Today's Reading

Within five minutes she'd had the discovery of a lifetime, panic at an error message, and an exchange where she learned she couldn't talk about either of them. Her mind was whirling at the speed at which it had all transpired. But then she did what she always did: She wiped it away and focused on the task at hand. Focused on the science and what she'd do with it. She could leave the politics to her boss, who would be happy to deal with it. For her part, she needed to send additional commands to the probe, so she sat down and pulled up the program that let her do that. Even though new commands wouldn't reach it for several weeks, Sheila was excited, and she needed to order an extra set of diagnostics to confirm or deny the error message. There would be more probes with more capabilities in the coming days, but for now she had what she had, and she'd work with that. If she still had contact, they'd get soil samples, water vapor readings at a bunch of different places, wind speeds, and temperature readings. And that didn't even begin to account for later probes that would focus on the critical area of microbial science. So many tasks.

She should have had help. She had a team that planned the requirements for the drones and wrote the code to execute them, but she couldn't tell them what she needed without violating Lavonia's gag order. She'd have to write the code herself.

That was okay. She didn't really want to go to the full-grav deck for a workout anyway. She sent a quick message off to Alex, telling him not to expect her for dinner, and she buried herself in her work.


CHAPTER TWO
Eddie Dannin

135 Cycles Until Arrival

Eddie Dannin slammed a set of vise grips into her tool satchel and made an exaggerated show of dropping the whole thing on the deck. The soundproofing in the floor kind of ruined the effect she had hoped for. At nineteen, she was the youngest person on shift by at least five years, and the others looked at her with a mixture of annoyance and pity. It wasn't her first outburst.

"You get assigned to customer service again?" asked Niko. He was a tall man, at least thirty years older than her, but one of the few people she genuinely liked in the division. Or on the ship, for that matter.

"Yes. Again. You want to trade?"

"No way," said Niko. "I'm working air duct preventative maintenance. Nice and clean, and nobody complaining. I'll be wearing earbuds all day, watching bots as they spray antifungals, and I'll be done two hours early." He left unsaid that customer service was the worst job, filled with unpredictable tasks and whiny people who were just as likely to fill out a complaint on you as give a simple thanks.

"This is bullshit. I'm going to go talk to Walter." Walter was the director of maintenance, their boss, and, most significant at the moment, the man who made the daily work schedule.

"You know you're wasting your time," said Niko, as he slung his satchel over his shoulder then ran his hand through his thick, graying hair.
 
"It's not a waste," said Eddie. "I haven't bothered him in a while, and I don't want him to forget how much I despise him."

Niko half chuckled. "Not much chance of that." He lifted his arm, and Eddie bumped her elbow against his as she passed in the typical greeting.

Eddie made her way out of the locker room where they stored their coveralls and tools and down a short corridor to Walter's office. She pressed her thumb to the pad and the door slid open.

"How many times have I told you to stop hacking my entry pad?" Walter didn't look up from his screen, which was mounted on a wall bracket over his cluttered desk. A light sheen of sweat showed through his close-cropped hair, almost shiny in the small, well-lit room.

"I don't know, eight or ten times, maybe." It had obviously been a rhetorical question, but Eddie found it amusing to answer anyway. It was an ongoing battle with them. He would change the coding on his door, and she would immediately break it. Now she blocked it so her boss couldn't close it on her.

"Yet you keep doing it."

"I figure when you get sick enough of it, you'll finally approve my transfer to engineering. By the way, it's been three months, so I submitted another request." He was going to say no, but she'd keep asking until she died.

"Answer's still no." And in that, his word was final, and the reason why transfers didn't happen. They required approval of the department director, and he had no incentive to allow it. It meant training a new person, which meant work. And Walter wasn't willingly signing up for more work.

Never mind that it would be good for the ship, which was supposed to be everyone's priority.


This excerpt is from the ebook edition.

Monday, April 1st, we begin the book A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen.
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