A Glibertarians Exclusive:  Listening Post, Part 3

Personal log entry:  24 May 2234, Mimas Listening Post

Jule Hortenz didn’t turn up for her shift in the command suite last night, so I said I’d cover until she showed up.  She didn’t, leaving me for a twenty-four-hour stint, which aside from being tiring isn’t that big of a deal.  There’s nothing else to do here anyway.  But about two hours into her shift, Commander Venko came in, said they had found Jule in the storage room.  She had found an old e-beam cutter that the mining engineers used when they were digging the tunnel to the reactor and somehow turned it on herself.  Guess there wasn’t much left of her above mid-chest.

Eight of us now.  Commander Venko didn’t look so hot.  Must be a bitch, being in charge of the last eight people in the universe.  I don’t think anyone would mind a nice hot gamma-ray burst right now.  At least it would be quick.

But then, I guess that e-beam cutter would have been quick, too.

The Commander is going around trying to buck everyone up.  He’s right about one thing, best not to dwell too much on the folks that are checking out.  At least nobody had the nerve to point out that it will make the food last longer.  I mean, why?  It’s not like it’s going to make that much difference in the end.

Recorded 0425 hours station time, 24 May 2234, Chief Electronics Mate Bel Deveran, Coalition Navy

***

That morning’s brief was only perfunctory.  Commander Venko asked if anyone had anything to announce.  Nobody did.

“Well,” the Commander said, looking uncomfortable, “we will just have to keep on.  We don’t know yet what the state of the rest of the system is, not really.”  To Deveran’s ears, the Commander’s statement had a distinct ‘whistling past the graveyard’ tone.  The Commander went on, regardless: “Maybe we’re not alone.  I’ve set up a beacon on our Signals system, to keep sending a hailing call out through the system, but we’re not sure if the Gates are up, so we may be restricted to light-speed.  That means months before a reply can come from Earth or Mars.  So, we carry on.  I know it’s hard.  It’s going to get harder.  But keep on, everyone.  Just… keep on.  That’s all we can do.”

On that distinctly underwhelming note, the meeting broke up.

Exhausted from the twenty-four on, Bel Deveran went to his cabin, hoping against hope to actually sleep.

In the cabin, he looked at the VR headset for a moment.  I’m not sure that’s helping me, he mused.  Good to remember, I guess, but knowing what’s happened – could make it hurt more.  I don’t know. 

Wish I had some VR records of earlier days.  Why didn’t I record our honeymoon?  Now that was a trip.

Having married in his thirties, Bel Deveran had wanted to show his twenty-five-year-old wife a nice wedding trip to the Caribbean.

She always did love beaches, he remembered.  Looked good in a bikini, too.

I wonder if the Caravela bar in Kingstown is still standing.  Not like there’d be anyone there, but still.  They had the best rum.  Clear, clean stuff, not like the cheap crap some of the other local bars were serving.  We must have hiked a thousand miles, around and around that island.  Camping, walking, swimming and… all the other things you do on a honeymoon.

Wish I had some VR records of that.  Well, most of it.  I think Sara would have objected to my recording us having sex.

Deveran laid down on his bunk, but exhausted or not, sleep refused to come.  His memory of that golden summer refused to fade.

Six week’s leave I had saved up, and we used every bit of it.  I can still see her…

One memory stood out.  Sara, standing in a Jamaica marketplace.  She wore a black bikini with a sheer, floral-print sarong tied loosely around her hips.  Her long, black hair gleamed in the tropical sun, and she turned towards Deveran, smiling, her dark eyes flashing, holding some trinket or another.

An involuntary gasp escaped him, and he was suddenly aware of the vast emptiness of the surface of Mimas, only a meter outside the bulkhead behind him – and the millions of miles separating him from the desolated, sterile husk of Earth.

“Fuck.”

Ever since arriving at the Mimas Listening Post, Deveran had wondered about the effects on his sanity the VR set was having – even before the T’Cha.  Reliving those golden moments so clearly, when meters away was an airless, frigid desert, bombarded by the radiation belts of the gas giant – contained in a ceramic bubble with eleven other people, with only the plating and the gossamer shell of a magnetic shield preventing Saturn from cooking them.

Don’t regret bringing this along, though.  Got to have something to keep me sane.

But the memory, even more than the VR records, that stayed.  That image, from the Jamaican market, that lingered, until finally his exhaustion took over.

He slept.

Five hours later, Deveran was awakened by something new – the listening post was actually shaking.  “What the hell?”  Deveran sat up, rubbed his eyes as the rattling built up to a crescendo, then finally, after about twenty seconds, tapered off and stopped.

Oh, shit, I’m the XO now.  Guess I better go see what’s going on.

Moments later, he was in the command suite, where Commander Venko and Mord Defino were already poring over the station’s diagnostics readouts.

“What the fuck was that?” Deveran asked.  “An earthquake?  A Mimasquake?  I thought this place was geologically stable?”

“It wasn’t that.” Mord Delfino said.  “From what I can figure, something hit Mimas.”

“Something hit Mimas?  Saturn throwing off some new kind of hell we haven’t picked up before?”

“No,” Delfino said.  “Maybe I’m not the guy to read this – I’m an astronomer, not a geologist.  But according to the computer’s interpretation, something hit Mimas, on the far side from us.  Probably a meteor or a comet.  Would have had to have been a pretty good sized one, too, even on a moon as small as this one, for us to have felt it.”

Deveran asked the unspoken question he felt hanging in the air: “The T’Cha?  Are they back?”

“I think they are not,” Commander Venko said slowly.  He was still scrolling through the seismic data.  “From what little we have picked up from Titan and Europa, they did not use any kind of impacts in their attacks.  Just the nanotech, and bots to vacuum up… what was left.”

“And we’re probably too small to bother with anyway,” Defino said, finally voicing another unspoken assumption all of them had made days ago – the T’Cha ignored the tiny Mimas Listening Post because the proceeds of material from twelve humans weren’t worth hauling up even out of Mimas’ tiny gravity well.

“What about the reactor?”

“It looks to be working normally,” Commander Venko said.

“Well,” Deveran admitted, “I guess that’s not nothing.  So, we were hit by a meteor.  Just another day, eh?”

Maybe it would have been better if it had just hit us head-on.  That thought Deveran kept to himself.

***

Sleeping in the woods by a fire in the night
Drinking white rum in a Portugal bar
Them playing leapfrog and hearing about Snow White
You in the marketplace in Savanna-la-Mar

Sara, Sara
It’s all so clear, I could never forget
Sara, Sara
Loving you is the one thing I’ll never regret