Orphans of Apollo - S3 E7
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Previously: as Aiden and Lana worked to remove the battery heater control unit from Rover 1, they share a moment of intimacy.
October 2056
The half-hour Lana had suggested stretched to nearly an hour.
Lana thought it would look less suspicious if she headed up as soon as she was ready. Aiden didn’t think it would make any difference either way. He was still pulling off the legs of his suit. Lana bent down to where he was sitting on the bench, gave him a peck on the cheek and bounced out of the EVA prep room.
Aiden closed his suit locker and picked up the box they had removed from the rover. He took it over to the workbench and set it down. From one of the draws below the desk he pulled out a cable and plugged it into the data bus connector on the heater control unit, then connected it to a socket on the workbench. He scrolled through the menus on the screen and found the correct diagnostic programme and set it running. Then he headed up to join Lana and Joanna upstairs.
“Seems like it was quite the job removing that heater control?” said Joanna, looking up from the table.
Was that a smirk on her face? Aiden willed himself not to blush.
“The layout of those access panels is definitely something I want to feed back to the rover design teams. It’s a real pain to get in and get to things.”
“We’ve probably missed the cut-off of for those sorts of changes,” said Lana, “but at least we’ve figured out how to work around some of the issues.”
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t have done it without the tool I printed. Or your help.”
“I can help you write up the report after lunch if you want. Make sure everything gets included in the updated rover documentation.”
“Well, it sounds like you guys had a grand old time out in the rover this morning,” said Joanna, getting up from the table and taking her dirty lunch dishes with her.
Aiden’s tablet chimed. He pulled it out of the thigh pocket of his cargo pants and made a couple of swipes at the screen as he quickly scanned it.
“Well, the diagnostic tool couldn’t find anything wrong with heater control unit.”
“That was quick,” replied Lana
“It’s not a very complicated component. I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to find anything wrong with it. Typical, one of those problems you can’t replicate.” He tapped away for a few seconds. “I’ve sent the diagnostic report to Mission Control, see if they can make anything of it.”
“It will be at least a few hours before they get back to us with anything and the others are getting further away all the time,” said Joanna, her playful mocking tone from before was gone.
“We went through this before they set off,” said Aiden, looking across at Lana. Her face had dropped and she wasn’t making eye contact with either of them. “Whatever this obscure problem is, the chances of it affecting the other rover are highly unlikely. Mission Control agreed with that assessment.”
“I know that Aiden, but I just have a bad feeling about it.”
“It’s going to take them nearly five days to reach the Transantarctic Mountains. With their stops to drill ice cores, they are only covering about 180km a day. We can do all the diagnostics and troubleshooting we can in the next couple of days and they will still only be about four hours drive away at full speed in the other rover,” said Lana.
“If we can indeed find anything wrong, which I doubt we will,” added Aiden.
There was a soft, barely perceptible click as a door opened a couple of rooms away from where Aiden sat on his bed. His heart raced and he focused intently, trying to pick out sounds other than the wind noise from outside. Yes, there it was, some soft footsteps padding across the floor and the creak as the metal frame of the staircase took up the load. Aiden was still staring at the tablet in front of him and realised he had no idea what was on it. He had opened a news feed to distract himself and pass the time, but in the end, he couldn’t stop daydreaming. Replaying over and over in his mind the time he and Lana had spent in the rover together that morning.
He checked the time 21:18, a little late for Joanna, who was a creature of habit. She had probably been messaging Brant. In a couple of minutes, she would come upstairs from the bathroom and refill her water bottle before going back to her room to sleep. He closed the news feed and noticed a new message from Mission Control. He hadn’t even heard the chime when it came in. It wasn’t marked urgent, and from the first few lines in the preview window, it seemed they could find nothing wrong with the battery heater control either. It could wait until the morning. He closed the tablet and put it on the bed next to him. There was the sound of running water from the kitchen area outside. It stopped. Aiden waited, nothing. He waited some more, still nothing. He concluded he must have missed the click of Joanna’s door when she returned to her room. Better give it another couple of minutes.
In the end, he couldn’t wait any longer. As quietly as he could, he eased his door. The common area outside was in nighttime mode, as was the rest of the hab. To keep out the ever-present summer sunlight, the window shades were down, and dim strip lights on the floor provided just enough illumination to safely get around. The always-on status screen, which gave various readouts of the hab’s systems, was in dark mode. Aiden closed his door as softly as he had opened it.
He took a few soft steps and gently pushed down the handle of Lana’s door and cracked it open. His heart sank. The room looked to be in darkness. Had she gone to sleep already? He pushed the door open wider and saw the glow of Lana’s desk lamp. As he swung it open wider, she turned around from where she was sat at her desk at the far end of the room. She smiled at him. Aiden closed the door softly and they looked at each other across the room.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” whispered Lana.
“I got held up, sorry. I was waiting for Joanna to go to bed.”
Lana got up from her desk and walked the couple of paces over to where Aiden was standing. He put his arms around her and pulled her tight in towards his body. His heart was racing now. What started as a gentle kiss quickly became more passionate.
“You know, Joanna probably already knows. She’s not stupid,” said Lana through gaps in their kissing. “She’s being a little standoffish because she’s jealous.”
Aiden pulled back. “You mean she likes me?”
“No,” giggled Lana, “Because we’re together here and Brant is out on the expedition.”
“You mean… she likes Brant?”
“You mean…” she gave him a look of mock astonishment. “You didn’t realise that?”
“No?”
“Girls really are more perceptive than boys, aren’t they?” said Lana as she sat down on the bed. Aiden sat beside her. “I guess so.”
“You know I have liked you for a long, long time. It’s just—”
“Just what?” said Aiden, suddenly concerned.
“It’s just we were always soo busy. I felt I owed it to the program and to Christian to devote all of my time to it. I feel guilty whenever I spend time on frivolous activities like socialising.” She took Aiden’s hand and their fingers interlaced. “You know, my mum would always try to set us up together. Mums have pretty good intuition.”
“She tried to set us up?” He glanced away for a moment, as if replaying old scenes in his head.
“Not like on a date, but she would always nudge us together whenever she could. But she would always be subtle about it. I could tell there was always something she wanted to say, but she would hold back. I never pressed and neither did she. It’s like this unspoken agreement.”
Aiden looked away, “I have liked you for a long time too, you know. I was just too scared to say anything.”
“Well,” said Lana as she gently kissed him on the lips, “let’s not waste anymore time.”
“No,” whispered Aiden.
They lay back on the bed, their bodies intertwined. Aiden slid his hand under Lana’s T-shirt. She lifted her arms above her head and he took the cue to pull it up over her head. They slowly removed more and more of each other’s clothes, then Aiden stopped. He seemed troubled.
“What about… you know…”
“You know what?”
“I mean, we don’t want you to get…” Aiden’s voice trailed off uncomfortably.
“Pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
Lana lifted her left arm and stretched the skin on the inside of her bicep tight. Just beneath the surface, there was a visible ridge about five centimetres long.
“Is that an implant?”
“Yeah. They gave one to all of us when we were about sixteen or seventeen, I think. I can’t really remember. I guess they figured young people together. Stuff’s going to happen. Given the amount of resources Christian has put into us, it would be a bit of a setback if one of the girls got pregnant.”
Aiden relaxed. “I never realised they had given you those.”
“They also help with your period. It makes it lighter and stops you from getting all the cramps and stuff like that. Kind of useful, stops it getting in the way of doing things.”
He drew her close again. “So they gave that to you when you were sixteen because they thought stuff might happen?”
She nodded.
Has it ever… happened?”
“No,” whispered Lana in his ear. “Has stuff ever happened to you, with someone else?” Lana smiled mischievously.
“No, not until now,” said Aiden, his voice quivering.
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Elseware
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Orphans of Apollo.
I find it a little strange writing this kind of scene. Romance is not a genre of fiction I have ever been into, but it does play an important part of many stories, so hopefully this lands well.
This week we went to watch the new Formula One movie. It’s not really something which I have written about on Substack, but I have always been a Formula One fan. My first memories of Formula One are Nigel Mansell, constantly breaking down in a Ferrari. I’m not really that into other forms of motor sport, just F1. I think it’s because the aerodynamics give it a lot of similarities to flying.
Getting back to the movie, it’s definitely worth watching even if you’re not a fan of the sport. It’s not particularly a thought-provoking film or one that has you thinking about your place in the world, it’s just good Hollywood - and that’s fine.
The Netflix series Drive to Survive proved the concept of a shop-window for the sport and the movie is a continuation of this. The storyline is good if not anything out of the ordinary. That it was made with the full co-operation of the franchise is probably the biggest appeal for fans of the sport, and I think what the film does best. It has the actual teams, drivers and other personalities of the sport in the movie but follows the trials and tribulations of a fictitious team and comeback driver. The filmmakers could so easily have done this badly and made it cringeworthy, but they didn’t. They did it exceptionally well.
Have a great week.
Thanks for reading - the future belongs to the optimists.
Alex
