Lee allowed a small smile to creep onto his face after that joke. He was going to need more than a broken nose for the corporation to clear the expensive shuttle extraction. Kenta stood with her hands tightly clasped together, biting her lower lip below eyes deep with worry.

Lee let out a small sigh for her benefit. "It's alright Ken, that was a mad idea. We are almost halfway through this contract anyway." Kenta smiled in relief, "Yeah," she replied, "Almost halfway." Lee regretted telling her the truth. She would be keeping a closer eye on him from now on. He would need a way of doing this without anybody noticing. Lee met Kenta's gaze as he slipped his laser drill out of the toolbag. It fell with a clang on the dish below distracting Kenta from the confirmation beep of the resonant injector.

Lee spent the next 3 cycles doing what he was supposed to, but the doubts were always with him, the strange history of the planet, there absence of deep water life after the gamma burst, terraforming permits should have been illegal here and how did a company with no terraforming experience get the rights or the resources to claim this planet but Jim's message was the most worrying, the explosion at Hab-5's greenhouses had an unnatural radioactive signature. It was no pocket of methane, like they had been told.

Lee woke up anxious the next morning. He was sleeping uncomfortably on top of the aerogel lined suit he had made in the Electroloom. He wished he could just send the transmitter up with the weather balloon but the signal could only be encoded by the quantum tag in his arm. He had to go up with it. Lee took a deep breath and slipped off the warm gel bed...