In the years since he’d taken command of Shepardsport, Reggie Waite had became reasonably adept with teleconferencing. Not that he’d really gotten used to it, because he still felt a measure of awkwardness whenever it was necessary. But he could handle even an hour-long teleconference with multiple people in different locations and not wind up feeling exhausted.
However, the teleconference he’d just completed had left him feeling far more worn out than usual. Perhaps it was just having to deal with several participants whose native language was not English. Even a slight accent or subtle differences in the ways of signalling when one was finished speaking created far more difficulty in a teleconference than in face-to-face conversation. In fact, sometimes it seemed like having the little image of the person’s face on the screen made it harder than a pure telephone call — and that was in a one-on-one teleconference. Trying to keep track of ten or fifteen faces in tiny little frames on your monitor could be actively painful.
But the real issue right now was the leaden dread that filled these meetings. Day after day, week after week, they had been talking about nothing but the diablovirus and how to keep it away from the lunar settlements. Twice now they’d had terrifying close calls, and there was always that unspoken dread will the next one be found too late?
And now there was the wait for an incoming solar storm, with no certainty that it would be the only one. While the understanding of the Sun’s inner workings had improved greatly in the decades since the Zond 12 disaster, none the least as the result of much better solar observation technology, the Sun still surprised even solar astronomers on a regular basis.
On top of it all, Reggie needed to go straight from this teleconference to the dining commons, where he needed to make a presentation to the entire community. Usually he would have at least a little time to talk privately with Steffi, or with one of the other department heads. But there would be no time for such reflection today.