Figment Daily Theme: Sea
INT. CARGO BAY
Boxes, colour coded by content, some as big as a small car, some the size of a fist, stacked in magnetic racks that leave little room to move around, lit brightly by light that spills from behind and around. Where you can see the walls, they're industrial white and marked with the omnipresent signage of space.
TWO MEN load one a flat platform with both mag-latches and straps. They both wear suits which, while not bulky, add a certain girth, like medieval armour. The unmistakable lines of augmentative EXO-FRAMES run along the sides of their limbs, giving them many times their expected strength.
One of the men, the name ROBINSON is blazed across his upper back and down one leg as well as his upper chest, pushes off the floor toward one of the upper stacks.
Zero gravity.
The other, VALIENT, grunts in effort as he sets the hooks at the sides of his wrists into one broad BOX COLOURED GREEN for foodstuff. He swings it in that peculiar way you shift the center of mass in 0g, one foot up on a bracing object, the other providing the pivot, and swings, twisting his shoulders as if to do a back flip, keeping the box oriented while his body spins slowly.
VALIENT
(filtered by helmet)
Jesus, I hate doing the grunt work.
Robinson settles back toward the floor, dangling "underneath" a massive RED BOX of volatile gasses, releases and kicks away just in time for it to lock down where he was but a moment before hanging.
ROBINSON
(also filtered)
You're just a picky bastard, Val. Have some fun!
VALIENT
Fun, he says. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of rednecks working a mining crew.
He looks around the bay, about the size of a football field. Clean, orderly, but with signs of wear starting to show on edges and latches.
Robinson shrugs, a gesture magnified by the joints of the exo at his shoulders.
ROBINSON
Could be worse. Could be the solar run. Let me tell you, that's no fun at all. Nothing to do but babysit cargo and recheck calculations until you get down to perisol, and then everything happens at once. Freakin' everything. Then nothin' again.
VALIENT
You're space-born, right?
Both men begin checking the sled. Running cables across the boxes and latching them in with ratchet fixtures. Double checking the mags. Shoving the load to see if it wobbles loose.
ROBINSON
Yeah. Never set foot on a planet, thank Hell. Never wanted to. I like it here. In space.
Robinson drifts to the HATCH, peering through the tiny WINDOW.
VALIENT
I like it at home, on Mars. For one, I load marginally less cargo.
ROBINSON
Martian! And you call us rednecks!
They both laugh as Robinson returns to the sled.
ROBINSON
Ready, then? Might as well take this outside to the other cargo door. It's a pain moving through the tunnels, anyway.
VALIENT
And you'd like to visit home before we get done, alien-boy?
Robinson laughs.
ROBINSON
Haven't heard that one in a while. C'mon, let's get this thing movin'.
They pull together at the sides of the sled and get it moving. Carefully, slowly. One stands at the back, one to the side, hooks in indentations around the sled. There is a lot of slow leaning and the language of loaders, the "port!" and "star!" of left/right, the "roof!" and "flo!" of top and bottom.
Getting to the hatch puts both men behind, one above, one below, leaning against the sled's progress.
ROBINSON
Outside is going to be the fun part.
VALIENT
No. No fun, man. I'm adamantly opposed to fun.
Robinson works the hatch which opens soundlessly with a tiny hitch. The doors split and swing up and down, the lower providing a ramp.
EXT. OUTSIDE THE CARGO BAY - CONTINUOUS
The BAY itself is a single module, grey and pitted as if carved from a chunk of pumice with a few pieces of high tech detritus glued on. It's sintered sand, lased until it makes a continuous form. A few MAINT BOTS step around on it's surface, LASERS BLIPPING to remove micrometeor erosion.
The doors open onto the surface of a grey world of sand and dust and rock. It's bright, bright as every noon ever, and the eyes have to adapt a moment to take it all in.
Robinson and Valient push the sled out of the bay, tiny by comparison, and latch it to one of a network of glowing cables which lead this way and that along the surface to OTHER MODULES, most bigger, all made of the same sintered sand.
VALIENT
I'll never get used to this.
ROBINSON
Me neither. It's beautiful.
VALIENT
Not exactly what I meant. It just reminds me I work in a sand castle.
ROBINSON
See? You like fun. Sand castles by the sea are huge fun--I'm told.
Valient looks up at the sky above the mining base.
Far above glows a sullen RED GIANT STAR, prominences visible arcing far from the surface in lazy loops before crashing back in. The small planet orbits very, very close in, but the star itself is close to death--close as such things go, anyway. Mere millions of years as opposed to billions.
Valient shades his eyes uselessly as he watches another prominence move visibly along the surface.
VALIENT
Yeah, sand castles by the sea. It's all fun and games until she obliterates you from existence.
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