Once Constance’s workday in the Greenhouse is done, she triple-checks her daily checklist, examines the system panel to make sure that everything is operating as intended, and puts away her tools. She doesn’t enjoy the wind-down as much as she enjoys the wind-up, because it means that once she’s truly done, she has to turn off her audio implant, put on her pressure suit, wait for the airlock to do its work, and then exit out onto the planet’s surface.
The landscape that lies before her is perfect, velvety blackness. Erinyes has a terribly thick atmosphere choked with soot from volcanic activity, and it blackens the sky to keep any light from the stars from seeping in through the clouds. The planet’s three moons are almost never visible, despite their size and proximity. The ground at the colony base is unremarkable grey stone with a thin layer of obsidian-black sand that gets whipped up by winds, and, combined with the ever-present thin fog in the region, produces a sort of visual static effect when illuminated by the enormous, geothermally powered flood lights that bear down on the base from above. Though the temperature range isn’t actually dangerous most of the time, and there is enough oxygen for a human to breathe, the levels of air pollution from volcanic activity make the prospect deeply unattractive. It’s a nasty, depressing place, and Constance can’t help but feel sad for the little, strangely dense sphere. For all the fury and fervor of its overactive mantle, it is inevitably leaking heat out into the cold depths of space. In a few billion years, the planet’s atmosphere will cool to the point that the air itself will begin to freeze, and Erinyes will die. For now, the base sits on the planet’s surface as a set of four grey-ish geodesic hemispheres, each illuminated both from within and without, and designed to be able to withstand the region’s frequent sandstorms. It’s difficult for her to not think of the domes as pustules or parasites on the rocky, obsidian-dusted hide of this strange, rare, dying thing. She tries to push those thoughts aside, though, as she makes her way back to the habitat. It’s a short walk, around five hundred feet, but the way that her boots drag when they sink slightly into the sand makes it feel substantially longer.
When she enters the habitat airlock, the outside of her pressure suit is blasted with pressurized air to free any loose particles of obsidian dust, so that the majority of them can be sucked out as the air exchange system kicks in. The whole process takes something like sixty seconds, and it’s one that she goes through at least four times a day. It never gets any more interesting than the first time it happens, but when she has done it for the fourth time in a day, it usually means that she gets to take off her pressure suit, hang it up on her designated hook in the entry room right next to Hazel and the Warden’s, and go down the hall, take a right, and enter the sixth door on the left–her personal room. Tonight, however, she feels an obligation to, at minimum, check the medical bay, which is down the opposite hallway.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The medical bay is a small room, built with the idea in mind that if more than half of the base staff were too ill or injured to tend to the others, then they likely would not survive until the next shuttle arrived, anyway. It’s the precise polar opposite of the greenhouse, in her mind. It’s all perfectly white, made of lightweight polymer materials and designed to show any stain or smudge, to encourage keeping it clean and sterile. There are three beds, a variety of medical equipment that Constance only loosely remembers how to use from her training, and a small terminal that contains the medical records of all of the current inhabitants of the base. It is empty, however, and the lack of any stains suggests that nobody has been in it recently, either. Neither did she see any blood stains anywhere in the hall, or anywhere else aside from the greenhouse, for that matter. Curiouser and curiouser.
For wont of any evidence of Hazel’s presence in the habitat, she resolves to make a report to the warden about Hazel’s injury after she bathes. The greenhouse, after all, is hot and humid at the best of times, and the pressure suit tends to exacerbate the issue. Bathing on the base is not terribly pleasant at the best of times, because filtration systems are heavy and expensive, and despite its many curious properties, Erinyes does not have an abundance of usable fresh water. Water is heavily rationed, and so the process mostly amounts to taking off her clothes in one of the habitat’s two very small bathrooms, and taking a standing sponge bath. The water is lukewarm at the best of the times, and the antibacterial gel lacks any scent, and so the whole thing is distinctly pleasureless. It does help to make the whole place a lot more tolerable to live in for extended periods of time, though. During the process of removing her clothes, she notices specks of blood staining the sides of her boots, and sighs. Cleaning that particular variety of synthetic leather is a real bitch.
When she’s done cleaning herself, she makes her way from the showers to her room. Because her room is the last one, at the end of the hall, she has to pass by those of every other person on the base, and the door right before her own gives her pause, because it is slightly ajar. It’s the warden’s room. If it were anybody else’s, she might do them the kindness of reaching out to close it, but the warden frightens her, slightly, so she ignores it. Instead, she passes by the door and to her own room, which is a tiny thing with a bed, a combination dresser/desk/nightstand, and precious little else. They are, strictly speaking, allowed to decorate their rooms with any personal effects that they might have, but Constance didn’t want to risk anything being confiscated for being against company policy.
Constance has been occupying herself in her precious little spare time (such as it is, for somebody who is functionally on-call 24/7) by reading old books that she pulled from an archive on her datapad. Tonight as on most nights, she strips down her uniform to the bare minimum of decency, turns off the light, and curls up on her bed with the datapad. Quite unlike most nights, though, she doesn’t make it ten pages into the old romance novel before nodding off into fitful, restless sleep.