The new information about the destruction of the first Tanaka Base, it turned out, had not come as a complete surprise to the folks at KPS. There had always been a suspicion that the Sanders family had not been entirely forthcoming. The information, however, appeared to come as a surprise to the representative from the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s possible the representative had other things on his mind; the United States election had happened, without a rogue nuclear explosion to derail it, and this fellow would likely be out of a job in a couple of months. He seemed willing to let KPS handle it however they liked.
KPS handled it by doing what it does—by having the event not officially exist.
The mission to bring Bella over stuck with its official cover story of being a group of scientists trying a new method of radio interferometry.
Which went horribly wrong.
And exploded.
As radio interferometry projects sometimes do.
“They do not,” Niamh had protested, as they were an astrophysicist. But they were overruled.
As for the tech billionaire Rob Sanders, who had funded the project out of his passion for science and knowledge, it was assumed he was killed in the explosion and his body predated before it could be retrieved, possibly by Labrador wolves.
“Labrador wolves?” Kahurangi had asked. “Are those a real thing?”
“Oh, yes,” Aparna had assured him.
While Tensorial could not officially be held accountable for Sanders’s activities, or the activities of the company involving KPS over the years, at the turn of the U.S. government in January, the Department of Justice announced that Tensorial and its past and current CEOs, all members of the Sanders family, were being investigated for a decades-long pattern of fraud involving the Departments of Energy and Defense, among others. It would be a long and uncomfortable process for the company.
Which, well. Good.
While we were away, Tanaka Base held its memorials for those it had lost from Sanders’s taking of Bella. The official cover story given to family and survivors was close enough to the truth: While doing research on the animals they were tasked with protecting, they were ambushed by poachers and killed. KPS’s survivor benefits were always generous, and its grief at the loss sincere.
We learned that everyone at Tanaka Base held their breaths until they learned whether Aparna, Kahurangi, Niamh, Martin Satie, and I had survived. When they learned we had, they collectively celebrated, and swore to murder us for making them worry.
They did not murder us when we returned. Instead, they declared a holiday. One whole day of partying and feasting and drinking and karaoke.
Then we went back to work. Aparna to the bio lab, Kahurangi to the chem lab, Niamh to physics, and Satie to—well, in the short term, to doing not a whole lot, because getting a whole helicopter back to Kaiju Earth was an actual project, but then, back to flying.
I went back to lifting things.
MacDonald had offered me Tom’s job on a temporary basis, with an eye toward making it permanent. I passed. I didn’t feel right slipping into his place, and also, I had already forced Val to do a two-person job by herself for several weeks. And anyway, I liked my job. Lifting things was surprisingly good for my brain.
So I kept doing it, without undue drama, for the rest of the tour.
Which, frankly, felt odd. After such a dramatic start to our tour, everything else after we came back to Tanaka Base felt like an anticlimax. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Niamh said, and we all agreed with them.
But the shoe stayed up. Until the day, in March, when we stood in aloha shirts, drinks in hand, to welcome Blue Team back to Tanaka Base, and for them to see us off.
As was custom, I left a welcoming gift for whichever member of Blue Team was taking over my room, and a note.
Dear whomever:
If it’s your first time here, welcome. If it’s more than your first time here, welcome back. When I arrived six months and forever ago, I was given a gift of a plant. I am giving you the same gift. It’s larger than when I got it, and has been repotted. You may need to repot it again before you gift it onward.
This plant was given to me by someone who was leaving this world behind for good. She said that it was time for her to go back to the real world. I understand what she meant—this world is so strange!—but I think it’s just as real as the other one. This plant is real. The people here are real. The bonds and friendships we make here are real, too. It’s unreal how real this world is and can be.
This plant is yours, but I will be back. And when I come back, I hope I get to meet you, and have a meal with you, and sing karaoke with you, and talk about plants, and perhaps become friends. I can’t wait to meet you.