“Are we sure this thing is buried deep enough?” Jamie asked nervously. He looked around, and was disappointed not to see Maria Clarkson, the base physician.
“I just hope we aren’t in here for too long,” Billy said. “I’d hate to have to eat those rations for any length of time.”
Paul Kashiyama, a large, muscular man with a crewcut, spoke up. “Those rations are no worse than Squires’ cooking.”
Jamie wanted to ask him which bad movie he’d stolen that line from, but said nothing.
Jamie met Maria his first day on the job, after he’d almost gotten into a fight. He remembered it all too well. Jamie had run out of the kitchen upon hearing the clatter of dishes and cutlery hitting the floor. A wall of flesh had stopped him before he’d barely taken three steps into the mess hall.
Paul Kashiyama grabbed Jamie by his apron. “What the hell are you feeding us?”
“Cajun stew,” Jamie replied meekly.
“It’s burning my goddamn mouth! What the hell are you trying to do, kill us?”
Jamie tried to peer around Paul’s massive bulk. The diners he could see had odd expressions on their faces. “It’s supposed to be spicy.”
“Spicy?” Paul tightened his grip. “This isn’t ‘spicy,’ it’s goddamn nuclear. What the hell did you put in this?”
“Well, the recipe does call for hot sauce—”
“How much?”
“I put six tablespoons—”
“Your idiotic recipe calls for six tablespoons of hot sauce!”
Jamie shook his head. “No, no! the recipe calls for three, but I always double up because—”
“That’s enough, Paul,” a female voice interrupted. “He’s new. Cut him some slack.”
Paul released his grip. “You watch it,” he said, jabbing a finger into Jamie’s chest “You’re going to be the death of us.”
The woman coughed. “Get yourself a drink, Paul. And clean up the mess you’ve made.” She was in her early thirties, of medium build, with long, curly light-brown hair. She turned to Jamie. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Maria Clarkson, the base physician.”
They shook hands.
“Jamie—”
“—Squires. Yeah, I know. Our new cook.” Maria grimaced and swallowed. “Did you really put six tablespoons of hot sauce into that stew?”
“Well, yeah. At my last job, everyone complained my food had no flavor. I’ve doubled up on spices and condiments ever since.”
“Your last job was where?”
“Canacian Pacific. Earth to L5 shuttle.”
“There’s no spin gravity on those shuttles, right?”
“No.”
Maria nodded. “That explains it. I guess those terra-centric cookbooks don’t tell you that food tastes different in zero G. Weightlessness redistributes body fluids. People tend to feel congested in the head, so food seems to have less flavor.”
“Oh…”
“Don’t worry, new guys are entitled to one nonfatal mistake. And don’t let Paul scare you. He’s all bluster.”
Jamie could see Paul cleaning up his mess.
“Welcome to Maryniak Base, Jamie.”
“Thanks.”
Maria covered her mouth and coughed again. “By the way, may I have another glass of water?”
Maryniak Base was a mining facility on the lunar farside owned by the Alamer-Daas Corporation. Headquartered in Montreal, ADC’s properties included three other commercial Moon bases, half a dozen Earth orbiting stations, and an industrial unit aboard the L5 colony. Maryniak produced titanium and iron extracted from lunar ilmenite for export to the burgeoning Lagrangian point settlements.
The solar storm lasted eleven hours before the United Nations Space Development Agency gave the all-clear signal. Jamie returned to the kitchen to find things exactly as he had left them. Using the back of a knife, he scraped the diced onions into the trash, and dumped the liquid eggs. He then got some garbage bags from the cabinet and walked to the refrigerator, a secondhand unit purchased by ADC at a former rival’s bankruptcy auction.
There was a knock on the doorframe.
“Mind if I come in and pick up the TLD?” Billy asked.
“Go ahead.”
Billy walked to the wall beside the refrigerator and pulled the thermo-luminescent dosimeter from its bracket. The TLD was a stubby fat tube, about the size of a fountain pen.
“It’s a shame to waste all this food,” Jamie said as he surveyed the refrigerator’s contents.
“Yeah.” Billy held up the TLD. “But until I’ve had a look at these, we don’t know if the food in the shielded logistics module is compromised. If it is, we’ll be eating those disgusting rations from the shelter until the company bothers to send up a shuttle.”
Crenshaw broadcast a briefing on the status of the base at the end of the workday. Being one of the largest common areas, the mess hall was a natural gathering place. A large post-dinner crowd gathered to watch the monitors.
“On behalf of the company, I want to commend everyone on the manner in which we handled this emergency.” Crenshaw’s image was dotted with dark spots, indicating pixel dropouts from the radiation-damaged CCD elements in her office camera. “The good news is that the impact on production will be minimal. The total dose in the shelters was less man twelve millisieverts, and the reading in the logistics module was also within limits.”
Jamie let out a bream. The food supply was okay.
“Now, the bad news. The proton degradation of the solar arrays was severe. Output from the power farm is down almost twenty percent. In order to maintain production levels and have adequate battery margin for lunar night, there will be unscheduled brownouts of nonessential systems over the next several weeks.”
Jamie spotted Paul talking to Maria. She seemed to be grinning at something he said. Jamie frowned.
“The other major loss is the greenhouse. All the plants will have to be destroyed. This will impact atmospheric regeneration, requiring increased duty cycles of the metox canisters for CO2 scrubbing…”
Jamie tried to push Paul and Maria out of his mind, shifting his thoughts to the loss of fresh fruits and vegetables. He would have to adjust the menu to meet the nutrition requirements while maintaining variety.
“… other than that, we fared well. Some of the essential electronics we couldn’t power-down suffered single-event upsets, but the redundant systems kicked in as designed. We should be fully back on our feet when the supply shuttle comes through next month. In the meantime, we have a business to run.”
Crenshaw’s image faded to black.
The people in the mess hall began to disperse. Jamie managed to recruit two of them to help transfer supplies from the logistics module. He’d asked their names, but promptly forgot them, and they took off immediately after the job was done.
Jamie activated his organizer to plan next evening’s dinner. Suggested menus, based on UNSDA food guidelines, were uplinked by the company nutritionist in Montreal. But on-site cooks had wide latitude in meal preparation to accommodate local preferences and nutritional needs. Jamie scanned the proposed choices: macaroni and cheese, quiche Lorraine, or fish and chips. He called up the nutrient specs for the shelter rations. They were short of the 150 microgram UNSDA RDA for iodine, so that would have to be made up.
It would be fish and chips tomorrow night.
The stethoscope felt cold against his chest.
“Breathe in,” Maria ordered.
Jamie inhaled.
“And exhale.”
Maria removed the stethoscope from her ears. “How do you feel overall? Sleeping well, eating okay?”
“Sure, same as always.”