Look!
It’s RIGHT THERE! That’s another planet. It has alien life on it. Intelligent alien life! How friggin’ cool is that? We make a few sweeps from orbit, and then I get to explore that sucker!
Okay, fangirling over.
We spent about a week at GZ Station. It took a while for our various bits and pieces to remember how to work properly. Lots of rounds on the treadmill and free weights and we convinced our muscles to remember how to be muscles, and our digestive bits finally figured out how to work with more than that puree-of-nutrients color-of-barf soup slop they feed you the first couple days out of cryo. We aren’t staggering around anymore, and while I miss the entertainment of watching Ed crash into bulkheads, it’s nice to not find new bruises every night before bed.
Speaking of Ed, I should probably mention the crew. Also, it was an excuse to exercise my sketching (did I mention we’re on a tight budget? Going to have to document a lot of stuff the old fashioned way, since all my life support tech will be sucking the generator dry). There’s only three of us, but we’ve been working together, training, learning, everything for months before this little space jaunt.
Ed Bannik’s actually a behavioral scientist. He’s one of those super green types who loves to wander out in the woods and try to figure out what animals are thinking. I think he may have super-glued himself to the Marco Polo’s hull just to get to Minerva. No, seriously. He really may have, if he could have figured out how to deal with the no-oxygen-in-space dilemma.Dr. Sutherland is next (his first name is Jerry, but he’s one of those serious scholarly types, and you can’t help but forget he has a first name). I caught him in a rare moment without his hat.
He’d shit a cat if he saw this. We suspect he wants everyone to think the hat’s been attached since birth. And that “Doctor” is his first name. Anyway, Dr. Sutherland is a plant biologist. I think his first paper was titled something like “Growth Parameters of Granite-Based Rock Lichens and Their Effects on Slime Mold” or something equally riveting. He’s a nice guy, and I really like him. But his interests baffle me.
So then there’s me, Teagan Dodge. Eww. Why are self portraits so hard to do? Meh. Anyway, my degree’s in anthropology and environmental science. Nice combo, huh? Apparently someone thought so, because I somehow manage to land this job. Guess the eleven year road trip was a turnoff for some people.So that’s our crew. We’ll each be working with an individual Azu-nah clan once we’ve landed on the planet, so we won’t see much of each other, but we’ll be in contact via simple visual lansat comlink. No long heart-to-hearts, but we can give a shout for help if we need to each other or to Ground Zero.
So that’s all for now. Tomorrow’s the full sat imaging profile of the planet. Then we pack….
Then we land.
You know, I can tell you've gotten a degree in that biological stuff by reading this. Maybe it's just my ignorance, but I get the feeling that you know what you're talking about when you write this. It's interesting stuff hearing about the effect of cryo on body tissues.
ReplyDeleteMight be interesting to know what kind of effects the planet below has on our courageous adventurers.