Why do I keep feeling like we’re under siege?
Rick Sutton was no stranger to staying in the BOQ. He’d done so plenty of times over the years, back on Earth when he was deployed on a station where one could not bring dependents, or here on the Moon when he had an overnight stay at another settlement. But he’d never been in the one here in Coopersville until now.
He understood the rationale. Every time pilot-astronauts visited Luna Station or another settlement, they were exposed to a multitude of outsiders. In normal times it wasn’t a huge concern, since the pre-flight quarantine periods were supposed to keep people from bringing anything up here, beyond the colds that could never quite be completely eliminated (and according to Medstaff, were necessary for the healthy operation of the immune system).
In the current situation, the stakes were far higher. Already a seemingly trivial breach of quarantine in the Indian space program had effectively shut down a big chunk of Japan’s spacelift capacity until everyone who might have come into contact with the infected individual had completed the necessary period of quarantine and was pronounced clear by the doctors. And there’d been a scare at Schirrasburg, although it had turned out to be an ordinary norovirus, not the diablovirus.
He knew he should be grateful that their isolation wasn’t absolute. He could still talk to his wife and daughter via FaceTime, but it just wasn’t the same.
And he was getting some worried texts from Quinn Merton up at Shepardsport. In normal times he would’ve visited his clone-brothers when he was up there, but now that simply wasn’t possible.
However, this was definitely not just a matter of missing his visits. No, Quinn was pretty clearly getting some contradictory information, about the current space weather situation and picking up a sense that something a lot bigger was going on behind the scenes.
Not surprising, considering that his position as a DJ at Shepardsport Pirate Radio would be putting him in touch with some information sources that ordinary civilians didn’t see. And he could read between the lines and pick up the gaps and lacunae in the official space weather forecasts too.
Rick’s wife was a planetary geologist specializing in cometary water deposition, so her understanding of solar storms would be glancing. However, she would know people in the appropriate specialties, and be far more able to contact them than he would.
Yes, it was time to ask her some questions.