6. Thinking About It

The conference room was dark except for the work terminal Angie had dragged to the small side table, and Angie liked it that way. The big overhead panels would have been the wrong kind of light for sitting alone, the kind that pretended it was still a normal day at the office.

The Hive was not having a normal day at the office. The Hive was having its last day at the office.

Down the corridor someone laughed too loudly, the sound traveling far in the emptied-out air, and was gone.

Her calls to the Ranchers were not being returned, but she had half expected that. They were a spooky lot and probably not happy about the idea of their precious environment being used as a life raft. Anyway, they liked to do things at their own pace, by their own clock, the way they did everything. Fine. She could afford to let them stew for a few hours. They had to call back eventually, because eventually there would be no way around 114 stationers sitting in bulk transports outside their doors. The math was the math.

She tapped a fingernail on the terminal's edge. The terminal stared back at her, dim and silent.

Peter, of course, was off somewhere being Peter. Peter was the captain, which meant he had no real idea of what was going on in any department, he just steered the ship. She had learned that the hard way, because while he was busy steering them into disaster wearing a uniform, he had left the running of the Statistics Committee in her hands. They ran the numbers for future growth and development, and nearly two years ago the committee impressed Mizmo by dredging up an idea that everyone had forgotten about before the station was even built: using the terraforming as a stable platform for mining operations.

The wadi was not meant to be commercial, which was how Mizmo won the contract to mine on the Moon in the first place decades ago. If they funded the purely scientific research of the terraforming experiment, they got the rights to put the mining station in a crater and start blasting away. The two were never supposed to mix more than they had to, and it was now gospel that the Wadi was the last bastion of pure science.

Li was the one who had found out it never started that way. In original station drafts, the terraforming was supposed to kick-start a development project for mining operations. He'd dug the memo out of an obscure folder on an educational server Earthside, back when he first came into administration from the mines and was overloading himself on Mizmo culture to fit in. He showed it to her as a laugh. They had coffee in the cafeteria and Li read it out loud in his deadpan miner's voice, and they laughed because the idea was so far-fetched. It was so obviously a thing some Earthside suit had typed up in 2028 and forgotten. So obviously dead.

When Angie took over the Stats Committee, though, she started thinking about it.

She mentioned it to a geek friend Earthside, who took it to his own department's statisticians, and quietly, very quietly, people had started to get interested. Orbital stations were expensive, and orbital stations tended to fall apart. Very topical, that. Everyone with any sense knew the future lay in ground stations on the Moon and Mars, but ground stations had their own problems, and the biggest by far was sustainability. Current dogma said terraforming operations would export supplies to their sister ground stations and create a beautiful symbiosis between finance and science. That was a pretty idea on paper, with lots of smart footnotes.

It had been a long, long time since anyone had seriously looked at simply putting a mining operation into the middle of a terraforming dome. Angie told the Stats Committee to crunch the numbers. They submitted them to her geek friend who ran them by his own people. Together they submitted a paper to Admin, who shoved it up the ladder without fanfare, where it became very popular and very top secret. It was voted a long-term goal of the Board before she'd been cleared to even tell her father about it.

She had been about to tell him that week. She had the whole pitch laid out in her head, the numbers, the order to drop them in, the way she was going to ease him into it because he was going to hate it on instinct and then love it when he saw the math. She was going to tell him at dinner that Saturday. Saturday came and her father was already three days dead.

Angie closed her eyes.

Big Jim had been the only person in her life who let her win arguments fair and square. Peter let her win because Peter would rather be punched in the face than continue an argument past lunchtime. Mom let her win because Mom had loved her in a vague, hands-off way that had always been partway out the door, even before the divorce sent her back Earthside. Big Jim had fought her on everything, every year of her life, and the times he conceded he conceded because she was right, and the times she conceded she conceded because he was right, and that was the deal they had. Nobody else had ever bothered to have that deal with her.

He died because Peter held the lock too long.

She knew the official story. She had heard it a thousand times. The new filter box had imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with the timing of the lock. The Mizmo board had reviewed the recordings and cleared Peter. Sam had cleared Peter. Everyone had cleared Peter.

She had not cleared Peter. There had been a window. There must have been a window, somewhere in those minutes, where the call could have gone the other way and Big Jim would have come back through that lock and bitched at her about her unit reports and lived another twenty years. Peter, faced with the call, had played it safe. Played it safe was a category of decision making that Big Jim had made fun of his entire career.

She did not know if she was being fair to her brother, but she did not very much care.

The terminal continued to make no sound. Out in the corridor, someone was wheeling something heavy, the wheels squeaking on a deck decades old. Half the station was wheeling things out of storage today they had never seen before. She thought about getting up to see what it was, and didn't.

Angie had let the whole matter of the terrforming domes go quiet. Peter was not their father, and he would have fought it, numbers be damned. She was sure the Ranchers had probably got wind of her ideas somewhere along the line, even if he hadn’t. She did not suspect anyone of telling them straight on, but she had complete confidence in the combined genius of the terraformers. Any single Rancher was smarter than her whole Stats Committee combined. It was their nature to be brilliant. Also arrogant, also difficult, which she was used to. Her bet was that they had figured out what the new plan was just based on the data Mizmo was asking them to collect. Subtlety was not a strong point of the Mizmo suits.

She had known from the start that the Ranchers would not like it and would howl all to hell about it. They could be incredibly passive aggressive about things, but in the end, though, every single one of them was Mizmo crew. They had a genuine emergency on their hands, and if she knew one true fact about the Ranchers it was that they valued life above all things. Life was their whole purpose. They would not let people die over a tantrum about a development plan that was not going to be implemented for another twenty years.

It was unthinkable.

She sat in the dim conference room and waited for the Ranchers to call.