Sue lay stretched out on the floor of the small lab. From her prone position she could see the battered calendar on the wall. August 13th, 2014. Three months to the day after the impact. There’d been a remembrance ceremony a few hours ago. The governor had shown up, along with a lot of crying people. Halting speeches had been made, fruity drinks had been drunk, and much over-frosted cake had been consumed. These sort of occasions always made people hungry.
Sue appreciated the free food, even the cake. But she was eager to get back to work. The company wanted mining projections soon, and Sue’s team needed to do more drilling. They would start again early Monday morning. For now the team was just waiting for the stragglers from the ceremony to clear out and leave them alone.
Vanny wandered in.
“Wh’up, Sue.”
“Nothing. You?”
“Nada. No results yet from G-36.”
Sue rolled onto her stomach, facing her colleague. She picked up the plast-organic fork and dabbed at the drying frosting on the plate. “Company will want a report by the end of the week. A good report.”
“I can’t guarantee that, but I’ll keep the teams working. We’ve still got some quadrants left.”
“Most are already played out. We get paid for results, not for coming up empty.”
“Yeah, boss.” Vacant look on the chiseled face. It was thinking, probably calculating the probability of finding valuable ore in six days. Vanny always looked vacant when it was thinking.
“Just hurry up the drilling if you can.”
“Yeah, boss,” Vanny repeated. He turned abruptly and walked off. Vanny wasn’t too bad for a synthclone. It did have a tendency to wear lace underwear and wasn’t too strong on conversational gambits, but it worked hard and didn’t complain. Couldn’t ask for more from a coworker.
Sue heard faint shouting outside and grimaced. One of the voices sounded like Burke. He’d probably had too much to drink again and was going off at somebody about his second cousin twice removed who’d died in the aftershocks from the collision. She should probably go out there and calm him down.
Pushing herself up and away from the floor with a sigh, Sue left the lab and walked out of the team’s complex. The impact crater stretched out before her, a huge red pockmark on the earth’s surface. It seemed to form a perfect circle with the summer-blue, deceptive sky above.
The shouting was clearer out here. Sue looked around for the source. Sure enough, there was Burke a few hundred feet below her, yelling at the petite Tian Yua. Sue caught a few snippets of the argument—Burke saying something about “the deaths” and “are you even human” and Yua snarking back “caveman” and “company profit,” and there was Patton, always the peacemaker, trying to separate them with “let’s just calm down and feel the energy of this place” and Burke coming back with “Ageist freak” and Yua countering with “intolerant bastard,” and now it was getting ugly, right next to the newly erected monument to those who had lost their lives in the impact.
They don’t pay me enough, Sue thought, and began to descend the side of the crater.
