Cather Hargreaves wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be getting home for the evening. On one hand, he was glad that he’d been assigned to the main Safety and Security station here in Grissom City proper, which meant he was able to go home every night. On the other hand, he was all too aware that several other members of the department were stationed out at the Roosa Barracks, monitoring flight operations (such as they were these days), although they lived here in the city. Because of the effort to prevent possible contagion from being brought from the spaceport to the city, they were stuck living in temporary quarters out there, seeing their families only via FaceTime or teleconferencing software.
And how would it benefit anyone if you were to join them, just to lessen your feelings of guilt about their situation?
Those had been Toni’s words when he’d mentioned it to her. And he had to agree that, looking at it from a perspective of efficiency, she was absolutely correct. It was just when you looked at it from a perspective of human social cohesion that he really didn’t like being able to go home every night when some of his people couldn’t.
And it’s more important that you be at your best and able to do your job to the best of your ability.
That too had been a strong argument. Or as Toni was wont to point out, sacrifices aren’t magic and don’t have any supernatural power. But she was a deist, and didn’t view the Creator as the sort of entity to be moved by sacrifices.
As usual, she was already home when he got in. She looked a little weary, but that was hardly surprising when one considered that she was one of the people trying to hold the Internet together while things were falling apart on Earth. Just last night she’d been talking about how many of the really big websites were having momentary outages as one set of servers would drop offline and the routers had to reconnect users to a mirror site somewhere else. Now IT’s big project was trying to make sure everything critical was mirrored up here on the Moon, which meant she was lucky to even get to come home.
When her eyes met his, she pushed the weariness away to look excited for him. “Hi, sweetheart. How did it go, or do I ask?”
“The usual.” Cather hoped he didn’t sound too downhearted. “No major problems, but a heck of a lot of little stuff that sure sounds like people stressing out and not quite having the level of self-control they usually would.’
“Not surprising. We’ve pretty well identified all the critical websites we need to have mirrored up here, in case all their dirtside mirrors go down. Now our biggest problem is figuring out how to expand our server capacity to accommodate that much data. Oh, and I just got an e-mail from one of your clone-brothers over at Shepardsport. Seems he’s trying to track down some rumors about the situation down at Schirrasburg.”
Cather’s guts clenched at the mention. “All I know is that they’ve had someone sick, and they’re worried enough that they stopped all flights in and out until they’re certain it’s not the diablovirus. They should have sufficient supplies to get by for at least another three weeks, although things could get pretty tight by the end of that period.”
“OK.” Toni sounded dubious. “According to what he said, he was hearing two contradictory rumors, one that the guy recovered and the other that he died but someone’s covering it up to prevent panic. And before you tell me about not passing rumors, it looks like he’s involved in trying to quash them with facts, and running short on those. I was just about to see what I could find out when you showed up.”
Cather recalled his wife’s skills as a hacker, that she’d gotten into some measure of trouble when she was younger and not so careful. Of course now she had a lot broader authorization as one of the senior members of Grissom City’s IT team, but there still were limits.
“If you’re going to take a look around, be careful. Not just because of health privacy laws, but because if they’re trying to keep a lid on something serious, they’re going to take information security as seriously as physical and biological security. And considering my own position, they could very well take it as an official action on the part of Grissom City.”
“Got it. Now that you’re home, let’s have supper first.”
“Sounds good. I think there’s some leftover chicken from last night that I can turn into something.”