The corridors leading down to the port facility were unusually quiet. Normally they would’ve been bustling with activity, and there was a good possibility he’d be stuck at one or another airlock, waiting for someone to bring a large piece of equipment through.
However, these were not ordinary times. With the restrictions on travel, shipping had been reduced to only essential materials. Food and Nutrition was still shipping cases of prepared astronaut meals to the small science outposts scattered about Farside, as well as some of the smaller mining outposts that didn’t have enough people to maintain a Zubrin hobby farm. Engineering was still fabbing parts for equipment at those outposts, especially when spares simply weren’t available, whether because the manufacturer had ceased to support something or shipments from Earth had been cut off.
But compared to the usual volume of material traveling through these lower corridors, right now there was almost nothing. In fact, from some of the things his clone-brothers had told him, operations had been reduced to the point that some of the more junior pilot-astronauts were having to fight for enough missions to maintain their flight status. Not to mention the financial consequences of losing one’s flight pay.
Not as serious a problem over here, where things were still run like a research station or a ship at sea. But at Grissom City and Coopersville, which were transitioning toward a civilian economy, it could be awkward for the pilot-astronauts who had apartments rather than living in the BOQ.
On the other hand, the shortage of missions meant that Chandler Armitage was going to be sticking around for a while. Which meant that it might be possible to pull him in on this project — but Sprue also knew that he’d have to be extremely careful about how he went about it.
Sprue was just exiting the airlock that joined Innsmouth Sector when his phone buzzed. Not a text chime, not a mail beep, but an alert tone that was used only for emergency communications.
Not a good thing to hear when they were in the middle of a solar storm watch. He didn’t think that it would be upgraded to a warning this quickly, although he doubted that they’d be so lucky as to have it turn out to pass by the Moon without causing any trouble. The best they’d probably get would be a near miss with low enough radiation counts that only flights and EVA’s would be suspended, but ordinary activty within the settlement would continue.
When he pulled out his phone, he saw the push notification. As it turned out, it was just a general alert for a couple of long-term EVA’s that weren’t reporting in. Both of them were based out of nearby outposts that were nominally under Shepardsport’s command, but were effectively autonomous. Some of the commercially-owned outposts were a bit lax about certain safety protocols, and according to some things Carl Dalton had mentioned, Betty Margrave had had words with their people more than once.
On the other hand, it wasn’t something Sprue needed to worry about, so he cleared it and continued on his way. If those teams were still an issue by the time he did tomorrow’s air shift, he might have to read announcements about it.
However, he doubted it would be an issue. Most likely, if they hadn’t reported in within the next few hours, someone would be tasked to fly out and search for them. Of course their companies would be charged for the search and rescue flight, so they had an incentive to make sure their people got back in before things reached that point.
Better to put the whole thing out of his mind. He needed to concentrate his mind on how he was going to present the situation to Chandler. Especially since he really wasn’t supposed to go blabbing about this stuff, so he had to find ways to talk about it without being obvious.