During orientation, Ricci and I had company. Bouche and Eddy claimed they needed a refresher and tagged along for the whole thing. Chara, Treasure, and Eleanora joined us halfway through. Even Vula popped out of her hab for a few moments, and actually made an effort to look friendly.
With all the all the chatter and distraction, I wasn’t confident Ricci’s orientation had stuck, so I shadowed her on her first maintenance rotation. The workflow is fully documented, every detail supported by nested step-by-steps and supervised by dedicated project management bugs that help take human error out of the equation. But I figured she deserved a little extra attention.
Life support is our first priority, always. We clear the air printers, run live tests on the carbon dioxide digesters, and ground-truth the readings on every single sensor. It’s a tedious process, but not even Vula complains. She likes to breathe as much as any of us.
Ricci was sharp. Interested. Not just in the systems that keep us alive, but in the whole organism, its biology, behavior, and habitat. She was even interested in the clouds around and the icy, slushy landscape below. She wanted to know about the weather patterns, wind, atmospheric layers—everything. I answered as best I could, but I was out of the conversational habit.
That, and something about the line of her jaw had me tongue-tied.
“Am I asking too many questions, Doc?” she asked as we stumped back to the rumpus room after checking the last hammock.
“Let’s keep to the life-and-death stuff for now,” I said.
Water harvesting is the next priority. To get it, we have to rise to the aqua-pause. There bright sunlight condenses moisture on the skin and collects in the dorsal runnels, where we tap it for storage.
Access to the main inflation gland is just under the rumpus room. Ricci squeezed through the elasticized access valve. The electrostatic membrane pulled her hair into spikes that waved at the PM bots circling her head. I stayed outside and watched her smear hormone ointment on the marbled surface of the gland. Sinuses creaked as bladders began to expand. As we walked through the maze of branching sinuses, I showed her how to brace against the roll and use the momentum to pull herself through the narrow access slots. Once we got to the ring-shaped fore cavity, we hooked our limbs into the netting and waited.
Rainbows rippled across the expanded bladder surfaces. We were nearly spherical, petals furled, and the wind rolled us like an untethered balloon. The motion makes some newbies sick, and they have to dial up anti-nauseant. Not Ricci. She looked around with anticipation, as if she were expecting to see something amazing rise over the vast horizon.
“Do you ever run into other whales?” she asked.
“I don’t much care for that term,” I said. It came out gruffer than I intended.
A dimple appeared at the edge of her breather. “Have you been out here long, Doc?”
“Yes. Ask me an important question.”
“Okay.” She waved her hand at the water kegs nested at the bottom of the netting, collapsed into a pile of honeycomb folds. “Why don’t you carry more water?”
“That’s a good question. You don’t need me to tell you though. You can figure it out. Flip through your dash.”
The dimple got deeper. Behind her darkened goggles, her eyelids flickered as she reviewed her dashboards. Naturally it took a little while; our setup was new to her. I rested my chin on my forearms and waited.
She surfaced quicker than I expected.
“Mass budget, right? Water is heavy.”
“Yes. The mass dashboard also tracks our inertia. If we get too heavy, we can’t maneuver. And heavy things are dangerous. Everything’s tethered and braced, and we have safety nets. But if something got loose, it could punch through a bladder wall. Even through the skin, easy.”
Ricci looked impressed. “I won’t tell Jane about that.”
We popped into the aquapause. The sun was about twenty degrees above the horizon. Its clear orange light glanced across the thick violet carpet of helium clouds below. Overhead, the indigo sky rippled with stars.
Bit of a shock for a mole. I let Ricci ogle the stars for a while. Water ran off the skin, a rushing, cascading sound like one of the big fountains down belowground. I cleared my throat. Ricci startled, eyes wide behind her goggles, then she climbed out of the netting and flipped the valve on the overhead tap. Silver water dribbled through the hose and into the battery of kegs, slowing the expanding pleated walls.
Ricci didn’t always fill the quiet spaces with needless chatter. I liked that. We worked in silence until the kegs were nearly full, and when she began to question me again, I welcomed it.
“Eddy said you were one of the first out here,” Ricci said. “You figured out how to make this all work.”
I answered with a grunt, and then cursed myself. If I scared her away Vula would never let me forget it.
“That’s right. Me and a few others.”
“You took a big risk.”
“Moving into the atmosphere was inevitable,” I said. “Humans are opportunistic organisms. If there’s a viable habitat, we’ll colonize it.”
“Takes a lot of imagination to see this as viable.”
“Maybe. Or maybe desperation. It’s not perfect but it’s better than down belowground. Down there, you can’t move without stepping on someone. Every breath is measured and every minute is optimized for resource resilience. That might be viable, but it’s not human.”
“I’m not arguing.” Ricci’s voice pitched low, thick with emotion as she gazed at the stars in that deep sky. “I love it here.”
Yeah, she wasn’t a mole anymore. She was one of us already.
One by one, the kegs filled and began flexing through their purification routine. We called in the crablike water bots and ran them through a sterilization cycle.
Water work done, the next task was spot-checking the equipment nests. I
