Leisa

Only six of them remained. Jose sat down and had a table to himself, two empty chairs on either side. The rest of the station meeting room was just as spare. Four long tables had been arranged in a square, twenty-two seats in all. Seventeen were still pushed in.

Carhart breezed into the room and took up his usual repose on the wall next to the door. He was whistling and rattling a pocketful of metal tidbits that filled the service trousers he had long since cut down into a pair of threadbare shorts. He looked at the men in turn, his eyes amused, his exposed legs oblivious to the sixty-two degree air that now served the station for room temperature.

"Well, we might as well get started." He said to the group, then looking down at the back of Willis Crane’s head, "Willis, when are you going to get me one of those ‘Grand Poobah’ hats so I can calls these things to order proper-like."

"Oh shut up, Roger."

The station chief laughed where he stood. "Okay, let’s get this over with. Dave, What’s the story on the condenser?"

Richter’s jaw worked in place for a second before shaking his head of stark white hair. "Number two is a lost cause. One of the super conducting elements is burned out. No replacement. We’re down to three now."

Chae Chong-Yang made a mocking sound. "There goes twenty-five percent of our water ration. What are we supposed to do for showers?"

"Not exactly twenty-five percent." Countered Richter, his wrinkled jaw struggling to keep pace with the cadence of his words. "It will get a little more humid with the lack of recycling." He stopped and blinked at the air around him as if seeing spots. "The increase in overall humidity will allow the other three to pull a little more water."

Carhart let out another of his sardonic laughs and lifted a thoughtful hand to his thick, grey beard. "Good thinking Dave. A few more years, a few degrees colder and we can start licking the dew off the walls."

"We could take some water from the algae vats."

"I think that’s a great idea, Dave." Muttered Chong-Yang in a voice that said that he didn’t. "All in favor of making Richter drink bio-water?"

"We could sponge bathe."

Willis Crane snorted. "Anybody seen any sponges laying around."

"We could use the material from one of the empty mattresses."

"Right, Dave. We’ll put that on the back burner." Said Carhart in voice that was rapidly losing interest in this weeks meeting. "Tell us about the food situation."

"Oh, yeah, I was tinkering with some of the protein configurations and I think we might be able produce some new kinds of food."

"That would be a welcome change. Not that there’s anything wrong with synthetic Goulash and mystery patties. I think we all enjoyed last week’s–"

"WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LEISA!"

The other five jerked in the direction of Owen Hodder. It wasn’t just the shout that stopped them so suddenly. The station com-chief rarely spoke anymore at the weekly meetings. It had been over a decade since Carhart had stopped calling on him. No one wanted to hear his latest attempt at making sense out of the cosmic background radiation. It was too depressing to hear over and over. Years before Hodder had permanently turned the station’s antennae array toward earth and now spent his days listening to fifty-year-old transmissions from homeworld satellite broadcasts. His unfamiliar voice rattled through the meeting room a second time.

"Someone needs to talk about it! We all know it’s getting worse.