Tag: Chandler Armitage

Spruance Del Curtin looked at his phone, trying to decide what to do. So Drew wanted him to get answers about the situation in Schirrasburg, right when he was getting told that Command was taking notice of his curiosity, and not in a good way.

Should he contact Autumn Belfontaine, express interest in taking her up on that offer to put him on the news team? Except he really didn’t like the idea of having to give up being a DJ.

Who else could he talk to? A lot of times he’d ask Brenda, but she was Drew’s wife and Ken Redmond’s daughter, and Sprue wouldn’t be surprised if she told both of them that he’d asked her. Drew might be amused at having his own question come full circle, but Sprue was pretty sure that Ken was the one that sent Lou Corlin to make those passive-aggressive remarks last night.

However, Sprue did have a reasonably good rapport with Chandler Armitage. Not close, given that they were both Sheps and there was always a certain edge of competitiveness in any interaction between them. But if Sprue played his cards right, Chandler might just take the question as a challenge and plunge right into the search for the answer with all the determination of a terrier digging out its prey.

On the other hand, did he really want to discuss it over an insecure channel like SMS when it was clear that very senior people were taking an interest in his activities, and not in a good way? In normal times he might’ve found an excuse to go down to Flight Ops and see if Chandler was in his office. When you had lineage rights, there were plenty of ways to make the connection without catching flack about it.

Maybe sent a carefully worded text, to avoid making it too clear why he wanted to talk, and see if Chandler was at least in town. In the meantime, he had studying to do, and at least the latest lesson packet in his statistical analysis class would keep his mind too busy to fret.

The corridors leading down to the port facility were unusually quiet. Normally they would’ve been bustling with activity, and there was a good possibility he’d be stuck at one or another airlock, waiting for someone to bring a large piece of equipment through.

However, these were not ordinary times. With the restrictions on travel, shipping had been reduced to only essential materials. Food and Nutrition was still shipping cases of prepared astronaut meals to the small science outposts scattered about Farside, as well as some of the smaller mining outposts that didn’t have enough people to maintain a Zubrin hobby farm. Engineering was still fabbing parts for equipment at those outposts, especially when spares simply weren’t available, whether because the manufacturer had ceased to support something or shipments from Earth had been cut off.

But compared to the usual volume of material traveling through these lower corridors, right now there was almost nothing. In fact, from some of the things his clone-brothers had told him, operations had been reduced to the point that some of the more junior pilot-astronauts were having to fight for enough missions to maintain their flight status. Not to mention the financial consequences of losing one’s flight pay.

Not as serious a problem over here, where things were still run like a research station or a ship at sea. But at Grissom City and Coopersville, which were transitioning toward a civilian economy, it could be awkward for the pilot-astronauts who had apartments rather than living in the BOQ.

On the other hand, the shortage of missions meant that Chandler Armitage was going to be sticking around for a while. Which meant that it might be possible to pull him in on this project — but Sprue also knew that he’d have to be extremely careful about how he went about it.

Sprue was just exiting the airlock that joined Innsmouth Sector when his phone buzzed. Not a text chime, not a mail beep, but an alert tone that was used only for emergency communications.

Not a good thing to hear when they were in the middle of a solar storm watch. He didn’t think that it would be upgraded to a warning this quickly, although he doubted that they’d be so lucky as to have it turn out to pass by the Moon without causing any trouble. The best they’d probably get would be a near miss with low enough radiation counts that only flights and EVA’s would be suspended, but ordinary activty within the settlement would continue.

When he pulled out his phone, he saw the push notification. As it turned out, it was just a general alert for a couple of long-term EVA’s that weren’t reporting in. Both of them were based out of nearby outposts that were nominally under Shepardsport’s command, but were effectively autonomous. Some of the commercially-owned outposts were a bit lax about certain safety protocols, and according to some things Carl Dalton had mentioned, Betty Margrave had had words with their people more than once.

On the other hand, it wasn’t something Sprue needed to worry about, so he cleared it and continued on his way. If those teams were still an issue by the time he did tomorrow’s air shift, he might have to read announcements about it.

However, he doubted it would be an issue. Most likely, if they hadn’t reported in within the next few hours, someone would be tasked to fly out and search for them. Of course their companies would be charged for the search and rescue flight, so they had an incentive to make sure their people got back in before things reached that point.

Better to put the whole thing out of his mind. He needed to concentrate his mind on how he was going to present the situation to Chandler. Especially since he really wasn’t supposed to go blabbing about this stuff, so he had to find ways to talk about it without being obvious.

Getting back to Shepardsport had proven harder than Chandler Armitage had anticipated. He’d been supposed to fly straight back, but just as he was heading down to do the final checks on his lander, he’d gotten the word that he was needed to take some parts and supplies out to a minor outpost that had experienced a critical failure. Yes, they did have backup systems, but those systems are like a spare tire on a car. They’re designed to carry you far enough to get your primary systems repaired or replaced, no more.

At least the people at the outpost had the necessary skill sets to do the repair on their own, so the delivery was just a matter of using a robot to set the boxes out on the lunar regolith. The settlers had send their own robot out to retrieve them, and all communication had been via radio. Neither Chandler nor his pilot had needed to get out of the lander, let alone enter the outpost’s habitat.

In the old days — had it only been a few months? Already it felt like an eternity ago — they probably would’ve been welcomed inside, maybe even fed supper and invited to stay overnight to rest. Most modern outposts had a sufficiently elastic oxygen budget that they could extend hospitality to the occasional visitors. It wasn’t just a matter of building in redundancy to absorb shocks, although that was an important engineering principle. There was also the human factor, the need to make connections with the larger world at a personal level, not just voices on a speaker and images on a screen.

A problem that remained even now that he was home — or at least as much home as this settlement could ever be. He still felt homesick for his native New Hampshire, and wondered what had become of his mother when President Flannigan had cracked down on the Granite State’s resistance to his policies against clones and replaced her with a governor of his own choosing.

It always comes back worst when I’m not busy. He considered that thought. Normally he would have plenty to occupy himself. Not just his professional duties, overseeing the maintenance of his lander, keeping himself up to date on training and his secondary specialty, but also social activities here or in whatever settlement he was visiting.

But the current crisis meant that last was no longer an option. He understood why it was necessary for the pilots to stay down here, away from the rest of the settlement. Hell, some of the scuttlebutt he was hearing from his old flying buddies from his carrier days was downright terrifying. But the loss of his usual diversions made it altogether too easy to brood.

On the other hand, he did have some unfinished business to take care of. Although he’d been raised in a regular family — or as regular as a family can be when one parent is a senior politician — he appreciated the importance of astronaut lineages among his clone-brothers who’d grown up in the NASA clone creche.

Yes, there was Spruance Del Curtin’s text. Might as well see if he was where he could talk about whatever the data was that was bothering him so much.