Inflow ✔️

1 - Collision Course

Wyatt Alexander reclined, propping his feet up on one of the tables in the tiny mess hall and switching on his reader. He was on a break, a nice, extended break, enjoying the silence and hoping to catch up on some reading now that he had finished gorging himself on his lunch.

The plant seemed empty today, or rather emptier than usual, adding to the pleasant silence. Most of the systems operated automatically and the outpost required only three personnel on shift at any given time, though more was always better. Unfortunately better also cost more, meaning minimal staffs tended to be the norm. With some doubling up, the plant frequently managed with only seven employees living on site, even though it had been built to house up to thirty within the living quarters at the center of Cooper's Crater, so-called for the first colonist to set foot there, Horace Cooper.

Cooper had always considered himself a failure, as his partner Sundeep Kembhavi beat him to the big goal, the now appropriately named Kembhavi Crater. Kembhavi spanned a diameter of roughly 2.75 kilometers, whereas Cooper on its southwestern rim spanned closer to a mere .75 kilometers in diameter. Now the two craters were best known as the home to the Kembhavi-Cooper Water Extraction, Recovery, and Treatment Plant, or KWERT Plant for idiots that preferred acronyms. Wyatt did not belong in this group.

He couldn't say for certain, but at last count he believed that they were down to nine current inhabitants, and felt pretty damn sure that there were only two on shift this morning, including himself, despite the three personnel minimum. Albeit, the outpost spanned over a kilometer and a half from the extraction site in the center of Kembhavi Crater to the living quarters and main office of operations up in Cooper, so he could have miscounted. Add in the recovery and treatment facilities on the southern slopes of Kembhavi and the outpost totaled over four kilometers in passageways, walkways, and stairways. In the end, even on a crowded day, he rarely ran into his coworkers.

Wyatt preferred it that way. The solitude of the water plant had been a major draw for him when he had left Hoover and the other colonial cities of the Aeolis Mensae behind. As the seat of Curiosity Colony (a name that was just one in a long line of mistakes that dotted the history of Martian settlement), Hoover had been far too crowded for Wyatt's temperament. Now he enjoyed the quiet of the plant, the only sounds being the gentle hum of the machinery and the distant echoes of water rippling through intakes in the treatment facilities.

"Wyatt, come in."

His walkie talkie blared out at him from his utility belt. So much for silence.

"Wyatt, here," he said, holding up the walkie-talkie.

"Give me a location?" Kelly Roth, the voice now interrupting Wyatt's peace, helmed the main terminal this shift, the current eye in the sky. Wyatt liked Kelly well enough, but he hated working under her. She tended to micromanage.

"I'm in the Mess," Wyatt said. "What do you want?"

"Break ended at eleven hundred." Wyatt worked the early shift, starting at six hundred local time, meaning he got one break between ten hundred and eleven hundred. He glanced to the clock on the back wall of the Mess: 11:45.

"Sure, on a good day." God, he hated being questioned. "But we had a pressure malfunction on Line Eight for the Aeolis Planum return flow. I had a PRV stuck good and solid and had to wrench her loose. Dropped my bar and it fell off the walk. Took me a good fifteen minutes to haul my ass to tool storage and back to give her another go. Then I had to give the outflow pipe a good once over visual QA to make sure we hadn't screwed up the return. Didn't wrap up 'til about ten after."