“It’s been especially bad the last few years, for sure. That being said, time does still happen over on this side, and you should pace yourself. Almost nothing we do over here is so critically important you have to exhaust yourself to do it.”
I looked at Tom, shocked. “Where is your Protestant work ethic, young man? You went to business school!”
“I know, I know. I’m an embarrassment to capitalism. But I’m about to slightly reduce your work schedule by adding slightly to my own, so we can both feel better about me.”
“You’re going to lift something for me?” I asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Tom said. “I’m going to take you off the mission to replant the instrument packages at the kaiju site and put myself on it.”
“Really?” After three weeks, most of the instrument packages at the kaiju site were low on power, or had experienced glitches, or their images were useless because some creature or another had knocked them over or slimed them up. The science folks were preparing updated instrument packages; we’d send them out once the last of the tourists were gone and Honda Base shut down its dimensional gateway device for maintenance. “Why are you doing that?”
“I would like to say it’s because I’m a good guy and I’m concerned about you, but actually it’s because Riddu Tagaq has told me it’s time for me to recertify for ground and weapons training. If you actually go on a mission right after you recertify, the recertification lasts longer.”
“No one told me that,” I said.
“You got certified to go on a mission, so it was implied.”
“It was not, not in the least.”
“Well, congratulations, Jamie, you won’t need to be recertified for ground and weapons until two tours from now. And once I go on the mission I’m taking you off of, I will be the same. Unless you were really wanting to go.”
“No, you take it. I want you to have it. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be here lifting things.”
“You’re intentionally ignoring my advice, I see,” Tom said.
“No, no, I listened and considered it fully and with gravity,” I said. “And then I rejected it.”
“This is what I get for trying to be helpful.”
“You want to be helpful, I have some things you can deliver for me. Heavy things.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Coward.”
* * *
“Damn it, the feed’s down again,” Niamh said. They were staring angrily into a monitor in the physics lab. The monitor that was arousing their ire was blank.
“What feed?” I asked. I was in the physics lab to pick up equipment to take to storage. The labs at Tanaka Base were small, and anything not directly in use was schlepped away to make room for what was in use.
“The one from the kaiju site.” Niamh pointed at the screen.
“Well, it would be down, wouldn’t it,” I said. “They’re swapping the instruments out over there right now.” It was the Tuesday after we had sent away our last set of tourists, which was the day after they had been sent back to Earth, and the day Honda Base shut down the dimensional gateway for maintenance. Kaiju Earth was on its own for two weeks.
Niamh quickly disabused me of my misapprehension. “No, it wouldn’t,” they said. “Or shouldn’t be, anyway. The individual instrument packages are shut off when we switch them out, but the feed is routed through the aerostat, which has its own camera and instruments as well. The aerostat is not being swapped out, and it’s what out.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“It’s been happening more. The aerostats are like any other machine, they’re finicky and they should probably be brought in for maintenance more than they are.” I grinned at this. “What?” Niamh asked at the grin.
“I’m listening to you complain about the aerostats like you knew they even existed six weeks ago.”
“Look, mate, time is weird over here.”
“Tom was telling me that just the other day.”
“Also, I’m not wrong,” Niamh continued. “We’ve been using the same aerostat over Bella since she squatted her ass down there. That’s a long time. If we lose the feed from the aerostat, we can’t get the data from the instrument packs.”
“You’ll lose the data?”
“No, they all record locally if they can’t connect. But eventually their memory will max out, and then we’ll lose the data.” Niamh was grumpy about that. Having installed the previous instruments, they were proprietary of the data feed.