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CHAPTER 47

December 13, 2099 (Earth timeline)

Proxima b, aka Fintidier

Roy was a spaceship design, build, and test systems engineer. He wasn’t a colonist, an explorer, a geneticist, or, for that matter, anything that this mission particularly needed. But he didn’t want to spend another minute on that damned spaceship if he didn’t have to. He’d pressed Captain Crosby to let him go down on one of the first OSAMs. Crosby had agreed to the third one. By the time he’d gotten to the base, Proxima One they were calling it—Roy laughed at how unimaginative that was—he was afraid all the good living spots would be taken. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case at all.

The Fintidierians had built a complex designed for hundreds, not tens, of people. In fact, Roy wasn’t so sure that there wasn’t room for thousands there. He was given a choice of one of twenty different living spaces. They were all the same and lined up in street blocks on a perfect grid with streets between them that were wide enough for what the aliens considered automobiles. They were amusing versions of fossil-fuel vehicles. Roy was glad they’d brought their own transportation from Earth. Several electric six-seater all-terrain vehicles had already been brought down from the ship. More were on the way.

The living-quarter buildings were single-story, ten-meter-by-ten-meter concrete-block buildings with what appeared to be some type of petroleum-based roofing material. They were all painted a dull gray color and the roofing was as close to obsidian black as possible. Roy just randomly picked one of the unclaimed quarters on a street corner. He figured that way, he’d only ever have one neighbor to deal with. Each living-quarter building had a small front “yard” covered in sand about ten meters deep between the roadway and the door with a single sidewalk leading to the front door. There was an equal space behind each house with a small chest-high privacy fence made of some type of wood. There was about ten meters between each house down the street.

Inside was very nondescript. The buildings were bare block buildings with electricity and running water. In the kitchen area there was a box resembling a refrigerator and a stovetop. Roy realized that he was going to have to ask for a microwave system. The furniture looked a lot like that from old black-and-white movies from the previous century. He guessed that the Fintidierians had used the movies as references for building the complex and furnishing them. There was a bathroom and two bedrooms. The only bit of color in the entire quarters was a single painting-sized picture hung over the couch in the living area. The picture was of what must have been one of the metropolitan cities on the planet.

Roy sat the holoprojector on the alien’s excuse for a coffee table and activated it. The image of his two-year-old daughter looked back at him. Roy thought that she’d have to be pushing ten by now. He was so far behind on the data from home and all that data was scrambled and he couldn’t see it. He ached to know the status of his family, even a four-year-old one. But that asshole, Gaines, had seen to it that he couldn’t even keep up with his wife and daughter’s life. He wanted to watch her grow. And for now, he couldn’t even do that.

He had taken it on as his job to build a radio telescope system so that they could receive the signals from home. He’d identified most of what he needed, but some of the parts would have to be constructed from base materials. There were some chips he might be able to “salvage” but they were all in critical systems. He had spoken to Dr. Gilster about it and the two of them had taken that project on headfirst. They had found a suitable location on the complex map. They had identified how they planned to build the components. But they were still weeks away from completion. Honestly, they’d yet to even start.

He looked at the case of issued things from the Samaritan. He wasn’t in the mood to unpack yet. He opened a beverage and plopped onto the couch breathing hard, and realized that he needed to get acclimated to gravity again.

“Nigel,” he said. “Play the latest letter from home.”

“Right away, Roy.”



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