The hissing sound of hydraulics that reverberates through Constance Morgan’s helmet as she goes through the Greenhouse airlock has become a pleasing sensation to Constance, as it’s the moment where she truly starts her day. Her mornings in the Employee Habitat are just processes of nutrient paste, antibacterial powders, and synthetic fabrics that she prefers not to think about very hard. Arriving in the Greenhouse, however, means that she can remove her pressure-suit and begin her work for the day.

The Greenhouse is an entirely self-contained, hemispherical ecosystem a little over one-hundred-and-fifty feet in diameter that provides all of the food that Erinyes’s six inhabitants need, with a very large amount of surplus. The place is packed with seemingly impossible density. Every square inch is used in one way or another, with the majority of the volume of the place filled with as many calorie-dense, nutritionally complete plants as the biological engineers back in the Home Systems could manage to fit within it. Much of the floor space is used for root vegetables, while vines grow up elevated trellises. Tanks of water are also used for the harvesting of nutritionally augmented algae and seaweed. Artificial sunlight seems to cast the place in a white, fiery glow that emits from the dome itself, necessitating eye protection. Constance adores the place, even if much of the technical work that went into it goes somewhat over her head. She’s just the Greenhouse Technician, and her job is to maintain all of the complicated machinery that goes into keeping the microclimate of the Greenhouse in homeostasis on a planet as impossibly hostile as Erinyes, not to understand the details of the biological engineering at-play. Still, it’s a marvel of Empyreal technology, and more importantly, it reminds her of being on a planet that is beyond dead.

Erinyes is a rogue planet, meaning that while it is still gravitationally bound to the center of the galaxy, it orbits no star. Rogue planets are not, historically, a popular choice for colonization, but occasionally there is the odd project, usually by the Empyreal military, that requires an unusually low level of radio noise, unusually good planet-side astronomy, a great deal of secrecy, or some combination of the above. Constance is not privy to the details, as she has the lowest information clearance of anybody currently on the planet. That’s fine. She doesn’t need to know the ultimate purpose of the colony for her work, and she doesn’t particularly want to.

Once she’s changed out of her pressure-suit and gathered her tools onto her belt, she reaches up her hand and presses the pad of her finger into her right temple for three seconds, which activates her bone-conduction audio implant and begins playing her usual playlist. She climbs the ladder up to the elevated catwalks as she sings along. She’s not, to her own ear, a particularly good singer, but she doesn’t really care. Though she’s not supposed to be engaging with any kind of outside media while she’s on the clock, in the three months that Constance has worked on Erinyes, nobody has so much as commented on it. That is largely because there’s only one other person who actually visits the Greenhouse with any amount of regularity. Hazel Cross, the other technician, is responsible for monitoring the subterranean parts of the dome where the Greenhouse connects to the base’s wastewater and electrical systems, but because Hazel’s much higher clearance level, the two of them are only allowed to talk under special circumstances, due to security concerns. Constance has only even seen the woman on a few occasions, when the two of them are scheduled to work in the Greenhouse at the same time and she sees Hazel enter and immediately head toward the door to lower levels. She is, to Constance’s eye, devastatingly pretty, but that is among the many things that Constance tries hard not to think about. She likes this job, overall, and would quite like to keep it, thank you very much.

Today’s work is almost entirely routine maintenance, essentially a check-in. She has to check the temperature, acidity, mineral content, and pressure of the water in all of the hydroponic tanks, check the soil, measure the growth of specific test plants, and a smattering of other minor duties. It’s not particularly stimulating work, when everything is going right, but that’s okay by her. She likes the calm. The peace and quiet is the greatest perk of the job, to her mind. She rarely speaks with anyone, really, and they rarely speak with her, which is exactly how she likes it. Sure, she gets lonely sometimes, but it’s not like her coworkers are especially likely to be the kind of people that she’d get along especially well with. She knows that well enough from radio communications with her boss. There are other ways for her to keep her mind occupied, though.

After a long five hours of tedious maintenance, she gets her lunch break. This gets to be something of an actual meal, unlike the utilitarian nutritional supplements derived from the Greenhouse’s less tasty plant matter that act as her sorry excuse for breakfast on this base, because workers get to pick out their lunches and dinners for each week from digital catalogs. Getting to pick and choose her meals is pretty much the highlight of Constance’s week, and she relishes the opportunity. Today, her lunch takes the form of a package of vegetable soup from the base’s significant stockpile. This is something that she has begun picking very often, largely because she’s the only person here who likes the stuff. She could take the time to walk back to the habitat and warm it up, which she does occasionally, but today she decides to drink it straight out of the pouch, as per usual. She finds herself a comfortable place under one of the sun lamps on the catwalk to eat, but about halfway through her meal she catches a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. It’s Hazel, she thinks, leaving through the airlock. This would not be especially remarkable except for the fact that she never saw Hazel enter the Greenhouse, and Hazel has never come into the dome before her in the morning, before.

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Since there are no emergency alarms going off, or anything of the sort, Constance takes the opportunity to admire her coworker from a distance, somewhat shamefully. Hazel is tall, slim, all silky black hair and olive skin and grace and grandeur. The uniform jumpsuits can’t exactly be said to be fashionable in the best of cases, but Hazel Cross wears one with as much dignity and poise as anyone could ever hope to muster, Constance thinks. She only has a few moments to leer voyeuristically at the woman before she enters the airlock, and goes out of sight. Constance lets out a long, wistful sigh, and she taps her finger to her temple three times to turn off her music for the first time in hours. The whirr of the motors and pumps and the background buzz of electricity are all that rushes in to fill the silence, as she scarfs down the rest of the lukewarm vegetable broth.

Once done, she folds down the top and tucks the package into one of the pockets on her jumpsuit for later disposal, and spends the remaining five minutes of her lunch break basking under the warm glow of the sunlamps and reflecting. Her tenancy here is only four more months, but between her salary and the hazard pay, she’s going to be set for quite a while. She lets her mind drift along, thinking about all of the places that she’s going to get to go off a check like that. She thinks that the beaches on Kepler-B are going to be in-season when she gets off of this assignment, and the thought soothes her.

Eventually, however, the alarm on Constance’s watch goes off, and she has to go through the arduous process of hauling herself back onto her feet and resuming her duties. The latter half of her day primarily involves taking measurements of the greenhouse’s flora, mostly insects and arachnids, which she likes a whole lot less than just working with machinery and plants, but she’s willing to put up with it. After all, as soon as she’s done, she can go back to the employee habitat and relax for the rest of the evening. With her music back on, she descends the ladder back down to the ground floor so that she can begin sampling the soil for its population of decomposers. Suddenly, however, as she turns around at the bottom of the ladder, her eye is caught by something interesting (other than a beautiful woman), which causes her blood pressure to rise. Interesting, after all, is almost never a good thing in this line of work.

Across the dome, on the door that Hazel uses to get to the lower levels of the Dome, she sees a bright splotch of red. With slightly more haste than her usual languid pace, Constance makes her way through the narrow paths between the planet beds covering the floor of the greenhouse and to the door that she has never entered. As she feared, the splotch of red on the door looks an awful lot like blood. Worse, there seems to be a fairly substantial pool of the stuff around the door, and a trail of spatters leading off toward the airlock. For lack of a better way to tell, Constance leans her head in close to the spatter on the door, and sniffs at the red stain. She has to strain slightly to smell anything over the heady scent of plant matter and ozone that permeates the greenhouse, but when she leans close enough she can pick up what she is certain is the bright metallic sting of intravenous blood. There aren’t any animals in the greenhouse big enough to leave a puddle thing big, so her mind jumps straight to any number of unsavory conclusions.

Instinctively, she wants to check to see if there is more blood on the other side of the door, but she knows that it’s locked and that she doesn’t have the right clearance card to open it. For lack of available options or any idea of what exactly she should do, she pulls her communicator from a pocket of her jumpsuit. This design is ancient, and the buttons are a thick, shiny, oily scarlet plastic. They make a satisfying click whenever she pushes them. It’s the kind of old model that’s only really still useful on tiny bases like this, where they’re rarely used. She starts to open a channel to her boss, Warden Hector, but she hesitates. Should she really bother the Warden for what is, essentially, a very minor biological contaminant that she is more than capable of cleaning up herself? Bothering the Warden unnecessarily is a great way to get herself shipped off planet and replaced as quickly as they can schedule a shuttle, with a commensurate cut to her final pay. With a sigh, she re-pockets the communicator, and goes to collect cleaning supplies from the catwalk.

It only takes ten minutes to mop up the blood and thoroughly sterilize the contaminated surfaces, but that’s more than enough time for her to begin to wonder if Hazel is alright. The woman certainly didn’t seem wounded, but she was looking at her from a distance and was more concerned about her looks than her physical condition. Perhaps she should check for her in the Habitat’s tiny medical bay later, just to be sure. For now, she’s obligated to see through the rest of her shift, which means putting the cleaning supplies away and getting down to business before some automated system realizes she’s behind schedule.