Foothold, page 26
part #1 of Foothold Series
***
“She’s pregnant,” Veronika told David later. He’d pulled her aside to discuss the issue after she had tended to Nathalie. “She’s resting now, but she may feel sick in the mornings for a while. I’m surprised that she made it through dinner last night.”
David looked surprised. They were, of course, supposed to breed as prolifically as they could, to build the colony, but not yet. First, they were supposed to establish their physical environment, and then play happy families.
“How far is she along?” he asked.
“Nine weeks.”
“Wow. She doesn’t look it… that dress last night…”
Veronika shrugged. “Some are lucky like that. They hardly show.”
“Huh.”
“She must have known, but hasn’t told anyone yet, not even Nigel.”
David raised his eyebrows. The surprises kept coming.
“Yes, the child was conceived in space - while Nigel was in stasis. He’s not the father.”
“He’s not?” David asked, knowing as he did what a banal question it was.
“No.”
“That’s… awkward,” he said with understatement.
There was no official taboo on them sleeping with someone other than their designated partner, in fact mission control had let them know that it would be a good thing, given their tiny population, if they could spread their genes around a little. But starting with someone else was… surprising to say the least.
What made it awkward was that they were not allowed to keep it a secret. Because of the extreme danger from inbreeding, their bloodlines had to be tracked, to make sure that they and their descendants didn’t end up accidently breeding with a close relative. What made it especially awkward was the Nigel was entrusted with keeping those records, his ‘studbook’ as they jokingly called it. Nathalie was going to have to tell him.
David’s face was easily read.
“John.” Veronika said, answering his unasked question.
David sighed. That wasn’t a surprise. John’s reputation of being someone who had difficultly keeping his pants zipped was well known, and so far as he could tell, well deserved.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said finally, not really knowing exactly what he was going to say.
***
“Can I come in?” David asked carefully, tapping on the open door to Nigel and Nathalie’s quarters.
Nathalie shrugged. “You may as well get it over with.”
David entered and pulled the door to. “I’ve asked Nigel and Josh to start a detailed search for life signs. They’ll be outside looking for bugs for a while.”
“Bugs?” Nathalie asked, her face blank.
“Microbes,” David corrected. “Bacteria. You know, little things.” He grinned, holding his thumb and forefinger close together.
“Oh.”
David had difficulty reading her. She didn’t seem upset, or bitter, or particularly emotional at all.
“Veronika told me about your… situation.”
Nathalie shrugged again. “It happened.” She looked up at David. “The timing is not the best. But we have to start sometime.”
“Does Nigel know?”
“I’ve told him.”
“That John is the father?”
Nathalie didn’t say anything.
“You haven’t told him, have you?”
Nathalie shook her head and sighed.
“He’s English. He won’t take it well,” she said. “The English.” Another shrug. “They do not understand these things.”
“You will have to tell him. Even if you don’t think it’s his right to know, it’s his job to know. You have to tell him.”
Nathalie looked at him, chin held high, defiant. “I’ll tell him, but I refuse to be ashamed.”
David nodded. “Good enough.”
His next port of call was John, who was poring over plans for the new fabricators.
“Gidday, mate,” he said as David walked in. “What’s up?”
“Nathalie.”
John’s face failed to register any surprise.
“She OK?”
“She will be. Congratulations, you’re going to be a father.”
“Shit.”
David couldn’t help smiling a little.
“Does Nigel know?”
“Not yet. He will soon though.”
“Shit.”
***
Nigel and Josh trooped tiredly back into the dome, entering through the main airlock. Their day had been spent hiking through the hills and valleys around Haven, and along the lakeshore, collecting samples.
“I’ll take these to the lab,” Josh said. “I guess you’ll want to check on Nathalie.”
Nigel nodded. “Thanks – see you at dinner.”
Nathalie was waiting for Nigel when he arrived back at their quarters. She was trying to put herself in his place, trying to think how to tell him gently. Unlike him, she did not place any particular value on sexual fidelity, and to her their relationship was simply one of convenience. Her fling with John onboard Hope had in fact just been a rekindling of a previous dalliance during their training days; for her it had been simply a welcome release of tension during the time she had been camped in the observation dome. While she didn’t really love Nigel, and if she was honest with herself tended to have volatile relationships, she didn’t want to hurt him deliberately. She just didn’t really know how she was going to avoid it.
“Hey, how are you feeling?” Nigel asked.
“OK. Better.”
Nigel watched her carefully. He could tell something wasn’t right.
“What is it?” he asked, brushing her hair way from her face with his hand. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Is it the baby?”
“I’m sorry,” Nathalie said, wishing she could cry or at least look upset.
“Sorry? I don’t understand.”
“You aren’t the father.” She looked down, suddenly ashamed despite her convictions.
Nigel’s face changed, this time the emotions running the gamut from shock to despair to anger. His face grew red and there was a tremor in his voice as he spat out a name.
“John! It’s him isn’t it?” His fists clenched unconsciously. Intellectually he knew he shouldn’t feel this way. They all knew the score; they had all put personal feeling aside in the competition to be where they were. But damn it, it hurt. It wasn’t as if this was agreed. He might have been able to handle that dispassionately, an agreement to do the right thing for the colony and accepting someone else to father a child with Nathalie. But like this, behind his back, it hurt.
Nathalie didn’t deny it, and Nigel knew he was right.
***
John was still pottering around in his workshop; he didn’t need to be there anymore, but in truth he wasn’t sure where to go. Finding himself in the situation of being discovered sleeping with someone else’s girlfriend actually wasn’t new for him, something that wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew him for more than five minutes. But this was something different; their group was so small, and there was no avoiding Nigel. He wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
Nigel saved him wondering any further by bursting into the workshop.
“You bastard! You duplicitous son of a bitch.”
“Mate…”
“Don’t you ‘mate’ me!” By this time Nigel was right in front of John and he was just getting started. John swallowed, hard. Nigel was quite intimidating when he was angry; he suddenly remembered that martial arts were his thing.
“What the bloody hell do you think you were doing? You bastard! You bloody well waited until I was in stasis didn’t you? You just couldn’t even bloody wait until we got here; you just had to do it up there! And you got her bloody pregnant! What the fuck were you thinking!”
“Aw, mate, sorry, it just happened…”
“Bullshit!” Nigel was usually quite reserved, but now the barriers were down and he was really letting it out.
“Mate, let’s be civilized about this…”
Nigel was through talking. He simply drew his fist back and punched John as hard he could in the face. John, shocked, fell back against his workbench and clutched his nose, which started to gush blood. Nigel just glared at him and then stormed out.
Any other time, John thought, I would have had a go at him for that. But this time, deep down, he had a feeling that he deserved it.
John cleaned himself up then went looking for Heidi. Might as well get this over with, he thought ruefully. Finding her in their quarters, he explained as gently as possible what had happened, not sure what to expect in response. It didn’t take long for him to find out, as Heidi socked him in the right eye, delivering his second painful punishment for the day. She then proceeded to throw all of his possessions out of their shared quarters and ordered him out.
John left, nursing a rapidly swelling eye and slunk off towards the engineering workshop, hoping to find a place to doss down for the night.
Dinner was a restrained affair that night. Neither John nor Nathalie made an appearance; as the guilty parties, perhaps they had decided it was better to give Heidi and Nigel some space.
Dinner over, Heidi took Nigel by the hand.
“Come.” she ordered, not taking no for an answer. She led him back to her quarters then bid him to sit at the little table against one partition wall. She then rummaged in her personal supplies for a moment and extracted a bottle of schnapps, plunking it down on the table with two shot glasses.
“Now we drink,” she ordered, brooking no disobedience.
Nigel was not normally one to drink heavily, and indeed they had little opportunity to do so, given their restricted supplies. But he was in no mood to deny Heidi’s demands tonight. He had been raised in a family with a strict, conservative father, who drummed into him from an early age what constituted proper behavior, and silently he was outraged by John and Nathalie’s betrayal. Even though he understood their circumstances and knew they had no choice but to work together, the disrespect shown him by Nathalie had pricked his male pride considerably.
And so he drank. There was no talking; both he and Heidi had a shared understanding, a shared hurt that they both wanted to anesthetize with alcohol as quickly as possible. Shot followed shot, and after half a dozen or so they found they could start to talk.
“That arschloch! How could he this be doing to me?” Heidi’s speech was already slightly slurred and she wasn’t even trying to string her English sentences together correctly.
Nigel was perhaps slightly less drunk as yet, but was feeling a pleasant buzz and cared little about his evaporating inhibitions.
“He’s a bastard,” he declared, “and she is a whore.” He frowned for a moment, and then unsteadily threw back the next shot of schnapps, that had somehow reappeared in his glass. “A whore,” he said again for emphasis. “They deserve each other. Fuck both of them!” he laughed at the sudden profanity as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever said.
Heidi filled their glasses again and they toasted. “To what they deserve!”
The lightweight table shook as they slammed their glasses down in unison.
Heidi looked at Nigel, fire smoldering in her eyes.
“And what, what do we deserve?”
Nigel looked at her as if noticing her for the first time. Heidi stood up unsteadily, her chair falling behind her unnoticed. She advanced on Nigel and straddled him, loosening the tie that held her long dark hair and letting it fall around her shoulders. Gazing intently into his eyes, she bent forward and kissed him.
“Is this a good idea?” he asked, trying to be the gentlemen and not take advantage.
Heidi’s response was to kiss him again, this time slipping her tongue into his mouth and consuming him hungrily. Nigel would have liked to exert some chivalry but the combination of Heidi’s passion and the schnapps was making that almost impossible. He felt himself growing hard and his hands involuntarily reached out for Heidi. His breath caught in his throat as he touched her bare torso. Where Nathalie was soft feminine curves, Heidi was firm and sculpted. She wriggled on his lap and pushed her hips forward to tease his erection, and he felt her muscles rippling under his hands, arousing him even further. Suddenly he gave into the inevitable and responded to Heidi’s kiss. She gave a low throaty chuckle as she acknowledged his capitulation, and pulled away long enough to slip off her sports bra to reveal her firm breasts.
Nigel stood up and she wrapped her legs around his waist to allow him to claim her nipples with his mouth, then he carried her to the bed.
Until exhaustion finally claimed them, they abandoned themselves to their passion.
Haven, Serendipity
May 16, 2109
The next day, Nigel simply moved his belongings to Heidi’s quarters, and John to Nathalie’s. None of them spoke about the new arrangements, then or ever. There had been a realignment of the planets in their little human universe, and that was that.
Ironically, Nigel and Heidi found in each other something that had been lacking in their relationships with Nathalie and John; Nigel’s professional interest was somewhat piqued as he, as team psychologist, had helped allocate the pairings. But now he found himself like a teenager in love for the first time after just one night, and not caring two hoots about whether it was supposed to work or not.
John and Nathalie on the other hand, did not look quite so happy with each other. John, apparently, was finding Nathalie to be somewhat demanding. Perhaps they really do deserve each other, Nigel thought. At least he could think of this with amusement rather than bitterness. His sudden romance with Heidi had taken the sting off what would otherwise have been a painful split with Nathalie.
At breakfast, there were seven of them; Josh was missing.
“Where’s Josh?” Grace asked Veronika.
She sighed. “In his lab. He’s been there all night.”
David raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Something he found in his samples. He refused to come to bed last night.” She sounded a little miffed, as though she didn’t think anything would be more important than that.
“Hmmm,” said David, his interest piqued.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out what had kept Josh up all night. He burst into the galley with a wild expression on his face that was, David thought, exactly what one would expect from an over-tired child who was too excited to go to bed. Say what one would about Josh; one couldn’t deny his enthusiasm for… just about everything.
Veronika adopted her long-suffering expression for public consumption, but David knew that secretly she found Josh’s puppy-dog zest for life addictive.
“I found it!” he exclaimed excitedly.
“What?” They all chorused with interest, except John who looked moody, and Nathalie who looked a little unwell.
“Life!” he said, nodding his head. “In the samples! From yesterday!”
Now he definitely had their interest, even Nathalie’s.
“You found life?” John asked. “What sort of life?”
Josh’s face fell a little. “Well, not alive life,” he clarified. “Fossils.”
Veronika couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “For this you stayed up all night?”
Josh looked crestfallen for a moment like a puppy that had just been told off. Then he brightened. “But don’t you see? If there are fossils then there was life once! If there was life then maybe somewhere there is life! And this is the first time we’ve ever found any evidence for life outside of Earth! This is big!”
Even Veronika couldn’t argue with that, and they were all on their feet now to congratulate Josh and were showering him with questions.
It turned out that the fossils that Josh had discovered were micro-fossils – evidence of small organisms and bacteria left behind in the soft rocks and sand they had collected. Not just a few either – they were everywhere. But not one single living cell had been found.
***
After the excitement had died down, Josh had scoffed down some breakfast then dragged Nigel to the lab, without any protest whatsoever, to continue their studies. Veronika decided she’d give him an hour then make him get some sleep; she was sure she’d find some way of luring him to bed.
The others gathered in the park, as they’d started to refer to the center of the dome, to discuss their plans. The middle of the park, where they’d held their thanksgiving dinner, was paved with flat rocks they’d found down by the lake; John had replaced the table with some benches. They all preferred being out in the closest to outdoors that they had; even though they had only some grass and the vegetable plots, the air in the dome somehow seemed fresher than inside the landers.
“As I see it,” David started, “our main focus should be on preparing the cavern as a habitat. Does anyone disagree?”
No one did, but Veronika mentioned that Josh and Nigel would want to continue their search for life.
“I think those objectives are complementary,” John said. “To build the cavern we’ll need to travel to find the ores we need. They’ll be able to get a lot of samples if they tag along.”
David nodded. “Sounds good. What do we need?”
“Well, as you know the fabricators can make anything we need, and we will in fact be making new fabricators first. So what we need to do is focus on finding the raw materials for the fabs. For this job, what we need is aluminum, which means bauxite, and fluorite for the windows. These are both pretty common on Earth, so with any luck we’ll find some here without any trouble.”
“How do we proceed?” David asked next. He actually had a fair idea, but as the specialist manager in the group, he wanted to make sure everyone else knew too.
“Prospecting,” he answered. “That would be me, Grace and Nathalie. We can do most of it from the air; we’ve got a pretty comprehensive suite of scanners that should be able to identify the ores from there. After that, it’ll be a matter of digging it out and bringing it back here for processing.”
“We can’t do it on site?”
John shook his head. “We need power, lots of it,” he answered. He grinned. “Unless of course, you’d like us to take the power to the ore.”
