Year Zero: Your Right Hand
Titan's auroras filter in past the viewports into my office room, a dancing shimmer of multicolored light visible across the landscape of the world. The same landscape that can kill if taken lightly, that can kill without equipment, the same landscape that I've been keeping out of the domes for the past two years. It's become something of a ritual over the past two years since I became Director of the Titan colony, to look outside the 'windows' to the landscape of Titan with a cup of ersatz coffee in hand before starting work. I'm in here in my office at the top Dome One, the oldest and weirdly the best-maintained of the Titan colony domes, nice and warm and sipping the bitter not-quite-right taste of synthetic coffee with synthetic creamer.
Outside? Worse than freezing.
It gets driven into you over the time in training and the time in space that Titan kills. Most of space kills, mind you. Titan is no exception. The atmosphere is methane, nitrogen and an eclectic chemical mix that has a spectacular lack of oxygen. Suffocation is bad enough, but it isn't the main concern – cold is. Titan is beyond freezing, cold enough to kill in seconds without protective gear. Cold enough to kill – or at least force you unconscious – before the suffocation or poisoning from the atmosphere get to you. Out here on Titan every human works together, or we all die.
Again, drummed into you in training. Back on Earth.
Well. What
was Earth.
That thought gets pushed aside very, very carefully while I sip my coffee and absently wipe an eye. There's a well of emotion there I'm not going to touch yet. I can't afford to. Not as the Director. So I sip my coffee, look out onto the planet ten minutes before the workday begins, and think.
The coffee's a bit too bitter today. A bit too little creamer and a bit too much of the instant ersatz. I set the cup down after draining it in one long pull and sit down to start work. It's too damn bitter and the aftertaste lingers. I do wish I'd had the foresight to get some coffee from home-
Not that thought. I shake my head. This isn't the time, Basira. Later.
What concentration I have, though, isn't helped by the first set of requisition forms that flash up on my terminal. The seal of the UN Initiative for Space Exploration glares out at me from the document, as formal and grave as the message header reading
PSYCHOLOGICAL STABILITY AND RECENT NEWS.
The rest of the message isn't anywhere near as formal or cold, thankfully. For all that my second in command is somewhat caustic at times, she isn't hopeless at reading the room.
Pick a name for the second in command:
[]Name
[]Optional Flavor, Keep It Usable, QM Veto Applies. It Must Gel with the Below.
One quick skim of the letter gets me the gist of it, but a few passages stand out.
...The electrical engineers are worried about rationing what spare parts we have for the waste recycling systems and the hydroponics monitors. Our electronics used to come from Earth, but now we're stuck with no resupply and a yearlong round trip to Venus. I don't think that we have time or personnel for augmenting what supply chain we have here on Titan, so we're going to have to scream loudly enough that the Venerians will hear and send something. I don't think things are as bad as the engineers' first panicked appraisal makes it out to be, but my advice is to plan for the worst and be pleasantly surprised…
I smile a little at the old adage that she's always held to. A bit pessimistic, but one look at the attached appendices tells me that it's damned true. At worst case projections we're all going to die, but a more measured worst case means food rationing and waiting for resupply from Venus for the electronics fabs. I make a note on the tablet at my side.
One more thing for the list. I mark it
Critical, a bright flashing red on the to-address list.
The list in question flashes red all the way down, by now.
...Life support is holding up for now, but psych is worried. We have a decent number of psych specialists here courtesy of the UN and your plans for expansion, but they're all saying the same thing. We don't have enough of them. We've had three more suicides since last night, newcomers who had family back on Earth. All of us do, but they haven't had time to settle into the colony yet. No life here for them. Pierre Niang, William McFarland, Jasmine Hertzog. All by hanging. Titan's worse than smalltown USA, the news has spread like wildfire and people are on edge…
This...this, I'd expected.
We all had family on Earth seems to glare at me from the page. It takes me a moment to realize that my fingers are pressing down on the chair's armrest and that's why they were aching a bit, and it takes another to get my mind away from thoughts of home. Of the hot, humid, unbearable summers of Lebanon sheltered behind air conditioning with my parents away from what was my second home at university-
Later, Basira. Later.
There's a bottle of water on my desk. A sip to calm the nerves, and then back to it.
...I hope you're able to cope, Basira. I'm not an idiot so I won't ask if you're alright, but for all of our sakes I hope that you can shoulder this. I'm writing this on autopilot and thinking of Eunice back in Delaware. I can't do this, that's why you're the Director here. I'll do my best as your second, but for all our sakes…
I blink once, twice, and then wipe my face on my sleeve. This isn't the time to cry.
Not now, Basira. Later.
Pick an affiliation for your second in command:
[]Life Support Engineer: She's the one in command of the hydroponics and waste management units, dealing with a collection of irascible bioscientists and assorted support engineers to feed the colony and supply air and water. And, of course, deal with the literal mountains of crap that are generated by the thirty thousand colonists on Titan.
[]Spacer: She's the leader of the logistics department, which translates to 'yelling for supplies from Venus' and 'loading up freighters in orbit'. She's someone who knows how to run the orbital sections of Titan and deal with the resupply ships from Venus, run resupply for the mining outposts in the Belt and the refining domes set up across Titan for collecting hydrocarbons and what metals Titan's surface can provide.
[]Personnel Manager: While Dr. Khouri is someone who prefers to take this section of administration under her own eye, a capable subordinate here is something of a godsend. Personnel is more than just dealing with the issues that the colonists bring forward or addressing medical/psych issues – it's also public order, ration allowances, monitoring the mood of the colony, skill development and cross--training, and more.
Pick one memento of Earth:
[]Coffee: Dr. Khouri brought real coffee here from Earth. Ground, sadly. But genuine coffee from home in Lebanon, a few bags of Jamaican and a bag of the supermarket blend that she had a guilty craving for. It's all in a trunk in her room, a small box that's now something more to look at than to open. When the coffee runs out, there isn't any more on the way. The doctor will ration it out, a sip or two just to remember what real coffee tasted like. To remember what home tasted like. It's comforting, at least until it's gone.
[]Samizdat: Dr. Khouri was a digital activist when it wasn't fashionable to be one, and a battered volume on her room's table is testament to that fact. It's handwritten, in a mishmash of Arabic and English and slang that only she can parse, a collection of memories and orders and emotions spilled out on paper that was passed from member to member before the organization drifted apart and aged. When Basira is gone there will be nobody to read it anymore, and with Earth gone that means nobody else to remember the plucky little Pirate Underground and their so-called 'illegal medicine' campaign. Nobody now will remember Simone Lang the librarian, Yusuf Khalilzad the cableman, or poor little Abubakar Konte who took the fall for all of them. Nobody but Basira Khouri, all the way here on Titan.
AN: Please keep the description of the 2IC sane and meme-free. I will not hesitate to veto if I do not want to write it. After this, Turn 1.