Too bad the prescribed local time was midnight, because she would have enjoyed the view. She wasn’t enjoying the company.
Blake had accomplished the impossible: making Antonio look chatty. He was making the rocks from Antonio’s collection look chatty.
Dana sighed. Antonio had asked to come along, looking so kicked-puppy disappointed when she’d said no. And though she hadn’t lied about there being no time between collection points to gather southern-hemisphere rocks, and that this was fancy enough flying she should have a proficient copilot to spell her, neither had she been entirely honest with him.
On her console, a timer ticked down the seconds to the next atmospheric sampling. A real-time holo showed her displacement in three dimensions from the target collection point. As the high-altitude winds buffeted the ship, her hands danced over the controls to make endless course corrections.
A single moon above the horizon—everywhere—could have captured the data they sought. The moons did not cooperate like that, and so here she was. As for precision, computer-controlled navigation, forget it. Only all three moons in sight would have served to triangulate the ship’s position. And so, as one moon or another sank below the horizon, as clouds turned her course into a game of peek-a-boo with the stars, as the buffeting of the jet stream befuddled the autopilot and played havoc with the short-range projections from inertial navigation, she fell back, time and again, upon the most basic navigational system of all: seat of the pants.
If the outing had been a summer evening’s stroll through Kensington Gardens, she still would have left Antonio back in the settlement. She needed some one-on-one time with Blake.
“Collection on my mark,” she announced. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”
“Mark,” Blake repeated. As he had for the past twenty or so collections.
“Throw me a bone,” Dana said. “Are you satisfied? Dissatisfied? How does the data look so far?”
“Fine,” Blake allowed.
“And the data is telling us…what?”
“Nighttime temperature and PFC trace concentration profiles—”
“By altitude on a grid of closely-spaced points surrounding the planet.” Dana sighed again. “I know what we’re collecting, and why. Is the data revealing anything useful? Is it what you expect?”
“I don’t know. Rikki doubted the raw measurements themselves would reveal much; especially not point by point. It’s all input to a global circulation model. Ask me after Antonio and Marvin have taken a crack at the full dataset, when we know how well the PFCs have dispersed.”
The nav holo updated to show the way to the next collection point; Dana put her ship into another steep climb. “You’re not very talkative these days.”
“Well, you know.”
“No!” Dana snapped, surprising herself. “I don’t know, because you’ve locked me out. I thought we were friends.”
“We are.” After a long while, he said, “I’m not a deep thinker, you know.”
Deeper than you credit yourself. “What’s your point?”
“Except for Rikki, we’re introverts, if not loners and misfits. Have you noticed that?”
“Uh-uh.” Hawthorne had, though, in dossiers the existence of which Dana still kept to herself. More than once she had almost deleted the files. Other than the occasional piloting gig, her job was farming. She had no reason to keep the personnel data—and less inclination to share any of it with Li. “Not deep, you say?”
“I couldn’t make a puddle jealous.”
On Dana’s console, a timer initialized and began counting down, showing when she should aim to reach the next collection point. She slowed the ship. “So, introverts and loners. What of it?”
Blake busied himself checking something on his console. With not answering. “My mom and dad were like oil and water. My sister, the raging extrovert, and I were more like oil and matches. The neighbors didn’t offer many shining examples of stability, either. As for the broader community where I grew up, it was a mess. One-parent households were the norm. The schools sucked. To belong to something the choices were high-school sports, if you had talent, which I didn’t, or the gangs.”
“So you stuck to yourself.”
“More like, I kept my head down. Then the oddest thing happened. I was either ten or eleven. Standard years, I mean. It was late summer, and I was getting the mandatory preschool physical from the family doctor. Doc Sullivan was this upbeat guy with a friendly, booming voice. Jovial, yet managing not to be obnoxious. He asked me some questions about school.
“Whatever he asked and I answered, he decided, and I couldn’t tell you why, that I had potential. Then and there, he zapped two old college texts from his datasheet to my little-kid pocket comp. Both books were decades out of date and of no use to him, but I didn’t know that.”
“And that’s why you became an engineer,” Dana guessed. She had no idea what this had to do with, well, anything. “Nice.”
Blake laughed. “Who gives a college text on biochemistry to a ten-year-old? It was Greek to me. No, less. At least I’d heard of Greece.
“And yet that is how I ended up an engineer. You’d like to believe it was because this engaging, successful professional saw potential in me. Did the gesture inspire me? Yeah, for the couple of weeks before the cops hauled Doc Sullivan away. My last, best hope of a role model had defrauded Federal Health Service of millions.
“So he set my career course, all right. He decided for me that, whatever I did when I grew up, it would involve machines, not people. Not that I understood engineering then, beyond that machines, maybe, could be fixed.”
“I’m not buying you as a loner,” Dana said, still at a loss where this might be going. “You can charm the pants off people.”
“Off young women, anyway. That doesn’t make me a people person. It makes—made—me a
