An unholstered pistol rests against the thigh of the chief engineer we saw yelling at people down in the Morgan Prospecting camp. She’s up here on the hillside now, a dozen or so feet from the driver’s side of our rover. She still has her hardhat on, and we’re close enough now to see that her long black hair is braided tightly to her scalp beneath it. She has reddish-gold skin and looks older than Yushi, though she wears a uniform much like his—except for the logo, of course. I estimate her to be about my age, which means she must be being careful with herself, to still have an outdoor job into her mid-twenties.
I was sitting behind Takuto, but now I quickly slide over to Cleve’s side of the rover and lower the back window. I start with the truth, trying a friendly approach against the deep brown eyes glaring angrily at us. “We recently woke up and the ground collapsed over our cryopods here. We’re back now with some excavation equipment to dig them out.”
“This is a Morgan Prospecting excavation site, and I’m Chief Engineer Shu-Fen. You need to leave immediately. You do not have authorization to be here. I don’t know what your situation is—I admit, I haven’t heard of this before—but I’m sorry, you need to exit this site,” she says matter-of-factly.
I’m already opening the car door. We are not just going to back out of here, no matter how driven she is to succeed at her mining project. She’s pretty much ignored my explanation, so I treat her request the same. And I don’t reciprocate the introduction, considering my name has already been bandied about the hallways of Morgan Prospecting. “Oh, this is Morgan land or something, you said? That’s fine. You can keep doing whatever you’re doing over there,” I say, waving downslope in the direction of the drill as I walk towards her. “We’re only concerned about getting our own things from right down below here.” I tap my cane into the ground. “We had to shuffle out of there pretty quickly because everything was collapsing. I don’t know if you noticed a siege worm has been through here recently? It’s kind of unstabilized the whole area.” I keep my tone pleasant as I assure Shu-Fen that we won’t interfere with her operation at all. “Certainly we’re not going to get in the way of any ores you wish to recover or anything like that. There’s no reason we can’t all get what we want out of this. You’re clearly not here to recover cryopods or the personal belongings in shelves under them.”
“You just woke up from cryopods?” she says, finally really hearing me.
I tap the ground again with my cane. “Down there.”
“Yeah,” she bites out, “I know there’s a cryopod chamber down there.”
Something about that irritates her, but I respond brightly, “Oh! Have you already uncovered it? Then we can just get our things and go.”
“Cool your heels a little bit there!” Shu-Fen tells me, unswayed by my charm. “Ugh, I do not need this! Look, it’s not safe for you to be here. This is an active mining site, okay? This place could collapse at any moment. You could fall, you could injure yourself further than you did clawing your way out of those cryopods,” she says, eying my cane. “We had someone get trapped for half a day already. We thankfully got him out, but he was struck with miasma poisoning and had to get sent back to the dome.” That makes me shudder—not from fear of the miasma, but from the thought of how horribly our initial escape could have gone if the ceiling had fallen on us instead of around us. “The project almost got halted, but that’s not going to happen on my watch, okay? I will see this project through. I will finish it. I will make this project work. I always do. No chance of this failing.”
I hear the sound of a car door behind me; Cleve must be tired of waiting. “It is literally not safe for you,” Shu-Fen continues. “You’ve heard of siege worms, it seems. I don’t know what you’ve heard, so let me tell you, they will murder you. They will swallow you alive and not even be aware of it. There’s other dangerous wildlife you can encounter, like alpha wolf beetles. You probably don’t even know—the miasma is incredibly dangerous. You don’t want to go anywhere near that. It will kill you immediately. So, for your own safety, I need you to leave this site and head back to the dome. For your own safety. Okay? Can you do that for me? Can you do that right now?” Those words could be so caring and compassionate, but Shu-Fen’s delivery makes them belittling. “This is not a joke. This is really serious,” she insists. “I don’t know how awful your air was back on Earth, but this is much worse.”
“Nobody came looking for us for thirty years!” Cleve shouts, exploding into the conversation. Shu-Fen takes the brunt of his bottled-up anger over all that lost time. “And now you’re going to just come in here and crush whoever else might still be in there? The least you could do is let us go get our stuff. Now you’re telling me it’s not safe? Yes, it’s unstable! Who knows who else you’re crushing—what other poor souls you’re going to kill—because nobody bothered to come looking for anybody! What did we land here for? Just to die?” I look at Cleve in surprise, taken aback by the rant. His complexion is even redder than normal with how worked up he is, and he’s brought his rifle out of the car with him. It’s just slung over his shoulder, but still! This could get out of control really quickly.
Shu-Fen does not react well, matching Cleve glare for glare. “Look, buddy, I didn’t choose to come to this planet, all right? But I’m here. I was born here. I don’t really care about whatever your planetfaller problems are. Your cryopods woke up late? Oh, boohoo, no one tried to find you for thirty years,” she shoots back, words dripping with scorn. Cleve clearly hit a button here. “I don’t know if you heard, but the whole Unity Project… disunity! Whatever you remember about there being some charter—forget all of that, okay? Just take that—” she snatches the air with her empty hand and mimes tossing something away, “—take your rifle out back and shoot it, or whatever your thing is. I don’t really care what you thought this was. You don’t have any property rights here—it’s really that simple. So you can just leave. You can go live in the wilderness, I don’t care. You’re just some exiles who are going to die in a few weeks anyway. Not my problem. You didn’t wake up in the past week, I know that much. So get out of here!” Shu-Fen uses her empty hand to point in the direction we drove in from. “Drag your useless planetfaller butt off of my excavation site.”
“Property rights, my ass!” Cleve growls.
I quickly step forward, not towards Shu-Fen, but into the space between her and Cleve. Shu-Fen’s gun is in her hand, but she hasn’t raised it yet. I’m reading anger from her body language, but not an immediate threat of violence. Cleve I’m less sure about. Takuto has thankfully stayed in the rover, where he is watching this whole argument with wide eyes. I stretch my right hand out toward Cleve in a calming gesture. “Let’s all calm down,” I suggest, looking back and forth between him and Shu-Fen. “It’s a very stressful environment for everybody on this planet. We’re all dealing with the situation we find ourselves in as best as possible.” Cleve lets out a breath—perhaps a huff, but I’ll take whatever sign of relaxation I can.
I turn my attention to Shu-Fen. “We don’t want to impede your operation in any way. We know exactly where our cryopods are. We can just get our things and get out of your hair.” I’m pretty sure that the best we can hope for at this point is the cryopod data. Any other material Cleve thought we were going to lug out of here, we need to just write that off. “And there’s no reason that we couldn’t help you out along the way,” I offer. “We appreciate all the warnings you’ve given us. Clearly, we don’t have the same understanding of the dangers of this place that you do. We certainly haven’t even heard of some of them. And who knows, we may not have long on this world if it’s as bad as you say here. So, please, a little compassion goes a long way.” I have enough control now that I can intentionally flare my eyes, and I do so at this point. I’ve noticed it unsettle people before, and it underlines my point about the environment taking a toll on us already.
Shu-Fen actually looks startled for a moment, but then she slowly nods. I look questioningly to Cleve. Stand down, I beg him wordlessly, stand down! Cleve takes a deep breath, and then lets it out in a slow, controlled fashion. I get a swift nod from him. Seeing that, Shu-Fen holsters her pistol.