though, the leaves get a lot bigger and so do the roots and fruits. Sometimes the leaves change color and even get narrower because the sunlight is so bright.
Jamie says the different spectrum of the primary has a weird effect on plants grown outside. The plants get different colors of light than they do in the greenhouses. And there are mutations too. We can’t really keep up with all the raw data we’re collecting. We just gather the information and send it back to Earth with every return voyage of the Cascade. Supposedly, they turn it over to the data-diddlers crowd-crunching, which is like crowd-sourcing only more so.
Everybody knows about the test plot, but it’s one thing to see it on a big 3D wall and it’s a whole other thing to see it in real life. So when Captain Skyler told me to suit up and grab a collecting kit, I got excited. Outside! I jammed on my helmet and scrambled for the airlock. But when I slid down the ladder, I saw he wasn’t wearing his helmet.
“Do you have all your vaccinations?”
“You know I do.”
He thumped the top of my head and said, “Well, then take off the brain bucket. You need to smell this with your own nose.”
Take off the helmet—?
He saw me hesitate. We weren’t supposed to do that out here, were we?
“It’s okay, Kyle. It’s only air. You breathe it all the time. It’s the same air we have at home.”
I wasn’t sure about that, but I trust Captain Skyler. So I unclipped the safety strap and lifted it slowly off my head—
The day was bright. Too bright. And hot! I blinked in the harsh sunlight, it seemed to give everything a sharp blue edge. It made my eyes water. “Ouch!”
“Yes. That’s one reaction. When you’re ready, open your eyes again. Take a deep breath. Tell me what you smell.”
I sniffed. A little at first. Then a little more. “I’m not sure,” I said. I inhaled again. “Something sweet. Is that the grass? Something else too.” I looked up at him. “Does blue have a smell?”
“That’s what air smells like when it doesn’t come from a can. That’s air so fresh it’s never been breathed before. Not by anyone from Earth.”
I started to take another deep breath, but he stopped me. “Uh-uh. You know better than that. You’ll get dizzy. Slow shallow breaths. Remember? Or put on your rebreather.”
I didn’t want to, but it was probably safer. If I put on the rebreather I wouldn’t have to worry about my oxygen levels, so this was probably another test to see if I would be reckless or careful.
Captain Skyler pointed me toward a row of tomato vines. “See how the leaves have frayed edges? Something’s been chewing on them, tasting to see if they’re any good. Collect a few leaves for the lab. But more important, look for droppings. They might look like little black raisins. Or even big black raisins. Anything you’re not sure of, photograph and bag it. Oh, and grab a couple of the tomatoes too.”