29:37 Local Time
Eternity Base
For a moment Kerri Helfort struggled to remember where she was.
It didn’t take long; the hated breather mask cutting into her face saw to that. She rolled onto her back and checked the time. She had twenty minutes before midnight and reveille for Red Shift. She hated getting up in the dark and, along with everyone else, had been more than happy with Digby’s announcement that the much-disliked system of two back-to-back shifts seven days a week would end on Friday. Even the stupidest Hammer, and Kerri hadn’t taken long to work out that Digby was far from stupid, understood that you couldn’t work people nearly fifteen hours a day every day of the week forever.
And so this Saturday would be a big day for the mostly unwilling inhabitants of the Hammer’s newest settled planet.
Not only would it be their first free weekend, it also would mark the end of phase 1 of the terraforming project with all the primary infrastructure well on its way to completion. With the massive methane/carbon dioxide converters now in final testing, the next day would see the carbon sequestration and oxygen production plant commissioned, all of which was something of a relief to Kerri and everyone else dirtside. Nobody liked the idea of depending on the breather oxygen supplies being ferried down from the Mumtaz. Speaking of which, she saw that her oxygen supplies would get marginal during the shift, so she’d need to get replacement cylinders. And while she was at it, she thought, she might as well cycle the breather’s molecular filters.
But far more important to Kerri was Sam’s welfare. Not surprisingly, Sam had taken the hijacking very hard. But things were looking up. Thankfully, the biomass plant was only days away from final acceptance, and once it was on-stream, seeding the planet with geneered plants and cyanobacteria would start in earnest. In the absence of anything better to do, Sam had secured a position on one of the crews that would be responsible for field biomass management and atmospheric monitoring. Kerri said a small prayer of thanks for the experience Sam had gotten back on Ashakiran at the Manindi Center for Oceanic Research. Even though it was largely irrelevant, it had sounded impressive enough to land her the job.
And the job was a good one.
Sam would be a member of Doctor Jack Loudon’s atmosphere monitoring team. Despite his cultural heritage, Loudon seemed different from the rest of the Hammers who had been brought dirtside. Most unusually, he did not seem to share the view held by most Hammer men that all women were good for was sex, reproduction, and housekeeping and that if they really had to take paid employment, it had to be doing the crappy jobs that men or cheap labor imported from Scobie’s World couldn’t be persuaded to do. In fact, Kerri strongly suspected that Jack Loudon’s three or so years as an unwilling guest at the Hammer’s premier prison facility had made him think long and hard about what the Hammer of Kraa really stood for.
To top it all and thanks to Sam’s holding a basic grade flier’s license, a sixteenth birthday present, she had been selected for flight duties. That was not really a big deal given the power of the average flier’s AI and the fact that almost everyone had a fliers’ license of some sort, but nonetheless it was not something offered to everybody. She strongly suspected that Doctor Loudon’s promotion of Sam had been motivated by more than professional interest, but she didn’t care. For a Hammer, he seemed like a nice guy, and if he wasn’t, it was time Sam learned to handle herself.
Finally, there was the icing on the cake. One of the guys from the project planning office had told her over lunch the previous day that he had overheard two of the Hammers discussing the possibility that they would get their neuronics back. Mumtaz had an entire planetary neuronics system sitting in containers somewhere, and because the entire project was being run by AIs, Kerri could see that it made no sense not to bring the power of neuronics-based decision support to bear as well. She hoped Professor Wang could persuade Digby to relent on the matter. It would be nice not to have that awful empty, blank feeling in her head anymore.
Not that it was as simple as not having neuronics.
Like all the older Mumtazers she spoke to, she felt the awful certainty that everything they had spent their entire lives building-careers, homes, families, friends-was gone forever, every atom of it vanished. The loss hung over all of them every waking minute of the day like a black cloud, and no matter how hard she tried, it was always there-an immovable monument to everything she’d never see again.
And Andrew. How she missed him. There wasn’t a waking moment when she didn’t think of him, and the thought that they would never hold each other close again tore at her heart with an intensity that was almost physical. Not to mention Michael. How must he be feeling? If it were not for Sam, she feared she might have given up completely. Some already had, retreating into a world of drug-soaked might-have-beens. By God, it was hard to get up every day, to work up alongside those Hammer swine, to keep going hour after hour.
In truth, she did it only because of Sam.
Worst of all was knowing that without the goodwill of the Hammer, they were all dead. Digby had made sure of that by keeping the food plant in orbit, and there was no sign of its being brought dirtside. In the days immediately after being dumped on Eternity, the very small number of people with some claim to military experience naturally had coalesced around Kerri; she was by far the most senior service officer around. But every way the group looked at it, they were jammed. All the early talk of violent action against Digby and his goons had foundered on the rocks of cold hard reality: They had no weapons, they had no way of sustaining life, and they had no way of getting off the planet, and even if they somehow did, they had nowhere to run to and no one to call for help.
The group, now self-deprecatingly called the escape committee, still met regularly, but the focus had shifted to intelligence gathering and to planning what they would do in the unlikely event that the cavalry arrived to rescue them. Despite her private fears that the whole process was a waste of time, Kerri played her part-strong, firm, and resolute-and tried to keep alive the few embers of hope she still had left.
Another quick check of the time told her that she had three minutes to Red Shift reveille. If she got going now, she would beat the rush through the showers and be first in line for breakfast. Sitting up, she grabbed her towel and washing kit and set off down the still-dark shed that was home to almost a hundred fellow Mumtazers, their sleeping forms quiet and unmoving around her.