Brenda Redmond had intended to go straight to her father’s office in Engineering. However, she’d been thinking about what she needed to review for the upcoming test in her current training course, the force of long-standing habit had led her to turn the other way, to the radio station.
It was only when she was opening the door and stepping in that she realized her error. Her face flushed warm with embarrassment as she recalled more than one time when her parents had made a wrong turn, automatically heading toward school instead of their intended destination.
No big problem, she told herself. This was after hours, and the only person who’d be here at this hour would be the DJ. Right now it was the disco show, and Spencer Dawes tended to stay in the DJ booth his whole shift.
Just as Brenda was about to step back out and close the door, she realized the light was on in the newsroom. Not just the usual telltales on the life-support monitors which were just part of living in a habitat where everything down to the air they breathed had to be provided and maintained by sophisticated technology. No, someone had the overhead lights on in there.
Maybe she’d better take a look, make sure the news crew hadn’t forgotten to turn the newsroom lights off when they left for the evening. Her dad had been grumping lately about that kind of carelessness, and how it was affecting the settlement’s heat and energy budgets. With an incoming solar storm that might require powering down everything unnecessary, she’d probably better check, rather than hope that Spence would notice.
She hadn’t even gotten to the newsroom door when a familiar voice called out, “OK, who’s out there at this hour?”
The flush of embarrassment returned to Brenda’s cheeks. “Just me.”
Might as well go on in and see what Autumn Belfontaine was doing. Otherwise, Autumn was going to wonder what she was doing poking in and then disappearing, and would probably have awkward questions tomorrow morning.
Or worse, she’ll come over to Dad’s office and ask.
Autumn Belfontaine was sitting at the main newsroom computer, and from the what Brenda could see at her angle, there was a bunch of data on the monitor. It looked like something from one or another of NASA’s solar observation satellites, from the headers, but she couldn’t see without being obvious about it.
She looked up from her work. “So what brings you down here at this hour?”
Brenda essayed an awkward grin. “Dad and I were going to talk privately over at his office, but I’m so used to coming here that it was like my feet just walked me over here.”
Autumn’s laughter was genuine, not just professional courtesy. “I could tell you a few stories about that myself. And speaking of your father, I was planning on speaking with him myself. Having near-realtime data is nice, but I simply don’t have the background to interpret it, and Dr. Doorne’s got enough projects on her plate already that I really don’t want to take any more of her time than I have to.”
“And Dad’s got the engineering background to tell you what it’s going to mean in terms of operational effects for us and the outlying settlements. At least Earth shouldn’t get hit too bad, since the magnetosphere should offer some protection, but it could get rough up here.”