The High Five

Preparations

When Tayen entered the lab to pay her last respects, she caught a whiff of something wild and sweet that reminded her of the Oklahoma reservation where she grew up. Once you got downwind from the reek of diesel and refuse, you could smell the plains: sage, prairie onion, and milkweed. If you concentrated, you could pick out animal droppings, markings, and kills. You could always tell which direction the river was. The smells were strongest there, thick with the stink of life. Her ancestors had been trackers, keen observers of the natural world.

She finally located the source of the scent. The strawberries in the crew garden were ripening. The garden carousel was not part of any formal experiment. The first crew of the Moonlighter started it with a handful of cherry tomato plants. Living off bland, hermetic meals, they relished the little pops of flavor from "the fruit of space." Every crew after that added a new edible to the garden. There had been eight crews in all, rotating out every two to three years. By tradition, the fruits were always red: cherry tomatoes, strawberries, pygmy-pomegranates, cherries, red peppers, red grapes, raspberries, and something called a rambutan that looked like a miniature sea urchin. Tayen's favorite was Crew 5 that sweated and coughed through the red peppers. Her own contribution was cranberries. Dried cranberries were her favorite snack. She liked the mix of sweet and bitter with the sharp bite at the end.

Tayen picked the tiny strawberries and placed them in a vacuum-sealed pouch. She would save them for the bunker. Her cranberries were only tiny black beads. It was a shame she would never get to taste her own contribution. Radiation would kill them before they had a chance to ripen. Most of the experiments, which relied on controlled conditions, would be ruined too. A certain amount of radiation was expected in space but not a thousand-year solar event.

She panned her phlex around the lab to capture a panoramic view. Maybe she would send it to Chig later. If Chig was still getting her tweeks. She hadn't had a response from him in almost two weeks, and she was starting to get worried.

She spent the next couple hours putting the experiments in suspend mode and confirming their files were backed up to the data vault. Last of all she checked her pet project, the synthetic plants Milo called "space weeds." She was continually fiddling with their parameters to try to achieve thick, straight stalks, but the latest adjustments hadn't worked, and they were still growing wild as clown hairs. Their refusal to be tamed made them seem willfully obstinate. Would they survive the CME? Though not technically alive, she had no idea what effect the radiation would have on their jello-like growth stock. Maybe they would mutate into giant, slimy tentacles that took over the ship. When you go to eat the crew, remember who took care of you.

Tayen turned out the lights and closed the portal to the lab.

* * *

Vivian asked Milo if she could interview the crew as they went about their preparations. This was media gold. They were playing for real stakes now. The urgency would translate into compelling feed. If it got enough views, maybe she could revive the docu-stream concept. She had never completely given up on it.

Milo was unusually curt with her. "We need all hands working. Focus on your tasks."

"But this is the perfect opp—"

"I'm serious, Vee. Preparations first."

Vivian was crestfallen for a moment, but then she had an idea. She placed her phlex on her forehead in record mode. She would capture herself at the center of the action as she went about her tasks. Far better than interviews.

The first task was to stock spare oxygen tanks, two per crew member. This turned out to be much harder than she expected. With a bulky tank under each arm, she had difficulty navigating the narrow corridors. She kept smashing her knuckles and elbows going through the even narrower portals. "Aw shoot! Ouch! Dang!" The tanks were smooth and seemed determined to slip loose. Her arms ached from the effort of squeezing. "See all this equipment along the walls," she pointed out for the benefit of the stream. "If I lose my grip, these oxygen tanks could smash it to bits."