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Narrative

Bad News Keeps Coming

The entire dining commons had gone silent as Captain Waite presented the situation. There’d usually be some whispering in the back of the room, the soft sounds of people shuffling their feet or shifting their weight in their chairs. But the only background noise Spruance Del Curtin could hear was the soft whir of the ventilation system.

Everything the commandant said was meshing with what Sprue had seen while working his way through all those statistics of Dr. Doorne’s, everything Chandler Armitage had told him as they discussed possibilities. Although the largest lunar settlements had developed enough industry in the last decade that they could make most of the things they needed, there were a few very specialized things that still had to come from Earth. Biologicals for the most part, especially some medicines, but certain devices and spare parts for others, simply couldn’t be produced with the equipment available up here.

However, the real chokepoint was going to be capacity. Yes, Shepardsport or Grissom City or any of the other big settlements could produce a lot of the parts that weren’t coming up here — but could they produce them fast enough to keep up with demand?

Which meant that a lot of things were going to have to be made to stretch a lot longer. It probably wouldn’t be as tight as those first few weeks and months after the Expulsions, when Shepardsport had to accommodate a sudden expansion of its population, right to the limits of their life support systems’ capacity, where they moved from crisis to crisis, finding ways to eke out just a little more capacity.

But it would mean a lot more work for everyone at the station. New public service announcements to record, and all of them would probably be pressed into service, not just the news crew. Especially if Captain Waite wanted to record some of his own, since that meant setting up the recording studio. With pressurized space at a premium, the station couldn’t justify a permanent recording studio when they might do one pre-recorded show a month.

But we’ll find a way to do it, somehow.