Taking her arm, Monica guided her determinedly to the closest exit instead of continuing toward the cafeteria. She shook her head again. “It’s all the twitching—the deep sighs—the drumming your fingers ….”

Noelle blinked at her friend, casting her mind back, but she didn’t remember doing any of those things. “I didn’t ….”

“Yes, you did,” Monica said, interrupting her denial. “You’ve been at it since you got here this morning.”

Noelle glanced around to determine where they were. They’d emerged from the building into the tiny ‘garden’ area between the science building and the med-center, but Monica was heading briskly toward the gate that opened onto the main thoroughfare of the colony. Confused, she sent Monica a questioning look as she paused to open the gate with her retina ID.

“I haven’t …. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to explode if I spend another minute in there!”

Despite her irritation at what she perceived as unjust complaints, Noelle perked up at that. “We’re going to … uh … play hooky from work?”

Monica threw her a startled look. “What’s hooky? And how do you play it?”

Noelle frowned at her. “You’re the sociologist! You ought to know—truancy? Absent without permission.”

Monica frowned, but thoughtfully. “Oh. Well I’m a xeno-sociologist, damn it! I specialize in alien sociology! My god! That’s archaic! Where did you hear it?”

Noelle felt a lump form in her throat. “My grandmother ….”

Monica bit her lip. “Sorry!” She gripped Noelle’s arm, squeezing it sympathetically. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Noelle smiled with an effort. “No. It’s ok. I like remembering ….”

It was the truth—to an extent. She did enjoy remembering her grandmother and the happy childhood she’d had because of her.

But it hurt so bad to know she was gone forever, to only have memories!

She’d never really known her parents. They’d left her with her maternal grandmother when they’d taken jobs mining on one of the new outposts/colonies in the asteroid belt because it was deemed too dangerous for children. They’d planned to make their ‘fortune’ mining and return with enough credits to buy a home to raise a family, but they’d never made it back. Someone had broken into a gas pocket and the entire asteroid had exploded into pebbles, killing all 600 miners—including her parents.

Fortunately, she’d been too young to really feel the loss. She hadn’t been too young to see her grandmother’s grief, though. And her grandmother had never gotten over losing her only child. Noelle knew her grandmother had loved her and that she’d brought her grandmother some comfort, but nothing ever healed the wound of loss.

She thought it hurt most to think her grandmother had been glad to go ….

Which sucked for her because she’d been the one left alone.

As sorry as she felt for herself, though, she was ashamed for feeling that way. Her grandmother had endured a lot of suffering to be there for her as long as she had.

Besides, a lot of the people who’d volunteered to colonize were in the same boat—alone—which was a major incentive to start over somewhere else.

It sucked that she’d traveled so far only to discover that you can’t leave grief behind by leaving everything familiar! That just made you miss everything else on top of missing the person you’d lost!

“You aren’t the only one that’s bored stiff, you know!” Monica said testily, effectively distracting her.

Noelle shrugged. “I know.”

“You at least have something to study!”

“Dead things?” Noelle let out an irritated huff. “You have the recordings from the probes if it comes to that.”

Monica rolled her eyes. “I have memorized that shit! I have analyzed it ad nauseum! The social structure looks very reminiscent of the mythology about Amazon women,” she said irritably, “but that’s just a wild guess based on the fact that they appear to be warrior women and there doesn’t seem to be any men—or at least a separation of the sexes, I suppose. That’s pseudo science at the very best! You could’ve guessed that much!”

Noelle frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Monica snapped. “I was just pointing out that I wouldn’t have to have a degree in xeno-sociology to ‘guess’. I need hard facts! I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get them cooped up in here!”

Noelle completely empathized with her—she was desperate to do some ‘real’ research herself—and yet the moment Monica expressed a desire to leave the safety of the colony she felt a shiver creep up her spine. “We haven’t been here even a month—well by this world’s time.” She frowned, thinking. “By Earth time ….”

“What difference does Earth time make when we’re here, damn it? This time matters!”

Noelle huffed an irritated breath. “Ok, already! Don’t bite my head off!”

Monica looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Sorry! But don’t try that ‘holier than thou’ attitude on me! You’re bored stiff, too! We don’t have any fresh material and I’ve studied that shit the probes collected until I feel like puking every time I look at it!”

Noelle shrugged. “The delegation is bound to be back any time now. As soon as we know for sure that we have a peace treaty with the natives, we can leave the colony and do a little real exploring. It isn’t like either of us could really do our jobs without the treaty, you know.”

“I can’t! You’re a xeno-biologist. There’s plenty of biology you could study.”

“Hey! You can study the social behavior of the lower life forms just easily as I could study the biology! We just can’t tackle what we’re really interested in.”

Good point. Monica still wanted to argue that she was worse off than Noelle and had more room to complain. They both knew that the social behavior of the lower life forms wasn’t nearly as important to the future of the colony as studying the natives.

The problem was that Noelle had already made that point—none of the alien life forms were as important as the natives—because they were intelligent and could create more problems than pretty much any of the other life forms.

Of course the chances were high that they were going to run into problems with all sorts of things. They could upset the eco balance if they weren’t careful. They didn’t belong in this particular food chain.

The impulse to skip out on their afternoon shift had been a poor one. Noelle and Monica had reason to be glad they had rethought the impulse and headed back once they’d had lunch at the apartment they shared. If they hadn’t, they would very likely have been written up as displaying rebellious and/or irresponsible behavior and that could have had all sorts of unpleasant repercussions. The most important being that they wouldn’t have been there for the ‘special treat’ everyone was allowed late in the shift.

The department head had managed to wrangle permission to leave the compound to collect new specimens for study.

Noelle and Monica were both instantly nearly hysterical with excitement and sheer terror and struggling to hide both as they left the facility with the small group of ‘chosen ones’ and headed toward the main gates of the city, lugging specimen containers and equipment.

Noelle was inclined to think that was a punishment of sorts in and of itself. They had robots for god’s sake—a lot of them! Eighty percent of the construction bots that had built the sprawling complex that made up their first city while the colonists themselves were en route to it had been ‘decommissioned’ and reassigned other duties once they weren’t needed for construction anymore—ten of the twenty percent held in reserve for future construction projects and the other ten reprogrammed for maintenance. All of the robots hadn’t been reassigned to handle security—most, but not all. One could have been spared to haul equipment!