Payton Shaw had never intended to spend so much time texting with Tom Burdett. They both had work to do tomorrow, but Captain Burdett was the best leadership figure Payton had to turn to within their lineage. And Captain Burdett was aware of that situation, which was why he was so willing to give freely of his time, at least as much as he could while quarantined down in Flight Ops whenever he was in town.
But now the conversation was over and Payton knew he needed to get to bed. At least he didn’t have an air shift tomorrow at the station — he only did the Sunday morning all-Elvis show, the Church of the Blessed Elvis — but he had plenty of other work to keep him busy. And enough of it required close attention that it wouldn’t do to be so tired he was on the verge of nodding off the whole time.
His roommate had already gone to bed by the time he got back to the apartment. It made the process of rigging his bed a little more difficult, but once his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting of the panel of the room’s life-support monitor, it wasn’t that difficult.
He remembered when he first got up here, how the light from it had made sleeping difficult. He’d found out later that several of the other kids had gotten in trouble for covering theirs at night, because they simply could not sleep unless the room was much darker. However, in an artificial habitat on a world with no life-giving atmosphere, being able to see at a glance those vital figures on the conditions upon which life depended was simply non-negotiable. Adapting to the resultant light level in sleeping rooms was your problem.
Like so many things up here, Payton thought as he lay there looking at the ceiling. For Expulsees, there was no option of washing out of training, of being sent back in disgrace. Either they adapted, or they died.
Like Clarissa Munroe. Why should she come back to his mind now? He hadn’t thought of her since the day he went down to the Wall of Honor to pay tribute to his clone-brother, who’d died trying to save her from her own foolishness. But then the damnatio memoriae that had been placed upon her did not exactly encourage thinking about her overmuch.
But there’d been plenty of other people who’d died up here, in circumstances such that they weren’t condemned, and in some cases even got a place on the Wall of Honor, but left people wondering. A few accidents, but also more than a few seemingly heroic actions that had a certain odor of “get out of jail free card” to them.
And there too, it was considered an impropriety to speculate. Especially with the honored dead, one did not say anything that might appear to disparage.
Quite honestly, some of the stuff he was hearing about right now had that feel to it. Were people taking stupid chances because they no longer cared whether they lived or died, but were not going to destroy their reputation by an obvious act of self-destruction? Especially this business with the guy over at Schirrasburg suddenly coming down sick — the various protocols the pilot-astronauts operated under should have protected them from infection. But he was also aware how people took shortcuts — how many times had Betty Margrave put out reminders of the absolute importance of not propping safety doors when bringing large objects through?
Except most of the likely mistakes are the stuff you’d expect of dirtsiders, not someone who lives with the constant awareness of the slender margins of our survival.
But right now there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it. Do his best in his own area, but better to put those thoughts out of his mind so he could go to sleep.