///
“No, looking good is not useful. It doesn’t get things done,” Shu-Fen says. “Except deals, I guess. But yes, you look good, okay?”
With those words directed at Cleve, Mariah excuses himself, standing up and dropping his napkin on his empty plate. “Where are you going?” Cleve immediately asks.
“To the restroom?” Mariah’s voice lilts up, as though reluctantly asking for permission to leave Cleve’s sight. “By all means, you two continue denigrating fashion in my absence.”
Without the main driver of conversation present, there are a few moments of awkward silence at the table. Finally Shu-Fen breaks it. “So your name was on one of the cryopods,” she says, “but who is Mariah Thorne?”
“What do you mean?” Cleve asks.
“I got a message, people asking if there’s a Mariah Thorne in Prospecting. There’s not. Why does his name randomly turn up?”
Cleve considers for a moment, evaluating what information is dangerous to give up. Of course, the most dangerous is already out there. He sees no harm in sharing this. “Mariah stowed away. Just like Morgan did.”
“Oh interesting…” Shu-Fen murmurs. She was tasked with securing Morgan’s cryopod and the computer from its compartment, but she wasn’t privy to all the details why. “I wonder if they were former rivals or something.”
“No,” Cleve says. Mariah worked in Morgan’s department, that’s it.
Shu-Fen waves a hand dismissively. “Whatever, that doesn’t matter. So you are a planetfaller, but you woke up late, right?” she asks, moving the topic to the more intriguing man of the pair.
“Well, our pods didn’t open,” Cleve says. With a shrug, he adds, “I guess late is relative to when other pods opened.”
“That’s a good point. It’s just, you seem a little different from the other planetfallers. Just a little bit. Although, I don’t know, you’ve still got weird Earth ideas. So who are you, Octavius Augustus Cleveland?” He looks a little surprised to have his whole long name trotted out. “I did look at your cryopod data,” she reminds him.
“I was hired to be part of the initial colony. I was supposed to be a forward scout to help people get set up, particularly for a specific family.”
“Which family? Not Morgan, surely.”
“The Santiagos.”
“Whew, that’s a family that crashed and burned quick, did not adapt.”
“Maybe if they had woken me up!” Cleve says jokingly.
“I’ll be honest, if you had woken up, you probably would have died in the first five years. I heard that miasma poisoning got most of the forward scouts. So you’d probably be dead if you hadn’t slept in like you did.”
“But who else died because I wasn’t there as a forward scout?” Cleve counters. Surely he could have kept some of those people safe.
“A lot of people died,” Shu-Fen says, almost dismissively. That is old news. “So what do you do now?” She taps the report in front of her. “You’re a researcher at this Data Haven place?” She’d heard rumors of a mystery enclave on the other side of the pass, and this document was the final piece of evidence she needed to fully believe them. It puts a lot of recent activity in a new light, particularly the news that a siege worm tore up the pass. When she first met these fellows, they claimed to have recently awoken but they’d already heard of siege worms. Clearly Data Haven has something going in that regard.
“I pretty much do the same thing I was hired to do by the Santiagos,” Cleve tells her. He certainly does not reveal that he’s Datajack Prime. It’s bad enough she knows about Data Haven; there’s no need to divulge the level of organization it now has.
“So who do you work for?”
Cleve crinkles his brow as he considers the question. Who do I work for? he ponders. “Well, I still kind of owe some time to the Santiagos…”
“Are there any left? I heard there was one granddaughter, but she got exiled as far as I know.”
Cleve shrugs—he is definitely not going to answer that question. “I mean, I’m just trying to make myself useful. Keep people alive. Same as you, I would guess?” She has exhibited a bit of protective attitude toward her underlings, even if she does berate them.
“I don’t know that I could quite say I’m as altruistic,” Shu-Fen says. “I’m not trying to hurt anyone, sure. But this planet has a bounty of things that we need to acquire and process to make this place safe for humans.”
“Well, I’m not going to pretend like I was a gung ho ecologist on Earth, but one of the reasons why we left was because the raiding of the planet’s resources was overdone,” Cleve tells her.
“Yeah, but we have a chance to restart here, so we can be a little more circumspect. Still, you’re not going to be able to build more domes if you don’t find more metals. How else are you going to live? How do people live in Data Haven? Do you have your own dome?”
“We have a sealed environment,” Cleve answers carefully.
“Oh? How did you make it?”
“There are technologies for miasma management besides domes,” he replies, hoping to discourage further questions.
This backfires, however, just intriguing Shu-Fen more. Her questions turn technical. “Do you have glass? How do you deal with the filtering problem?”
“Honestly, we have a lot of problems with the filters in our sealed environment. We don’t actually have factories, so we struggle with getting new parts.”
“Do you have a portable solution like the Planetary Security Forces have?”
“No, and here’s what I’ve tried…” Cleve shares some of his attempts at mask filters.
“They have to replace their filters every twelve hours,” Shu-Fen says of the armored carriers. “It’s really not sustainable.” At this point, Cleve pulls out his notebook and begins jotting information down. “How do you protect yourself from wildlife?” Shu-Fen asks after the filtering topic eventually peters out.
“You mean like the briar beasts?”
“Those are not as common around here, but I have encountered them a couple times,” she says. “But also craws stealing your stuff? Wolf beetles?”
“Oh my gosh, yes! Try not to spend too much time in their nests!”
Shu-Fen laughs. “Had that happen once or twice,” she shares.
“But the craws can be traded with,” Cleve tells her. Shu-Fen tilts her head quizzically. “If you have something shiny, you can get something shiny back.”
“What does a craw have that I want?”
“What did a craw steal from you?” Shu-Fen presses her lips together in disapproval, having little interest in trading with a thief. But Cleve gets more clever with his suggestions. “What did a craw steal from somebody else? What did a craw recover from a Progenitor facility that they can get into?”
That gives Shu-Fen pause. “You’ve seen craws in Progenitor facilities? Interesting…” She makes some notes of her own.
“Yeah, they can get into ruins. If you see one, you might try to trade. I’m not completely sure how it would go. Mariah usually does all of the communicating. But it seems like if you offer them something, they will give you something back.”
“Interesting,” Shu-Fen says again. “I don’t go out of my way to trample their nests, and frankly, they seem to like human habitation. Maybe for all the shinies, as you say.”
“Yeah. I think they’re smarter than we realize. Just not sure how smart.”
“Probably smarter than some of the people I employ,” Shu-Fen mutters. “So, what are you doing after the war? Are you just going back to Data Haven?”
Cleve shrugs. “I guess it depends on how it goes down.” Data Haven might be a series of craters in the ground at that point. “But I like the idea that we might survive it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“What are you doing after the war?”
“Sounds like I might be on the board.”
“Do you want to be on the board?” Cleve asks. That’s a question Mariah never raised.
“It’s a useful position to be in. I can make sure things get done that haven’t been getting done correctly. We cannot have representation that’s all planetfallers. I don’t care that it’s this debt-driven shareholder system, but we cannot have all planetfallers. It’s just not stable. That’s literally what we’re seeing right now. It’s not going to work. So, I don’t know, I’ll have to do some of that… But can I visit this Data Haven place? I’d love to see your Progenitor lab.” She glances down at the report. “Talk to this… well, I guess I know Mariah… Mr. Cleve?”
“You saw my name.”
“I’m sorry, do you really go by Mr. Cleve?” Shu-Fen asks with a playful laugh.
“No, that’s just what Takuto calls me.”
“Who’s Takuto?”
“He was with us when we met you the first time. The young man with the computer. Very smart. Pretty much wrote that document.”
“Oh, he was that one. I’d hire him, for sure.”
“And he can handle himself on missions,” Cleve adds, high praise indeed from the survivalist.
Shu-Fen flips to the second sheet and reads, “‘Dedicated to my most amazing partner Arx.’ Interesting.” She glances up at Cleve, but he just nods in acknowledgement, doesn’t claim ownership of the line. So perhaps that Arx goes with Takuto or Mariah, and Cleve himself is unattached…
///