There was something vaguely satisfying about the afternoon receptionist coming in early. Maia might not be a stunning beauty, but she was reasonably pretty, if tending more to the cute, and most important, unlike Cindy, she wasn’t family. She belonged firmly in the McDivitt lineage, and nobody was going to complain about a Shep being interested in her.
Of course Sprue couldn’t be too blatant about his interest in her, and not just because they both worked here at the station. With the tension of a solar storm watch, excessive levity was not appreciated around here. He’d already gotten some sharp words about treating the girls in his class like capture targets in a dating sim, and he really didn’t want to get the same static here.
“You’d think that things would start loosening up now that the CME just barely grazed us. Radiation levels hardly went up, even in the most exposed areas like the observatory.”
Sprue considered how to answer that. Dr. Doorne had told him a few things about the unsettled state of the Sun’s magnetic field, but he wasn’t sure just how much was for general consumption. Especially considering that some of it was technical enough that he wasn’t sure that he could explain it properly, and mixing things up was a good way to get stupid rumors going. He hadn’t forgotten the times when he’d tried to catch a girl’s interest by showing off insider information, only to get things mixed up badly enough that he made a fool of himself.
And then he looked over at the clock, realized just how swiftly the time had gone by while he was chatting her up. “It’s complicated, and you’d probably do better asking someone in Astronomy. If you want, I can connect you up with my boss there. Right now, I’ve gotta go.”
Maia might not be an on-air personality, but she understood one critical principle of broadcasting: you were not late to start your air shift, ever.