Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [1]
Holly, however, was feeling far from hopeless at the moment. Coralee had been nothing short of miraculous for her love life. She squinted through the blazing sunlight at the shape of Jim, struggling with a seized engine filter on the far side of the deck. She smiled as his curses drifted across to her. She’d finish her cigarette and go and give him a hand.
The Hyperion Dawn was showing its age. Twenty years ago it had been a top of the line cable-laying platform; now the sea had done its work and it was worn and scruffy, the polycarbide hull showing the scars of too many storms. It was long overdue for a refit but the colony was expanding fast and they had to get the communication and power cables laid to the outer islands before the winter storms started to set in.
A sudden swell lifted the platform and Holly snatched at her coffee cup as it toppled from the edge of the wheelhousing. There was a bang from the deck and a burst of swearing from Jim. The autopilot gave a brief electronic burble and motors whined into life as the automatics repositioned the craft.
There was a harsh shriek from the communications console. Holly stubbed out her cigarette and clambered back into the cabin. She picked up the microphone.
‘ Hyperion to deep crew, go ahead.’
‘ Are you planning on letting that crate drift all over the frigging planet? The cable just jumped a foot out of its housing. ’
‘Stop moaning, Auger. We had a short on the starboard thruster.
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Jim’s on it. Besides, I hear that with you, anything over four inches qualifies as a foot.’
‘ Don’t you just wish, Bruiser. Don’t you just wish. ’
Holly grimaced. She’d been christened Bruiser after an incident at her last company, OMC. She’d rather hoped that the whole thing would be forgotten but everyone on Coralee seemed to know about it.
She’d been with OMC for seven years and had worked her way up to a position of considerable authority. Planetary engineers with oceanic specialities were something of a rare commodity – how do you train divers when your planet’s oceans are so choked with sewage and pollution that it barely qualifies as water?
She’d only seen the sea on Earth once, when she was in her teens.
She’d defied the curfew and, under cover of night, had slipped past the guards and scrambled under the fence, creeping down to the narrow strip of concrete that looked out from New Oslo over the North Atlantic. She remembered her shock at the vast expanse of liquid heaving back and forth, a thick viscous slime, flecked with grey scum.
This wasn’t what was shown on the broadcasts. Sure, everyone knew that all the cetacean life forms had had to be shipped to the settlements near the pole because of the pollution but this... This was obscene.
She had crawled back to her living unit in a daze and vowed that she would get away from Earth, make for the colonies and see an unspoilt ocean. She’d joined the planetary engineering course shortly afterwards, directing all her energies to the study of the water worlds.
OMC had snatched her up as soon as she had graduated and within a year she was part of the team terraforming Hobson’s World out in the Cerelis cluster. A good relationship with her team and a genuine love of the sea propelled her up the company ladder faster than anyone expected, and before long she was sitting in on colonisation meetings at the highest level.
Extra responsibility brought duties that Holly would rather have done without. Paperwork, courses, endless, pointless meetings. By far the worst was the annual company ball. Big social affairs had never been Holly’s thing. She was far happier in overalls than ball gowns.
Her flame-red hair and deep green eyes would have made her an imposing woman at the best of times, but years of diving had toned her figure and given her a set of shoulders broader than those of most men.
She knew she could turn heads when in her work clothes and in a party dress she could bring a room to a standstill.
The OMC dinner on Kandalinga had been no different. As always