“Becca… already checked you out, you’re good.” He touched his slate and said to Sandy, “And you’re good, too.”
“I already knew that, having done exactly what you just did,” Sandy said.
Martinez shut down his slate and said, “Two heads are better than one, especially… I say, especially… when one of them is yours. That problem doesn’t come up with Becca, of course.”
Becca yawned: “I gotta pee before I go out.”
Sandy: “You haven’t already?”
“Yeah, but I had two more bulbs of coffee since then and I could really use another.” She handed Sandy a sack: “Peanut butter sandwiches and a bag of cookies. We might be out for a while.”
“Hmm. Junk food. My body is my temple. Do I want to stick sugar and fat into it?”
“You might, if we have a problem, and wind up being outside for five or six hours.”
“Good point.” He stuck the sack in a plastic box next to the egg’s pilot seat.
Becca yawned again and said, “You guys are playing tonight, right?”
“Seven o’clock. We’ve got three new covers of Eye-Shine songs, so you’ll probably want to be there.”
“I can hardly wait.” She wandered off to the restroom and was back three minutes later. “Let’s get out there and get it done. Wendy’s ready to push the button. Sandy, you got the macro on?”
“I do.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Have fun, you kids,” Martinez said. “Don’t stay out too late.”
The next two hours were carefully choreographed, a virtual textbook exercise, and thoroughly documented. It wasn’t as bad as the cold starts had been in Earth orbit. The radiator ribbons were still moving, the reactors were simmering along at ten percent output, and the heat exchangers and sodium boilers were primed and simmering, like a stove set on very low.
Becca was in frequent contact with Greenberg as they worked through it, and she and Sandy cruised the radiator mechanicals as they worked toward full speed. Becca pointed Sandy at a couple of items she’d wanted documented: the exact way the edge of the molten ribbon flowed from the outer end of the slot nozzle, some details of how the ribbons got collected and shunted down the masts.
It was dim out there: the sun was still the sun, but drastically shrunken: pea-sized.
There was no planetary light to fill in the shadows. Jupiter was nowhere close, and Saturn was still a long way out—although they’d been past the orbit of Mars and through the asteroid belt, and were approaching the orbit of Jupiter, the planets were nothing like evenly spaced: Saturn was twice as far from Earth as Jupiter.
Sandy finished another scan of the slot nozzle and asked, “Now what?”
“Let’s just back off for a while—probably ought to go back in, but let’s give it another hour.”
“All right.”
“How come Fiorella’s not out here?”
“After the turnover operation, we had about as much as we needed for her show. She talked to Wendy about what she’d see today—Wendy said there wouldn’t be much—so she’s trying to scrape some kind of feature story out of the garden guys.”
“That ought to be exciting. I hear they thought they had an aphid last week.”
“Turned out not to be true. It was a flake of the dry fertilizer they use.”
Becca laughed and said, “And you ran right over to cover the nonexistent aphid?”
“Hey, it coulda been a big story.”
Becca made sure they were on a private channel. “Can I get serious for a moment?”
“Yeah?”
She could hear a little resignation in that drawn-out word. “I’m feeling like we need to talk about what’s going on between the two of us. And I’m going to need you to talk back for a change. Please?”
“Oh, Jesus…”
“We’ve been keeping company, as my folks would put it, for two months now, and I’m still not sure how deep I’m in. For me, that’s a long relationship.”
“I guess it is for me, too,” Sandy acknowledged.
“You think I don’t know that? I knew that about you the day after we first met. The other women on the team made sure I knew about you. You think you don’t have a reputation that precedes you?”
“Ummm, I don’t think about it.”
Becca sighed. Guys! “I’m sorry. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about and I’m not trying to put you on the defensive. It’s just…”
Becca took a deep breath. I’m finally getting to the point, she thought.
“It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just I don’t exactly know what that is. I’m not sure there’s a future.”
“If this is about us breaking up…”
“What? No! No, no, no! I mean, I’m really enjoying this. Whatever it is.”
Deep breaths, just breathe, she thought. Damn, I hate Talks.
Engineering pinged.
“Hold on,” Becca said, “Wendy’s calling. Back to you in a minute.”
Becca opened the two-way comm to Engineering. “How’s it going, guys? I’m seeing temperature fluctuations in Exchanger 1. Anything I need to worry about?”
Greenberg came back: “Becca, it doesn’t look like much from here. We’re getting a few hiccups in a couple of the heater coils. Minor current spikes. We’ll stamp ’em out.”
“Okay, Wendy, but sooner rather than later, okay? Turnaround’s enough work without distractions. Let’s kill this one, pronto.”
“Sure thing, boss. I’ll ramp up the damping algorithms another notch. That oughta do it.”
“Good. Stay on top of it.”
Becca switched two-way back to Sandy. “Hey, you listen in on that?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Not much, some rattles in the gears. Do me a favor, though, feed me an external shot of Slot Nozzle 1, the outboard half? IR, false color mapping, like you did back when we were doing the Earth-orbit tests? Can you do that?”
Sandy was a few hundred meters away: “No problem, I’ve had an IR camera running. Just let me switch to wide-angle”—there was a pause—“Okay, should be getting the IR feed on screen four”—another pause—“Okay, I just kicked in the color thermal map post-process on the vid. You seeing that?”
“Yeah, it’s good. I’m copying Engineering in on this.” Becca opened a conference channel back to Engineering. “Wendy, I’m feeding you Darlington’s IR view of Nozzle 1. See that hot spot between Plates 87 and 91, about seventy percent out from the mast? I think that’s where the fluctuations originate. Try dialing back the heaters around there.”
“I agree. We’ve already been focusing on that section,” Greenberg said. “We’ll sweat the small stuff, doncha worry.” Wendy clicked off.
Becca switched back to the private link with Sandy.
“What was I saying? Oh yeah. I’m liking this. A whole lot. I think you are, too. You’re sticking around, anyway. It’s just that… when we get back, I expect I’m gonna go home to Minnesota and you’ll be going back to Pasadena. That whole shipboard romance thing, and that’ll be it.
“I’m really not sure I want that to be it. I’m still working on it. But I’d really like to know how you feel about this… ‘thing’… between the two of us. You ever thought about moving to Minnesota? Okay, not much to surfing there, but at least we’re not topping fifty degrees in the summer.” Becca took a deep breath. “Okay. That’s your cue. I’m done. You’ve got the floor.”
Sandy was silent.
“Sandy? What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Well, maybe it’s time!” Becca blurted exasperatedly. Damn, this mattered. She was surprised by that.
Another ping: “Wait one, Wendy’s pinging me again.” Becca went back to the engineering channel.