As soon as Lou Corlin stepped out of the DJ booth, he was glad he’d just finished lining up a long set. Their news director had just emerged from her office, phone stuck to ear and a worried look on her face.
“I’ll be right up there.” Autumn Belfontaine paused, a thought furrow forming between her eyebrows. “No, I’m not going to tell anyone until I get up there and have a chance to talk to you. We need facts, not rumors and speculation.”
Finished with her conversation, she looked over at Lou and the receptionist, who had been bent over a tablet, apparently studying for a class. “We’ve got a developing situation, and Reggie wants to talk to me right now. You two hold down the fort while I’m gone.”
Although Lou wondered what would require a visit to the settlement’s commandant, he kept his professional face on. “Yes, ma’am.”
Not quite in unison with the receptionist, since she’d gotten surprised, but good enough. And then it was just the two of them.
Lou looked at Cindy, then at the flimsy partitions that walled off the station offices. Unlike the studio proper, the office area was most decidedly not soundproof. Which meant that he’d better watch what he said. “Looks like things are going to get interesting.”
Cindy twirled a stylus between her fingers. “It sounded like something bad’s happening. Like when they had the cyber-attack on the landers over at Slayton Field kind of nasty.”
Lou remembered that day. He’d just been finishing up his air shift when Autumn had come into the DJ booth and practically pushed him right off the mic. Even her trained professional-journalist voice had betrayed a hint of breathlessness as she reported the crash of the first lander.
And even then we thought it was just an accident.
“I think we’d better be very careful right now.” Lou cast a sharp look at the phone at Cindy’s elbow. Not her personal phone, which was lying beside her tablet, but the official station line. “Until we get definite word otherwise, our face to the outside universe is business as usual. In the meantime, I’d better grab my coffee break before this set runs out and the boss yells at me about having dead air.”
“Got it.” Cindy returned to her studying. Technically she wasn’t supposed to be studying during her work hours, but with the station manager off to Grissom City for some kind of training class, things had slacked up.