All of a sudden, the people in the control room went quiet. Backs straightened. A coffee cup disappeared under the desk. The staff nodded polite greetings.
Someone had come into the room behind Jonathan and Gaby.
The newcomer was a stiff-faced man in officer uniform with patches that identified him as Major in the Auxiliary Division - Research B. Vika.
He was quite tall with dark eyes, dark hair and the overly bronzed skin that was quite common amongst inhabitants of the outer system bases who spent too much time in the solar capsules.
"There you are, finally,” he said, meeting Jonathan’s eyes.
Jonathan glanced at the Control Centre workers, all of them lower-ranked officers. This guy was really that scary, huh?
"I'm sorry about the delay. We were just about to come and meet you,” Jonathan said.
The man held out his hand. "I'm Bernard Vika. Senior Research Officer of Miranda Base Station.”
Jonathan shook his hand. “I’m Jonathan Bartell, and this is Gaby Larson, my partner."
It felt good to finally be able to say that, and to mean the word partner in all possible interpretations of the word.
"Pleased to meet you," Gaby said in her professional voice.
They started walking, out of the control room.
"What did they want over there?" Bernard asked while they walked down the corridor.
"We almost had a run in with some object just when we were coming into the base," Gaby said. “The pilot wanted to file a report and asked us to file witness reports. We were witnesses, so we—”
“Young could have told me.”
Whoa. This character was not to be messed with. Jonathan said, “I’m sorry, I should have notified you, but usually in small bases, news like this travels quickly and I thought you would have heard about it—”
“A shuttle almost hitting something? There are small chunks of ice all over the place. They exist at low altitude because of the low gravity. I don’t know why Young wasted your time in this manner.”
Jonathan didn't think it was an ice chunk, but he let it rest. After all whatever they had almost hit was not important. Authorities would sort it out.
“Well, we’re here and ready to start work,” Jonathan said, making an attempt at levity.
“Great. I will take you to the lab first," Vika said.
Crap. Jonathan had hoped to be taken to their rooms. The journey was quite long and he wanted to freshen up and change into more comfortable and less sweaty clothes.
On the other hand, his experience was that many of the scientists that they visited were so keen to get started that they found it hard to give him and Gaby that time.
Their superior on Earth, Major Sara Edmundsen had even given them a little lecture about it. “If you arrive during local work hours, they can quite legitimately demand that you look at their problem straight away. For the sake of a healthy working relationship, just have a little look, no matter how tired you are. Just to keep in their good books.”
So this was going to be one of those occasions.
They walked with Major Vika across the arrival hall of the settlement, a multi-storey space inside the main dome, which housed a couple of small shops, all of them with very little to do. A group of admin officers sat at a cafe, but it was clearly mid-shift, and the bulk of the base had a post to attend.
In most of these bases, there would be a smattering of parents with young children, but there were none of those.
They crossed the hall into a wing that housed admin offices as well as a small hospital, a uniform depot and something named “Distribution Centre” which was the busiest place Jonathan had seen.
The corridors were quite bare, although obviously someone had made recent efforts to improve the communal spaces with plants, some of them fake.
The research lab was a small but well appointed facility on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable apartment block within the main dome of the base. Vika said that there were other domes, but that they were mostly for industrial and military purposes and that the main dome housed all the administrative work and residential sectors.
Three Research Officers were working in the lab, and they greeted Major Vika when he came in.
He announced, “These are Research Officers Lieutenant Bartell and Larsen of the Special Division. They will spend some time with us.”
More nods. No one commented or asked questions.
Vika took Jonathan and Gaby into an office off the main lab room and offered them a seat.
"Do you want tea?" he asked.
“We’re right thanks,” Gaby said.
Jonathan gathered that she felt as frazzled as he, and also really wanted to go to her accommodation so that they could freshen up. She didn't want to prolong this initial visit.
“I’ll show you the basics of the problem.” Vika bustled about with his computer, and after a while he brought a couple of satellite images to the screen.
“We’re dealing with this area here. These are some recent images from the surface around the base. As you can see, this area here is different from this area over here.” Vika pointed at areas in two different images.
Jonathan had to force his concentration, but it was quite obvious once he did see it. One of the surfaces was much smoother, with many small ridges, instead of bigger, deeper cracks.
“The sub-surface layer of Miranda contains a region of liquid water, which we call the danger zone.”
Jonathan nodded. It was well established that the types of organisms that could infect human bases lived in liquid water.
“The lack of large features indicates that the surface crust is thinner, which allows the bacteria that live under the ice to come to the surface. I’ve ordered this area on the western side of the base to be closed, because our sampling has detected bacteria, and they are spread around by trucks and vehicles moving across the ice."
"Yes," Jonathan said. "I have seen areas like this at Europa and Ganymede as well. These are areas where the surface crust is thin, and the organisms that live in the liquid layer can easily break through. This surface area is a weak point. What do you know about these organisms and the type of trouble they cause?”
“We have evidence that these microbes are invasive and spreading around the base. I have a long list of locations where the bacteria have been found. I have another list of cases of disease in the personnel of the base. I’ll send that to you so that you can look through it.”
“Thank you.”
"What is the general nature of their sickness?" Gaby asked.
“Mostly problems with the digestive tract. Some other conditions. You’ll find all those details in the files. I’m not a medical doctor, as you will appreciate. The patients had a range of symptoms, but the common factor was that they had all been working in that area, or had contact with equipment that had been in the area.”
“Thank you. I will look through it,” she said.
Jonathan was too tired to think clearly.
Major Vika told them about stacks of samples he and his team had collected. Jonathan asked if they would be collecting their own material, but Vika said it was probably not necessary, because “the less interference with the site, the better.”
"Look, is it all right if we start on this tomorrow? We've just arrived and we’re tired and hungry. I don't feel fresh enough to look at this with the attention it deserves.”
Major Vika let them go, although reluctantly, after giving them instructions on how to get to their accommodation.
The complex was in the same dome, near the perimeter, in close proximity of the curved surface of the transparent bubble.
From the gallery that ran outside the doors of the short-term stay apartments, you could see through the scratched cover of the dome to other parts of the settlement: concrete tunnels and a concrete bunker, a square and ugly thing without windows.
“Weapons research,” Gaby said in a low voice, when Jonathan stopped to look at it. “That’s what they do here. Most of the base is dedicated to it.”
“To fight imaginary alien invasions,” Jonathan said, in an equally low voice.
It was an opinion that non-military people, especially politicians, on Earth liked to put forward: that the Force pushed spending on defensive capability by hyping up the threat of alien invasion. There was an alien invasion, in the form of billions upon billions of microbes.
But he guessed they had to test weapons somewhere.
The room itself was nice, with modern furniture and soft lighting. A screen against the back wall gave the illusion of a window overlooking a landscape of jagged ice shards glittering in the airless environment outside.
"What a weird guy," Gaby said while sitting down on the bed and pulling off her shoes.
"You can say that again. Why do I get the feeling he doesn’t like to share things?”
“Or let us collect our own data.”
Jonathan sighed. “He may be right that it’s quicker and less risky for us to use his samples. I’ll have to look at the stuff he’s sent us. I’m sure there is a pressing reason why we needed to come here in a hurry, but he doesn’t seem to be terribly good at explaining.”
Gaby laughed. “You’re too kind. Some of these scientists are so wrapped up in their work that they get bogged in details and forget to explain the big picture.”
“Great. Another science-obsessed nerd.”
Gaby laughed and put her arms around Jonathan.
He hugged her and kissed the top of her head.
In the last few months they had to come so much closer together. They would work great as a team.
"Have you given any more thought to the question I asked?” she said.
"That would be about a wedding, right?"
"You would be right."
"I honestly can't think what we can do that will satisfy both our families. I'm not even sure I want to satisfy my family. I don't know that they deserve it."
"Oh yes they do. They’re your family."
"But I don't see, with our families being as separated as they are, how we can get them all into the same place and not put anyone out because it's too far or too expensive to travel.” In fact, he wasn't sure that he really wanted a wedding party. It sounded like a big bother to him.
He would much rather hold a small ceremony for some friends, but Gaby had pointed out that most of their friends were scattered around the place as well.
They had been talking about this for months, and recently the subject had resurfaced. Jonathan knew that something needed to be done about it. If they were legally partners, life would become easier, especially when navigating these old-fashioned backwaters.
"We could just elope," he said. To him that seemed most logical of solutions.
“We could, but I want to do something meaningful. You know, because people don't get married so often any more, and it's not really necessary for being each other's partner, although the military really likes it. We could just have a small ceremony, but in the old days they used to have these big parties and lots of people would come in that would be dancing and flowers and all that stuff."
"Now you're just being a romantic."
"I am a romantic," she said. “You don't even realise you’re one, too."
He knew she was right about that, and that was the reason that he hadn't pressed on with having just a small ceremony. He wanted to do something special as well, but he didn't care enough about his family to involve them, he knew that Gaby didn't really care enough about her family to involve them either, and they were out of ideas as to what to do instead.