War's Oversight - Chapter 03
#2 of War's Oversight
War's Oversight
Chapter 03
Sarah waited for a few seconds while the door to her quarters slid closed, and then let out her breath in a sigh of weariness. She fairly ripped at the zipper at the neck of her utility suit, and unfastened it to the waist before shrugging her shoulders and arms out of the sleeves. Hot and sticky as well, she thought, as she slapped a hand to the palm-reader mounted at shoulder level near her closet. _I swear I deserve an allocation of the newer fabric type._In obedience to the signal from her room's personal computer, the fitted filament bindings that held her boots tightly laced beeped once, and then relaxed. The release of pressure was almost as pleasing as it was painful, as her feet began to throb lightly with the soreness of the recent walk across Omicron Kappa 3's gravity-heavy surface. Kicked smartly to the back of her closet, her boots came to rest in an untidy pile. Unlike with her boots, she took a moment to carefully remove her cap, and set it on a small hook at the back of her closet with comparative care.
When she was finally out of her utility suit, she stepped clear of the discarded garment and sat in the simple chair which often doubled as her bedside table to strip off her socks. When that was finished, she plucked her utility suit from the floor again, got to her feet, and threw the socks into her clothes hamper, which often doubled as her workbench and as occasional guest seating.
For a moment, she stood with her suit in one hand, and with the other she billowed the front of her tank top to let some of the colony's cleaner, drier air at her skin. After flapping the front of her shirt for a few seconds, she felt at least a little better.
Her gloves were still crumpled into a ball as she pulled them from one of her suit's pockets, but she deliberately shook them right-side-out again and tossed them to follow her socks. From experience, she gave her suit a careful top-to-bottom check for electronic gear and other items which mightn't survive a laundering through New Boston's powerful - and strangely sluggish - laundry facilities, and came up with her communications earpiece, her ration card, and Rick Bayer's ration card as well. And the wrapper from today's mid-morning snack, she remarked to herself. And the wrapper from yesterday's mid-morning snack. She had a moment of realization that there had been something metallic and rustling in the suit's pockets as she'd pulled it on in the morning. _That's what I get for 'recycling' one of my suits each week,_she thought, as her utility suit also sailed into the hamper. She'd been staring at the same requisition for a replacement fifth utility suit for so long that she'd begun to suspect the words "On Order" had a different meaning like so many things on OK3, and she'd eventually given up waiting for it to arrive.
"OK," so the joke went. Before the war, when 'OK3' was under partial terraforming, the story was that you could put in a requisition for anything - non-ration food, field equipment, a housing expansion, vehicles, electronics - and the response would be: "OK, OK." Okay, Omicron Kappa. She smirked as she tugged at her underwear to remove a crease from where it had migrated from her initial morning's dress to a where it was now -- lodged between her buttocks. Nowadays, anything sent to the Logistics department under the heading "Requisition" was likely to get the revised 'OK3.' Or rather, OK3. Okay, okay, okay! Colonists knew the unspoken part of the joke - "requesting something again won't make it come faster, or at all - please get off my ass about it."
She dropped into her chair again and closed her eyes for a moment. Logistics had twenty times the personnel of Survey, but at any moment there was undoubtedly one person in the former who was seriously contemplating getting partially crushed under a container of refined ore in order to get EVAC-ed somewhere else. Somewhere with more fresh water and soap, she thought, that's for certain. She pulled at the elastic loop which held her hair back, and shook her hair loose as it came free.
She sighed, and swiveled partway around in her chair to face her desk. Whatever my problems are here, at least they're not insurmountable. She tapped at the smallish screen of her computer's interface to wake it, and saw that she had a message pending. From her father, no less.
With some renewed interest, she sat up straighter in her chair and tapped at the screen a few more times. Her father's face, virtually unchanged from when he'd last posed for an image, filled the screen as the message audio began to play.
"Hi, sweetheart," he said, his voice filling her with a momentary flood of comfort and familiarity. "I wanted to let you know how things were going since we hadn't heard from you in a while. I know that you're busy with your assignment on 'Kappa Three so I'm not all that worried." His voice almost took on an apologetic tone. "Your mother, you know - she worries, but you can't blame her."
Sarah nodded to herself. A firstborn son and a youngest daughter, she thought. No surprise that Mom had issues with me leaving home, being the little one, after all.
"Derek keeps sending us regular messages, but he can't really talk about his unit's operations, as usual. You probably heard via the news channels that the Rangers had spearheaded the landings on Phi Delta, and Derek was there - 3rdRangers did their part. He wouldn't say anything about casualties, or whether he lost any of his friends. I'm not too worried about him - that brother of yours is a strong one, but you know him - he never complains even when he's feeling low."
Classic understatement, she thought. Her older brother had never been one to talk about his problems. When we were playfighting in our teens, she recalled, and I broke his arm by accident, he never complained. 'Turned white as a sheet but he never complained. 'Just held up his other hand and said, "Help me up, wouldya?"
Her father's message continued. "Maybe you could give Derek a quick message and reassure him that you're okay too. It might not help with his problems, but it'd give him fewer things on his mind."
She reached over to the screen again and touched the button which would pause the message playback. As she lowered her hands to the desk surface in front of her, the faint outline of virtual buttons began to glow dully A few deft strokes of her fingers brought up a short list on the screen, to whose items the entry "msg Derek" were added. She dismissed the list with an impatient stab at the desk again, and then tapped the screen, leaning back in her chair.
"Your mom and I are doing well. Both of us are working again, although none of our friends in the retiree community have been asked to do any more than half-shifts. It gets us out and about, and we get to meet at lunch like we did when we were first starting to date." Her father's voice chuckled in such a way that Sarah felt a small twinge of homesickness.
"Anyway, I didn't want to keep you busy, so I'll let you get back to work. Your mom and I love you very much. Stay safe, sweetie! Bye!"
A slight click from her room's speaker system signaled the end of the message. Sarah sat for a moment, and then laid her fingers to the desk a second time, adding the entry "msg mom&dad" to her list.
She stood, stretching some of the soreness in her muscles out, and caught a glimpse of herself in the larger of the room's screens - this one mounted on the wall near her closet - which when not in use as an entertainment device doubled as a mirror, as it was functioning now. Her father's comment about being employed part-time in one of the essential wartime industries and having regular lunch breaks with her mother had made her feel somewhat self-conscious about her figure, all of a sudden. Maybe not self-conscious about that, though. Maybe it was how her mother always seemed to touch that sensitive nerve, about her not yet having settled down with a nice fellow her age.
Granted, there was no one at the colony she even felt remotely attracted to, but she found herself wondering about how long it was going to be before she found someone who made her feel ... Special? she thought to herself. Is that what I'm waiting for? Someone to make me feel special? She gave an almost soundless huff as she exhaled through her nose against a frown. I'm already_special_. I'm one of two 'specialists' in my department, I work alone, and when I'm in my skivvies I look like I beat up men in the workout room for fun. She ran her opposite hand over one of her biceps. If I wasn't a tomboy before I came here, what the heck am I now?
For about the hundredth time, she wondered if she'd made the right decision in coming here. Wartime pay or not, job advancement or not, the planet outside was inhospitable and there were few people in the colony she could call close friends. She shook her head vigorously, as if to separate the good thoughts in her head from the bad as much as to let her hair relax. It had still been vaguely bunched together as when she'd been undressing, but this latest movement let it settle about her shoulders and curl into little ringlets at the bottom, near her shoulder blades. Well, she thought, at least my hair doesn't look masculine. Whatever her body might look like, she got plenty of compliments on her hair when it wasn't pulled back or in a sweaty mess.
She shook her head again, to steel herself, and then grabbed at the small bag hanging on the side of her closet, and also at the towel which hung above the bag. Career first, relationship first, she thought, fuck it all. I can think about this in the shower.
A moment later, she was striding down the corridor toward the showers, her sandals making a brisk slap! slap! against the corridor floor.