Leisa

A man like him wouldn’t." Jose said and repressed a chuckle at the thought. It was an understatement. Twenty-two years at mining station XR 621 had taken its toll.

There had been a resonance of excitement when production had first begun – the next step in the colonization of a habitable world. They had been the ambassadors sent from the homeworld. They had been intelligent and cosmopolitan. No longer. Now they were insular and overly dramatic. They were old men marking time. Five out of the six had warped predictably under the strain of being marooned. Only Carhart was different. He had assumed the position of leadership so naturally that it was almost difficult to remember that it had not been his original post. He was in his element. Carhart had taken to fatalism like a cat to a ball of yarn. He had a frightening curiosity and Jose knew that he would be the first to ask about their night together.

He swallowed hard. "The men want to feel as though someone cares about them. They want to hear that they matter."

"And what do you want?" She asked with sudden closeness.

He turned in time to meet her lips, taste the electricity that always came with her touch. She could have crushed him with a single press of dense fluid. A careless movement, a casual nudge where the metal chassis pressed against her skin and he could have been maimed. Jose Frederick Marriott never considered any of this. He had nothing to fear. Not from her. Not from Leisa.

There was only one viewing port in the entire station. Any of the computers could route the external cameras into them, but it wasn’t the same. The eight by five bioluminescent wall panel had been designed to look like a real window. It had a sill with room enough for Jose to rest his hands while gazing upon the planetscape where he would live out his pitiable existence. XR621 had been built into the rocky surface of one of the eleven moons that surrounded a Jovian-sized gas giant the first explorers to the region had named Tertius. The moon had no orbital spin and XR621 perpetually faced the dark blue monstrosity. It held forever motionless just above a horizon. Stars filled what was left of the heavens. The land was far less interesting than the sky. Tidal forces had pulled the moon’s blackish surface matter into an endless expanse of sastrugi-like ridges. There were no natural features taller than fifty meters.

Only one manmade structure was visible in the scene. The station had built like a wheel, spokes radiating out to an outer loop – the launch tube. The tube circled the complex before lurching out into the barren desert and lifting straight up, over three thousand feet into the airless sky. Jose looked at the barrel of the enormous cannon for the thousandth time and imagined that he was a mining technician once more.

They had gone on for an admirable time. Anyone at the WSC – if somewhere in space there was still such a thing as the WSC – would have commended them for their loyalty. Half of their contracts would have been up in less than a year when the com channels first went dead. A relief ship would have come and eleven new faces would have replaced the old. Another year after and Jose and his team would have boarded a ship for home. Twenty-two others would have carried on the work of supervising the mining droids.