Getting back to Shepardsport had proven harder than Chandler Armitage had anticipated. He’d been supposed to fly straight back, but just as he was heading down to do the final checks on his lander, he’d gotten the word that he was needed to take some parts and supplies out to a minor outpost that had experienced a critical failure. Yes, they did have backup systems, but those systems are like a spare tire on a car. They’re designed to carry you far enough to get your primary systems repaired or replaced, no more.
At least the people at the outpost had the necessary skill sets to do the repair on their own, so the delivery was just a matter of using a robot to set the boxes out on the lunar regolith. The settlers had send their own robot out to retrieve them, and all communication had been via radio. Neither Chandler nor his pilot had needed to get out of the lander, let alone enter the outpost’s habitat.
In the old days — had it only been a few months? Already it felt like an eternity ago — they probably would’ve been welcomed inside, maybe even fed supper and invited to stay overnight to rest. Most modern outposts had a sufficiently elastic oxygen budget that they could extend hospitality to the occasional visitors. It wasn’t just a matter of building in redundancy to absorb shocks, although that was an important engineering principle. There was also the human factor, the need to make connections with the larger world at a personal level, not just voices on a speaker and images on a screen.
A problem that remained even now that he was home — or at least as much home as this settlement could ever be. He still felt homesick for his native New Hampshire, and wondered what had become of his mother when President Flannigan had cracked down on the Granite State’s resistance to his policies against clones and replaced her with a governor of his own choosing.
It always comes back worst when I’m not busy. He considered that thought. Normally he would have plenty to occupy himself. Not just his professional duties, overseeing the maintenance of his lander, keeping himself up to date on training and his secondary specialty, but also social activities here or in whatever settlement he was visiting.
But the current crisis meant that last was no longer an option. He understood why it was necessary for the pilots to stay down here, away from the rest of the settlement. Hell, some of the scuttlebutt he was hearing from his old flying buddies from his carrier days was downright terrifying. But the loss of his usual diversions made it altogether too easy to brood.
On the other hand, he did have some unfinished business to take care of. Although he’d been raised in a regular family — or as regular as a family can be when one parent is a senior politician — he appreciated the importance of astronaut lineages among his clone-brothers who’d grown up in the NASA clone creche.
Yes, there was Spruance Del Curtin’s text. Might as well see if he was where he could talk about whatever the data was that was bothering him so much.