“Well, by all means, send her in.”
The woman who walks into the room is dark haired, slender, and almost as tall as I am. She is wearing an irritated expression on her face. She strides toward the conference table where Sergeant Fallon and I are sitting next to each other, and sits down in the chair directly across the table from us.
“Don’t expect me to ask permission to sit down,” she says. “I’m not used to asking the military for the use of our own facilities, and I don’t think I’m going to start any time soon.”
Sergeant Fallon raises an eyebrow and smiles the tiniest of smiles.
“And you are?”
“Dr. Stewart,” the woman says. “I’m the head of the scientific detachment here on the colony.”
“I’m Briana Fallon. Do you have a conventional first name, too, or did your parents anticipate your future academic achievements when they picked your name?”
Dr. Stewart replicates Sergeant Fallon’s tiny almost-smile.
“My first name is Janet,” she says. “You have to forgive me for not addressing you by your proper rank. I’m not fluent when it comes to military rank insignia.”
“I don’t think it matters much at this point,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Our new chain of command down here is a bit unorthodox. Bur for what it’s worth, I’m a master sergeant. And this fellow next to me is Staff Sergeant Grayson.”
“Andrew,” I offer. Dr. Stewart nods at me.
“How can we help you?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Well.” Dr. Stewart folds her hands on the tabletop and smiles curtly. “You certainly get down to business promptly. I appreciate that in people.”
She looks at the big holoscreen on the other side of the room, but it only shows the gray standby screen.
“You could help me and yourselves a great deal by packing up all those extra troops you crammed into this settlement and taking them back home as soon as you can. Preferably before the start of the winter.”
Sergeant Fallon snorts and shakes her head.
“I would like to do nothing better right now. But just in case they left you science folks out of the loop, the fleet turned off the Alcubierre network and mined all the off-ramps. I’m afraid we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future.”
“Then I hope you brought enough sandwiches for a few years. I know the pencil pushers in the administration office aren’t all that great at math, so they probably haven’t pointed this out yet, but we don’t have nearly enough food on this moon to feed ourselves and a few thousand dinner guests.”
“I thought you grow your own,” I say.
“Mostly. We’re still dependent on shipments from home for quite a few things. With our normal population, we could probably run things lean for a long time, but not with the current headcount. Simply put, we have food capacity for x people, and right now we have x times two people on this moon.”
“Can we increase capacity? Put up a bunch more greenhouses?” I ask.
“Wish it were that easy,” Dr. Stewart says. “But we don’t have the local facilities to make those prefab greenhouse modules. And even if we did, the growing season down here is really short, and we’re almost at the end of it.”
“The carrier has a lot of food and supplies in its stores, but we’re not exactly on lunch-line terms with the rest of the fleet right now.”
“Once we get the fleet units to stop shooting and start talking, we can pool our supplies,” Sergeant Fallon says. “With the stuff from your food stores and the task force reserves, I think we can make it through to the next growing season. And that’s about all I can put on the table right now, because I can’t just tell a thousand of my troops to commit suicide for the sake of the headcount.”
“No, of course not.” Dr. Stewart smiles curtly.
“That’s assuming we make it all the way to the next season without the Lankies paying us a visit,” I say. “Because if they show up, the supply problem is the least of our worries.”
“They’ve never shown any interest in this system,” Dr. Stewart says. “There isn’t much here, you know. Two little moons, one too hot and one too cold for proper colonization. If it wasn’t for the ice on this moon, we wouldn’t even have a presence here. Too desolate and too far from home.”
“Let’s hope they share your views on the value of this property,” I say. “Because if they show up in orbit one morning, we’re all compost a few weeks later.”
“You mean all those extra troops won’t make a difference?”
“Not in the long run, no.”
“Then why are they here?”
“So they’re off Earth and well away from anywhere they could be starting trouble,” Sergeant Fallon answers for me. “We’re mostly malcontents and troublemakers with a history of insubordination. Your little moon is now a penal colony, more or less.”
Dr. Stewart smiles her wry little smile again.